@petebrown Can we both miss the community and features that were, while also realizing it's not the way forward?
@petebrown I've used I think 3 different RSS readers since Google Reader went away. They all work fine and do everything I ask for, certainly everything that Google Reader did. Maybe the "otherwise smart and sensible people" just aren't aware of how their attention has migrated to things like Facebook?
@JMaxB Possibly. I feel like statements like “I miss Google Reader" may also represent a broader wish that RSS had taken off more and been adopted more broadly by the public.
@petebrown Honestly, I don't wish Google would do anything, except fold into an ocean.
@petebrown Agreed. Feedly has one of the Nicer UIs. Inoreader is more generous in their free offerings. I'm a paid customer of Inoreader now because of this.
@petebrown Google Reader was the Twitter of RSS: a monolith with social features and an open (though not published, apparently) API. It was the only choice a lot of users had ever heard of. Through inertia alone it would probably still be the top RSS aggregator if Google hadn’t stupidly killed it. I prefer the current federated nature or RSS aggregators and apps, though. Recently I looked at screenshots of Google Reader web UI, and it doesn’t hold up at all. It was worse than I had remembered it.
@mjdescy Fair. I can imagine a universe in which some big platform builds an RSS app that tons of general web users use without really having to think about it too much, and that maybe being good for the ecosystem. Sadly, in this universe, it was Google that did it.
@petebrown Yes! Google is such a frustrating company. Why did it have to be them. They kill far too many of their products and half-assedly support the ones they keep around.