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Expunging Google

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Re: Expunging Google

#51

Post by cromwellian »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #46
cromwellian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, the quote, from you, specifically says "open Web" not "open Internet" Secondly, Reader was not killed because of G+. If FriendFeed is finally killed off, will you say it was because Facebook needed the resources and engineers on a competing product? Consumers have moved on to desire the kinds of features that are inherent in services like Facebook, and RSS simply isn't suited to solving the problem of f…

You're right; I've corrected that. You're also correct that RSS doesn't solve the problem of federated social networking. It was never intended to. W.r.t. developing protocols for federated social networking: Google isn't interested; it would harm their bottom line if users on their systems could easily share content outside those systems. Hence why Google+ doesn't even offer an RSS feed. Do you really, hand-on-heart…

A central core feature of Google Wave was federation. Wave failed. Reason? Not because of federation, but because of consumer experience and confusion.

If you look at G+, Google has taken a very very careful approach this time (after OpenSocial, Buzz, Wave, et al failed), building on it very incrementally, always concentrating on user experience at each step. Even to the extent that they don't have even have an API to post content to G+ programmatically. Whether or not it will eventually turn into some idea federated open network, I have no idea.

But I would not take G+ as somehow Google dropping support for the open web. Google is a very large company with lots and lots of product, and company culture just doesn't change overnight.

I'd love it if Google had done a disapora-like federated system. But honestly, if they had gone that route, we'd have threads all over the blog-sphere laughing at Google for yet another social networking failure.

Those kinds of projects earn the love and adoration of the hacker community, but they don't get grandma, teens, and celebrities on your site.

Want better counter-evidence? Look at WebRTC and Google Hangouts. Hangouts are a defining competitive advantage G+ has over all over social networks, and Google sponsors a spec that essentially makes them a commodity that anyone can implement now.

Re: Expunging Google

#52

Post by sbuk »

ebbv wrote: post #35

This is not conscious consumerism. This is a childish temper tantrum. Chrome has better developer tools. If your job is being a web dev and you purposely make your job harder because you're mad at Google for shutting down Reader, you're not being rational.

Why not just say "You should just do as you are told and not ask questions!"?

Re: Expunging Google

#53

Post by magicalist »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #48
ebbv wrote: post #35

This is not conscious consumerism. This is a childish temper tantrum. Chrome has better developer tools. If your job is being a web dev and you purposely make your job harder because you're mad at Google for shutting down Reader, you're not being rational.

I'll still happily use Chromium for web development, as and where necessary. Just not signed in to Google for sync, etc. etc. I do wonder though ... would you have described the formation of the FSF as a childish temper tantrum? I remember the days when to use Linux as a development OS was painful ... it worked out well in the end though :)

I don't entirely agree with the GP's phrasing, but it's worth pointing out that the FSF doesn't paint all a company's software with the same brush. They're happy to rail against non-free software while accepting contributions to GNU projects from the same developers.

Re: Expunging Google

#54

Post by rattray »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #11
ok_craig wrote: post #8

I still think this is all ridiculous. Stopping support for a product that uses a certain standard doesn't mean you're against that standard, unless you're a conspiracy theorist. You can argue that they're against certain open standards if you want, but the canceling of Reader isn't actually evidence of that. Simultaneously putting effort into G+ is also not evidence of that. It's not even symbolic of that. It is only…

The main problem with Google at the moment is the centralization of many popular services into one corporate entity. Video, search, email etc. are all now in the hands of, mostly, Google. With so few viable competitors, you get a de-factory monopoly as well as insane growth. The centralization itself is the problem. Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass…

I'd have to disagree on the innovation point. Google continues to make dramatic improvements (imo) to many of their apps and services. As a developer building on Docs/Drive, I've seen that service continuously grow and expand, though much of the work remains below the waterline. Similarly, Maps, Now, Voice Search, Chrome, App Engine continue to be improved at a rate that outstrips what I'm used to at most other companies Google's size.

It's true that the visible feature changes have slowed significantly, but I'd attribute that more to the size and completeness of the existing products than anything else. It's also true that they aren't entering many new product lines, though for one thing I'm not sure that's something you'd lament and for another, I hear they've declared they won't be entering any new business that they expect to be below $1bn.

Re: Expunging Google

#56

Post by tikhonj »

Even assuming Google is not being malicious--and I think that's a broadly safe assumption--I'm still concerned. I'm am significantly over-reliant on Google's serviced: my email, my calendar, my OpenID, my web search, my videos, my phone, my maps, my web browser... (Well, I do use Firefox now.) It's a single point of failure. A rather scary one at that.

Some of these things do not have good alternatives. My phone? I could use an iPhone or Windows phone, but Apple and Microsoft are malicious. Also, they both hate Linux. But the other things? I probably could--and probably should--move some of them to a different service, if only in the interest of diversification.

Of course, I've been meaning to do this for a while. But I haven't. In many different, usually small ways, I'm hooked into Google. That by itself worries me; in some cases, even if I did want to move to a different service, it would not be easy. Very importantly, this is not Google's fault at all--in fact, they're very good about making my data portable. It's entirely poor planning on my part. Yet it's still an issue.

Perhaps the worst part--or the best part--is that I don't have any immediate problems with this situation. Everything works. Quite well. I just have a general sense of disquiet about it all.

Just something to think about.

Re: Expunging Google

#57

Post by h2s »

I'm planning to do exactly this, myself. Not so much because of any perceived danger to the open web posed by Google, but because I've come to realise that I simply have too many eggs in their basket. Tellingly, my list of products that I will be replacing is almost completely different to this person's. Google has become the Walmart of computing and it's time to resist.

Re: Expunging Google

#58

Post by magicalist »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #50
jmesserly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons. I see this meme a lot, but I don't get it how the analogy is supposed to work. There is actual evidence that Microsoft in the 90's was trying to sabotage standard protocols and open source software, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Docu…

... except where it isn't in their interests, which is why Google is trying to kill off RSS with a multi-pronged strategy (ignore RSS in Chromium, kill off RSS reader, don't offer an RSS feed in G+). If your platform is free-as-in-beer, you have to monetise your users to advertisers. You do this by learning more about them by keeping them within your ecosystem, not by allowing them access to your platform through ope…

Not only would that be a pretty poor multi-pronged strategy, it still has absolutely nothing to do with "embrace, extend, and extinguish", as the parent pointed out.

And, seriously, "ignore RSS in Chromium" is now kowtowing to advertisers? How about the lack of gopher support[1]? And no built in bittorrent client[2]??

I'm starting to agree with others that you have a point somewhere in here but you're missing it over anger about Reader.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11345

[2] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=182399

Re: Expunging Google

#60

Post by jay_kyburz »

I would find this a lot harder.

I have 6 applications running on Google App Engine. I use Analytics to track stats in them. I use Ad Sense and Ad words to help monetise them. I have 2 apps for business accounts each with separate gmail, calendar and docs. One for personal life one for business.

Crome is significantly better than both Safari and Firefox on my Mac laptop event though I use both and have all three browsers open, each has a different google account loged into it.

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