[simonsarris]

I sympathize with Google Reader users. I find it occasionally tiresome to be half-foot in an ecosystem. But I've come to accept that this is just the way that Google does things.

I love Gmail/Calendar/Maps/DamnNearEverything. I love Groups, which they've recently taken pains to hide[1] so I suspect its up soon for the chopping block. Heck I even love Google+.

All that said, at least they had the gall to kill it. One thing that pains me more than killing a product they don't want is letting one languish broken for ages.

I'm fully in the G-cosystem[2] but sadly Google Finance is nearly worthless, and only edited about once a year, usually to break something and fix it a month later.

You can't switch to a current (non-closed) holdings view where it only shows you information about stocks you own right now, instead you have to make two portfolios. You can't reorder portfolios so my real portfolios and my "lookers" are separated in an awkward list. News stories are half spam and appear out of order anyway. Finance doesn't sync well with the Android app, sometimes it finds zero portfolios and makes me make temporary mobile ones that I have to delete later.

How many Java errors are on the Finance homepage today? Just one. How about on a stock ticker page? Thirty-one. And it's still using Flash.

I don't think the Reader backlash will hurt Google. There are just some products they plainly don't care about and will continue to ignore them until somebody brushes over the "shutter" button while the rest of the company shrugs.

~~~

[1] http://i.imgur.com/bs7i5pL.png

Groups isn't even on the extended products list in the Gmail header bar, though Reader is! You have to click "Even more" to get to Groups.

[2] I cringed writing that but it was too good to let go.

[kanzure]

> Groups isn't even on the extended products list in the Gmail header bar, though Reader is! You have to click "Even more" to get to Groups.

They have been really destroying Groups for a while now. The new ui is terrible, the new url format is also bad. They got rid of instructions for emailing for subscriptions, and someone reported to me earlier today that emailing [e-mail] doesn't even work anymore.... are they just going to dump their usenet archives?

[Teckla]

It's probably too late to ask now (the story was posted 19+ hours ago, as I write this), but -- do you know what happened to Google Groups digest emails? They just stopped working for me a long time ago, with no communication about what happened.

[kanzure]

No, I don't use the digest email feature. Sorry. The other day I had to clean out some old Groups subscriptions, because apparently you can only subscribe to 200 groups at a time. What a fucking joke. :(

[abraham]

[e-mail] still works. I used it last week.

[yesbabyyes]

To an onlooker, it seems that it could both have worked last week, and not work today.

[tomcat7run]

haha, I just died.

[tomcat7run]

I was replying to yesbabyyes's comment and I get -3 points? Jesus...

[olalonde]

Probably because you aren't adding anything to the discussion (HN is not Reddit). See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[ianstormtaylor]

I really wish Github would fill the Groups niche because they would do it 100x better and most of the groups I'm in are coding related anyways. Especially if they really are trying to do collaboration in general...

Agreed about finance too. It's too bad it's so crappy.

[camus]

I think it will hurt Google. Who use reader ? journalists , analysts , and they are pissed off. I dont recall such a huge reaction when other Google services shut down.

[danilocampos]

Yeah. They're furious.

https://twitter.com/ginatrapani/status/312451705692385280

[jQueryIsAwesome]

"Yep. And it never figured out how to handle high-vol and low-vol blogs together in any meaningful way". What I always thought but was never able to articulate so well (hi again fellow twitter user).

[sbmassey]

How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? I guess I'm not really sure what the problem is: it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once, if that is the issue.

[stcredzero]

> How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"?

An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.

[vilhelm_s]

>An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.

Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.

[crucialfelix]

its a problem I've thought about too. its a big problem on twitter.

some people post rarely, and they often have very high quality well thought out posts. others are media outlets or blabber mouths.

you can balance them by presenting a feed of what is new, moving each item through the "what's new" section at a speed relative to that feed's post frequency.

so a feed that posts rarely would have its new items persist in the new area for a longer time.

a feed that posts 20 times a day would move its posts through the new area each day.

> it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once

I have thousands of subscriptions. I'm not going to take the time to judge and separate them. this is a job for a computer.

[jQueryIsAwesome]

I know the problem, not the solution, but maybe calculating the popularity among the people I follow on twitter (or the ones following the ones I follow in case that dataset is not big enough) to show me a lot less articles for frequent-publisher.

[sbmassey]

So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.