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Google Technology

Digg Hints Its Replacement For Google Reader Will Include Social Media Content 78

Posted by samzenpus from the follow-my-likes dept.
RougeFemme writes "To capitalize on Google Reader's shutdown, Digg is building an RSS reader from scratch. But this Reader replacement will go beyond RSS to include social media content, like Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. From their blog post: 'Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring."
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Digg Hints Its Replacement For Google Reader Will Include Social Media Content More

Digg Hints Its Replacement For Google Reader Will Include Social Media Content

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  • Digg?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A dead community that acts as nothing more than a news scraper with a paid bias? Do they have any staff left?

    • Re:Digg?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by interkin3tic ( 1469267 ) on Monday March 25, 2013 @06:11PM (#43276435)
      Well, they evidently have someone to say that they are making an RSS reader that includes "features" that every other reader BESIDES Google reader had, so that's one. Perhaps they're now going to claim other apps as their own in addition to claiming content for their own?

      I was excited briefly when I thought it said "will NOT include social media." Because that seems to be a rarity. Here's a wild thought guys: maybe the reason everyone was using google reader was because it did one thing and did it well, and didn't bug us about "LOGIN NOW with your Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, twitter, G+, Digg, stumbleupon, orkut, myspace, grindr, flickr, picassa, slashdot, memebase, youtube, fox news, and social security number to proceed."

      If I want to see pictures of my friends from high school's babies pooping, I can load up facebook. If I want to go onto reddit, there are like a dozen apps for that.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        and social security number

        I've never understood why the primary key in a table of the federal database for retirement is used as the secret password for the assignee's identity.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wmac1 ( 2478314 )

          Because primary keys do not change!!! If it is revealed to public you could do nothing to change it. That has possibly been the idea behind it!

          Another reason is that another field in the database (to hold a secret password) would take excessive! space.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ClioCJS ( 264898 )
        Google Reader doesn't bug you to do that anymore than Slashdot [which also has social share buttons] does. Furthermore they let you configure which things are in your 'send to' in your options, so you don't have to have any you don't use!

        At least get your facts straight. Maybe the reason Google Reader is closing is because of people like you who leap to conclusions and spout false facts.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Desler ( 1608317 )

          Maybe you need to reread what they wrote:

          Here's a wild thought guys: maybe the reason everyone was using google reader was because it did one thing and did it well, and didn't bug us about "LOGIN NOW with your Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, twitter, G+, Digg, stumbleupon, orkut, myspace, grindr, flickr, picassa, slashdot, memebase, youtube, fox news, and social security number to proceed

          Reading comprehension ftw!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ClioCJS ( 264898 )
            I knowwww, riiight?

            I caught myself 2 seconds after posting, realizing I'd read the negative. Derp. See my other comments....

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ClioCJS ( 264898 )
        Shit, I totally read the exact opposite of what you meant. There's no way to delete my previous comment? This is embarrassing. My apologies.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ClioCJS ( 264898 )
        Seriously. I think I was in a blind rage over Google Reader closing. Hopefully this excuse comes up in a major crime sometime.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by icebike ( 68054 )

        Here's a wild thought guys: maybe the reason everyone was using google reader was because it did one thing and did it well, and didn't bug us about "LOGIN NOW with your Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, twitter, G+, Digg, stumbleupon, orkut, myspace, grindr, flickr, picassa, slashdot, memebase, youtube, fox news, and social security number to proceed."

        Exactly!

        I detest social media inclusion in my reading list, (or anything else for that matter). I'm an adult, and don't need my friends approval or recommendations on what to read.

        The problem is that Google hasn't found a way to monetize Reader, and they want to replace it with features in Google Plus, where they can package you and sell you to advertisers.

        To date there is no good replacement for Google reader. They all want to foist image laden feeds to your reading list, because they believe you are ill

    • I didn't even know Digg was still a thing!

    • I remember when Digg was set to dethrone as the main tech and geeky stuff web site. At first it was good, it had a lot of interesting stories a lot of them covering stuff that was just too technical for Slashdot, links to scientific papers, and other neat stuff, with the sometimes funny of offbeat stuff that techies like.
      However it got political, Anti-Bush conspiracy on top of Anti-Bush conspiracy, stuff that would make the lies about Obama seem tame. Then the top 10 lists, then came the LOL Cats, by that

  • Strangely, I had both Twitter and FaceBook feeds in my Google Reader at one point or another. Many of these 'social media' sites are capable of providing an RSS feed. Personally I think that's the right way to do it. To hand code interfaces for each specific service seems silly when you can actually use a standard protocol.

    • To hand code interfaces for each specific service seems silly when you can actually use a standard protocol.

      That's very smart.

      I've always wished for a standard protocol for social media. It's probably not what you had in mind, but I'm thinking something like what Trillian was for IM services. I guess what I really want is social media without Facebook looking into everything I say and do.

      Until then, I will remain for the most part blissfully unaware of most of the social media world except in the most pas

      • Re:Reader (Score:5, Insightful)

        by girlintraining ( 1395911 ) on Monday March 25, 2013 @07:00PM (#43276933)

        I've always wished for a standard protocol for social media.

        And the social media website purveyors want anything but. People have been trying to hack together a way to show Facebook feed information minus all the advertising crap, the applications, the random way that it sometimes sorts by most recent and then spontaniously doesn't... the idea of "promoted" posts... it's all bullshit. The RSS feeds they had used to show your friends "feeds" as well, but then they crapped all over that, and they change their HTML and CSS code every few weeks in an aggressive attempt to prevent YOU from exporting your own data in a convenient, real-time fashion, while giving THEM (that is, their advertisers, app purveyors, etc.) full access to everything... as long as they don't publish it in a nice, convenient, standardized fashion for third parties to use. Right there in the EULA even.

        I admire Digg's attempt to do this... but if they succeed, it will be at some terrible (privacy) price, if Mark F*ckerberg doesn't screw the pooch first.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )

      Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc?

      Why in the fuck would I want to drown out the signal of my RSS feed with the NOISE of a bunch of shitty social networking crap? I don't give the slightest fuck what my "friends" on social networking are eating for lunch, doing for the weekend, or what smarmy observation they have about life.

  • Meaningful improvement? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement.

    ....to include social media content, like Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.

    That's improvement? Oh God! Idiocracy here we come at warp speed!

  • Wait - wasn't that the place... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jnmontario ( 865369 ) on Monday March 25, 2013 @05:48PM (#43276245)
    Wasn't Digg that site I used to visit as often as ./ before they whored themselves to advertisers to allow funded content to overtly make it to the front page instead of ACTUAL user submitted content? BTW: yes - I'm aware lots of users were themselves industry shills, but at least it had the pretense of being a community-driven website.

  • lol, digg (Score:2, Interesting)

    by game kid ( 805301 )

    The last time digg did one of its boneheaded overhauls (back in August 2012?) it became a pinterest lookalike that IIRC required (not merely allowed, as bad as that already is) a facebook account just to log in. I quickly did the export old account data thinger they supplied that time; I've yet to make any use of that data, but at least I still have it cooped(sp?) up somewhere.

    Anyway, the real story here is that anyone would still care about, much less report on, digg. It's long dead and longer buried by

    • Oh, and by that time, well after the prior boneheaded overhaul turned it from user-submitted stories to media-submitted (which in turn was after the 09 F9 censorship crap), it was basically a place where people tried to add me as a friend because I had "game" in my name (I knew this because of all the other Friends named *game* almost all my inviters had). In short, people were friend-collecting, and maybe doing some other important stuff that I wouldn't know because I was bored of digg and not visiting of

  • Why is on slashdot homepage?
    http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=digg [google.com]

  • Word. Soon, if they play their cards right, they are going to have *all* the obsolete. I heard they were planning on teaming up with CompuServe to corner the Gopher market.

  • Tales from the grave (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hey, they should team up with myspace, it's so cute when zombies work together to make something that nobody cares about!

  • Social media, you say? That's great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday March 25, 2013 @06:15PM (#43276471)

    One less Reader replacement I need to consider. Of course, having the Digg name attached to it was already a major demotivator for checking it out, but this seals it for me.

  • You can put a UI like pinterest on it and win the Web 3.0 trifecta!

    Geez, people... Get a clue. We have tabbed browsers now. We don't actually need everything munged together into a single dashboard. An RSS reader should be that - anRSS reader!

    In fact, if you have a large number of contexts (which all of these sites are), shoving them all together into one big ball of mud does not make things more convenient, only more confusing.

  • Kuro5hin is announcing a cloud storage service.

  • So a bunch of junk I don't want in an RSS reader (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Minter92 ( 148860 ) on Monday March 25, 2013 @06:49PM (#43276833)

    This is why I am writing my own simple reader. Just check the feed to see if there are new posts and link me to them. It's all I want.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sootman ( 158191 )

      > This is why I am writing my own simple reader.

      Aah... you too? [pixelcity.com] :-)

      And if anyone has their own host and wants something full-featured right now, look no further than Tiny Tiny RSS [tt-rss.org] which, despite the name, is not all that tiny. If you use PHP and want to start rolling your own, I recommend starting with MagpieRSS. [sourceforge.net]

      • Yea, TT-RSS even supports importing the xml file from Google Reader to automatically add all feeds.
        Though I miss the trends/statistics page of Reader (on the other hand, now I can monitor the server).

    • This is what I loved about Google Reader that nothing else I've looked at seems to have. With Google, you add a shortcut to your browser to http://www.google.com/reader/next?go=nextauto [google.com]... Every time you click on it it takes you to the next new page in one of your subscribed feeds. If there are no more unread pages, it takes you to some end-of-the-internet page. That's all it does, and that's all I want it to do. i don't want extra crap, I don't want to be forced to install a plug in, and I certainly

  • Hrm.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Did Google just unleashed a RSS bubble?

  • No! (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrEdofCourse ( 2670081 ) on Monday March 25, 2013 @07:17PM (#43277047) Homepage

    Not Digg. No, just, no! There's so many things wrong with this.

    Here comes Digg thinking Google Reader was just an RSS reader and now wants to join in on the replacement game. Great, so now we'll have a Bazillion and TWO RSS readers!

    Google Reader was more than just an RSS client (which there have always been more than enough of). Google Reader was a feed manager and aggregator, with the ability to share posts from feeds and generate new feeds based on the combination of shared items along with a public API for all of it.

    The loss of this functionality is pretty significant, especially since Google crushed and eliminated all competition in this field. This is what is needed.

    One really important criteria for anyone attempting to fill in here, is that they have to be trust worthy long term. Many sites/companies invested a lot in Google Reader's infrastructure and are now feeling some serious pain as Google has abandoned it. The last thing we want to do is trust someone with a history of foolish abandonment.

    So, Digg...

    1) You apparently don't even understand what Google Reader is.

    2) You have a horrible history of abandonment.

  • Personally, I started using gReader Pro on my Android device approximately 15 seconds before Google made the announcement to get rid of Google Reader.

    Fortunately, gReader had already made itself separate from Google Reader (or so it seems). It supports syncing what you do and what you've read with your Google Reader account, but this is optional. I've already disabled the Google Reader-related features and so far gReader is still working just fine. It has a lot of extra bells and whistles that I don't ne

  • Easy (Score:2)

    by joh ( 27088 )

    Just implement the Google Reader API.

    Then, have all apps supporting Google Reader add a field to enter a server.

    Then, have several companies offer this service, for free or for money, with or without a web interface.

    Then you get a free market for RSS synchronisation on the free Internet, a level playing field for free players.

    OK, these days suggesting something like that probably already makes you a communist.

  • Don't we already have this to a limited extent with the Feedly addon for every browser that actually matters?

    • Yeah, everyone that cares has already moved to Feedly.

      I'm not sure the people still at Digg comprehend how irrelevant they are in general. :s

      • Agreed. Digg was just one of those things I never bothered with since everything that mattered was either here or at Engadget, both of which have RSS feeds for conviencence.

  • If they let you turn off all the crap you don't want and just use it for a handful of feeds, and if the UI is good, this could be awesome. Digg (despite its troubles in the past) does have a lot of talent and infrastructure. (Remember when they were good? All the cool things they had in labs.digg.com? (or whatever the URL was.))

    Google has actually created a huge opportunity here for a lot of companies, and there are plenty of people who could do great work to fill the vacuum that Google is creating. Despite

  • digg desperate trying to make the news..a couple days ago they sent out an email saying
    "hey..do you remember us? it's so dark and lonely here.. please come back and pay attention to us. sure we ignored every wish the users had and just completely fucked things sideways..but..please? please? please???"

  • I don't trust Digg anymore with anything.

  • What's "Digg"?

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