The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: Google Reader

Showing posts with label Google Reader. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Minus Google Plus

At some point this morning Google Plus, Google’s ill fated attempt to take on Facebook, went away.

Not that we had not been warned. The word went out last October that due to security issues and the cost of keeping the service up to date on that front, along with low usage, Google Plus would be shut down in August of 2019. And then more security issues came up and they said screw it, it is coming down in April.

They knew enough to avoid April 1

The third part APIs went first, being removed early last month, at which posts from the blog stopped going there. This wasn’t the first time they had stopped. Google had broken that connection previously, and for a long stretch auto-posts were flagged as private. I suspect that I lost any regular followers on the service when that happened a couple years back. But in March they went down for good.

WP.com letting people know

Last night I took a look and saw that it was still listed on the Google front page.

The top six on April 1

This morning though it was gone, all of the other services having moved up a spot.

Top six on April 2

And so it goes.

As I note previously I did, up until the very end, check Google Plus almost daily, though for the last year at least it had been mostly the Richard Bartle feed. Posts from his personal blog appeared there daily, even after the APIs were shut down. He must have been putting the links up there manually. And if I miss his posts I know where to find them in any case.

I am sure some will miss the service more, mostly because Google really pushed integration with Google Plus on every front. If, for example, you took their advice and used Google Plus for comments on your blog… well, now all those comments are gone. It is all gone.

Me… I’m not so hard hit. This wasn’t like the blow of them shutting down Google Reader, something I am still pissed about more than five years later. Just reading RSS feeds aside, it allowed you to build an outgoing feed that was the key to my live side bar feed. I have been struggling ever since to find something that worked as reliably. My current Rube Goldberg configuration mostly works, but is still down about half the time I check due to all the parts needing to be in exact sync the moment a request comes in.

The fate of Google Reader, another service they claimed had low usage… though its cancellation led to competing services being overwhelmed, proving one persons pittance can be anothers fortune I guess… made me reluctant to jump on Google Plus wholeheartedly.

And I am not alone. Ars Technica has an article up about how the now long history of Google shutting down apps and services is hurting their brand. How can you trust Google, how can you bring yourself to invest in their offerings, if they are more than likely to just yank the run out from under you.

I suppose the one success is GMail, which turned 15 years old yesterday.

Did they really launch on April 1?

But GMail has ads in it… Google used to parse your email in order to generate those ads, something is said it would stop doing, but how can an end user tell… so has a revenue stream of some sort. So it is maybe safe from closure. But does anything beyond that and search have revenue?

Anyway, another Google offering bites the dust.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Google Plus Ungood Securewise

Alternate Headline: Users unbellyfeel Google prolefeed, becomes unservice.

It is probably just me that saw the Newspeak potential in the demise of Google Plus.

That attempt at humor aside, the word has gone out from the Googleplex in Mountain View that Google Plus will be no more. Or that the consumer version of the product will be no more following a 10 month wind down, meaning that it will be gone at some point in August of 2019. Google says that the enterprise version of Google Plus will continue. Color me surprised that there was such a thing or that any enterprise outside of Google actually uses it, but they say “many” do. I guess it is likely better than whatever Microsoft is pushing lately. It is certainly better than anything Cisco has on offer.

The reason given for the closure in the news headlines involves a security flaw that could have potentially exposed the data for over half a million accounts. The data exposed was limited to optional items entered in your Google profile (which is semi-public to start with unless you lock it down) and Google says it has no evidence that the flaw had been exploited. But data breaches make for more views, so you may find your local news source pitching this as a stolen data panic.

The real reason for the closure is a little less dramatic.

Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.

Basically, so few people use Google Plus that it isn’t worth the effort needed to keep it secure. They didn’t just say “low” usage but “very low” usage. You’ll probably get no greater admission of failure than that. If it has been popular they would have kept it open. But now they have an excuse to shut it down.

Of course, part of me cheered at the news. I am old, have a long memory, and have been prone at times to carry resentments long past their expiration dates, so I continue to see Google Plus as the reason that Google killed off the much loved and still missed (by me at least) Google Reader. It has been more than five years since that happened and I am still annoyed by it and I still haven’t found a replacement that did all Google Reader did at its peak. Some twisted logic in the back of my brain sees this as justice for the late idolized RSS reader.

But a bit of me is bemused by the change. As it turns out, I actually check Google Plus pretty much daily. There are a few people I follow there, including Richard Bartle, that make it worth the effort. The updates aren’t rapid, so it is something I check once or twice a day at most, but I do check it.

I also syndicate my blog feed there as well and get the occasional response, so there is life out there still. But the activity isn’t anywhere close to what it was during the early days of the service, which in itself wasn’t that much compared to the competition, which is and always was Facebook. Nobody is saying Google Plus influenced the last election or anything else.

So I suppose I will miss it. And I know that it going away won’t magically bring back Google Reader, so my missing it will be genuine. You can’t blame a company for shutting down a service that few use and which brings in no revenue. The same goes for Google Reader as well. And iGoogle. And Google Insights. And Orkut. Man, what is it with me and dead Google products?

And so it goes. We’ll see how it winds down between now and August.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Blaugust and Consolidating Your Blog Reading

Sure, one of the main aspects of Blaugust is getting people to start up or keep going with their blogs, writing, if not every day, at least more than usual.

Blaugust Reborn

But the reverse of that coin is reading blogs. If we’re all busy writing more than usual we should all make some time to go read some of this extra output.

However, we as a group, and blogs in general, are a scattered bunch, with addresses all over the internet. And, while you could easily favorite/bookmark all your regular sites in your browser, that still means you have to go and check up on each and every one regularly to see what is up. If you check daily, then the less regular sites will start to seem a wasted effort, while if you check less frequently then those daily posting sites will be a chore to keep up with.

What you need is something you can check that will show you the new stuff. Well, the internet has you covered, though not as well covered as it once did. Here are some options for reading blog posts.

RSS Feed Readers

This is likely the default approach for most people, and there has traditionally been a lot of options in this area, both online and offline. Back in the day I used to use an offline reader for both RSS and UseNet because always-on internet wasn’t a thing, and even when it was I felt the need to archive some sites.

Google Reader changed that. It was light, readable, and had a lot of additional, useful functionality and dominated the RSS reader market for a stretch. At one point damn near everything, from Outlook to Firefox, had RSS reader functionality, but why complete with free from Google. Then Google killed Google Reader, hoping that we would all swap over to GooglePlus. I’m still annoyed about that five years later.

So some of us were left looking for alternatives, none of which quite lived up to Google Reader of old. Meanwhile, the continued growth of social media caused some of the options to, if not give up on RSS, reduce the importance of RSS compared to other areas. NetVibes went that way as an example. Other sites, like Digg, that would have been well positioned to pick up the slack, had long since wandered away from RSS. Digg actually killed off their reader. Still, there are some decent choices out there:

The Old Reader – An attempt to recreate the Google Reader experience, a light and useful online reader, and a good one at that. It is still doesn’t have features that Google Reader had back in 2008, but it has gone in other directions to connect with social media. A solid choice, and it is free last I checked.

Feedly – Where I ended up after Google Reader. Solid, has a UI that works for me, and free for basic functionality. I pay for premium which, among other things, lets me hook it up to IFTTT in order to run the blog feed in my side bar. Still lacks features that Google Reader had in 2008 and is building out new features in directions that do not interest me personally. Also is starting to get a bit too smart for itself. If, for example, a site you follows changes its RSS feed URL, Feedly won’t let you just add it without jumping through some hoops. It keeps trying to force you back to the original address.

NewBlur – Another site that benefited from the demise of Google Reader, so much so that the new traffic brought it down. Another solid choice. I am not in love with the UI, but I am picky about things like that. Worth looking into.

There are others out there, but none that I have any experience with, though I would be interested to know about others. Do you use Comma Feed, RSS Owl, or some other reader? Consider that a Blaugust writing prompt if you want.

WordPress.com Reader

I wanted to break out the WP.com reader for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it isn’t strictly an RSS reader. Also, I have been critical and dismissive of it over the years, but it has finally grown into usefulness. Among its benefits:

Easy to follow other WP.com blogs with that follow button
Can still follow non-WP.com blogs
Can use categories and tags to find blogs

That last item is the biggest feature to my mind. WP.com has long had a strong yet almost unknown tag and category feature. You can, for example, create an RSS feed from a WP.com tag or category and see all the posts that use it. For example, this one does it for the tag “eve online”:

http://en.wordpress.com/tag/eve-online/feed/

This is why I get annoyed when people are lazy about tagging, especially when they uses “wow” instead of “world of warcraft” or “eve” instead of “eve online” for their posts. The latter choices are specific, the former generic and used for many other things.

Anyway, you can search by tag or category to find new blogs. I have found a few new MMORPG blogs that way. I have a regular set of tags I look at for just that sort of thing.

The downside of the reader is that the interface isn’t ideal for me as I tend to prefer a compact view with more titles on the screen, and there is no reading the whole post. Still, if you have a blog on WP.com, you should check this out, if only to find new blogs.

Bhagpuss’ Side Bar

Once again I pitch how great the Blogger blog roll widget can be, at least if you configure it correctly. (I have seen it configured badly.) Go look at Inventory Full and check out how it is done.

There are long dormant blogs on the Blogger platform that still send me a regular trickle of traffic because of that blog roll widget.

If you want a reader of your own it is a legit option to create a blog on Blogger and use the blogroll widget to display the latest posts. You don’t even have to put it on the side bar. You can configure the feed to use the main space of the layout.

Use This List

Anyway, now that you are thinking about readers you can use the list below, which features all of the participating blogs this Blaugust, as a place to start populating your reader. If you just want the RSS feed links you can find a list over at Armagon Live. It should be at least as up to date as my own list.