By these standards, it would seem that every company on Earth is "opposed to an open web" because they don't make available a free web-based RSS reader.
Expunging Google
71–80 of 175 posts
Re: Expunging Google
#72Also: Self-Host Everything http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/
Re: Expunging Google
#73Even 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 c…
Diversification is a good idea, but the cost seems higher than the benefit in this case.
Let's say Google becomes evil and makes Android and Chrome evil: the solution is simple, fork Android and Chromium and continue on without the evil additions. Or, don't upgrade. If you "diversify" now, though, you miss out on cool Chrome features, or you spend your weekend maintaining a web browser fork when you could be at the beach.
As for services like videos, calendars, email, and so on -- you can download your data regularly [1] and move to a new service when you feel like it. This lets you defer the cost of switching until you actually need to switch. If that happens to be never, you win. If that happens to be tomorrow, you still win. (But if you switch now, you pay the feature difference cost every day. If Google never becomes evil, then you've wasted your time.)
[1] https://www.google.com/takeout/?pli=1
Think of it another way. Whenever I go to the grocery store, I typically buy "store brand" products. That means everything in my pantry is "over-reliant" on that one store. But in reality, that's not the case: if Whole Foods goes out of business, I can just shop at Trader Joe's instead, since flour and sugar is pretty much the same everywhere. My accumulated recipes will continue to work either way. (And while both stores exist, nothing is stopping me from shopping at them both other than the added time that visiting each store takes. But that cost is non-zero, which entices me to consolidate my shopping needs. For now.)
Re: Expunging Google
#74Reminds me of Android Market. Used to be OK for getting apps, but now it is going to shove music and video search results in my face every chance it gets with annoying screens between me and the app search results and annoying continue shopping screens after each app.
If I wanted those things, I'd be in the other apps for them, like Google Books or whatever. Of course I'm never in that particular one because Amazon Kindle is so much better. I'm sure if I liked music or video then Google wouldn't be my choice either. I tried to get 300 once for someone and it had a search result for it, but wouldn't show me the page. Then I bought batman instead and it just gave me a license error whenever I tried to watch it.
Really would have been better to migrate Android Market/Google Play as soon as someone else made an app store on Android, and there are many, rather than trusting Google not to sell out their users. With Google you invest time in a product, then basically it gets shut down or co-opted into something you don't want. A startup you like getting bought by Google is pretty much the worst thing possible since generally they'll just kill the product.
Guess I should go through this list and get off their other services proactively. It just isn't worth trusting Google where you don't have to.
Re: Expunging Google
#75People want their news curated, either through hacker news, reddit, Google plus or something else. For a minority RSS was their preference, but for everyone else Google correctly shifted their resources to the future.
RIP RSS, you had your day in the sun and lead the way for better products.
Re: Expunging Google
#76I 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…
You must have not been paying attention. A long list of evidence has been posted here on HN on several occassionas, including dropping CalDAV, of Google turning against the open web.
It's nothing new either, it has been going on for years. They've even dropped their support for net neutrality years ago.
In the mean time Google has been heavily pushing the Google+ walled garden, their anti-privacy and anti-anonymity agendas, and has been pro-active in filtering their services on behalf of the copyright-exploitation industry.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it's just a matter of connecting the fairly obvious dots that barely need connecting because there are so many of them by now all that's missing is an official "fuck the open web" press statement.
Re: Expunging Google
#77I'm a bit speechless with this post.
I have seen overreaction from people when Google shut down Reader.
I told myself that the craziest of those overreactions would be for somebody to quit all of Google's services.
Then I saw this article and I thought he was trolling.
Sadly he is not.
Re: Expunging Google
#78Switching to Firefox will not save you.
I recently found out that Firefox sends a request to safebrowsing.clients.google.com for every page I visit. I found out how to disable it, but it wasn't straightforward and there were still requests sent to Google for other things.
Safe browsing is in Firefox Preferences "Security" tab under "Block reported attack sites" + "Block reported web forgeries".
Search for "goog" in about:config to find more interesting things.
LiveHTTPHeaders extension is also an eye-opener, because Firebug usually doesn't show these requests.
Re: Expunging Google
#79I 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…
So are you saying that if we don't count the innovation that Google has been doing, Google is not innovative at all.
Btw, here are some Google products that it continues to iterate:
Google Maps YouTube Android Wallet Google+ Go AngularJS Shopping
However, if you don't want to count these ones, I guess you're right that most of Google's services have stagnated.
#sarcasm
Re: Expunging Google
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not exactly embrace and extend like MS did it, but similar in spirit: take an open protocol, embrace it for a while, gradually weaken it over time in favour of a parallel closed system, then once everyone is happily using it, kill it dead and watch the migration into the closed system. If I had to guess, I'd say that torrent support was nixed for fear of offending Big Content; Opera has already showed that it's reaso…
That's not similar in spirit to "embrace, extend, and extinguish", and not even a good description of what they've done. There's no migration path from Reader to G+ (presuming that's what you mean by "the closed system"). There's not even a clear correspondence between the content in each, and meanwhile Google does provide a migration path to other RSS readers.
I think there is a clear argument for Google consolidating around APIs and their social network instead of federated protocols in the future. However, the whole "strategy to kill off RSS" thing is silly and undermines the other arguments you're making.
The bittorrent and gopher comments were facetious. It's not at all clear that all browsers should have a button that appears when a page has an RSS feed and, when pressed, opens a different web page to then enter the address of that RSS feed into your reader. Zawinski's Law was not meant as praise.
The lack of that RSS button is no more evidence of trying to kill RSS than the lack of gopher support is evidence of Google's plot to make sure that Gopher will never rise again like a phoenix and supplant the World Wide Web once and for all. Instead, you make sure extensions are able to build that button for those that want it (or put an option to enable it in about:config) and you call it a day.