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Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

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Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#191

Post by adamisen »

mindcrime wrote: post #130
andyl wrote: post #123

Before Google+ came along, Google had many great products and embraced the OpenWeb. Now Google has abandoned Open Standards like RSS and CalDAV, and I think Google is more interested in building their own walled garden.

Bingo. It's very unfortunate too, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web. Who else has the clout to do it now, as well as the motivation? Does anybody see Marissa moving Yahoo that way? I'm guessing "no" but would love to be proven wrong. It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't that big and could wind up acquired by Oracl…

I know it's insane of me to suggest this, but Apple has pretty broad support for many open standards. Most iCloud services utilize open standards, they created WebKit, they broke Flash's grip on the web, they contribute to a lot of important hardware standards as well as software (mini display port and mDNS come to mind). They've been a force improving clang/llvm. Most of their file formats are XML based. Big contributors to the *DAV formats.

Apple isn't perfect and is not an exemplar of a libre philosophy. Their most strategic stuff is pretty much all closed. But they have embraced a lot more openness than people give them credit. With Google moving everything into their own APIs it might not be long before Apple is more open than Google.

Apparently Google's even made their own proprietary zigbee competitor for Android@home. Whyyyyyyyyy.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#193

Post by mkempe »

jseliger wrote: post #57
dudus wrote: post #12

Google Reader had an easy and clear migration path to export your data. I can't understand why people keep bashing Google for it. Just take your data to somewhere else. If tomorrow Keep goes away they'll do the same.

Google Reader had an easy and clear migration path to export your data. It's not just about the data: it's about the habits and familiarity surrounding the process of using the data. In RSS, I've been using NetNewsWire for years, even though it's basically abandon-ware and has really fallen behind. Why do I keep using it? Because it works okay, and when I've tried to switch—most recently to DevonTHINK PRO—I've gone b…

I've been using Vienna[1] on OS X. It's open-source and has a nice interface.

[1] http://www.vienna-rss.org/

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#195

Post by nicholassmith »

Without going into the whole debate of 'why should I use it when they're just going to Reader it?', does anyone else think this is a massive PR strategy failure? Seriously, the worst time to announce a product must be just after you've decided to shut one down that has a, granted not overwhelmingly large, vocal user base currently flogging the company on all platforms.

Super bad timing, the product is tainted with negativity already, if they'd given it even a fortnight to die off it'd be a much better play.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#196

Post by czr80 »

mbreese wrote: post #21
ghshephard wrote: post #2

My favorite comment from the post: "And by the way – how is this app strategic for you guys and Reader is not? A little clarity would certainly be appreciated." I too would love to know what Google is thinking here.

Everyone assumes that this was a big strategic decision to scrap Reader and ditch RSS. But from what I've heard, it was more of a practical decision to drop an unmaintained project because no one knew how to update it for new backend infrastructure. But I'm sure that they misjudged the importance that people put into Reader. All in all, it seems like a wasted opportunity and a massive amount of lost good will.

That may be true as the reason, but I cannot believe they could misjudge the importance of Reader to its users - they have all the logs and know exactly what the usage is. They just decided they didn't care enough, and could accept the negative publicity.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#197

Post by triplesec »

This is the fundamental problem for any cloud services. You don't know if a small company like Evernote is going to go bust, too, and many have, sometimes bought to kill by Google and its ilk. So it's no safer than using large company products. And if not Evernote, some other service you once used, like say delicious. Or they don't update it as fast, and it gets clunky, like flickr (not coincidentally both bought and ruined by yahoo)

For real security of data and use: either

1. Download and install with local storage only

2. whatever service you do use, save all the things locally frequently, in multiple open data formats.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#198

Post by nnnnni »

diminish wrote: post #160
nickporter wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Now is killer. The 'aha' moment for me was when I was visiting New York City: A few hours after my arrival, it told me that a favorite musician of mine was going to perform at a venue close to my location. I would have never known if I didn't have the service. I'm guessing they knew I liked that artist because of my youtube history (my phone doesn't contain any music). That's cool with me. Oh and if they want…

The turnoff switch for Reader is an inflection point for Google towards Microsoftization; where they new product launches will be skeptically seen by hackers, and geeks. I went to my phone, and did a Google spring cleanup yesterday, by deleting all the stuff I didn't use, and thought Google would see a future ; That is good for startups, they may attack Google product segments with ease, and we shall all PR for them…

No, the de-standardizing of Google Calendar is Microsoftization.

1. Release something that's compatible with another popular thing. 2. Build up a huge following. 3. Remove the compatibility. 4. ??? 5. Profit!

It's the same thing that happened with NT and OS/2 compatibility. I'm not sure if Excel can still deal with Lotus files, but Excel got popular because of its Lotus compatibility.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#199

Post by p_l »

senthilnayagam wrote: post #167
angryasian wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but I think you proved my point. How many dead end services can google continue at their scale before it starts hurting much like microsoft ? Google kills things quickly and tries something new. I applaud them on taking this mindset. G+ is far from a failure. The only people that say this are people that haven't tried it yet

People don't live in ghost town. Facebook has won agree that gracefully

FB is a ghost town for me, despite having bigger amount of "friends" there than on G+...

The difference is that the occasional content on FB is utterly lost between tons of "apps" and ads, to the point that I can count the amount of times I visited FB in 2012 on fingers.

FB's last "pro" is Messenger... which I use actually to talk to only one person.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

#200

Post by adestefan »

fakeer wrote: post #65
magicalist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You realise there were feed services that went kaput because of Reader People keep saying something like this without providing real examples. I can believe Reader's existence might have depressed the market for new feed readers (though there have long been competitors around--lots of open source and built in ones, and a few for-pay ones too, like Feedly), but I haven't been able to personally think of any feed rea…

>> I may just have forgotten them, though (2005 was a long time ago). Yeah, good point :-) There was Bloglines. It is still there, only difference being - it's a ghost town now. There used to be FeedDemon's own sync and now FeedDemon is jumping into the pyre with Reader. It's been long and I am out of example. Maybe others will bring some. But thing in this way - " because when the company launched Google Reader in 2…

Bloglines killed themselves when they tried to redesign into a Digg competitor instead of a feed reader.
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