If someone really thinks a cancelled product for which there are many alternatives is the end of what they're calling "the net," or if a self-proclaimed hacker views Google abandoning an area as anything but a huge opportunity, they need to see a professional.Īnd in the same way that individuals are using their outrage about Reader to market themselves, companies are doing the same. This preoccupation with how one is perceived is known as a "narcissistic tendency." And it's perfectly fine insofar as it doesn't interfere with one's perception of reality and normal behavior. Quick, let's all express our outrage lest there be some doubt about our above-averageness! Never mind the fact that the task at hand is not much different from watching TV. Meanwhile, it turns out that anyone could have demonstrated the same just by signing up at a web service. Many people spend their lives trying to make their mark by advancing science, technology, the arts or the human condition at large. Not just that, but the ones speaking up with an extra serving of outrage must be above average among the above average crowd, something that our current science of statistics cannot even express. So we learn that anyone who was an avid Reader fan is automatically above average. It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage. Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals used Reader * Nothing, that is, besides these so-called-hackers' decision to write blog posts instead of code. So, the only thing in between a hacker who misses Reader and a working Reader implementation past-June is. Unlike some other companies I can name without thinking, they have been particularly open about letting their users take their data out of their systems.
They provided a way for all Reader users to get their data out of their system. The area is probably not encumbered by Google's patents, and even if it were, Google is not going to initiate patent wars on small players in a niche they have willfully abandoned.Īnd it's not like Google is keeping anyone's subscriptions hostage. Anyone with a web framework and a NoSQL data store has the exact same technology that powered Reader.
What is google reader update#
And it takes little advantage of Google's scale besides amortizing update detection across multiple users. As far as I can tell, Reader takes advantage of none of the proprietary machine learning techniques that are internal to Google. It's certainly a nice service, especially because it kept track of what you had seen across multiple platforms, but it'd be a reach to claim that there is any technical impediment for why someone else could not make an exact clone, minus the trademarked logos. It's not like Google Reader was a particularly inspired service that's difficult to replicate.
What is google reader code#
Since the "H" in "HN" stands for Hacker, and since a sizable fraction of the people who are up in arms about Google Reader have Twitter profiles that say hacker (and we all know, even before reading their blog posts, that every single one of these people do indeed have Twitter profiles, and they are entrepreneurs also, and they're thinking about their next pivot, and they certainly have an opinion on NodeJS versus Clojure even though they've never written code on either platform, and yeah, they're attached to their Twitter feed but dontcha-know-it's-just-not-the-same-thing as Google Reader and now give me what is rightfully mine dammit, I used your service and you owe me in perpetuity!), let me remind people what the H-word used to stand for. There was even a White House petition, which Obama's people thankfully deleted before it got too embarrassing. There are blog posts that explicitly say, and I quote, "we've entered a darker timeline in the history of the net".
What is google reader free#
There have been far too many HN articles on how evil Google is for canceling a free service, how this product cancellation is a sign of the end times, how Google should never have given anything to anyone if they were going to cancel it later. I also gather that this is, "literally," the end of the Internet for some people. I gather that Google is planning to cancel Google Reader.