Annual response: no it couldn't have.

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-th...

Short version: Google couldn't keep Reader going because it would take money to get it working on the new Google+ infrastructure that failed spectacularly.

Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.

It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.

That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created.

I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.

Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back.

They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.

Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them.

Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.

More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.

Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products.

Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.

Heh, Google killed Reader so I could consider any alternative to Google before using their products. So it's been DuckDuckGo, Firefox, box.com, other OpenId providers etc. I still use gmail, because i only use email for boring stuff like amazon or whatever, not communication with friends, and it's not like I see any of their ads anyway because I use adblockers (part of the reason i use firefox - you can't block ads using chrome on android). I use Android. That's good. They're not screwed that up yet, although i'm sure given enough time they will.

WOW! Just wow! That would explain why + stopped working for me.

Thanks buddy.

Putting a single word inside double quotes makes it mandatory .

At least that's what I heard somewhere back then when they broke the + operator.

I also really wish that they would revert this change. But maybe Google+ was created just because they wanted to get rid of the + operator in Google search?

> They changed it to quotation marks […]

They just got rid of one of the two available operators; quotes were there 10+ years ago.

> broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail

This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.

When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.

The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.

Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.

This is my single biggest problem with the whole g+ thing. Very frustrating, never mess with contacts.

Oh. Eye-opener. Is this why in the past year or two random contacts are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and I can't merge them, and sometimes one app (like Hangouts/messaging) won't know a phone number is attached to a contact while another (the phone app) will, etc?

The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.

Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.

Randomly, I also notice sometimes I have to edit a contact's phone number then save again for it to register as a number that hangouts recognizes.

Edit: I have Google Fi

That "answer" had no facts and doesn't pass the smell test for me. "Old infrastructure"? Not very specific... "Google+ infrastructure"? Huh? Maybe they mean updating the authorization infrastructure, but even that is probably <= the dev effort on these April Fools pranks.

"There was no manpower" so uh... hire a few interested engineers? Maybe pick from the thousands of angry people who were loudly complaining about it? Or at least give the data to an archive - that's what I'm angriest about personally. They had archives of tons of defunct blogs, and they just deleted them.

Don't read too much into it, it was a business decision, not a question of resources. It's obvious that Google could have kept reader alive without much trouble if they wanted.

Likely not deleted. Just made private.

If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.

True. Doesn't help anyone else who wants to read the blogs though. And even thought the storage is redundant, the fact that it's controlled by a single company makes it a single point of failure. I also hope Geocities is around somewhere and is recovered at some point in the future.

A lot of Geocities was archived. You can access one of them at reocities.com. There is also a 650+ GB torrent out there containing the archived sites. It's still a work in progress, apparently, but perusing the "neighborhoods" on reocities.com brings back memories.

The torrent is not very good, and anyway there aren't really any seeds anymore. It's better to get it from the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-geocities This script makes downloading more convenient: http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/3209

Nice, thanks for the links.

There were definitely some good things lost with geocities :(

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken.

I can only speak about browser history sync, but it gets deleted after 6 weeks.

Someone broke something and it was producing mangled data. 6 weeks was the "cliff" for when mangled data stopped being visible.

You might be right, I'm always suspecting that they hoard as much data as they can. That would be a very googly thing to happen.

Mangling data is an interesting thing you raise. Would reveal some issues with their professionalism. Albeit after the disaster we watched today on their April's 1st joke, I wouldn't be surprised if indeed that was the (sad) case as you mention.. :/

Google Reader was, up until that point, the best Google had done at social discoverability and discoverability in a non-search ways. They had a foothold in the space and they just dumped it out and Facebook and Twitter won.

I don't understand how that proves anything one way or the other. Could they not have just left Reader on the old infrastructure?

As someone's that maintained deprecated services, I can say that's easier thought than done. Each piece underneath you will eventually ask you to migrate off it, for any number of reasons: It is deprecated itself and being removed, or it has a bug that was fixed in another version, ... Then the replacement / new version won't support all your use cases, so you need to coordinate with them development of that support.

And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure.

The TL;DR is: Maintenance is never free.

This. Parents comment is typical of management, and frankly I applaud Google for having the confidence to ignore it rather than incurring all of the technical debt.

It's a good joke, and I recommend people follow @Pinboard on Twitter, but the reality is that Google killed Reader because they wanted to, not because they had. They're immensely profitable and fund crazy things like Google Glass or Calico to the tune of many millions of dollars.

Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.

Honestly, I'm glad Google Reader is dead. Feedly is so much better than Google Reader ever was.

It's really hard to build an ecosystem when you have to complete again a "good enough" free google reader.

I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.

Unfortunately, a lot of blogs have shut down from a loss of traffic.

Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.

Better than Reader was in the end, but when reader allowed you to see what your reader friends were reading, that was the peak.

Does that include the operational cost though? I know it's probably trivial when you're at google's scale, but fetching every RSS feed on the internet every few minutes (or whatever their latency was, it seemed pretty low), processing and storing it seems fairly expensive.

Weren't they already doing that, for search?

It must be painful to be such a bitter person.

In other news, results are coming in of PR coverage of maintaining Google Reader vs Gmail OMG EPIC FAIL #MINION4LIFE... Jeff?