Digg says it’s serious about building a replacement for Google Reader

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/25/digg-says-its-serious-about-building-a-replacement-for-google-reader-outlines-its-focus/

by vinnybhaskar • 13 years ago

89 70 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

PleasePlease• 13 years ago

That could Save Digg. Good Move if they'd succeed!

obamasupporter2• 13 years ago

Save Digg? Digg has been dead!

nonamegiven• 13 years ago

"I'm not dead yet."

niggler• 13 years ago

Is there enough value in the Digg brand to justify using it here?

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

I imagine the entire point would be to have the reader improve the Digg brand, not the other way round

brokentone2• 13 years ago

No there is not. You're missing the point. The talent that bought the domain name though are the people for the job.

leed25d• 13 years ago

A Digg reader, done right, might just begin to put them in a lot of people's good graces.

wildster• 13 years ago

Yay, another plan for the Digg brand without a source of revenue. If you put too much advertising people will go the next hot thing.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Interesting, if you could pair it with a blogging service and hook up an ad service provider there is a business model in there.

norswap• 13 years ago

At least, they appear to have their priority straight.

Keep it simple, we don't need no stinking share buttons. Make it fast - my connection is badly lagging these days and I can't do anything about it short of relocating, so this is close to my heart. Synchronize across device - basically, make mobile apps so that it's fast on mobile too.

greenmountin2• 13 years ago

1) This article has no new information

2) The linked "Follow Our Progress" form is for email updates

3) Their tumblr blog has no rss link

That's not what I call serious. I use their site all the time, but it's no substitute for GR, and I don't want their curation to overpower my feeds. Reader was all about the RSS. At this rate they are sounding like a tardy Prismatic.

lrm• 13 years ago

RSS for the Digg blog: http://blog.digg.com/rss

jordanmoore_• 13 years ago

1) Correct 2) Also correct, not sure why this is an issue 3) Their blog does have an RSS feed - http://blog.digg.com/rss do you mean an anchor link for subscribing? I can't recall I used one of those instead of the RSS icon in the address bar.

Additionally, Digg - the product, like HN, Reddit etc was never going to be a substitute for Reader. The product they are currently working on sounds like a direct replacement for Reader with a social slant. Seems like the most sensible move for them to become relevant again.

lazugod• 13 years ago

The number of browsers offering an RSS button in the address bar is decreasing.

Finster2• 13 years ago

He's probably using Chrome. No native RSS support, ya know.

greenmountin2• 13 years ago

My point is that they are missing the essence of what made Reader effective: RSS. Email for updates? Following on Tumblr instead of a prominent hyperlink with the cross-platform RSS feed? It's like they don't know anyone who ever used it.

When Prismatic came out with an opportunistic spiel, even though they had nothing anything like Reader, it really rubbed me the wrong way. This hype piece feels the same, almost like a car commercial (bare bones! ultra fast!) or an Onion piece about how every co-founder in the Valley is starting a social news sharing service.

I think the key ingredients to a GR replacement are an open API so it is not beholden and can be on all your devices -- as mindcrime notes -- a focus on RSS, basic and friendly sharing, and then surely a little curation magic that Digg must know already. It's probably fine if Digg gets there in a few months. But for example theoldreader is there already.

nothxbro• 13 years ago

It just goes to show how much of a failure what they were currently doing was. The fact they were willing to switch to this shows quite a bit.

They genuinely should have just let digg be and get costs way down. The ad income would have been substantial if they just left it alone. Digg stories ranked high in search and I imagine they would have continued to do so.

slg• 13 years ago

I have one question I want to propose to the gluttony of companies rushing to replace Google Reader. If it was such a valuable product, why would Google shut it down? I think we are getting too emotional in how we are viewing this market just because a lot of us used Reader. If Google thought there was money to be made with a great RSS reader, they wouldn't have left Reader abandoned for years. If there is a market in which the market leader isn't able to make money, I don't think that I would be rushing into it.

Mikushi• 13 years ago

Just because Google didn't pursue Reader doesn't mean a smaller company cannot make it work for them.

sachitgupta• 13 years ago

Food for thought: "RSS is a great $X million market opportunity. Google is not in the business of pursuing $X million market opportunities." (from patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/312017704045408256)

elvisds• 13 years ago

Some of the alternatives available to Reader also have one additional feature built in - Discovery. These companies might look at acquiring Reader users and giving them a taste of discovery, while satisfying the feed reading use case. Discovery then leads to potential monetization avenues. Google could have moved Reader users to Google Currents [1], but I'm not sure why they chose to shut down the product the way they did

[1] https://www.google.com/producer/currents

dlib• 13 years ago

I expect that Currents won't live very long. I don't see what value it adds in that space with competitors such as Pulse, Zite, Flipboard and a lot of others. Is anyone actually using Currents? If so, is it any good?

analog• 13 years ago

The RSS reader I use on my phone lets me view the text content without having to view the web page. No web page -> No google ads.

Finster2• 13 years ago

The same thing happened with Yahoo and delicious. People love that stuff, but Yahoo never bothered to develop it. In this space, growth comes through developing public API's. Google is notoriously bad at developing service API's. Don't misinterpret Google's failure to innovate and develop their product as a signal that such a product is inherently not valuable.

mikro2nd• 13 years ago

Digg who?

officemonkey• 13 years ago

Digg says it’s serious about building a replacement for Slashdot [2006]

codingthebeach• 13 years ago

Yay. I would really like to see Digg take a swing at this and said as much a couple weeks ago.

http://www.codingthewheel.com/internet/could-digg-replace-go...

Digg is the dark horse in this race. It will be interesting to see how well they can execute.

muglug2• 13 years ago

Um, there are a ton of Google Reader replacements out there doing incredibly well in the wake of that announcement. Digg deciding to create their own product from scratch seems very stupid.

Nowyouknow• 13 years ago

I would say it's far from stupid. Digg has brand recognition, additional exposure like TNW's article here will only help downloads. The brand has reach that can't be purchased. I'm speaking for me, but I think this may be the general consensus, too, we're all just waiting for a truly GREAT RSS reader. Digg has the opportunity to innovate here.

If they actually do a good job with it? This could be huge. Regardless, their product will do well.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

Why is it stupid? Has anybody - yet - clearly become the RSS reader? Is there any reason to think that the Digg guys might not have some innovative ideas they could potentially deploy? Will their brand recognition alone not give them something of a "leg up" (even after a couple of years of irrelevance, people still remember the term "Digg").

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they will succeed at this, but I don't see the justification for calling the move "very stupid".

larsberg• 13 years ago

Have you tried using any of them? Say what you will about Google Reader, but at least it didn't crash (most of the standalone apps) or require some sort of strange interpretive dance with your fingers to browse your articles and mark them as read (feedly).

There's definitely space here.

muglug2• 13 years ago

Right, but those apps nevertheless have a footprint and (hopefully) a codebase to improve upon. At this point in time Digg has none of that -- just a once-well-known brand and a new redesign that's failed to capture back the audience/community lost to Reddit and others. This looks more like a hail mary than a solid business decision.

dombili• 13 years ago

I don't think it's stupid at all. I've yet to find an RSS reader for my needs. Newsblur is good looking but filled with useless features that I'll never use, The Old Reader is simple enough and I like its UI but it's not fast at all (meaning navigating between folders is pain in the ass and it fetches feeds extremely slowly). I subscribed to feedbin yesterday and canceled my subscription an hour later because it didn't even support folders. So there's not a great alternative for Google Reader out there yet. I believe Digg have the technical capability to create one and I like their goals.

They gotta build the system as fast as possible, though. I get that they're building the system from scratch, but by the time Google Reader is actually shut down, most people will settle down with other products.

Grue3• 13 years ago

And they are all terrible. Seriously, I have tried every single one of them, and none have the look and feel, and capability for instant updates of Google Reader.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

I'm actually sort of rooting for Digg here. Even though "new Digg" has almost nothing to do with "classic Digg," I still feel some nostalgia for the brand, and anybody who will commit to supporting RSS and building a good reader application is worth of some support.

I think codingthebeach is right to call them a dark horse, but I'm also excited to see what they can deliver.

That said, one thing that disappoints me about the Digg statement quoted in TFA, is that there's no mention of open standards and/or the Open Web. I'd like to see these guys say "Yes, we will absolutely support the relevant standards you'd expect to find in a reader: RSS, Atom, OPML, etc." If they do support any "social" features they should consider exposing social graph info using FOAF, and using SIOC would be a nice thing as well.

brokentone2• 13 years ago

The Digg folks (betaworks people led by Jake Levine) are the people for the job. They understand surfacing relevant news in a timely way, and they move really fast. Looking forward to this.

buf• 13 years ago

I'm excited for Digg. Although I realize that most of the original crew has up and gone to greener pastures (Eventbrite, Sprintly, etc), I think Digg in itself still has the capacity to do great things.

If they can execute well quickly enough, I can foresee Digg coming out one of the top 5 reader apps soon.

homakov• 13 years ago

I thought digg is dead. Now they have a good idea

ck2• 13 years ago

If you are talking about it instead of already announcing it - isn't it technically too late?

mkr-hn3• 13 years ago

Why would that be?

coldtea• 13 years ago

Not at all. That's just the BS "first to market" mentality to get startup employers to work overtime.

If Evernote or Dropbox just appeared today, to give an example, people would still flock to them.

gap• 13 years ago

Digg is the company that lost all of my data (saved links and such) and then lied about it. We're slowly bringing the data back online, they replied to my messages 12 months apart. Yeah, I would totally trust them for my feed reading.

amix• 13 years ago

I think this is a bad decision as the market has moved to other things. And others such as Feedly or NewsBlur already serve this niche well.

For the record I haven't used Google Reader for years (and I have over 500 feeds in it as I used it a lot at some point). Why? Because I find my news elsewhere (on Hacker News, Twitter, Google Plus, /r/python, reddit/r/programming etc.) - - And not to say the awesome mobile services such as Flipboard or Prismatic. I guess RSS usage is even worse for the mainstream and non-technical users.

mkr-hn3• 13 years ago

I don't know if Flipboard can work for me since I have no way to try it, but none of the others come even close to what an RSS reader lets me do. It's good that you've found something that works for your needs, but RSS and RSS readers fill a large niche that has no equivalent tool. I would love it if Digg could better integrate what Reader did with what all the others try to do. Feedly and NewsBlur fall short in a long list of ways.

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

NewsBlur has been unusably slow since the Reader shutdown notice, so I disagree that the niche is being served already, it's anyone's ball game at this point.

conesus• 13 years ago

Try now. While I haven't scaled the backend yet, I have put a massive db machine in place as a stand-in.

Shank• 13 years ago

NewsBlur doesn't have an API, and as a result, the defacto standard would be Feedly. We now have a similar singular pipeline problem.

The Digg engineers have a lot more experience working at scale than the one person behind NewsBlur, and can probably whip out a suitable competitor and an API to boot faster than NewsBlur can.

That, and everybody loves competition.

mkr-hn3• 13 years ago

https://www.newsblur.com/api

ldh• 13 years ago

Discovering news was never RSS's sweet spot for me. What it's great for is tracking deeper content from handpicked sources regardless of popularity.

kristofferR• 13 years ago

Slightly ironic considering how so much of the demise of Digg was a result of their tight integration of RSS in digg v.4.

jlarocco• 13 years ago

Can somebody explain the appeal of Google Reader and why people are making such a big deal of it shutting down? I've tried it a few times, and I just don't see the appeal.

RSS readers are a dime a dozen, and Google Reader is mediocre, at best. The interface isn't great, it's tied to a Google+/GMail account, and there's no way to subscribe to RSS feeds on an internal network.

I feel like I must be missing something.

taylorishere• 13 years ago

It destroyed the competition as it was growing, and became the backbone of multiple services. Imagine you have all your documents on Dropbox, in multiple applications, and then Dropbox shuts down. Dropbox is already a part of your workflow, but now you have to find an alternative for the apps you use.

ludwigvan• 13 years ago

I guess it is the service (unofficial api) it provided (syncing bt. multiple devices) as opposed to the website itself.

jdechko• 13 years ago

Exactly, the web UI was mediocre at best, and went downhill the more they tied it to G+. But as a RSS syncing platform it was/is great.

geuis• 13 years ago

In my case, I have mainly used it as a podcast listener. There has never been a really good podcast-dedicated site that suited me well. But Reader does. I can play a podcast in place, easily see visually when new ones were available, easily import new feeds if I couldn't find it via Reader, etc. I'm sad this is going away. Seems very arbitrary and unnecessary.

chadgeidel• 13 years ago

The UI kept mostly out of the way. I could read it at any computer (and I read my feeds at at least 3 different machines). And the "killer feature" is/was that my feeds loaded instantly. I did not have to wait for every one of my 250+ feeds to open when I opened my "RSS reader".

I'm currently subscribed to NewsBlur and I have to wait for my feeds to load. It's not such a big deal as the UI is brilliant, but it's still annoying.

I'm trying out Feedly but I'm concerned about the behavior when Google Reader goes away since that's just a UI on top of what Google provides.

I'm still waiting in the import queue in The Old Reader.

BCM43• 13 years ago

I'm currently subscribed to NewsBlur and I have to wait for my feeds to load. It's not such a big deal as the UI is brilliant, but it's still annoying.

It was less than half a second before a huge influx of users. Hopefully it will be down to what it was before when the scaling gets set up better.

simcop2387• 13 years ago

I've currently setup a tinytinyrss install on my VPS. I'm actually liking it better than feedly. I haven't gotten a chance to checkout newsblur as much as I'd like, but i do like that it too can be setup by a user to run on it's own (I don't want to pay for an account just yet until i learn if i like it). The 64 feed limit is disappointing but i can completely understand it.

rhizome• 13 years ago

That's great, gals and guys. Let us know how it turns out when you're finished.

rjvir• 13 years ago

This is interesting since Digg was an instrumental piece in the disruption of Google Reader.

danielki• 13 years ago

Makes sense. The system for the "new Digg" seems to be heavily based on getting as much signal as possible about the popularity of particular news items among certain groups of users. Why wouldn't they want another signal source, especially given the "news junkie" tendencies of the population most likely to embrace such a service?

da_n• 13 years ago

I would happily use a Digg/News.me RSS Reader and I think they could pull it off, however for me to take it seriously it must include this:

    Settings -> Export Feeds

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

The Old Reader is okay for now, but it's slow.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

It sounds like they want to add specific features to integrate with Hacker News:

"We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News."[1]

[1] http://blog.digg.com/post/46251309499/whats-next

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

This is interesting, and I know just what they're getting at.

I've always had this "problem" of reconciling my consumption of RSS feeds (of items I will read every single one of, like an inbox, until the queue is empty) with that of massive streams of information like those mentioned above (where the best I can do is cull a little bit here and there from what's on the front page right now). The standard feeds from these sources don't really fit well within the normal RSS workflow since there's too much content to read exhaustively (and it's all sequential, removing the value of voting mechanisms). People sometimes use tools like Yahoo Pipes to make feeds that only allow content over a certain karma threshold, but these have their own set of problems (and you can't customize the results without spinning up your very own version).

chickopozo• 13 years ago

Dear Digg,

If you use the work social whilst creating a RSS reader you have already failed.

Sincerely, People who actually used Google Reader

P.S. A point-and-click html scraper to rss would be nice too.

johnward2• 13 years ago

Nobody cares. There are already good rss readers out there.

Digg says it’s serious about building a replacement for Google Reader

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