61–70 of 131 posts
" 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.
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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. Wha…
>The traffic to the web app was negligible. This is completely and demonstrably false. It drives more traffic at this point than G+ itself. http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have
G+ can't be google reader for two reasons: 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.
..and you know what? I like text. 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…
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.
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You assume that these actions were coordinated, and that all individuals in Google know about, and act on, a single vision.
His assumption only requires the group that's replacing Google Reader to have been aware of and involved in the effort to replace Google Reader. Which seems pretty reasonable.
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.
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You assume that these actions were coordinated, and that all individuals in Google know about, and act on, a single vision.
His assumption only requires the group that's replacing Google Reader to have been aware of and involved in the effort to replace Google Reader. Which seems pretty reasonable.
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 Googl…
Google never get feedback from users. They don't even beta test when they build products.
Uh... Gmail pretty much started the "launch your web app as a beta" craze.
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 Googl…
You're totally right. Google should absolutely never, ever ask for input from users.
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 Googl…
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.
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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 latte…