Google is about to learn a tough lesson • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#161

Post by ufo » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 4:53 AM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #143

danilocampos wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Aren't you a charmer. I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow. And while you're right about…

If you're using a gmail domain email, setup auto reply/forwarding for a few months/indefinitely. Businesses would largely be using their own domains, so the point is moot.

If you forwards emails through gmail then Google still gets your data.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#162

Post by tmzt » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:01 AM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #73

tikhonj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more a reaction to their general recent policy of doing far less away from their core business. They used to have a ton of projects with a very relaxed attitude about making money from any given project. Now that they've given up on focusing on that much beyond their bottom line, they're acting much more like other large companies which is not necessarily a good thing.

Like self driving cars and Google Glass? Or the cheap/free fiber optic Internet access? Or free Wi-Fi in NYC? I do not think you know what evil means...

What's the point of a car that drives itself if there is nothing to read while you're driving? I was seriously looking forward to that - or even a text to speech app that reads Reader feeds.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#163

Post by smsm42 » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:19 AM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #100

xaa wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service. To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable…

They built Gmail. People need it desperately. So far, no one distrusts it or has any reason to. That's their identity moat.

I use gmail daily, many times, but I don't actually need gmail site. I rarely even go there. What I need is a free and reliable mail storage server that supports IMAP. I'll take it from there. Same with GReader - I need free and reliable feed aggregator, and then I'll use the tools to consume it.

I am sad Google is getting out of this market, since that brings me inconvenience of migration. But I'm sure the niche will be filled in.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#164

Post by smsm42 » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:27 AM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #28

So, what's going to happen, exactly? "Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Android, to erode the dominance of Google in search, and prevent the regulatory approval of self-driving cars? Google has quite a few heavy responsibilities on their hands. They have to manage growth and competition in hugely complex, emerging fields. The lesson the…

I'm reading all these comments about "RSS is dead" and how everybody uses Facebook for it now and I'm completely confused. How you can even use Facebook for this? Facebook is totally useless as a reading list organizer, it is useful for sharing lolcats pictures, but if you need structure and organize known sources of information and keeping track of what you read and what you didn't - Facebook is as useful as a trombone in a Moon landing mission. The only conclusion I can make is that these people don't mean by reading the same thing as I do. Maybe for them lolcats and pics of each other's dinners is reading...

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#165

Post by smsm42 » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:31 AM UTC

sbmassey wrote: post #149

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the problem, not the solution, but maybe calculating the popularity among the people I follow on twitter (or the ones following the ones I follow in case that dataset is not big enough) to show me a lot less articles for frequent-publisher.

So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.

IMO, that's exactly why Reader exists - structure and creating personal consumption patterns. Social networking is useless for that, it's like recommending replacing a library with a disco pub. Disco pubs are fine places, lots of fun to be had there, but recommending it as a substitute for the library is crazy. RSS/Reader is completely different use case.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#166

Post by arihant » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:44 AM UTC

This just shows Google just doesn't get design. Sure, they may have figured out CSS3 and made Gmail super hard to use, but they don't really get design.

Ever noticed how Facebook kills a feature? Slow, steady, they drift you away, showing you by hand what better is out there, and then the feature disappears, first from our conscious, and then from the website. If FB was the one calling shots here, they probably would have somehow merged G+ and Reader, and then slowly started to show us those stories better using Currents, and by the time everyone is comfortable, would have killed Reader.

Google doesn't get design. It has to be in everything. Even in killing products off, there is design. You can't design with a corporate sledgehammer. All they seem to be doing is kill off established niche products in hopes of somehow making a niche social network successful. If only someone builds a better search engine, right this moment.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#167

Post by icelancer » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:47 AM UTC

veridies wrote: post #120

baby wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a change of life for me too. But a bad one. Instead of checking my favorite websites separately I started checking a hundred websites. I would eat information. I would get a new post every 30 seconds. I would spend my days just sitting at my desk and archiving what didn't seem of interest and read the rest. After a few month I started realizing I wasn't enjoying what was written anymore. I wasn't enjoying visi…

It doesn't help you. But that doesn't mean it's not useful. I subscribe to about fifteen developer blogs that update only two or three times a year. Huge waste of time to visit their websites, but whenever anything important happens, I'll know. I subscribe to the New York Times' main feed. I don't read most of the articles, but I'll flip through all of the headlines for ones that I want to look at. Much faster than t…

>I subscribe to about fifteen developer blogs that update only two or three times a year. Huge waste of time to visit their websites, but whenever anything important happens, I'll know.

This is the EXACT use case I desperately need it for.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#168

Post by WilliamTJ » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:51 AM UTC

Google Reader is not just a feed but also as a tool for many people that are oppress by internet censorship it the only way people get free information and fight oppression...

I guess Google don't care

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512566/unintentional-in...

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#169

Post by cromwellian » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:52 AM UTC

OGinparadise wrote: post #156

cromwellian wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites. When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it. Vertical search is getting rolled up into search, not just by Google, but by Microsoft too, because…

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites. Their mission changes based on their revenue needs. First it was no ads on top, then send users as fast as possible to other sites, now it's almost all ads and keep users at Google at any cost. Even if what Google provides is sub-standard, very typica…

Vertical crawlers and linkfarms going out of business is different than publishers going out of business. The web's fertile lifeblood is content, federated, distributed, content accessible by URL. I worry more about newspapers going out of business than comparison shopping sites or RSS readers that never could charge $1 per month, that's nostalgia for a history that never existed.

The open source community as a whole continues to put people out of business by offering free alternatives. We don't call it evil, we just tell those who can no longer compete with free to find another business that isn't com-modified.

There was a time when people also sold memory managers and TCP stacks and everyone OS vendors put them out of business by including their features.

If anyone is hurting the Web these days, it is mobile, and a new generation of DRM'ed, native, locked down computing devices that take away far more rights than people who had general purpose computers used to have, and who push a new way of distributing applications that is platform dependent, distribution dependent, even carrier dependent in some circumstances.

Yeah, but keep droning on about ads, ads, ads, as you seem to do in every post, and how the world would be a much better place if somehow people had paywalls and subscriptions for stuff they access for little transaction cost today.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#170

Post by jQueryIsAwesome » Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 5:53 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #165

sbmassey wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.

IMO, that's exactly why Reader exists - structure and creating personal consumption patterns. Social networking is useless for that, it's like recommending replacing a library with a disco pub. Disco pubs are fine places, lots of fun to be had there, but recommending it as a substitute for the library is crazy. RSS/Reader is completely different use case.

Ok, "personal consumption patterns" now means the authors I want to get updated about. A better analogy would be subscribing to see what an author publishes and subscribing to hear about what everyone is reading; sure, you get a lot of noise but is way more opening and less self-centered. And if you happen to like a lot of authors you get more focus in the ones that are more likely to be of your enjoyment because people like you are working as a quality filter.