chris

“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.” – Google, March 2013. 

Today, Google Reader’s remaining users will “Mark All As Read” one last time. There are two schools of thought on Google’s decision to move on from its aging RSS aggregator, never adopted by the mainstream: one, that’s it’s pretty much the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. Ever! And two: who cares?

Even though I count myself as someone who falls into that earlier group, it’s hard to argue against Google’s thinking in the matter. Following websites using RSS feeds is just not something the “normals” do. So an RSS reader like Google’s remained in the hands of the tech elite, the domain of the I.T. crowd, the programmers, the researchers, the journalists.

The rest of the world merely surfs the web, and now they just tweet.

But Google Reader was special because it was one of the last remaining places on the Internet you could really call your own. In every other way, the nature of news reading on the web these days and the social services that now dominate your attention are crafted by others who dictate what you will read and when. Whether browsing through an editorially run news site, parsing your Twitter stream or reading your Facebook News Feed, the links before you are those that others have deemed important.

There’s value in this signal, of course – a sense of what’s trending in the larger world allows for serendipitous discovery. But it’s also a relinquishing of control. Oh sure, you can choose who to follow, but it’s not the same as choosing which news news sources’ feeds you will subscribe, why, and how often you will read them.

In Google Reader, I’ve gleefully stuffed websites into collections like “B-List” and “C-List” and “Can’t Miss” and “Panic Button,” instead of more proper names like “top tech sites” or “Apple bloggers.” It’s my decision which headline collections get scanned with a glance, and which writers will see me devouring their every word.

Meanwhile on Twitter, every missive is as important as the one that preceded it. A photo of your cat. News from the war. A beautiful sunset on Instagram. A government overthrown. It’s a real-time firehouse of information that you dip into as you can. There’s no unread count. You just refresh and refresh and refresh for more.

Days Until Cancellation: 0

Having never caught on as a social network in its own right outside of a niche group of users, Google Reader couldn’t rival something like Twitter. The writing was on the wall for its demise when Google ripped out the social features in the product back in October 2011 in order to make room for deeper integration with Google’s newer social network Google+.

The move, essentially a big @#$% you to Reader’s small but highly engaged audience of users, may have come as a surprise to some, but with the internal thinking at Google, perhaps it was a miracle that Reader was being given any sort of development attention at all.

In the definitive recounting of Google Reader’s history here on BuzzFeed, Brian Shih, who became Reader Product Manager in fall 2008, spoke of how the team had to fight internally for what, in terms of Google’s scale, was a really, really, really small project. “Someone hung a sign in the Reader offices that said “DAYS SINCE LAST THREAT OF CANCELLATION.” The number was almost always zero,” he said.

At Google, senior execs only cared about absolute user numbers, not on growth or market share.

But even though Google Reader could never compete in numbers with Gmail or other Google products, it wiped out the market of RSS competitors, while letting its 800-pound gorilla sit and rot.

Today, Google is too busy trying to change the world with self-driving cars and face computers, search engines that think for you and a balloon-powered Internet to care about Google Reader. It’s thinking of how to dominate mobile and connect the next 5 billion users to the web – lofty goals that leave no time for a silly little product from Web 2.0′s early days.

At least by shutting down Reader, Google is admitting that its stewardship in this area has failed.

Google can’t – and no longer wants to – do it all.

We’ve seen evidence of that already in the systematic shutdowns of other dated, stagnant services through Google’s “Spring Cleanings.” Google Reader was not the first, nor will it be the last that fails to survive these cuts. Google Alerts and Feedburner are other prime candidates at this point.

We’re retiring Reader on July 1. We know many of you will be sad to see it go. Thanks for 8 great years! http://t.co/0jtSqBnORp

— Google Reader (@googlereader) March 13, 2013

Ever since Google’s announcement this spring, many new services have stepped up to help fill the void Google Reader leaves behind, but none will ever fill its shoes. None of those that now vie to become the new incumbent even have search built in, for example. A few promise “yeah, it’s coming” but too many startups begging for a second look think that merely supporting RSS feeds makes them a Google Reader clone.

Google Reader wasn’t a list of things to read. It wasn’t a collection of RSS feeds.

It was your own, personal Google. A search engine built on top of the sites you cared about. A Google News with the stories you wanted to see. A taxonomy where you chose the labels, and drove the SEO. Google Reader was your web, your slice of the Internet.

Social media, now, is theirs.

Reader’s death isn’t the end of a product, it’s the end of an era. We have protested, bargained, begged, and cried. Now we have to accept and adapt.

Google Reader, thank you for eight great years.

Goodbye.

shift-a

OK kids, it's time. Throw this on in one tab http://t.co/Mj3njMeWZn open "All Items" in @GoogleReader & "Mark all as read" One. Last. Time.

— Jason Shellen (@shellen) July 1, 2013

I’m a programmer. Through and through. I might pretend to be good at organising a community every now and then, or at speaking on panels, but in my heart I’m a programmer. I deal much better with pieces of code than I do with words or people. So please bear in mind that writing is not my forte as you read this. It is a struggle to communicate exactly what is on my mind – just ask the people who know me well. And sometimes I screw up: what I say doesn’t quite capture what I meant, and occasionally people can take other meanings from my words. Also, the following is all my opinion, and mine alone. It does not represent that of the IGDA, AIE, Convict Interactive, the GDAA, PAX or AltDevBlog. And if you would like to comment about this article, please do so here – as I mention below, discussion over Twitter is difficult.

Which brings me to the discussions on social media over the last few days. It started with Tony Reed’s interview on MCV Pacific. I read it and thought it was quite sensible – I agreed with almost everything Tony had to say. But perhaps because I know what the GDAA are busy with, and I know Tony, perhaps it was easier for me to grasp his meaning. Since others online took huge offense to the article, which puzzled me to no end. So I asked them about it and suddenly it seemed like I’d started a war on Twitter.

Now, Twitter is great – so many opportunities can be found through it, and I’d be a different person today if it didn’t exist – but it’s not a great medium for a heated discussion, especially if you’re not great at crafting your rebuttal to fit into 140 characters or less.

This sentence from Tony’s interview seems to have generated the most controversy:

Creativity comes from everywhere, so raising gender, race or sexuality should play no part in the hiring process.

I read this to mean that we shouldn’t take gender, race or sexuality into account while hiring. By hiring I believed that meant the point where you say: “yes, you have a job, come work for us!”. So I thought he meant that you shouldn’t choose a woman for a job just because you want to improve the male/female ratio. I always believe you should choose the person most suitable for the job – the person with the appropriate talent level who fits the culture of the company, can communicate well enough with others and is significantly motivated, etc. The idea that someone might hire me instead of a male – who actually suited the position more – just because I’m a female is absolutely terrifying. It completely undermines and insults my intelligence, hard work and motivation. One of my main insecurities is that thought that perhaps I’m getting further in life because I’m receiving special treatment for my gender, and not as a result of my skills and hard work.

But others on Twitter took “hiring process” to mean the entire process. So, going out and looking for applicants as well. I hadn’t considered this part of it and I’m glad they pointed it out. But I don’t actually know enough about how that works at the moment to be able to find fault with it, or to know why that might be broken. From my experience and limited knowledge, companies will first look to people they already know for the job. Now this would be people already in the industry or individuals around the fringes who’ve made themselves known in some way. So yeah, if you’re looking to hire from that group of people, the numbers are going to be skewed towards men. Because the industry, and even student balance, is male dominated.
So where else should we look for applicants? I honestly don’t know how we could do this differently. Is it posting the job ad in female only, or gay only/friendly, or indigenous only societies? Is it attempting to find equal numbers of male and female applicants before reviewing applications? This makes no sense to me. What is the “affirmative action” that Christian talked about in his blog? I honestly don’t know what he was referring to and it was never expressly stated. What is it that we aren’t doing that we should be? I genuinely want to know.

I mentioned students briefly above, and I’d like to expand on that topic. I don’t know enough about Christian’s class, but a 50/50 split of males to females in any game development related class is exceedingly rare. I’ve worked at two educational institutions and have watched the ratio decline over the past few years. When I was a student we probably had about 8 or 9% females in our classes. Now as a teacher I have 0%. My involvement with IGDA Sydney means I get to see into other schools, and the numbers are not too much better there. The numbers are usually better in game art, or game design degrees than they are with programming, but not by much. Which is why I believe what Tony said is true – something is happening at the primary and secondary school level that is not making game development seem attractive.

Is it because of our culture? What is our culture?

I have pretty thick skin – I worked for seven years at cinemas on the south coast of NSW. Verbal abuse from customers was at least a weekly occurrence.  I also feared for my physical safety on a number of occasions from violent patrons.  My fellow staff members were no better: we had low morale and bullying was common. I also experienced what I guess is called sexual harassment from a number of male employees. I just thought of it as them copping a feel – nothing more.

The games industry, in comparison, is amazing! Everyone is so polite, even when they are angry with me, or disagree with me. My fellow game developers are respectful, courteous, and treat me no differently to male developers. My only complaint would be that some assume I’m an artist and act surprised when I explain that I’m a programmer.

Any abuse or inappropriateness that I have experienced since entering the industry has come from gamers or members from other industries who we occasionally interact with.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a problem – the thousands of articles I see and have read are clear indicators that there is a problem in some areas. But, because of my experiences, I believe that these problem cases are the exception in our industry, not the norm. Which, with the volume of posts and articles that appear surrounding this issue, can be hard to believe.

I believe it is because bad news gets more attention than good news – thus media sites and the internet culture in general are more likely to jump on a bad news story. I get it. But it makes me so mad! Yesterday, the PAX Australia panels were announced and everyone jumped all over the “controversial” one. And that’s all anyone talked about. Did anyone talk about any of the awesome panels that are on? There’s one called Child’s Play that is all about how the games community can help sick kids in hospitals. WHY DID I HAVE TO SEARCH THE PAX SITE TO FIND THIS?? Why aren’t we screaming this message from the rooftops?

Yesterday I just got so down about the fact that the internet drowns out the good news by focusing on the bad. I DON’T believe that it is because there is more bad news than good.  I’ll get in trouble for this – but I believe lot of those bad headlines are just click-bait so people will get traffic to their websites.
Add to this the general negativity and cynicism of the internet, and especially the noisy people I follow on Twitter. For example – when the Xbox One was announced, everyone complained about the DRM among other features. Fast forward a week -Microsoft have removed those features due to complaints and THE SAME PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING THAT IT CHANGED. What the fuck?

This penchant to find the negative in everything drives me up the wall. Sometimes I feel that people go looking for the bad news. They actively seek it out. And if you go looking for bad news, you’re going to find it. There can be a certain feeling of power in being the person who presents the bad news for discussion – I get it. Suddenly you’re the centre of attention. But, you know, if you go looking for good news then you’re going to find it too – do people not do this because they don’t get as much attention from sharing it?

I feel like our industry social media culture is a far more unwelcoming place than the actual industry culture. If I’m not cynical and negative and agreeing with the horde then I’m shunned. I wanted to unfollow everyone yesterday because I just didn’t feel welcome.

Another thing that bugs me is people complaining about a thing without offering any solutions. If it shits you, then what are you doing about it? In regards to the PAX panel - did anyone send a quiet word to Yug, instead of publically raging about it on the internet not even in his general direction? Did anyone suggest a rewording of that panel description? All I could see were self-righteous pitchforks. And even when it had been fixed, people were still obsessing over it. What does that accomplish? How is that helping the industry? Why are you wasting time on it?

I’m not saying to not talk about it at all. Of course, we need to hear both bad news and good. But don’t get hung up on these things and continue talking unless you’re offering solutions and actually doing something to turn the problem around (which, I know, is hypocritical, given I’m writing this).

I’m finally in a position where I can go to high schools and speak with girls about entering the games industry. I’ve been talking with my boss about planning an event just for girls to learn what it is like to work ingames. Up to this point, my only contribution was trying to be a role model for any girls that I met at expos, Girl Guides or online. I also run IGDA Sydney and try to make it as inclusive as I know how. I’ve not had one person tell me to my face about any gender/homophobic/racist problems they’ve had with IGDA Sydney. I hope that’s because we have no problems, but I doubt it.

Tony said that we’re waiting until the industry stabilises to appropriately address this issue. He wasn’t saying he was going to ignore it completely, just that his full attention is not going to be focused on it. He’s busy working with the government and other bodies to get the industry back on its feet again. I appreciate that – I’m sick of our talent being made redundant and going off overseas and our students working in bars and pubs, unable to enter the indusyty. I believe THAT is a greater deterrent to working in games than the apparent unwelcoming male culture.
I believe it is true that a shift in the ratio of women in the industry would create more diverse games and generate more income, hence increasing jobs and boosting the industry. But that’s a long term fix and the Australian industry, sadly, needs a short term fix to keep us from going belly up right now. The money is the short term fix to enable us to work towards some long term fixes.

Anyway, I’ve spent more time on this topic than it possibly warrants – thank you to those who read the whole rant. In short, I feel that too many people are blowing up issues way out of proportion when they don’t need to be,  and that there is too much saying rather than doing.

I’m going to continue with my passions – coding, helping out Aussie game developers with IGDA Sydney and doing my best to be a role model to younger girls. What are you going to do?

First off? We’re having internet issues in our house. This is why my presence here and everywhere else online has been a bit sporadic. I apologize for this. Without regular blogging my left eye starts to twitch and I acquire an unexplained limp. If I don’t solve these technological issues soon, I’ll be rotating around the “Free Wi-Fi” locations around here.

Secondly? Did you hear that they’re shutting down my favorite RSS feed reader in July? I mean – FIRST they took away the ability to share and comment on the thing – and now they’re getting rid of it? All together? Kim is not a happy camper.

For those of you who don’t know what RSS is or a feed reader, let me give you an easy summary. RSS is – literally – “Really Simple Syndication”. Basically, any website that creates regular content, creates RSS feeds of that content without any bells and whistles. Just the basic HTML of the content itself. Then, “Feed Readers” like Google Reader allow you to subscribe to those pages, and it funnels those RSS feeds all into one location. So, if you read a lot of blogs/news/magazines type sites, you can read all of their updates in one location. You don’t have to keep bookmarks or remember links.

Google Reader used to let you “share” out items you really liked. I loved this feature because my “shared” items also displayed on my blog. And then any of my friends in Reader could comment on those items. So, it gave us a little community to discuss articles and entries. And then? THEN? Google took that function away. And a small part of my soul died.

But now? NOW? They’re taking away the entire reader. Basically they want us all to use Google+, which we won’t do simply out of spite now. So…where do we all go? WHERE DO YOU GO?

On Twitter yesterday, some key peeps decided to start using The Old Reader. Evidently you can A) Share items and B) Comment on those shared items. Which I have already done with this entry.

What are you waiting for? GO JOIN! FOLLOW ME! I’LL FOLLOW YOU BACK! These type of communities ONLY work if we all go. We need to ALL go over there and start following each other and start sharing items and talking about them and creating what we used to have on Google Reader. PUH-LEASE? If you read more than 5 blogs or websites a day, you will love having a feed reader. It means you only have to make one stop every day to see all of your favorite websites. And their entries ONLY show up if they have new content. So, if they don’t update regularly you can still follow them without stopping by their site constantly for updates.

If you’ve never used an RSS reader before and have any questions/confusion – just post a comment here and I’ll help you out. If you have, then you may be like me and appreciate the excuse to start over with your subscriptions. Don’t you still have those blogs on your Google Reader that you don’t know why you still follow? You don’t ever comment or even read their entries anymore. Why are you still subscribed? Well, now you can just start over with the ones you actually want to read!

Or – if you want – you can import your subscriptions from Google Reader. I did not do that because I knew I needed to prune my list a bit, but if you like your list as is? Easy as pie!

Come join the party! We’re leaving Google Reader before they shut the place down, and we’re setting up at The Old Reader, I can’t wait to see you there!