Baby steps toward replacing Google Reader

http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-reader

by mh_ • 13 years ago

277 61 13 years ago

I'm working on an opensource implementation of the API here if anyone is interested in helping out :) https://github.com/devongovett/reader

Sujan• 13 years ago

The most important thing right now is probably making sure that there is a documentation of the old API we all agree on. The one you are using [1] seems like a good start.

[1] http://undoc.in

pavel_lishin• 13 years ago

Did I miss something in their API, or was there absolutely no way to tell whether you had renamed a feed or not?

reidrac• 13 years ago

FYI: http://undoc.in/subscription.html#edit

numo16• 13 years ago

I might pitch in and help on this, I know I'll be looking for a replacement to Reader, might as well help build an api implementation

doe88• 13 years ago

That's a good idea but I nevertheless think big clients (client reader + integrated access to server api) will win anyway because if you have to pay a client and then pay a subscription to a server to have access to an implementation of this API I don't think it will be very appealing. All the current model of 'small' clients was based on the fact that the access to Google's (non official) api was free. That part won't be replaced.

jxdxbx• 13 years ago

It would be nice if one of the self-hosted server-side apps (Fever, Tiny Tiny RSS) replicated the Reader API. It's not really worth it for me to bother with a self-hosted solution if I have to use a web client.

zdw• 13 years ago

Also, an implementation independent test suite would be nice...

I'm sure there are plenty of corner cases where all the new implementations might fall down, or make different decisions than are expected.

canthonytucci• 13 years ago

Marco should write it.

khet• 13 years ago

why?

tenpoundhammer• 13 years ago

All I know is that I will be on whatever reeder supports. So basically whoever makes that thing is going to be deciding my fate. I hope they choose wisely.

r00fus• 13 years ago

Bingo. This is what's up for grabs - who wants to be the underlying infrastructure for all these great apps like Reeder or RiverOfNews Note: most folks are opting for Twitter/FB + Flipboard-style apps, so most of the market will be the privacy oriented elite.

ajslater• 13 years ago

Feedly's first out of the gate already here.

rluhar• 13 years ago

The current version of Reeder supports Fever. It took me about ten minutes to setup Fever (you need a MySQL instance, but thats about it). I use Bluehost for my hosting and setting up Fever was pretty painless.

It does cost $30, but it is worth it for me.

davidpayne11• 13 years ago

Please, as an advice to general HN posters, please avoid posting marco.org links here on HN, because his sole intention is to sell his readers out more than focusing on writing. That's a fairly grande accusation, but it's justified.

Do you know why is he writing about Google Reader now? Go to your HN homepage right now, as of writing this comment, the Google reader announcement has about 1700 upvotes. Ouch, that's a lot of views for someone to let go of. Hence, if someone writes something that compliments this announcement, common sense tells me that they would get more page views.

There's nothing wrong in having ads on your blog/website, people do it all the time. What's wrong is trying to create an impression to your readers that your sole intention is to write quality content, while you care just about pageviews. Please, realize that marco.org is no different from Techcrunch!

Marco isn't innocent, if you've been following him closely. Also, I think it would help if you take a look at this page where he just blatantly sells us, his readers like some piece of junk commodity. http://www.marco.org/sponsorship

ChrisClark• 13 years ago

Ok, so he responds to HN posts all the time. Everything he says here is a good idea. And I want all the reader developers to consider it. So I'm going to upvote it.

Just because he says what we want to hear doesn't make the content wrong. I want to hear it and I want others to hear it too.

If what he is recommending isn't perfect, the comments here can expand and fix it.

timmins• 13 years ago

I've been under the impression that HN doesn't sit well with Marco. I've read it multiple times on multiple occasions.

Quickest example I could recall: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/176437401156194305

Wilya• 13 years ago

He's far from the only one. Most people with thousands of followers monetize them, one way or another. There's a ton of bloggers out there hungry for pageviews.

So what ? Why accuse him right now, out of the blue ? And what does that have to do with the post ?

greghinch• 13 years ago

Are you crying foul on a writer trying to make money for his writing? Do you cry foul on magazines, newspapers, etc. for selling ads? Ever notice how "the news" in general is about what's going on in the world currently?

adeaver• 13 years ago

I saw 1 ad. 1. And he's not selling user information but ad space and sponsored link posts which doesn't flood his site.

What exactly are you protesting against?

saidajigumi• 13 years ago

At some level, that's exactly how every ad-funded site in the world works. Is your complaint simply that the process is more visible? Marco.org and a few other independent sites use advertising that basically follows the "buy a slot" model that's been with us for more than a century. Is there an argument here as to why you would single out this ad-supported source versus every other such submission? I'll observe that there's nothing in the HN guidelines on- or off- topic about ad-funded sources.

In this case, you don't seem to have a critique of the content, the only area that the HN guidelines discuss. AFAICT, the content submitted is 1) original and 2) apparently quite relevant to the HN readership given the level of voted interest in this and other submissions related to the Google Reader shutdown.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

So he's basically our slave and writes more content on whatever we like? Awesome. If he wasn't already getting paid, I'd say let's hire him.

swombat2• 13 years ago

Are you completely stupid or are you just trolling us?

On the off chance you're just stupid, here's some enlightenment. Marco Arment is a cofounder of hugely successful Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, both of which certainly make or made him more money than he'll ever make from ads on his blog, however popular. He's also created The Magazine, which probably makes a fair bit of cash already, and will be making more in the future. He has a solid reputation in the tech space, and it is stupid to argue that he's somehow spending his days trying to bait HN with empty crap articles.

marco.org is very different from TC, in that if marco.org had no ads, Marco would certainly still write to it, as it's his personal platform, whereas if TC had no ads, it would fold in a week.

corresation3• 13 years ago

Marco Arment is a cofounder of hugely successful Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, both of which certainly make or made him more money than he'll ever make from ads on his blog, however popular.

The GP post should be nuked from orbit, but the reasoning you put there is hilariously specious. If it is so irrelevant, then why are they there? Why does Arment stuff entries full of credibility-diminishing "sponsored by" text, or worse insidious Amazon affiliate links?

Every ounce of reality says that he cares very much about his blog income, your imaginings of his external wealth notwithstanding.

dingusmaster• 13 years ago

Pretty sure it's a troll. He knows he can get a response out of Arment (http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/davidpayne) just as another commenter on the Verge did a while ago from a huge personal attack (http://www.marco.org/2012/05/10/crazy-comment)

tomfakes• 13 years ago

The irony for me is that I had no idea Marco had ads on his site, because I get to read his blog content in Google Reader!

Kylekramer2• 13 years ago

You would still get ads there.

SmileyKeith• 13 years ago

Nope.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Twist: Marco actually posted this, so he could have an excuse to write another ad-revenue-generating post for HN.

http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/davidpayne

saw66• 13 years ago

I hate to be rude, but you haters are some amazing douchebags. I'm not a Marco fanboy, but he's a successful person who thinks a lot about the things he does, as evidenced by any listening to Build and Analyze and Accidental Tech Podcast. Do I always agree with him? No. Is he smarter than me, and has he accomplished more in terms of his career and technology? Yes, I'd say the evidence says so.

It's one thing to disagree with people, but to hate them and be a total jackass for no reason is just wasting your life on the internet. MANY web sites have sponsorship. MANY of them. Marco is no more of a sellout or in the business of selling you out than any of them.

What a tool.

JEVLON• 13 years ago

I enjoy his writing, but I don't take his writing as gospel. As with anything anyone says, we should exercise some judgement on the validity and biases of their ideas.

In 2011 in Marco's podcast he stated that 7" tablet devices don't make any sense, but then in 2012 he had changed his mind when the iPad mini was approaching its announcement. I am not calling him a liar, but just pointing out that opinions change and... opinions are just opinions.

I share his concern that each new feed reading service will use a different sync API, and am happy others will be reading this blog post. Regardless of whether Marco has jumped on the popular story bandwagon or not so he can make a few advertising dollars, this post is of value to enough people to up-vote it.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

Personally, this could be a killer use of App.net. Blend social with RSS and get something like Pandora for newsfeeds. Not sure how hard it would be to pull an RSS feed and then push that into an App.net stream, blended with some meta data on content and a machine learning algorithm which enhanced your feeds by finding similar feeds that has a high correlative match to what you read most. Just sayin'

fusiongyro• 13 years ago

What's the maximum payload size on App.net? Last time I went looking all I learned was that it's larger than Twitter's.

m_eiman• 13 years ago

256 chars of message, but things can be attached to the message in addition to that. See http://developers.app.net/docs/resources/post/ and http://developers.app.net/docs/meta/annotations/

mjfern• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder at Intigi.

With https://intigi.com, we've done just this, intake content from both social (Twitter) and RSS feeds. With Twitter, we index the full text of any linked article and make the text fully searchable. The full text provides much more data for us to search and also is a great way of deduplicating content (i.e., Tweets linking to the same article).

duaneb• 13 years ago

> Blend social with RSS and get something like Pandora for newsfeeds.

You might like Prismatic: http://getprismatic.com/news/home

pekk• 13 years ago

Nope, the demanded permissions are way out of control:

* View basic information about your account

* Manage your data in Google Reader

* View your email address

* Manage your contacts

* Perform these operations when I'm not using the application

zarify• 13 years ago

I've seen a lot of suggestions for replacements (either already out there or just an idea) since yesterday which want to blend social networks with RSS and personally it seems like a terrible idea[1]. I can't be alone in just wanting a news feed and not some mashup of the news and what's being talked about.

[1] - I realise the irony in complaining about not wanting social news yet still following personal blogs, but they're a known quantity. If I want socially filtered news I'll go browse Reddit.

pnachbaur• 13 years ago

I think you could do something really interesting simply by connecting feed usage data and content data, which (I believe) was zarify's idea of 'Pandora for newsfeeds'.

There are companies along this line[1], but I'd prefer a solution with just rss usage/content data, and not the social streams as well.

[1] Prismatic and Percolate come to mind

adestefan2• 13 years ago

No damn it. This is exactly why Google is closing down Reader. Most people who have stuck with Reader do not want anything to do with mixing RSS and social crap.

Jtsummers• 13 years ago

With the App.net storage API, you could just use it for sync'ing. It'd be up to the individual apps what features they extend (push it to your stream, make an RSS stream that others can follow, etc). In theory, it should be possible to partition the space for users who want them separate.

acdha3• 13 years ago

> This is exactly why Google is closing down Reader.

The large number of vocal people complaining specifically about how much worse Google+ is than the old reader sharing system (search for "sharebros" or http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network) would suggest this is not true.

With the exception of hardcore introverts, most people like the idea of sharing - but only when it's actually doing something they like rather than the gamified meaningless actions Google is chasing right now.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

Interesting mix.

So my thought was not 'sharing' in the sense of having your friends know you just read an article on TechCrunch, rather that you and your friends characterize the TechCrunch feed as '"news", "gossip", "opinion" => related to (startups)' so that when I or they start reading other things that are 'related to (startups)' the reader could mention or perhaps occasionally inject articles into that 'feed/grouping' (Pandora has the notion of a 'radio station' which is similar).

Basically the extent of your "sharing" with the rest of the community (with respect to the reader) is that you think agree that TechCrunch is about startups. The community helps create the taxonomy of the feeds they are reading so that the reader can know if some feed that one person is reading might be of interest to someone who is reading feeds that are similar to that. (with no knowledge about who is reading those other feeds, just that the the other person has the same sort of interests you have expressed for a feed)

I'm going to assume the app adds on to every article the familar /tweet/share/like/etc tags so if you are a social media engaged person you can push it out to your social media stream as well.

Even though I am "stuck in the 70's" in my music tastes according to my wife I enjoy the music Pandora finds for me on my originally 'bands from the 70's' radio station.

The only thing reader seemed to be missing for me was a way to discover new blogs to follow. That function is being provided a bit by HN these days but its hit or miss.

randallu• 13 years ago

OAuth rather than POST. I don't want a bunch of client apps storing passwords in plain text.

Spittie• 13 years ago

I just wrote something similar on an another site:

"For now, Google Reader was the standard. Now that it isn't it anymore, I hope that it will get developed a nice API to sync feeds between decides, and that the major reader will implement it. This way every application would be able to sync with every backend, without any problem. And if a backend close, you could easily switch to a different one by changing one line in the configuration."

I seriously hope that this will be true. What has got me stuck on Google Reader for now (beside the "it just works" interface) is that every major application synced with it. I don't really want this to happen again, only with a different company.

WilliamTJ• 13 years ago

Here a link to Mr Avocado? He the former engineer who created Google reader project in the first place.This is Just a suggestion from a user. Maybe getting him on board would help a lot in your project?

http://www.massless.org/?area=Projects

mstroeck• 13 years ago

I'm the project lead for Vienna, the open source RSS client for the Mac. We support Google Reader, and we want to support this:

https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss/issues/160

If you're a Cocoa developer, feel free to jump right in. If you're going to implement the server side, shoot me a note @mstroeck (app.net preferred).

pauljonas• 13 years ago

I tried Vienna today -- downloaded, installed, then tapped OK on the "Google Sync" option…

…an hour later, the application still was "not responding", though the little red number circle on the dock icon continued to climb. About a half hour later with the application still in a "not responding" state, I force quit and then proceeded to delete it.

coldtea• 13 years ago

Perhaps you're not a very technical person then. Or you have some bizarro ideas about testing new apps.

If an app is "not responding" after one hour, and it's not doing physics simulation or renders a 3D movie for Pixar, then you kill it and try again. Damn, I wouldn't even let it stay stalled for 10 minutes.

If you genuinely want to test the app (instead of only being interested in Google Sync), you'd also try how it does some other stuff, like adding some RSS feeds directly.

LiquidEyes• 13 years ago

Volvo or Volkswagen?

Baby steps toward replacing Google Reader

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