kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@zens

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 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.

@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.

@zens @WClayFerguson@fosstodon.org @wilw

Whatever

https://marco.org/2013/07/03/lockdown

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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