Feedly – The Next Google Reader?

When Google announced the death of Google Reader, it became clear just how much Google dominated the world of cloud-based RSS. Google’s product had become so ubiquitous for cloud RSS that no other companies really tried to make a competing product; instead they simply made different front-ends that connected to Google Reader’s API. With Reader now closing shop in just a few months, the scramble is on for who can gain all of the users Google is giving up.

Having a cloud back-end to sync feeds is really where the whole situation becomes tricky. At work, for example, I have a handful of RSS feeds that I like to follow which are related to my job. I only typically look at them when I’m at work on my work computer so in that case having a local RSS reader that runs solely off of my machine is fine, and Feed Demon does the job quite nicely. Things aren’t as simple with my personal RSS feeds, though. I want to be able to see those feeds on my desktop, my laptop, and my phone. I also don’t want them to be duplicated. When I read an article on my phone during my lunch break at work, I don’t want to see that same feed on my desktop once I get home. This is where a cloud back-end is needed to sync which articles I have read and which ones I haven’t.

In this regard, Feedly seems to be a clear choice for anyone looking to emulate the functionality of Google Reader with a clean, elegant design. On the desktop side, Feedly has browser plugins that support Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It also has mobile apps for iOS and Android. I’ve spent most of my time using the Firefox plugin, which works well under both Windows and Linux. I am somewhat confused as to why exactly a plugin is needed for all of the web browsers rather than just using a web page, but I’m sure there is a reason for it. I have also been very impressed with the Android app, which runs great. It provides you with quite a few different options for your interface, and it all runs very smoothly on my Photon Q without much of an impact on my battery. What helps a lot is that it doesn’t seem to actually use any background data; the app will only refresh your articles when you launch it, which is exactly what I want.

Feedly has benefited hugely from Google’s announcement of Google Reader being killed off, and reportedly over 500,000 users moved to Feedly in just two days after the Google Reader announcement. As I signed up in the same period, I also recently received an email from Feedly linking to their blog post on tips for Google Reader users migrating to Feedly. The big question I had, though, is what Feedly was doing to cut Google Reader out of the equation. When you use Feedly at the moment, it does OAuth to your Google account and automatically pulls your data from Google Reader. It’s still using the Reader API at the time of this writing. For example, when I read an article on Feedly and then look at my Google Reader stats, it will tell me that I have read another article. Obviously this behavior won’t continue to function once Google sunsets Reader. I had some confusion regarding whether I had to make a first-party Feedly account somewhere since I’m only authenticating to the service via Google right now. Information like this has been somewhat difficult to track down in Feedly’s official posts, but luckily some folks in the comments of the Feedly blog I just linked to had the same questions:

I had known that Feedly was working on a Reader replacement back-end called Normandy, but I didn’t know how that was going to fit into the overall scheme of authenticating to and using the service once the cut-over happens. Apparently Feedly is planning to continue using OAuth with Google as their authentication mechanism and the only difference is that the RSS feeds being imported will be coming from their own Normandy servers rather than from Google’s Reader servers. Thus, just logging in prior to the July 1st cut-over should be all that’s needed to ensure that Normandy is able to import your feeds from Google Reader so that you continue to have uninterrupted service. If you’re scrambling for a Google Reader replacement, it’s really looking more and more like you can’t go wrong with Feedly.

Twitter: Killing Windows 8 Apps With No Competing Product

Back in September I wrote about the horrible direction in which Twitter had officially aligned itself with regard to 3rd party applications. They essentially set a 100,000 user limit on any 3rd party application in an attempt to steer users toward Twitter’s official applications instead. It was something that bothered me quite a bit, especially since I first used Twitter at a time when the company didn’t even offer any apps and the 3rd party developer ecosystem played a major role in what allowed Twitter to reach the popularity it has attained today. I vowed to not use Twitter from that point on, and for the most part I’ve held to that. I’ve cheated in rare instances to respond to the occasional @-mention, but for the most part I’ve avoided making original content on the service; it serves mostly just to aggregate and broadcast my activities on WordPress, GoodReads, and Instagram.

Now some of the fruit of Twitter’s labor is finally being demonstrated. Tweetro is a Twitter application which was one of the first to be available in the Windows 8 Store. Even when the operating system was in Release Preview, Tweetro was there. Being in the store that early means that it got a lot of exposure as a the Windows 8 Twitter application. Now that exposure is causing problems for them as reported by Windows Observer from an email the received from co-founder Atta Elayyan:

Since the official launch of Windows 8, we’ve seen a massive spike in downloads.  We are averaging around 3-4K downloads a day and have had well over 200K downloads since Tweetro launched on ‘Release Preview’.  Unfortunately, we’ve been victims of our own success as it appears that the app is now being blocked by Twitter due to the new Token limitations.

The app is now completely crippled and users cannot get past the OAuth screen as they are presented with an error ‘Cannot connect to service’.  We were under the impression that Twitter wasn’t going to enforce the token limits until March next year (when all 3rd party apps are required to migrate to the new API’s) however this doesn’t seem to be the case. We have reached out to Twitter for confirmation however we haven’t heard back yet.

What was a successful app is now completely useless due to the arbitrary limit applied by Twitter. From the Twitter Developer Blog:

We will not be shutting down client applications that use those endpoints and are currently over those token limits. If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you’ll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you’ll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

Apparently if you’re a new application which reaches 100,000 users then you’re just screwed since Twitter hasn’t bothered responding to the Tweetro team’s requests for assistance. To make this situation even more ridiculous, Twitter doesn’t even offer a Windows 8 application. Essentially Twitter is more or less limiting users to just using their main web page from Windows 8 rather than letting users take advantage of Modern UI applications. I personally don’t see this as any different than telling users that they aren’t allowed to use native apps on Android or iOS, forcing users on their mobile phones to use the Twitter mobile web client. As such, the idea of blocking Modern UI applications while offering absolutely nothing else is completely ridiculous.

I hate to say it, but as evil as Twitter has become at locking down their ecosystem, they’re basically becoming the Apple of the social networking world. I’m glad that I stopped being a regular part of the community when I did.

Twitter: Sticking It To The Geeks

Over the last couple of years, Twitter has had something of a tense relationship with 3rd party developers. Many credit 3rd party developers and early Twitter adopters for the success Twitter is currently experiencing. When Twitter began, the official web page (which was barely functional) and SMS were the only ways to access the service. Hash tags and @-mentions didn’t exist; early adopters simply started using them figuring that when someone posts a tweet starting with “@JohnFail”, I would see it when I looked through my timeline. The Twitter community was small enough that it could reasonably be expected that users would read every tweet. These features grew organically as users discovered just how functional they could make the services.

By the same token, the 3rd party development community immediately began making clients to access core Twitter services. These clients were vastly superior to anything Twitter offered, especially since early on there were no mobile apps officially sponsored by Twitter itself. The service became far more usable as fully featured clients designed for smartphones allowed individuals to always be connected to Twitter rather than relying on SMS or having to check the mobile web page.

Twitter is in a bit of a troublesome spot, though, as they are now left with a service that has become massively popular but which still needs to find a way to make money. The direction they have chosen to go for that endeavor, though, ultimately hurts the very people who made Twitter successful in the first place. They’ve announced another round of sweeping API changes that will severely hamper the ability of 3rd party clients to be successful.

Twitter has also now removed the “via” tag from posts in the official web client. This has apparently been in place for awhile in the official iOS app and likely will be making its way to other official clients soon as well. This is huge because it takes away one of the easiest way to discover new Twitter clients. In fact, several developers have used this to promote their products. For instance, when the BlackBerry client Blaq was still in a private beta, they allowed in one of the CrackBerry.com editors to use it. All of the BlackBerry users following that editor on Twitter saw posts coming from Blaq, which generated a large amount of interest in the client. Ploys like that will no longer work.

While I can appreciate Twitter’s situation, it is just frustrating to see them treat the individuals who made the service successful in the first place be treated so poorly. Twitter wants everyone to have the exact same experience; they want that experience to take place via official clients so that advertisements and promoted tweets can be pushed accordingly. I understand that Twitter needs to find a way to monetize, but treating the individual responsible for their success in this way just seems like a terrible show of disrespect to the community as a whole.

As many have begun to think, though, it’s entirely possible that Twitter is fine with this because those are the users they don’t really want using Twitter anymore. Twitter likely doesn’t see as much of a concern if startup founders and client developers are no longer on the service. Celebrities trying to grab extra attention are now going to be far more important to them in drawing crowds to Twitter. If the vocal members of Twitter who are frustrated with changes in the service decide to leave, then things are all the better for Twitter as their ecosystem moves into a more mainstream state.

That said, the community Twitter wants to be is no longer one that I really want to be a part of. With intelligent conversation and usability thrown away in favor of spammy nonsense and advertisements, I’m figuring that my time is better spent elsewhere. For the time being I still have my account there and will syndicate my blog posts to it. I don’t intend to be using it for anything else, though. I no longer log into the site, check my mentions, etc. I’m hopeful that a competitor can emerge that will allow me to continue microblogging. In the meantime, though, I guess I’ll just be keeping a lot to myself or trying to make those thoughts into longer posts for this site.

Subscribing To Twitter Feeds With RSS

It’s disappointing to me how many social networking sites seem to have a complete disregard for RSS. While it’s a technology that never seemed to really catch on in the mainstream, it’s an incredibly useful way to have the information you want delivered directly to you rather than having to go get it. I use it frequently to pull blogs of interest to me into Outlook. While it is amazingly useful with blogs, it should offer the same use with microblogs. Unfortunately, Twitter seems to disagree.

Back when I first signed up for my Twitter account many years ago, before there was even a feed for your @-mentions, Twitter offered RSS support rather openly. It was an excellent way to make sure you saw someone’s tweets if you didn’t want to have them delivered to your phone via SMS. In 2008 the New York Times even included RSS as one of the prime ways to receive information from Twitter.

When I wanted to use this functionality a few days ago, though, I was disappointed to see that Twitter no longer has a link to RSS on any of the profile pages. A little hunting lead me to see that the functionality still exists within the Twitter API; for whatever reason they just choose not to advertise it. I would guess that the reason is Twitter wants users to be going to the site in order to view promoted tweets (read: advertisements).

Regardless, the following setup currently works for pulling Twitter updates via RSS:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=TwitterUserNameHere

Given that they haven’t even started pushing ads with their official mobile apps yet, I can’t see why Twitter would remove this functionality from easy access just to get a few more ad hits, but I can’t think of any other reason for the change. Regardless, at least this method works. Now I just have to hope that they don’t make any modifications to the API.