Rumproarious

Reader Roundup Iranians, R$$, and More Funny Please.

There have been some bigger names weighing in on the coming Reader changes. What I am liking is that client authors are starting ask some serious questions about what this means for google reader syncing.

Today I saw Marco, and Gruber posting about Reader. They both chose to reference an article written by Brent Simmons.

Marco said:

“The bad news is that there really isn’t an alternative RSS sync platform that I know of. The good news is that I don’t think there are any significant barriers to creating one, should it become necessary.” #

I of course agree with this, and think that someone should build a service for everyone to use. Many of the best feed readers charge money for there apps, and use Google Reader syncing for free. Why not pool some of that money on a common feed syncing service.

What is Reader worth to Google?

Brent Simmons has some really good questions for Google. One question is pretty easy to answer:

“We don’t know what the value of Google Reader is to Google. It doesn’t appear to have ads a la search or Gmail, though ads do appear in feeds via Google’s AdSense for feeds, and that presumably makes money. Does Google Reader feed the search engine ranking system? Does it exist to help ensure the goodwill of influential writers who use Google Reader? I can speculate, but I don’t know, which is my point.” #

Reader is totally valuable to Google if not just from Google Adwords, and Feedburner. It played a huge roll in Google enveloping every, and all web business it could get in. I made this point the other day.

“It’s hard to think that anyone ever thought RSS would be the next hot thing. That it would pave the way for the internet, and create the next hit company. I think a number of companies even hitched there success to it. When Google Reader came on the scene it was a competitive market. Google capitalized on the fact that they had a group of engineers who probably really wanted to make the best feed reader they could. In reality though this happened to also serve the needs of a company trying to WIN, win at everything they could. Google may not have even cared if Reader was popular as long as it won in it’s given category.

We all know the story from here, they won. They won so well that there is no one left. Bloglines, an old vestige of the war, gave up in the last year. The small ecosystem that has grown up has all hitched them selves to Reader as the backend. And why not? Google reader really is the best feed reader out there. But, where does this leave the eco-system.” #

The RSS Market

Unfortunately RSS is not the future for the masses, and Google reader needs to turn all of it’s energy on to it’s social strategy. They are scrapping up every last piece of traffic they have and pouring into Google+. Good for them, they need to win that space to stay relevant for the next stage of the web. For us Reader diehards, that means our needs are in the back seat. We need to move on to a specialty provider.

It’s kind of like really good coffee. Starbucks does a pretty good job, and can service a diverse swath of the population. If you want really good coffee though you need to find a specialty shop.

Simmons pointed at Nick Bradbury’s post on FeedDemons future with Redaer. I have wanted to see more of what the client creators thoughts were. We clearly agree that the social features are up in the air right now:

That means the social features in FeedDemon that rely on Google Reader will eventually stop working. They won’t stop working right away, though. Google will continue to support those features in its API even after they disappear from Reader’s UI. But at some point (I don’t know when yet) they will cease to function, and you’ll be unable to share articles in FeedDemon or follow the shared articles of other users. #

The Iranian Issue

I picked up on this in my reader roundup. I saw some tweets about Iranians being upset about Google Reader getting shut down. I was glad to see some information about why. First on techcrunch:

“Google Reader is not a separate domain (i.e., it’s available at www.google.com/reader) and it’s available behind a secure URL beginning https. This setup makes it hard for the government to directly block and filter Reader, even though many other social services, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr and Picasa, are routinely banned in Iran, a country that’s ranked as the world’s worst oppressor of online freedoms.” #

Then the source article had some really good details.

“Popularity map for Google Reader shows that Google Reader is the 1st popular website in Iran, despite the fact that many users which are using VPN or proxies and are not counted! Then It makes sense why Google Reader matters for Iranian and why integrating it with Google+ will makes it like any already available and banned website like facebook!” #

This jives with my experience. I don’t know why, but I do see a large amount of persian blogs on google reader, and in my shared with my feed.

The Atlantic wins for best editorial voice about the whole thing.

I just started see The Atlantic’s coverage the whole Reader shebang, and they have a great voice. That is highly underrated in tech journalism(haha.)

Have you ever heard of a sharebro?

“Sharebros identify themselves simply as “person(s) whom one is following and followed by on Google Reader (as formally recognized by a Google Reader founder),” but their devotion to Reader is uncanny.” #

They also seem to be doing a really good job at sourcing there stories.

Thank you Adam Clark Estes for being above all of it, and finding it a little funny.

What are people saying about Google Reader?

I wrote a piece yesterday about steps a competitor would need to do to take on Google Reader. This lead me to all the other people writing about Google Reader. I felt that a lot of them had some interesting things to say.

  • It’s sad how much Google Reader dominates the feed-reader market and how little Google seems to care about it.
    marcoarment
    October 21, 2011 at 6:18
  • The head liner for all stories was the original blog post. This kicked off the entire cycle.
  • Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up
    googlereader.blogspot.com
    Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design ( like many of Google’s other products ) that we hope you love.

  • There are two key statments here.

    “we”re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google”s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we”re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.”

    The changes won’t be big, but this move is clearly meant to prop up google+.

    “We think the end result is better than what’s available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you.”

    Now, I have never felt that free internet products owe anything to anyone. They should feel free to change the service when ever it suits them, but another thing that I have seen quite often is people complaining about the changes. 

  • Stop Google from killing Google Reader, one of its best most under appreciated products. #OccupyReader
    erikkain
    October 21, 2011 at 8:07

  • I think the Google Reader team is clearly saying if you don’t like it leave. So, I don’t think complaining at all is going to help anything. There is a burgeoning #OccupyReader movement going on, but I don’t think it will help.

  • Iranian activist: “This will be a HUGE blow to free flow of information inside Iran.” #OccupyReader
    sconover
    October 22, 2011 at 0:24
  • So long as I never refresh this tab, Google can’t take Google Reader away from me! #OccupyReader
    searls
    October 21, 2011 at 18:01
  • My whole Twitter feed is awash with #OccupyReader anger. Is listening even a teensy bit?
    zackbeauchamp
    October 21, 2011 at 10:46

  • While there were lots of plain jane comments either liking, or disliking Google Reader I found more then a couple mini-love notes to Google Redaer. As a die hard fan of google reader my self these were fun.

  • TechCrunch | Google Reader Getting Overhauled, Removing Your Friends
    techcrunch.com
    Today Google announced its long-ignored RSS app Google Reader is getting an update. Most notably, it’s getting a fresh new design along the same lines as Google’s other products, like Docs, Maps, Search and Gmail. While I’m not entirely thrilled about this change (I prefer the utilitarian look for the service), I understand Google’s need to maintain user interface consistency across its online products.
  • “Although there are many other services out there that promise to bubble up relevant content based on my interests, the best product I”ve used to date was the human curation of my Google Reader friends. Not only did my group consistently share the top tech news I”d want to read, they also share those oddball but interesting stories from outside of tech, including humorous cartoons, popular videos, space and science news, parenting tips and other news completely unrelated to tech, but still compelling.”
  • The Unsocial Network: Why Google Is Wrong to Kill Off Google Reader - Forbes
    forbes.com
    I wrote a pretty sober piece about the death or near-death of Google Reader yesterday, but after reading Sarah Perez and Austin Frakt and after thinking about just how much I use Google Reader every day, I’m beginning to revise my initial forecast. Stay calm is quickly shifting toward full-bore […]
  • “For one thing, Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it”s an anti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that “carefully constructed human curated” list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don”t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don”t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It”s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.”
  • World’s Youngest Leading Social Network Eats World’s Last Major RSS Reader: Google Reader Gets Plussed
    readwriteweb.com
    Why did Google Plus gain more users in a few weeks than Google Reader has in years? That’s a question for the ages - but it’s clear that Google’s strategy of infusing Google Plus functionality into all things will sometimes come at a cost.
  • “It is like a magic spell that calls together knowledge from the winds of the Internet into a swirling, dancing chimera that sits in your hand and shares with you the whispers of more people than you’ll ever meet in your life - on demand at any time. RSS readers are instruments of magic. When you use them you become a magician. May they proliferate across the land.”

  • And lots more places to find discussion.

  • Louis Gray - Google+ - #googleplusupdate #reader #googlereader This morning, we…
    plus.google.com
    208 shares - AbdelilaH El Khoudri, Abraham Williams, Adam MacDonald, Alejandro González Montpetit, Aleksandr Sidorenko, Alessandro Anghelone, Alex Meleg, Alexandre Poux, Alicson K, Amartya Khan, Amy Carlson, Ana Ulin, Andrew Grudtsin, Andy C, Angel Buendia, Anna Rolníková, Banz ai, Benoit Héroux, Benoît Huron, Bill Kinney, Brandon V.
  • Google Reader cutting internal social features, integrating into Google+ | Hacker News
    news.ycombinator.com
    (I do concur that Circles allow this partitioning to be modeled much more accurately than most other social networking systems, but the partitioning before was entirely organic and natural, not constructed.
  • Google Reader+ And Identity vs. Personas
    skepticgeek.com
    Google has announced that Google Reader will finally get a much-needed revamp. It will now be integrated with Google Plus, and its native isolated social network will be abandoned. See Techmeme for responses from the tech blogger community. The response from Google enthusiasts has been largely positive, as you can see in this Google Plus thread.
  • Big Changes Coming to Google Reader - Forbes
    forbes.com
    It was only a matter of time. When Google announced last week that it was killing off Google Buzz, those of us who use Google Reader began to get nervous. Would Google kill off Reader as well? Would we Google Reader fanatics be forced to use some other less interesting […]

With google reader changing is there a competitor looming?

Google Reader is changing, and that leaves a door open for a competitor. Google Reader is among my most used tools. It’s up there with the browser, text editor, and command line. I am pretty sure people have snickered at my interest in RSS more then once, and even then it’s only when I am in the company of people who know what the hell RSS is, an every shrinking pool of people. All that aside I think Google Reader is a powerful tool, and powerful people use it.

Today the Google Reader team announced that they are going to be changing Google Reader. It’s not surprising. Everything that google does now is going to be to prop up there social efforts. Their pay will even depend on the effort. I feel two ways about this change, one side is happy that more people outside of Google Reader, who will never use Reader, will see the good stuff that google reader can produce, but another part realizes that this is the start of the demise of the feed reader inside Google.

It’s hard to think that anyone ever thought RSS would be the next hot thing. That it would pave the way for the internet, and create the next hit company. I think a number of companies even hitched there success to it. When Google Reader came on the scene it was a competitive market. Google capitalized on the fact that they had a group of engineers who probably really wanted to make the best feed reader they could. In reality though this happened to also serve the needs of a company trying to WIN, win at everything they could. Google may not have even cared if Reader was popular as long as it won in it’s given category.

We all know the story from here, they won. They won so well that there is no one left. Bloglines, an old vestige of the war, gave up in the last year. The small ecosystem that has grown up has all hitched them selves to Reader as the backend. And why not? Google reader really is the best feed reader out there. But, where does this leave the eco-system.

The ecosystem has been put on notice, google is no longer building the best feed reader they can, google is building things to prop up Google+. They are playing the game that matters in terms of the future of the internet, but that leaves the RSS ecosystem screwed. A simple example of how screwed they are is the share button. Any Reader client has by now included a share button. The new Reader built for Google+ will have a way to share with a circle. How will the old share button translate to the new sharing with circle. Is google even going to give the ecosystem a head up before they launch, or one day will it just stop working.

I know it can sound like I dislike google, or the google reader product. That isn’t the case, I am merely trying to breakdown the consequences of the upcoming Readerpocolpys. There is a bright side though. Reader is making some changes. We don’t know when it’s coming, or exactly what is going go change, but if you really use google reader it will impact you.

In any time of change, chaos leaves a door open for a competitor. Here is the opportunity, there must be a core of google reader users who will be pissed off. There important tool is now playing backseat to a tool they can’t use in the same way, and they may even highly dislike it. If a new tool came out to help these hard core users they might be able to steal the hardcore audience.

They just need to look at the feature set that was what there core audience wanted and go from there.

Sharing

When sharing was introduced to Reader it made the experience much more fun. There became this feeling that you weren’t in a vacuum tube. It didn’t make you feel like you had to share though. I like to think of the Reader model as some sharing, or just enough sharing. The competitor also needs to have share by email, huge, and public sharing. Probably something simple like what Reader does, but it could probably be improved upon. Maybe borrow a bit from tumblr.

Starring/Read Later

When you talk with others about Reader, you realize that the star feature is actually a read later feature. This is an absolute must have. Although you could probably hook it up too a service like Instapaper, or Read It Later

Folders

Folders are my triage system for dealing with the huge amount of feeds I want to track. It makes it possible to wade through the social media river every day.

API

Make a publicly documented API, not something that people have to reverse engineer. Also, it needs to be at true in/out system. Sure you can hook up the send to feature, but that required a pop up. I would rather the backend do something automatically when I click share. Like send to twitter, or clip it to a links blog. It doesn’t matter let the users figure out where they want it to go, but seriously put the power in the hand of the users.

Human Curation

What I see happening right now in the RSS area is two things. First is like what flipboard, and zite are doing. They do bizdev deals to syndicate content. By syndicating content people know, and love they are limiting the ‘crap’. This for sure makes it easier to create a nice looking, magazine like experience, but hard cord feed readers could give crap, usually, about look and feel. Instead give use our stories in a straight line so I can mainline that shit into my brain.

Second thing is a machine learning approach. A great example of this is NewsBlur. This is a great site in general if you want to re-build the news reader, but the focus is to much on machine learning. Instead I would rather have something like what Sarah Perez talks about in her google reader piece.

“Although there are many other services out there that promise to bubble up relevant content based on my interests, the best product I’ve used to date was the human curation of my Google Reader friends.”

Which is totally true. I have never found a better source of curation then other google reader users. That needs to be the biggest focus of a Google Reader competitor, how do you rope up all the hardcore google reader users into one place, and get them to share with one another.

Good Luck

This may not be something you want to start your next company on. It’s not going to be the next Facebook, but RSS is a long game, and someone is going to cash in on it.

Google news is getting in on badges

You know what we need; more badges.

I logged into google news tonight and saw this.

Looks like google news is getting in on the badges. In reality it’s not like you can win something. It seems to be more like tags, but they don’t want to call them tags.

Google Dart – what does everyone think?

Google has released some of the pertinent details behind Dart, their new and improved web language. This will clearly be a years long process, but how is the web reacting to it right out of the gate..

What we need in mobile browsers

Let’s say you are a company who is getting ready to develop a new mobile app. Clearly, You want your app to be on as many platforms as possible to get as large an audience as possible. You could spend time developing an app for each platform with little shared code, but this could create a very high burn rate for engineering resources. Especially if you feel that your app doesn’t require anything that native platforms can do better then the web. Your left with a tough decision. It is possible to develop HTML5 Apps, but there is still a long way to go in the feature set. This situation is happening to app developers everyday. For HTML5 apps to lead the way, and not just to be competitive, there are a few things that developers will need from mobile browsers, and platform makers.

More Hooks into the platform

An example of a hook that most major mobile browsers have right now is the GeoLocation API. The GeoLocation API allows a HTML5 app to get the current latitude, and longitude of the user. There is a JavaScript API that your app can call which interacts with the device hardware to use the GPS unit. This is a hook into the platform.

Platforms need more hooks. From taking pictures with the camera to registering content handlers. There are two standards here that will help if they can get adoption. the Device API, a way to interact with things like the camera, and the File API, a way to interact with the devices filesystem.

Better Fullscreen support

Some platforms like iOS allow the user to save a HTML5 app to the home screen. If the app uses the correct meta data iOS will then open that app into a fullscreen chromeless browser. This allows app makers to completely control the look, and feel. This is important because often HTML5 apps change the current URL while navigating the app. In many browsers when apps do this they expose the URL bar. Even if the app has intentionally scrolled the URL bar out of the way. This can make an app feel glitchy. If platform makers allowed more control over the fullscreen experience. App developers could stop this glitchy behavior.

Better Data Storage

Right now if you want to store data in a web app. The most cross-browser way to do that is through the LocalStorage API. It’s great that most mobile browsers support the LocalStorage API. It’s a good first step, but there are problems. It can suffer race conditions if the web app is open in two or more tabs. Each tab is able to interact with the same LocalStorage database, but right now there has been no attempt to handle this fact. You can end up with access collisions.

Another problem is that It’s max storage right now is 5MB. In every platform I have tested there is a hard 5MB limit. In some platforms there is an alternative storage API called WebSQL API. It allows you to steadily increase the amount of data you use. It prompts the user every so often to let them know your app is increasing it’s storage. The problem with WebSQL is that it’s a dying API. Android, and iOS support it, but the W3C has decided to forgo WebSQL and instead build a brand new API that will overcome some of the problems behind LocalStorage, and WebSQL.

IndexedDB, yea that is an intentional double d, is the answer to the HTML5 app storage problem. It’s meant to handle large amounts of data, and it will be thread safe. The problem is that is far off. It’s only supported in some versions of Mozilla, and no one has any hard timelines for when IndexedDB will be coming to iOS, or Android.

Better Install Method

Depending on who you talk too this is the biggest barrier to entry. Right now, unless you have the power of someone like the Financial Times, or the Boston Globe, you will be hard pressed to get someone to install your app to the homescreen. Even on iOS, who actually has support for home screen installs, the process can befuddle even advanced users.

The other part is partly political. Who want’s to circumvent there native app stores. Platform providers put a lot of time, and money in to creating a distribution platform, and the app stores are paying the way. Right now they are probably not going to make it any easier.

Epic Google Reader Thread on Hacker News

If you are a google reader fan you might want to checkout this thread on Hacker News. It’s just a general bitch/love fest for google reader. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2804734

Why I wrote Code Polution

I wrote a piece for DailyJS last week, they just posted it today. It’s called Code Pollution. I have always loved finding new libs, it’s just fun to find a new plugable app that solves some problem you were having. Over time I learned that all projects have warts, and nothing is magic, or plugable. There is still a place in this world for good libs, but most of the time they are written in a fury, and then left to die. I wrote code pollution because I wanted to make an argument for why it’s okay to use someone else’s code. I wanted to help someone get though the hard part and synthesize better code through re-use.

A quick rebuttal for CSS Lint

Admission: I worked at Yahoo. I did not work with Nicole, or Nicholas but I am a fan their work. CSS Lint is an opinionated tool. It’s meant to be strict. Any lint, or style checker that isn’t strict isn’t doing you a favor. The whole point of a style checker is to be strict. Now, unlike other languages CSS doesn’t have a central leadership. I think a ton of CSS partitioners who might not know who Eric Meyer is, or have never even used a CSS reset before. If you use a language like python, you might have run across the PEP8. It’s python’s officially adopted style guide. If you don’t happen to program at all, and only end up using CSS as a tool to design with you might have never been exposed to such a style guide. If that is the case then CSS lint could be a bit shocking. When I read CSS Lint is harmful, the first thing that popped into my head was I felt like this person may not be an experienced programmer. When there is such vitriol levied against a project like CSS Link I wonder if it might be a bunch of people who aren’t programmers. I would like to know if a lot of programmers out there who really dislike CSS Lint. This is the biggest reason I felt the author wasn’t a programmer. > “And lastly: Performance is a browser level issue, it is not something > for HTML/CSS authors to fix or work around. As long as we are > authoring valid and sensible HTML and CSS, we should not need to > resort to such ridiculous rules simply to enhance the speed at which a > given page renders.”

If you think that its okay to pass the buck on performance then the author is completely right about CSS Lint. On the other hand, if you are looking for ways to write performance oriented code, because you want your pages to be faster, large company or not, then CSS Lint is a great starting place. No one said it was the last word. For more discussion checkout the HN thread.

Does Journalism need its own silicon valley?

Here is the problem investigative journalism is having trouble finding investment. When you look at investigative journalism it can be hard from an economic perspective to defend, but it’s very necessary to running a useful fourth estate. So, how do you fund investigation journalists with out also running a charity. What I find interesting about this question is that I work in an industry that has dealt with this exact issue. I build websites for a living, and I work for a startup. Basically my bosses had an idea, a good one I think, and they wanted to build it. Because they live in Silicon Valley, and because we have apparatuses here like Angel investors, and VC firms they were able to get an investment on nothing more than the speculation that they would build a successful company. I am not an investigative journalist, but I imagine their situation to be similar. Except in one key area, they don’t have a Silicon Valley. There are probably some technological tools that could help push a market like this along, but mostly it’s a human solution. Maybe the news co’s should outsource finding good investigative journalism to a system like Silicon Valley.