Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.
As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.
Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)
I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.
Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy.
Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.
>As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.
Oh there were many post on HN about the politics of G+ at the time, how meta ( Facebook ) are going to crush them with social graph etc. And G+ was effectively its own little organisation within Google. I remember there were something about RSS they didn't want. But I guess I have to dig up my bookmarks to find it.
Google Buzz also seemed like a better path for Google to have a "social network" than what they tried to do with G+: Post short twitter-like things from various Google properties and have your friends posts show up in the same place. Between Buzz, Reader and gmail chat, Google had a fairly solid lineup of social products that they killed one way or another to boost G+.
I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010.
We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.
The thing that sucks about Google Music is that they could have merged them but kept the good parts of both. Youtube Music is still missing features of Google Music. It would have been more than "just", but Google Music with Youtube backend and branding would have worked. It is the backend song licensing they wanted to merge.
The same happened with Google Podcasts. Merged into Youtube Music, not even separate Youtube Podcasts, and it sucks.
GPM was amazing for keeping my library accessible on a device with all of 16GB of storage space, but for recommendations, Grooveshark took the cake. Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Youtube... None have ever gotten close to GS in terms of showing me songs completely outside my wheelhouse that I immediately loved. Also likewise cruelly cut down by cynical forces.
The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff.
(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)
I had CDs from all my high school friends' dumb little bands. All gone.
I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.
Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.
Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device.
Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.
AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.
Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.
> They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.
This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).
Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.
Are you talking about uploaded music? All of mine is still available and a lot of it definitely isn't on YouTube. Did you try looking for the uploaded music tab? It can be hard to find
I lost my entire local indie music collection. I'm glad your interests were apparently more mainstream, but I can't listen to my high school classmates' songs ever again.
It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.
Google, culturally, seems very tone-deaf to market signals.
Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking)
But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both.
This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses).
At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA.
Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.
Google's problem is that, fundamentally, they hate end users. They do not want to hear feedback from them, they don't want to fix their bugs. They don't want to hear your thoughts and they actually don't value feedback. They don't want to support devices or older versions. They have no idea what LTS even means.
Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you.
And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part.
Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing.
When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.
The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter.
But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences.
Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese.
(This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
>A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.
A lot of people were using Google Reader without ever knowing what RSS was all about. And when Google reader was gone, they stopped using it, Facebook then taken the newsfeed over.
But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS.
There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"
There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.
The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it
I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma.
Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.
Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
> But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular
I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.
> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.
But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.
> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done
> I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.
I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.
If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.
In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and yet in blog comments readers would often reveal in passsing that they were largely consuming blogs through RSS. The technology was much more accessible than you assume.
They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.
The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].
It has the vibe of a corporate company doing post hoc justification for a decision they already made.
And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
Well, everybody _did_ use Google+ but nobody _wanted to_. I remember constantly finding myself redirected to it and them doing shady things like automatically connecting you with everyone in your gmail contact list. Also, if memory serves, they chose an avatar for me using Picasa or photos in my gmail or something and it was a photo of me without a shirt on.
I've always found YT's comment features to be worst in class. I never see notifications, there's a way to find your own past comments but it seems purposely hidden and the Android app keyboard / spell checker is really wonky -- like they don't want you to use it to type anything substantive.
As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.
At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.
Do you not realize that Google+ was a newer product and was a strategic priority for Google. Trying to say they are the same so you should be able to apply the same exact criteria is a false equivalence.
