What makes you think it was any different from the inside?
If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
I use Digg Reader. Web is awesome, love the simplicity, the app need some love but is way more better than Feddly. The thing I don't like about Digg Reader is the Digg part, I only want my lovely curated RSS feeds.
Also try NewsBlur, Feedreader, The Old Reader and Newsvibe but Digg Reader was the best for my needs.
The default, so far as I can tell, is to dump every feed together to provide an "all-up" view. That could be okay, but then they layer a terrible card UI on top of it that's completely unintuitive. The top cards are big and generally pixelated (because it zooms in for some inexplicable reason), and it switches to a slightly different view after the first card, again, for no clear reason. I can swipe through the cards and reach the end, where it shows a giant checkmark and the words "Done" and "N reviewed". Reaching that page doesn't actually mean I'm done, though. Nothing is actually marked read until I go back to the top and tap on each them (or use the "mark all read" option). I'm either completely missing the interaction paradigm they intend or they haven't put much thought into what the interaction paradigm actually is. Maybe the devs all use iPhones and the Android client is an afterthought?
Meanwhile their website is generally okay, but I am completely at a loss for how to mark an item as unread once I've opened it. I should probably look for a different feed aggregator.
I am actualy working on a Feedly alternative. That's sorts articles by popularity. And can import Popularty counts from Sites that offer it. I hope the 70k Hacker News Readers on Feedly would like that. My Idea is to make search free and instead offer "Sort by Time" and "Compact View" as a Pro feature. Would anyone here be interested?
Of course, maybe everyone else loves the interaction model and I'm the oddball. That's entirely possible, but regardless I want to find something else at this point. (Trying Digg reader as of last night.)
I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.
That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.
(and in retrospect that comment was a lot more negative than I really feel about newsblur, I'm absolutely not looking to switch to something else)
Why do you say that?
In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.
Some of the teens also have facebook, but none don't have Google+.
This is because of two reasons: 1: Gmail means they all have Google+ accounts almost automatically, and 2: The privacy controls are much better in Google+, and they like that.
The only few people I know on Google+ are hardcore google fans who work in tech. Every teen (~15-18) I know is on facebook. And their younger siblings.
Plugin, Facebook Messenger seems to be quite dominant across those age groups too.
It is paid-for, although very cheap (and first month free). I ended up buying a life-subscription. I really miss Google Reader as well.
*I think they are going to change the name and redesign the product to push forward the adoption.
Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.
[1] e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
I've only seen this printed in google search and google plus, not on any other website. Maybe it's an extension of yours?
If it's google search you're complaining about, just log out, or use something like DDG.
Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat.
Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing.
Odd.
I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of.
...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools.
I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.
Way to predict the past. Google's been doing that for years; its been widely noticed since Hangouts was spun out.
I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.
I feel that the FB posts are just as annoying and unwanted as those FW: FW: FW:... emails of yesteryear.
Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out.
Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory.
Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.
I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.
And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-...
If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?
iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.
A bit off-topic:
I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that.
Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").
Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.