Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV • Hacker News Board

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#71

Post by niggler » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 9:53 PM UTC

freshhawk wrote: post #67

niggler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Google broke aaronsw's guess at google's understanding of evil. Evil is a relative term, and if Microsoft is seen as the Evil empire then cutting off amicable relations (manifested by open interfaces) can be construed as "not evil" Read the update to the article, where he points out that the entire concept of ads could be construed as evil by some.

aaronsw was quoting google sources, not guessing.

"They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money." However, 'evil' is not defined in context: https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

Therefore, the leap "evil = make things worse for your users" is not from a google source. That's Aaron's attempt to construct a categorical rule from the examples.

"Google unambiguously break their own definition of 'evil'." <-- False, since google didn't explicitly define evil. They broke what Aaron believed google meant when they said "evil".

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#72

Post by r00fus » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

niggler wrote: post #27

robertskmiles wrote: post #21

I think Aaron Swartz hit the nail on the head with his "What Does Google Mean by “Evil”?" blog post[1]: > "They specifically name three: showing irrelevant ads, using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and selling off actual search results. Hardly the stuff of comic books. But what do these three have in common? They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money " This…

You mean Google broke aaronsw's guess at google's understanding of evil. Evil is a relative term, and if Microsoft is seen as the Evil empire then cutting off amicable relations (manifested by open interfaces) can be construed as "not evil" Read the update to the article, where he points out that the entire concept of ads could be construed as evil by some.

There is a continuum of evil - on one end, you have ruthless bloodthirsty organizations who don't balk at breaking all the rules to make a dollar or point, on the other end you have "mostly self-consistent" organizations like FSF and EFF.

Microsoft isn't pure evil, they're were just seen as being closer to the bloodthirsty end than Apple or Google. It used to be that Google was seen as closer to the FSF side than, say, Microsoft.

Nowadays, it's pretty clear all of these big tech firms are not far apart and moving more towards the ruthless side of the spectrum.

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#73

Post by chapel » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:03 PM UTC

onemorepassword wrote: post #66

I'm pretty much done with Google as supplier of business apps. I have to migrate our company's Google Apps account anyway because of a (domain)name change (which is still hell with Google Apps anyway, you basically have to buy and setup a totally new account an migrate everything by hand or with 3rd party tools), so I might as well look for another supplier. As much as I dislike everything Microsoft, 365 currently lo…

You can add alternate domains to Google Apps accounts which can work just as the main domain. So you don't have to migrate anything, it is the same account just acknowledges and accepts the alternate domain.

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#74

Post by cube13 » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:03 PM UTC

Selfcommit wrote: post #19

notatoad wrote: post #4

CalDAV is the spring cleaning killing that I'm most surprised about. It should have been obvious to everybody that reader was on track to be killed, but I would have thought that google would be eager to support any product that involves you telling them what your schedule is, whether that's through their calendar app or any other calendaring app you've got connected to their backend.

If you throw out all the 'tit-for-tat' assumptions, it really makes sense. Google has an API for nearly everything. I could easily see this as a standardization approach. Personally, I'm not effected at all between using the Google calendar website and my android based phone. I think Google's goal is to push everyone to use the API for their calander in future apps. I don't mind doing that for what they provide. I co…

> If you throw out all the 'tit-for-tat' assumptions, it really makes sense. Google has an API for nearly everything. I could easily see this as a standardization approach.

Except caldav is just a protocol. It's not an API. Google could have made an API that supports the caldav protocol, but chose not to.

This also effects me a lot, personally, because I have a Kindle Fire and an iPhone, and I use my Google calendar to sync up everything between the two.

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#75

Post by Osiris » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:11 PM UTC

cooldeal wrote: post #10

Is there any stated reason for deprecating CalDAV support? I hope the new Calendar API is open enough for platforms like Blackberry, Ubuntu Mobile, Jolla and Firefox OS etc to tap into. It's increasingly looking like Google is making it hard for other platforms except it's own Android and iOS(can't ignore iOS because of the number of users) to interoperate with its services like Youtube, Gmail, Calendar etc.

For my day job I work on a Calendar application. We provide a CalDav service for customers to access their Calendar data. While it can get tricky to support all the variations, it's a solid standard that makes integration really easy.

One problem we have is that Android doesn't natively support CalDav, so we can't integrate with the built-in Android calendar like we can with iOS's calendar.

For those that work with calendars, CalDav is a well documented standard for sharing calendar data. It robustly handles all the use cases that we've been able to think of (including edge cases).

It's disappointing to hear that Google will discontinue the service. I'm sure lots of iOS and Mac users use the CalDav sync to natively sync their Google Calendar to their devices. How will users of native apps be able to get their calendar now?

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#76

Post by Acen » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:13 PM UTC

a3_nm wrote: post #32

cooldeal wrote: post #10

Is there any stated reason for deprecating CalDAV support? I hope the new Calendar API is open enough for platforms like Blackberry, Ubuntu Mobile, Jolla and Firefox OS etc to tap into. It's increasingly looking like Google is making it hard for other platforms except it's own Android and iOS(can't ignore iOS because of the number of users) to interoperate with its services like Youtube, Gmail, Calendar etc.

Even if the Calendar API were open to all platforms, it's not a standard, it's just an API unilaterally defined by Google. CalDAV, however, is a standard " rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791> . It is certainly an evil move from Google to try to replace an existing open standard with an API defined exclusively by them (unless they have technical grounds to do so, and considerate and documented extensio…

Perhaps Google should be reminded of their own Code of Conduct. http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#77

Post by Osiris » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

a3_nm wrote: post #32

cooldeal wrote: post #10

Is there any stated reason for deprecating CalDAV support? I hope the new Calendar API is open enough for platforms like Blackberry, Ubuntu Mobile, Jolla and Firefox OS etc to tap into. It's increasingly looking like Google is making it hard for other platforms except it's own Android and iOS(can't ignore iOS because of the number of users) to interoperate with its services like Youtube, Gmail, Calendar etc.

Even if the Calendar API were open to all platforms, it's not a standard, it's just an API unilaterally defined by Google. CalDAV, however, is a standard " rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791> . It is certainly an evil move from Google to try to replace an existing open standard with an API defined exclusively by them (unless they have technical grounds to do so, and considerate and documented extensio…

Also see the iCalendar specification for common data transfer format[1]. I have to refer to these documents on a pretty regular basis for my job.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#78

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:22 PM UTC

egor83 wrote: post #54

a3_nm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the Calendar API were open to all platforms, it's not a standard, it's just an API unilaterally defined by Google. CalDAV, however, is a standard " rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791> . It is certainly an evil move from Google to try to replace an existing open standard with an API defined exclusively by them (unless they have technical grounds to do so, and considerate and documented extensio…

To make things worse, Google's support for their own APIs is pretty weak - I had some bad experiences with them. Calendar API wasn't the worst - okay, I didn't get any response from Google guys on a bug I ran into, but they eventually fixed it (and lack of user support is pretty much a norm for them now). The situation with Spreadsheets is way worse - the API is pretty much abandoned, no changes or any reaction to bu…

Also, the last time I used the Spreadsheet API, it didn't respond correctly to the OPTIONS request, making CORS pretty much useless.

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#79

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:25 PM UTC

orangethirty wrote: post #30

guelo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're going down the Facebook route, they want to lock you into their AOL-style walled garden. I was surprised the other day when I went to share a video from Google+ to Facebook, turns out I couldn't, it wasn't a youtube video as I had expected.

Just like PG said in one of his essays, Google is now the new Microsoft. It used to be about giving hackers tools to build on top of their services. Now, its all about turning the search engine into a social network. And before the Google army comes in, let me say one thing. I used to love Google. Used all of their services. Built stuff with their services. Each computer I touched got Chrome installed. I was a fan bo…

Nuuton sounds interesting. For me though, search isn't the biggy, gmail is the big one that I'd love to replace.

I imagine a pinboard.in like service but for mail (cheap, fast, simple, run by a developer that I trust to worst case mail me a DVD of my mail history). I'd jump to that very quickly.

Re: Google: Do what you want with Reader, but don't kill CalDAV

#80

Post by urza » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 10:39 PM UTC

meej wrote: post #56

gwern wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually been putting numbers on this: there are many fans of NewsBlur, apparently, as a replacement for Google Reader, so that's $12 a year; I'm worried about being tied to my Gmail address, so I finally got around to setting up a vanity domain address which forwards to Gmail and that's going to be about $10 a year. So I'm up to $22 a year, and I haven't looked into any free or paid replacements for Google Cale…

Between Google retiring stuff and Twitter's ongoing war against client developers, I'm seriously considering just packing up and self-hosting everything I care about on my VPS.