@WClayFerguson @wilw thatās *sigh* , it doesnāt follow from what i wrote.
@WClayFerguson @wilw i like RSS. google killing reader was a shame. the evidence that google actively wanted to kill RSS because it was a āthreatā just isnāt compelling. rss fizzled out on its own because it just isnāt a very compelling idea on its own. on the other hand, it has been extremely successful and never died, as the underlying protocol of itunes and podcasts. my apple tv uses en extended rss for all of its menus.
Let's just reword it that Google supported RSS in browsers until it acquired popular RSS aggregators, and then pulled the plug on RSS in browser. I remember very well how Feedburner was promoted among webmasters as an exciting and convenient way of making your feed popular, which of course was the way for them to get both sides hooked up and break any direct relationship between users and webmasters.
@WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw
@kravietz @WClayFerguson @wilw i also remember having a desktop feed reader being very annoying and inefficient. maybe itās just me subscribing to too many feeds, but seperately downloading rss files takes a long time iād rather happen somewhere else. and i guess thatās how cloud services become popular
@zens @WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw
That's long time ago so my memories are vague, but at some point web browsers had this RSS aggregation feature built-in.
You basically clicked this RSS icon on a website and browser would pull updates in the background for you periodically. In Firefox that was called Live Bookmarks and was removed in 2018 "because nobody used it" as they explained.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox
@kravietz @WClayFerguson @wilw so, youāre saying google somehow had the ability to pull rss features from firefox?
@zens @WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw
I don't think they did that directly, although Google has a financial leverage on Mozilla (default search engine payments).
It was sufficient to do what they usually do - acquire Feedburner, then quietly make Live Bookmarks obsolete by promoting Google Reader while making LB a "hardcore nerd-only feature", and then making Google Reader obsolete, after it was integrated into Google News wrapped by algorithmic and paid display.
@kravietz @WClayFerguson @wilw it sucks but itās a conspiracy theory. what makes you thonk it was a deliberate strategy?
@zens @WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw
It's not a conspiracy, it's a natural business strategy to increase your market share, as explained by Clay before:
https://fosstodon.org/@WClayFerguson/105669908866712953
Also, for the sake of clarity, Google did not *kill RSS* as a technical mechanism - websites still publish RSS but it's only used by search engines. Google just killed any *direct* relationship between website feeds and their users and replaced it with its paid & algorithmic aggregation model.
@kravietz @WClayFerguson @wilw thereās a difference between āconspiracyā and āconspiracy theoryā. if this conversation is just going to be about free association i am not interested
@kravietz @WClayFerguson @wilw exactly, i could say or ask whatever, and you would post whatever you were already going to post. i have no power over this conversation
@zens @WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw
Unless you're Google leadership you can't be 100% sure what was in their heads when they decided to decommission Feedburner and then Google Reader.
I'm just pointing out that their actions - acquire and then kill popular services - was consistent with their business strategy, and as demonstrated by the marco.org article from 2013 that was widespread interpretation at that time.
@kravietz i donāt know what you think that article says, but i couldnāt find anything in it to align with the notion there was a deliberate business strategy enacted by google in there. it blames facebook and twitter same as i did.
@kravietz āGoogle resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Googleās plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4 The escalating three-way war between Google, Facebook, and Twitter ā by far the three most important web players today ā is accumulating new casualties every day at our expense.ā
google is admirable! thatās what it says
@kravietz articleās got its tongue up googleās anus way further than I would ever stick it
@kravietz the issue i take is, i donāt think google is organisationallu clever enough to do long term ābusienss strategiesā like the one you suggest. i just donāt see the evidence for it.
@zens Whatever excuses their fanboys come up with, Google cannibalized both Feedburner and Google Reader (not to mention a number of other services), and did everything they could through Chrome to "proxy" all RSS traffic through themselvers.
@kravietz i am not a google fanboy, i just donāt think they are smart or motivated enough to do complex multistep machiavellian plots spread out over the course of a decade.
Oh no, I didn't mean you - I meant the author of the 2013 article who clearly had some illusions about Google back then.
@zens @WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw
You could also run your own RSS aggregator on your website, and most CMS supported this out of the box - I ran a popular Polish-language infosec blog at ipsec.pl back then, and had an aggregator that pulled many other infosec websites in Polish, and subscribed to its aggregated RSS.
At some point there was a lot of hype around FeedBurner and literally every "how to become a webmaster with X" tutorial recommended it just as they recommend GA or Cloudflare today.
@kravietz @WClayFerguson @wilw I am not sure what in-browser rss support chrome supposedly pulled. I certainly donāt remember it supporting rss any better than it does now