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Google is about to learn a tough lesson

blog.calbucci.com

211–220 of 242 posts

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yep. And it never figured out how to handle high-vol and low-vol blogs together in any meaningful way". What I always thought but was never able to articulate so well (hi again fellow twitter user).

How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? I guess I'm not really sure what the problem is: it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once, if that is the issue.

its a problem I've thought about too. its a big problem on twitter.

some people post rarely, and they often have very high quality well thought out posts. others are media outlets or blabber mouths.

you can balance them by presenting a feed of what is new, moving each item through the "what's new" section at a speed relative to that feed's post frequency.

so a feed that posts rarely would have its new items persist in the new area for a longer time.

a feed that posts 20 times a day would move its posts through the new area each day.

> it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once

I have thousands of subscriptions. I'm not going to take the time to judge and separate them. this is a job for a computer.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#212
post #113

Twitter and Facebook killed RSS. It's a far friendlier interface for people to keep up with news and people they find interesting. Geeks may be lamenting the loss of Google Reader, but they make up a very small percentage of the internet population these days. When I suggest that Twitter/Facebook is the new RSS I often catch a lot of flack for it, but honestly, that's how far more people consume information than any…

> When I suggest that Twitter/Facebook is the new RSS please explain how twitter and facebook are open protocols so i can suscribe facebook or twitter feeds on the long run without my facebook/twitter reader client breaking because of changes in the api or without having to create an account on their plateform. RSS exists because it allows free flow of information. I dont recall facebook or twitter being open platefo…

You're missing the point entirely. You are correct, they are not open protocols you can subscribe blah blah blah; ask a non hacker news reader if they care about any of that. You're answer will be "no". Twitter/Facebook are RSS for non techies, and they far outnumber non-techies.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#213

Twitter and Facebook killed RSS. It's a far friendlier interface for people to keep up with news and people they find interesting. Geeks may be lamenting the loss of Google Reader, but they make up a very small percentage of the internet population these days. When I suggest that Twitter/Facebook is the new RSS I often catch a lot of flack for it, but honestly, that's how far more people consume information than any…

I can't subscribe to with Twitter/Facebook. With RSS, content authors only have to update their websites and not worry about crossposting to a social feed.

That's exactly what "following" is.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#214
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...

You're asserting that providing free Internet access isn't evil? Have you ever once considered how it benefits Google? What possible motivations Google might have to want to know everything users do online?

So, here it is: Google does nothing altruistically. They are an ad company, and search is a fundamental component in service to that. Data collection is one fundamental pillar, establishing Google search on every device is another.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#215
post #112
post #4

>Third, and lastly, Google is sending a strong signal to the market that it will have no mercy of killing whatever product it doesn’t think it’s going well. Yep. I was just investigating Cloud SQL storage today and Google has a free Cloud SQL trial plan and decent pricing. I passed it over because I am concerned Google isn't interested in long term maintenance of products, and their support is non-existent. I'd rathe…

[Disclaimer: I work at Google in an unrelated area] Google platforms like Cloud SQL generally have a deprecation policy that will give you an idea of the minimum length of time that they'll be maintained. For Cloud SQL it's 1 year (it's in the Terms of Service), which means that you'd get at least a year's notice before it could be turned off. It's on par or slightly better than what I know of Amazon's policy (they h…

Tell that to users of App Engine who have experienced frequent, repeated downtime and utter apathy from Google. Google's customer support sucks.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#216
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point here is that your facebook has been filled. In other words, there may only be a few upset people, but they're people that other folks (like you) listen to.

In this case it doesn't matter, because the vast majority of my friends don't know what RSS is, don't care, don't use it, and don't care about Google Reader. The few that cared posted their angry rants, and noone cared. Noone commented. It's a complete non-issue. And even if you accept the premise of the article, that the ones who care about Google Reader are influencers, what exactly does that mean in practice? Goog…

I got a friend to give RSS another shot with this post: http://mkronline.com/2013/03/15/why-you-should-want-to-use-r...

The main issue for RSS seems to be that no one bothered to explain it in direct terms to all the tens of millions of people who rushed into the web starting around 2007.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#217
post #203

I love how the closure of Reader reveals something about the tech journalists and "celebrities". They throw tantrums. They throws hissy fits. They scream bloody murder. They divine doom and gloom for Google about how severely this will affect it in much more important markets like Android and Chrome. And yet the world is not ending, and not every Facebook wall has this petition [1] plastered all over. Even GOOG stock…

It's too soon to say whether or not the power of the trendsetters was illusory. The nature of trendsetting is that the setters have to figure out what it means for them before they can communicate it. Any change will take time to distribute itself.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#218
post #76

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…

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…

The cost of switching may be low but familiarity is a powerful motivator to stay. We saw this with Office 2007 drawing so much ire despite the ribbon interface being quite good. We're seeing it again to an extent because of the don't-call-it-Metro interface in Windows 8.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#219
"By killing a product that was beloved and heavily used by most influencers, you start to alienate those folks. Killing a product like Picnik with tens of millions of users, might have less impact on the business than killing a product with less than a million users, where most of those users are influencers."

Reminds me of what Apple is doing with the Mac Pro.

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