Google reader replacement 2015 software#

In early 2001, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer, was reading Kottke’s blog. (Disclosure: Kottke sometimes works from a desk in the BuzzFeed offices.) Kottke was another blogging pioneer, and after a courtship online as much as off, he and Hourihan married. Blogging was taking off, although the Pyra founders said they worried about “unimaginative” postings like “I’m tired” or “This sucks.” The following spring, Hourihan met Jason Kottke, a Web designer who, among other creations, drew the “half-assed technicolor logo” on Gawker’s masthead. The project found an audience and soon became Pyra’s focus. While she was away, her business partner, Evan Williams, who went on to cofound Twitter, released a side project, a digital publishing service for just such budding diarists. Hourihan was also the author of, one of the earliest weblogs. She had recently founded Pyra Labs, a Silicon Valley tech startup that aimed to increase workplace productivity. In the summer of 1999, Meg Hourihan took a vacation. Or, to put it more bluntly, why pave over paradise to put up a parking lot? In the year past, the same question has been framed and phrased in a thousand different ways - why force an unproven social network on users at the expense of an organic one? They wonder why Google deep-sixed superlative features, years in the making, for an upstart social network, a Facebook clone. All of them - the dental student in San Antonio, the academic librarian in Boston, the game developer in San Francisco - yearn for the scroll-tracked Shangri-La that was. Many have disappeared off the grid, while others struggle to rebuild communities that were, with a few keystrokes, deleted. Today, they are a population dispossessed. All of which has heightened the resentment shared by Reader fanatics. In the year since, Google+ has been derided as a “virtual ghost town” and a “ complete failure” unpopular even with Google employees. As one commentator complained, “There’s almost no way Google could have blundered more disastrously here.” A former product manager called it a disaster, while an ex-designer offered to rejoin the company to stanch the damage. Nonetheless, on Halloween of last year, Google went ahead with the redesign. After an Iranian blogger lobbied against the changes (citing Reader’s contributions to the Green Movement), a barrage of press from TechCrunch, Mashable, and Andrew Sullivan directed 13,745 signatures to an online petition. The few picketers in Washington stood for numerous members in a Facebook group that spanned from Houston to Detroit, with outposts in Macedonia, Switzerland, and Singapore, and a particularly vocal contingent in Tehran. 'Sharebros,' as some came to be known, crashed on one another's couches, sparking real-life friendships and not a few marriages in the soon-to-be-appropriated language of Google+, there were 'hangouts' among 'circles.' Google had fostered a social network and earned die-hard fans in the most valuable way possible - without trying. Over the years, so-called 'Reader Parties' had sprung up everywhere from the Long Island Sound to the Ozarks. 'We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you.' For Reader loyalists, the revamp was not only seen as worse - it was devastating.

'We think the end result is better than what's available today,' wrote Alan Green, a software engineer who announced the impending changes on Oct. And so, its users fretted, was their beloved Google Reader. Four years on, with Google+ ascendant, these same social functions were marked for elimination. But Reader had also became a social network in its own right. Pre-Twitter, it was the essential aggregation tool for news and information junkies. Formulated as a 'river of news,' a scrollable collection of headlines from across the Web, the site added sharing features that endeared it to a niche group of users. That week, on the heels of launching its long-awaited social network, Google was to make significant - and feature-breaking - changes to Reader, an RSS news aggregator launched in 2005.

headquarters, where the aggrieved customers had assembled. 'GOOGLE: DON'T MARK ALL AS READ,' pled a poster outside the Internet company's D.C. Wearing sheepish grins and business-casual attire, the 99% they were not one demonstrator said he worked for Grover Norquist. Last October, while hundreds of protesters were encamped in Zuccotti Park, a handful of people occupied a glass building in downtown Washington, D.C. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.' 'While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. 'We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites,' says Google. Today, Google Reader, the eight-year-old RSS reader that became an industry standard, has been given a funeral date: July 1st, 2013. This post originally ran in December of 2012.

Google reader replacement 2015