Yeah, I really don't understand what he's looking for here. He wants constructive criticism about what parts of Google Reader were useful, but if you complain at all, your comment will be deleted.
Google Reader itself was the useful piece. It aggregates RSS feeds. I don't really know how else you can explain that "yes, it aggregated RSS feeds, and I like to read all of my RSS feeds in one place".
I thought it was straight-forward: he wants to understand what it was about Reader that users liked, so he can work on incorporating them into Google+. Since he does not have the power to save Reader, he's telling people this is not the venue to complain about its shutdown.
That's funny, I assumed it was a PR move to make Google appear responsive when they inevitably add an RSS-ish feature to syndicate news subscriptions into google+ feeds, as opposed to appearing like a malevolent plan to kill a beloved service to push more people into google+.
Hence it's counter-productive to mention the shutdown in negative terms, as that associates the two efforts in a way that underscores the latter interpretation.
Where I work, Chief Architects do not make decisions about killing products. That happens higher than them. Their responsibility is engineering the architecture of their product. So, yes, I think it's accurate to refer to a Chief Architect as "an engineer."
> "Chief Architects do not make decisions about killing products."
No, but if you were trying to convince people you weren't forcing them into Google+, but Google+ was presenting alternatives out of their sincere love for the people, you wouldn't use the person who made the decision now would you?
And who better to stand up and ask "how can we help" than one of the people who will later take to the Google Blog to say "look what we added to Google+ because you asked for it?"
I see both points here. My response would be similar to nicksergeant's. The parts of Google Reader I found useful were the parts where you could read RSS feeds. Will RSS be incorporated into Google+ somehow? I don't really understand what else he's getting at.
i also think this line of thinking is silly. the Googler is assuming a set of features is what made Google Reader the best RSS reader on the market. while that is true in essence (features do add up to the overall product) i don't think any 1 feature in reader was killer. rather, the collection of all the features made the app itself killer.
UI-less sync scheme between numerous devices, simpler application backends as the work of actually aggregating (querying and parsing feeds, notifying, ...) was handled by Reader and the client just had to implement a UI to that.
I have to say I'm kind of glad. I have some AI ideas that I think are going to be killer. Currently in the early development stage. If they are focusing more on profit probably they can get distracted enough to not see me coming.
Currently worried that they are beefing up their AI pursuits because of the recent AI hires which could mean I don't even have a chance. Lets se what happens.
I don't get it either. I mean, if he really wants to make me happy but can only build in the context of G+, make a "Reader" tab and open up Reader in an iframe that takes up 90% of the page (outer frame optional). There's nothing about G+'s layout (or mission?) that will be conducive to feed reading.
This is like asking me what I like about burgers so you can make a better salad.
Maybe the intent was just to draw attention to his product? You liked the Reader? Now, that it is going to be killed, tell us what you liked about it so we can add these features to G+. And by the way, look how awesome we are, we care about your needs, you can already start using G+, don't wait until we add features from the Reader, because this will never happen.
1. Information density. Magazine style / tiles / graphics etc aren't the same as single line expandable headline with maybe 40 headlines visible per screen height.
2. Just the content. Reader didn't try to guess what you wanted to read or notify you what your friends were up to.
I 'circled' a bunch of people from the numerous Hacker News communities on G+, and I see far too many pictures and videos in the feed. And mostly personal life stuff, like their pets, or lunch, or some trees or whatever. (This is also my current complaint with App.net, but that's a different story).
I really wish there were a way to filter by post type (text and links only) in Google+, to bring it even one small step closer to replacing Reader.
This was my biggest problem with G+ and why I haven't used it since last year sometime.
Facebook by comparison is a network of people you know irl, so you kinda care what random stuff they're up to.
G+ on the other hand is more like long-form Twitter where you subscribe to people, whether you know them irl or not. Its network based more on shared interest than real life connection.
But when people you've subscribed to because you're interested in what they have to say about programming start sharing their vacation pictures and other personal stuff, it can quickly fill up your news feed with noise.
It would be really nice if G+ could implement tagging and filtering by tag, or some ML that learns what to suppress in your feed from whom, or something along those lines. Anything to enable people to continue posting whatever they want, but to allow their followers to selectively receive only the portion they're interested in.
Hmm... maybe what they oughta let you do is filter out posts from people that go out to "Public". I don't want his public or her public or that circle's public, but if they post to a specific circle that I'm a part of, send it on.
1. The popular RSS readers all seem/seemed to be moving toward looking like Reeder and Flipboard, moreso than Google Reader's Web UI. It seems that UI is/was only necessary for a niche of the niche.
2. And yet there were non-trivial complaints Google Reader lost its original sharing/social functionality. So clearly not everyone prefers the social-less implementation. And fewer still would seem completely off-put by a social panel they can tune out and ignore (as they already were ignoring it on Google Reader's rise).
The guessing and notifying that youtube keeps wanting to push is so annoying. At some point they have to learn that what are friends like has no relevance on what we like.
Gmail could easily be a Reader. Email is a mechanism which drops content into your inbox. It obviously requires someone's pushing it.
RSS on the other hand is a protocol which facilitates the dropping of the content into a reader. So an email client by its very nature a RSS reader (several email clients provide this feature, or at least they used to).
The question is not whether G+ could be an alternate. The question is whether we are looking at the world where the RSS would become the backbone of services like Lexus Nexus which is used by media specialist and/or people with resource ($$) ... or would RSS remain a pipe which is available for average Joe to easily "get" the information however and whenever they wish.
Don't be fooled, though, the fact that he is asking about Google Reader does not mean they intent to implement a feeds reader within G+. They most likely believe RSS is an old technology that should be phased out, so I don't think this is happening.
Yes. If Google wants to satisfy Reader users, they have to push back against G+ taking over everything. G+ is supposed to br about a seamless integration between products. Making all the features subservient to the Stream is putting style --no, fashion-- over substance.
That is the philosophy of G+, though-- to cannibalize Google into a Facebook clone. G+ is like the evil vizier whispering in the senile monarch's ear.
Interesting, but doesn't speak too well of Google. Shouldn't Google know how people were using Google Reader before deciding to axe it? And even if that information's in a different part of the company, shouldn't the chief architect of Google+ have access to it?
Surely you "have access" to wikipedia, so therefore nothing there will surprise you, right?
This doesn't sound so weird to me. No one was working on Google Reader. The traffic to the web app was negligible. It generated little to no revenue. And even the API traffic probably didn't amount to much. It just wasn't on the radar.
The fact that got missed wasn't that Reader was a popular app, it simply wasn't, period. What they missed is the demographics: the specific people who relied on Reader, though few in number, are disproportionately loud and influential tech leaders and journalists. So they were shocked at the outrage.
This is not demonstrably false, as the Quora post you linked to is 3 almost 2 years old. (For comparison, the latest answer is right around when G+ launched.) The large majority of the population doesn't even know what RSS is, let alone use it for their day-to-day reading.
Eh, depends on what you mean by "user", which in Googlespeak, is pretty ambiguous. I mean... I know I have stuff in Reader, but I never managed to use it seriously when I switched to it after Newshutch died. Do I count as a user? How many people are like me?
So like, the "Subscribe" button, and the list view?
That's what was useful. I really don't get what he's aiming for here... obscure features that may have existed that only some people thought were useful?
Weirdly enough, none of the readers I tested can replicate that. Qbix (list-view takes too much space, not available in "show all") and The Old Reader (no equal indent blog name -> post title in all view, shows no text snippets in list view) come closest.
Especially TOR looks like a great replacement but it's still pretty overloaded.
> There are 25746 users in the import queue ahead of you.
Okay, why did I write Qbix? What I meant was bazqux [1] and I just got a mail that list view in all is now available and they are thinking about offering a more condensed view :)
No, I agree, I just hope he doesn't hear "I liked that the list of feeds is on the left" and think that's the takeaway. Not that, you know, it's an RSS reader that people had gotten used to.
Wall of text from sources I have subscribed. When I press 'f' it embiggens that text to cover the whole screen. j/k for navigation. If he had spent a couple of minutes on Google Reader he'd know.
It's been quite a while since I've used Google Reader since my reliance on RSS in general has decreased over the last couple years. However, for anyone who still uses Reader on a regular basis who might be able to comment on this, I think Yonatan might be missing the point. It seems he's looking to incorporate individual features/aspects of Reader into G+ in order to woo newly disenfranchised users back into the Google ecosystem. The problem is that I think this is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Even if he incorporated a large subset of Reader features into G+, I think at best that would likely only capture the wants of a small fraction of the Reader user base given that both products have inherently different goals. G+ is, depending on how you look at it, either a full-fledged social network or a central identity service connecting various components of the Google ecosystem. Reader is a dedicated, decentralized (in the sense that the feeds themselves come from outside Google) RSS consumer. Both products seemingly have different philosophical approaches to the web (walled-garden vs. generally open) and I'm not sure that can be reconciled so easily.
These musings are off the top of my head though, so I'd love to hear thoughts from any avid Reader users and/or G+ engineers/users who agree/disagree.
The cache. Opening up any feed and going back in years. And it works with broken sites too! Even if the content of the original site is gone, you can easily read it. Nothing can replace this feature...
Yes. This is the irreplaceable, unique value of Google Reader. Even if other services start archiving feed history now, only Google has the data from years ago.
And I'm not terribly optimistic about them releasing all the historical information they have in one huge download, which would be the appropriate way to preserve it.
How can anyone expect serious and fair treatment when half of their post is threatening what he'll do with posts that don't conform to his specification? Trolling everyone in advance is not a good strategy for gathering feedback from community. If he can't face the regrets of the community, he should just keep his mouth shut, have a bit more respect towards others.
Because people on the internet are dumb, especially when talking to someone from a big company like Google. Who decided to stop providing a particular service for free.
Google can be damn stupid sometimes. They shutdown Google Reader which is used daily by every journalist on the planet. This resulted in a ton of bad press which was completely foreseeable. Now they have some chieftain try to change the conversation into "Tell me what you loved about Reader", under the guise that they will use your comment to help make better products. As if Google has no data on how people use Google Reader.
What is funny is how many lemmings are falling into his trap.
> they will use your comment to help make better products.
Ironically, I can't really come up with 'better product' in this specific use case.
"Reader killed RSS" feels just wrong. If anything Reader made RSS thrive, because the data source that get sinked into Reader data is RSS.
Reader is a killer product that shifted the landscape because it fills one single role (RSS aggregator with read+fav status syncing), and does it extremely well, in a fantastically unobtrusive way. I sure as hell don't want another Google product as a remplacement, nor another existing or future product integrate RSS aggregation (and certainly not Plus) as part of it. I don't want a kitchensink or mishmash social/news/aggregator app.
Anyone current or past Google employee who put some work on Reader, here's my personal message to you: thank you, your work is awesome.
I agree. I find most of Google products awesome, and thank the engineers for their work.
I also think Google is smart to try to get out in front of the negative press. I think this attempt is solid approach to redirect people's passion in a positive direction.
The only mistake I see, is that nobody spoke up and said, "Reader doesn't have many users, but the users are bloggers and journalists, so we better shut this thing down with an extreme amount of empathy."
In the interest of being constructive, I think they should have:
1) Done a phased shutdown by disabling adding new feeds.
2) Published the API
3) Offer to work with alternative providers to make migration easy.
I wanted to reply, but then it asked me to sign up for Google+.
Then it hit me: That's exactly it. Google+ is Google's way of controlling an entire ecosystem of replies to topics. That's exactly the problem with Google+.
Google Reader was great because it gave you a window into the internet. A window that you could shape however you wanted.
Yes. I scanned the first hundred or comments on the post and none said that the experience on Reader (and Twitter) is owned by the reader, while the experience Google + (and Facebook) are owned by Google (and Facebook).
I do not want to share my reading activity with everyone. I just want to sit here on the corner and read. So why make it "social"?
There is a much simpler explanation: the lead of one project is looking to improve his project however he can. In this case, he sees the ruckus over Reader as a chance to get a bunch of feature requests. It's kind of like a vulture picking over a carcass, but hey, circle of life and all that.
It's important to remember that to Google products like Reader are blips on the radar. Every second they spent scheming about Reader cost them millions in Ad Sense revenue; hence, there was no scheming.
I would find it difficult to believe that Google+ wouldn't have already been looking into getting news feed subscriptions into their product. An RSS-style solution with discoverability would leap-frog Facebook's News stuff and could even put them into quasi-competition with Twitter.
It seems an inevitable sort of feature.
So the idea that they were surprised by this and are going to start from zero to build a new bit of G+ seems... a stretch.
You seem to be disagreeing with a thing nobody said. It is possible that they were already exploring a news feed feature and that they see this as an opportunity to find out what their users want from the feature.
What I'm disagree with, is the idea that there must be some overarching Google Unimind for this to have been a conscious strategy, and thus that angle is implausible-to-laughable.
I assert it's rather more plausible that such plans were under-way and closing Reader was a step to clear the way for a Google+ solution. Because nothing near a unimind would have been required to coordinate it and because the entire migration is more inevitable than not.
Is it possible the Google+ team is sincere in wanting to help people and capture feedback? Sure.
But that's rather orthogonal to the question of whether this statement and the timing of all this is primarily motivated by PR strategy.
Once Reader lost favor inside the 'plex people didn't want to work on it because it wouldn't show well on their resume. (you don't get promoted for applying CPR to a dead product and manage to keep it alive in intensive care for another budget cycle). So there were no doubt people who were working on other projects who had previously worked on Reader sometimes fixing bugs, and there was probably a product manager somewhere that had at one time been responsible for it, and kind of still remembered where the files were in the source tree. But as a "product" it could continue to exist in Google with nobody "in charge" of it. Its hard to believe, and even harder to explain to someone who hasn't be on the inside, but there are things that exist as Google "products" or "features" only because nobody turned them off, but there is no one at the wheel any more.
Once Reader lost favor inside the 'plex people didn't want to work on it because it wouldn't show well on their resume. (you don't get promoted for applying CPR to a dead product and manage to keep it alive in intensive care for another budget cycle)
Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.
OK, you don't get promoted etc.
But promotion isn't one and only motivation, right?
For two years there wasn't one Google employee who added one feature to Google Reader just for fun? Ouch.
I reiterate :-) its hard to explain for folks on the outside. There are so many shiny toys inside of Google that yes, you could easily go 2, 3, even 5 years before you even thought to yourself "Hmm, I wonder if we could make Reader do this ..."
More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling."
Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
It seems to me that it didn't need much in the way of support. I have been using it for several years and have never experienced so much as a glitch. That could be down to excellent support, of course, but to me it seemed a mature product that could have been left to run exactly as is for any length of time and nobody would have complained.
I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.
I don't disagree, but that seems to get into the gray area where we don't have enough information. Some of the other Google discontinuations were attributed to bandwidth usage in excess of any possible revenue mechanism. (I'm not aware of whether or not that was debunked, either?) Was that the case here? No idea. It seems plausible that Reader uses more bandwidth than Translate would.
Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product.
There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.
It assumes that those who are responsible for replacing Reader were part of the decision that it was going away. In large companies, the people who decide such things are often not the same people who engineer them.
Pretend for one yoctosecond that you work at Google, disagree with the decision to shut down Reader, and are in a position to try to make the product you're working on help fill the void.
That people like you assume it's malice, or some conspiracy or evil plot, just saddens me.
Full disclosure: I have empathy, and own GOOG stock.
It is possible that Mr Zunger woke up this morning and thought , "This is a great oppourtunity to get a bunch of vague and unsubstantiated feedback on a product that is being shutdown. I'd like to spend half my day moderating comments".
It could also be that he wanted to redirect some of the passion for google reader in a positive direction. Make Google a bit more empathetic and friendly.
It could be some combination of the two.
I don't see malice here. I think Mr. Zunger made a smart move.
Now if he actually thought he was going to learn something he didn't already know from those comments, that would sadden me.
He is smart enough to realize that comments like those have a huge power-user sample bias and are mostly useless.
Yes, I would do the same thing. The only mistake I see is the way they handled the Google Reader announcement, which Mr Zunger wasn't involved in.
Then again, if I were so smart, I wouldn't have made the lemmings comment. I meant it as a mild joke, though you and other people interpreted it as an serious insult to 500 people and Mr Zunger's character.
Pretend for one yoctosecond that you work at Google, disagree with the decision to shut down Reader, and are in a position to try to make the product you're working on help fill the void.
So, Google would allow another team to create a clone of what they shut down after all these years? Their excuse was that they need to focus on fewer products
My point was expressed pretty clearly, I thought, and I did it without calling several hundred people "lemmings" and without calling Yonatan Zunger a liar. I have a nice list of names I'm perfectly willing to call jcampbell1 in response, but I felt sarcasm was more polite.
Or is this one of those cases where "lol u suk" is the preferred response?
I know reader was a free product that probably didn't make Google any money, but I find this plea for feedback on the back of the reader kill a little odd. Especially with the accompanying tone.
Feels something like:
"We're sorry that we took away your child support benefits, but can you give us some feedback on how we can improve our social services to the community? (any feedback about the withdrawal of child support will be ignored). Child Support Services. We listen."
What I find most interesting from this post is his belated admission of the brokenness of G+ when he writes "(NB: If you're seeing this via a reshare, please remember to comment on the original post if you want me to see what you're saying!)"...
Yeah, go write a wall of text, just in order to receive "you are not allowed to comment on this post" after you hit the "comment" button.
Bravo G+, you bring us real value.
" I'd like to integrate those ideas into future versions of many Google products, and try to capture that value."
... ugh. No! I don't want all that crap pieced out across many different apps. Just give me a damn reader. Charge me for it or use my reading habits to inform ad targeting, I don't care, just find a business justification to keep it around. Don't try and put some half-assed version in G+ or Youtube or gmail or wherever.
I think the real reason user numbers haven't grown as rapidly as expected could be the difficulty introducing it to a new user.
I've tried to explain how powerful it is, how it centrally gathers so many diverse publications, how it gives a new perspective on global events or political sensitive topics.
But it's a blank screen, the welcome wizard is helpful (I started with Apple and Google collections and quickly added Planet Gnome and Mozilla), but it's not the same.
Google+ is a product that tries to do everything, but makes the simplest things difficult. After Buzz, Google made discovery impossible, so G+ users accumulate very slowly. I'd like to "subscribe" to a circle, say Linux kernel or Node.js developers, but instead I have to get linked to someones G+ from somewhere like here and then follow just that user. I should be able to subscribe to that entire circle with one click, and have it appear as a subgroup on the left sidebar, and the, Presto, we have 50% of Google Reader.
I would suggest Reader be replaced (if it must) with G+ Curator, a reader for feeds including RSS and Atom, but also G+ Circles, third party feeds like Twitter or Tumbler (if possible), mayabe Google Groups or even a gmail filter.
I would use the Reader API for this, it's basically an atom feed aggregator, and could convert all those other inputs into Atom feeds the same as it does Atom and RSS today. I would translate the current feed IDs into G+ ids.
The problem with Google dropping RSS is it basically kills the prospect of sites bothering with RSS, they look to Tumblr and the like and think there's something there, but they find they can't easily browse other feeds, and it becomes like Facebook (now), a mess of pithy sayings and 'viral' photographs that people probably don't bother to read.
Then, at some point Tumblr (or some other site) shuts down and the community goes with it, the orgranization is lost and the users find something else to waste their time on.
But really, unless Google looks at fixing problems with G+ and makes it something that people want to use, we'll be not talking about it's shutdown a year or two from now
So the chief architect of Google+ wants to know why people used Google Reader? Can't he ask Google employees who should know this because they built the damn thing and documented their challenges and findings?
Or read the most upvoted complaints on open forums like HN or Reddit? Especially since he's architecting an ahem social product, shouldn't he already be comfortable doing that? And shouldn't he value the diversity of those responses more than those from Google+ buddies? I guess "dogfooding" has become more valuable than understanding.
Finally, my favorite "Zune" moment: "NB: The comments have filled up!"
I am sure there are technical reasons why more than 500 comments is not allowed, but none of them are user-centric.
You know, there's more than one person who works at Google. There are even multiple departments! So while it might seem that when "Google" says that it's removing Google Reader and then "Google" asks what we thought was good about Google Reader it's someone changing the subject, it isn't really.
Great comment from AJ Kohn on that thread (I don't know how to link directly to his post, unfortunately):
The Reader interface was pragmatic and efficient so it appealed to those, like me, who are information consumers.
At the heart of it all are two main points:
Time-Shifted Consumption and Deliverability
It's never been about having real-time access to information. It's about time-shifting the consumption and knowing that I will see that content at some point in time if I desire.
Feeds are to Reader as Season Passes are to TiVo. (As an aside, the latter is the model that should have been marketed to users.)
Using other methods such as G+ or Twitter or Facebook or any other mechanism that tries to find, shape and filter the information based on interest etc. are usually not comprehensive and rarely allow me the comfort of knowing I can rely on reviewing whether or not I value that content.
In short, I might not see it fly by in my stream and curation services might remove content that I may enjoy.
=====
In the same thread, Rob Ferguson writes:
Not specific to Reader, but regarding RSS (even Twitter to some extent), the multi-feed publish/subscribe model allows people to create separate feeds that each represent a facet of their personality, something they want to say. While the single-output model of G+ or Facebook has some advantages, e.g. seeing the 'whole person', the trade off is that you can't really specialise or segment content.
=====
Nelson Minar writes:
So I'd say the main value of Google Reader in the last year has been the very fast centralized feed crawler, along with its API that made it easy to put more modern UIs on top of Google's RSS reader infrastructure
It worked. It was minimal. I could click RSS on a site and subscribe. It was part of Google which I'm always working in. I stopped using the site, but I'd scroll through the widget on my Android phone every day.
I don't need "features," I just need to consume my feed without thought.
What a great idea!! Getting feedback to incorporate into the next Google product! Whatever it is, I can't wait to start incorporating it into my daily workflow...I know they would never yank it or take it down, right? They are totally dependable!!
</sarcasm>
Seriously, I was getting close to using G+ once in a while for things...now I will never, and I'll think twice before using any Google product on a regular basis. Dependability matters.
Are there any exploitation available reg. WHY they are closing it down?
Either the users being loud about it are a minority (it that case ok close it, deal with it etc.) OR they are not, and in that case I'm wondering:
When did Google lose its sense for the needs of users on the internet?
and
What is the problem google as an enterprise is having with the service staying alive... as at the same time g+ currently simply can not replace g-reader for its users.
Here's my simple use case: I use GReader to timeshift info, just like my DVR. I'm not sure i can even tell you when my favorite TV shows air live--they just show up on the DVR. Same with RSS and GR. I might go a couple of weeks without reading X blog, etc but it's there when I'm ready.
I liked Reader because it was a great tool, and wasn't a platform like Facebook... but since Google wants to be a platform now instead of a toolmaker, I'm not surprised they are killing the two tools I use daily: Reader and the iGoogle portal as my custom homepage.
Trying to parse this sentence, you are implying that you thought their actions could be explained by arrogance and now you think it is something else. Correct?
I'm not sure if it's arrogance or ignorance. Consider that Google has access to an extreme amount of user data and usage data. Did they analyzed that, then draw conclusions? Did they "assume" they knew best, since they are some of the smartest folks around? Actually asking users for opinions after the deciding to shut Reader down and getting a backlash seems to be a misstep on their part...
Hey guys. We at Qbix are thinking about building something like Google Reader, that's universal, works on your phone, etc. We've been building a next-gen framework that can handle all that stuff, including subscriptions, notifications, etc. and this seems like the perfect project to apply it to.
Let's take all this enthusiasm about Google Reader and not just save it, but make it into a community project that we can host online.
If you are developer who is proficient with PHP and Node.js, reach out to me if you might be interested in joining the project -- you can find my email at http://qbix.com/about
"Comments which disregard the previous paragraph will simply be deleted. Comments complaining about my deleting those comments will result in me blocking and/or mercilessly mocking you for failing to read instructions. Comments complaining about that will lead to some interesting replies in a combination of languages, probably starting with Yiddish and moving on from there."
I just love this offensive/defensive writing style: Nicholas Nassim Taleb does the same, all the time, throughout his books (and I'm a big Taleb fan).
I've noticed that people with strong ego typically hate that kind of writing that said.
Google Reader itself was the useful piece. It aggregates RSS feeds. I don't really know how else you can explain that "yes, it aggregated RSS feeds, and I like to read all of my RSS feeds in one place".