161–170 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My former startup Twingly http://twingly.com has hundreds of millions of blog posts stored (everything collected since 2006) in 128 MySql shards with a unified query interface. The last few months of data are indexed and searchable for free from their website, but the entire archive is kept forever.
Would you donate your data to the Internet Archive?
"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience." Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...
"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience." Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...
I'm pretty sick of this argument. Google is a company, they are not compelled to continue to support a product which is (presumably) not making money, or even if the resources they devote to it could be making more money elsewhere. Honestly I think Google went above and beyond by giving advance notice, having an API which allows feed exporting and allowing subscriptions to continue to be exported after they close it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sick of this argument. Google is a company, they are not compelled to continue to support a product which is (presumably) not making money, or even if the resources they devote to it could be making more money elsewhere. Honestly I think Google went above and beyond by giving advance notice, having an API which allows feed exporting and allowing subscriptions to continue to be exported after they close it…
You're attacking a straw man here. To attack Google for shutting down Reader in general is, I agree, silly. They don't owe us anything, and they managed the shutdown fairly gracefully. But that's not what was going on in the comment you replied to. He's pointing out that their stated justification doesn't make a lot of sense. Google says they're shutting down Reader to put more focus on a smaller number of products,…
They've shut down maybe 50 services over the past few years under this justification.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Google want to remain "experts" in the complex field of RSS aggregation anymore. It was probably a fun side project for a group of engineers, was written, then got sidetracked, then became not interesting to work on anymore, then was shutdown to focus on other more interesting tasks. Just like what their statement above says...
I think you're missing the point. Check out Google's mission statement: > Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful How is Google Reader less fitting than, say, self-driving cars or balloon Internet? An RSS reader is quite literally a way to organize the world's information, perhaps the most relevant of the product offerings. It's not about what is "more int…
Balloon internet is pretty high on the "universally accessible" front, I'd say. With regard to Reader, Google has a different way of organizing and providing access to RSS, atom, and similar information, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) -- both the protocol and Google's own PuSH hub -- which they are continuing to support and move forward with.
While this is infrastructure rather than end-user technology, it, at least arguably, has potentially much greater impact in terms of organizing information and making it accessible, and is much more the kind of thing Google is especially well-positioned to do, whereas end-user UI consuming feeds isn't something that really needs Google to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's pointing out that their stated justification doesn't make a lot of sense. Google says they're shutting down Reader to put more focus on a smaller number of products, but they're just as scattered as ever You can't criticize Google for shutting down Reader and then accuse them of being scattered in the same sentence. By shutting down Reader, they are limiting their scattering, and Reader is not the only product…
> You can't criticize Google for shutting down Reader and then accuse them of being scattered in the same sentence. By shutting down Reader, they are limiting their scattering, and Reader is not the only product they are shutting down. No, you very much can. Since, you know, they are shutting down a product in their main area of expertise, only to pursue BS non-products all around the map.
I mean, they say their objective is "organizing the world's knowledge", but what's hanging up in the GooglePlex is SpaceShipOne, not a card catalog.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as my life would have been easier this year without the decision to close Google Reader (I think this is what they call #firstworldproblems), it's a good thing that they didn't change their mind and decide to not shut it down at the last minute. Too many people have invested too much time in creating viable alternatives to Google Reader, and un-discontinuing it would have thrown a massive spanner in the works…
For me at least, having Reader shut down made me realize that depending on products delivered for free is ultimately unsustainable - I have no control over those services and if I can't figure out how that company is making money from me, there's little justification for that provider to continue providing that service, unmodified, for perpetuity. Self-hosted services are the only ones that you can truly rely on. I'm…
It seems like a better strategy is to assume that no service or company is forever, and demand reasonable ways to export your data or setup in the event they shut down (and time to do that export before they turn off.)
Gmail's days may be numbered -- you never know..
One thing I didn't expect was to have Alerts drop RSS support coinciding with Reader's death. However, today in Feedly I'm staring at a wall of "Google Alerts no longer supports RSS delivery" items.
This suggests to me that RSS was an output for Google products insofar as it served as a way of feeding content (and eyeballs) into Reader. Now that Reader is gone, why would Google output RSS?
Anyone seeing any other Google RSS feeds failing in a similar fashion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regardless of how many products they have, they still have one less after shutting down Reader. I'd say the argument still stands. Not if, in the same period they "closed the Reader to in order to focus", they started more than one products, all around the map. If I tell you: "I stopped going to the gym in order to focus on my painting more. Oh, and I also started bowling, belly-dancing, snooker, and etching classe…
That is fallacious. You're assuming they weren't going to start those other products anyway.
The argument is they did it to "focus better".
You can not do something with the pretext of better focus and then do several other things that break that focus -- whether you were planning to do them anyway is irrelevant.
To put it in some (arbitrary but isomorphic to the argument) numbers, increasing your focus by 5 points and decreasing it by 20 still leaves you with a decrease of 15. Yes, it's better than decreasing it by 25, but that's not the point -- it's a minor pedantic correction. A decrease of 15 is hardly "focusing".