A little bit from David Pierce’s Who killed Google Reader?
One feature took off immediately, for power users and casual readers alike: a simple sharing system that let users subscribe to see someone else’s starred items or share their collection of subscriptions with other people. The Reader team eventually built comments, a Share With Note feature, and more. All this now seems trite and obvious, of course, but at the time, a built-in way to see what your friends liked was novel and powerful.
I don’t think that feels trite and obvious, actually.
For the most part, I think the RSS reader apps that we have now are actually much nicer than Google Reader ever was. So my nostalgia is very tempered. But the social features of Google Reader, I don’t think, have quite been replicated yet. I wish there were videos or something of how that all worked so I could remember it better, but I seem to remember having friends on Google Reader, well before Google had Google+ or anything like that.
That’s how commenting and “Share with Note” must have worked, right? Anybody I was friends with could see my comments and shares. I imagine David considers it trite because, these days, the vast majority of people would use a social network to share/comment on a link. A select few might blog. The slowly-growing Artifact has added comments to its feeds of articles now, but no friends (nor specific subscriptions).
I don’t think I’ve seen a solid feed reader + social network take since those days.
You can follow my starred articles though, thanks to a clever Feedbin feature that makes a feed out of them.
I think that NewsBlur has social features built in. I remember seeing social functionality even in the demo. I thought that it was a really cool idea and it also had me wondering why it wasn’t more widespread. I wouldn’t want to share the entire list of feeds that I follow but sharing a select group of them would be great and it would also be useful to see what my friends are reading in order to find additional interesting feeds.
NewsBlur does, as that’s my RSS reader of choice. It’s very much the Share With Note feature, and that’s all it is. Share certain items you like, people can follow you, and you can follow others to see the things they share. I’ve used it ever since the GR shutdown announcement, and it’s well worth my money every year to support the developer.
Sounds like a “social reader” (https://indieweb.org/social_reader) avant la lettre, then.
To be honest, I don’t think very many people use ’em (the IndieWeb’s “Microsub” readers), mainly because you need a website to even log in to these apps (and then, later on, post to). And both you and the person or site you’re going to reply to will have to support Webmention or similar if you want them to actually get notified, and so on.
Much easier to just join a Mastodon server.
That said, they exist (and I very much like experimenting with this kind of “two-way RSS”)!
A thought I had recently was to make a social RSS reader that looks like Slack/Discord. You could make channels with different sets of subscriptions, other people could join your channels, each channel outputs its own RSS feed… still mulling through the details.
I wonder if something like this would have a decent chance of going mainstream. Most users wouldn’t need to even know how to use RSS; they’d just join and participate in channels while a smaller set of power users does the actual feed curation.
Inoreader does this. You can broadcast, comment on, and like posts. A “broadcast” adds it to your channel page, which other people can follow. You can publish feeds (RSS or JSON) for just about every organisational structure you create in Inoreader – tags, folders, filtered searches, etc. Inoreader really is a terrific A+ service. I couldn’t imagine life without it. It has so many epically useful power features that are a love letter to the power and flexibility of RSS.
There was a stark reminder of just how good RSS is this weekend as the Twitter RSS feeds I subscribed to via the excellent Nitter mirrors went dark due to Musk’s crackdown on scraping. I relied on these in tandem with Inoreader’s ability to filter, alert, highlight, and trigger IFTTT style rules based on content. Now they’re gone, I feel bereft. Twitter itself is awful, hostile, inefficient, and noisy environment to try and consume the same. It’s just no substitute. RSS coupled with a powerful reader is just heaven.