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Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

philip.greenspun.com

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Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#51

Post by benatkin »

jrockway wrote: post #42
benatkin wrote: post #15

Google may not be much worse than other FANGs, but the way it pretends to be friendly to open source and free culture communities and co-opts them is nasty. "Despite illusions in 2008–2009 that it was a fair player, Google is now trashing free culture by making all the Picasa Web images in Creative Commons vanish from the web. In fact, users and albums are often forced to "migrate" to Google Plus, without telling the…

> pretends to be friendly to open source I quite like go and Kubernetes.

That was meant to be parsed out as "open source communities".

When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being friendly or not. Can't really tell.

Also go feels a bit tightly controlled to me and like it's not carrying on the traditions of open source scripting languages (same with Swift). Fortunately, Rust and Elixir are shaping up to be good continuations of the culture of Perl/Python/Ruby/etc.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#52

Post by polishTar »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #35
scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

Mostly because people don't really use any of the products Amazon releases at scale. There's a reason why it's called Google scale and not Amazon scale. Also because as humans, we're generally more inclined to dogpile onto the Goliath and root for the David. Underdogs almost always get treated more leniently.

For what it's worth, Amazon is the same size as Google now (technically a little bit larger by market cap).

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#53

Post by cle »

icebraining wrote: post #16
scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

Amazon's are probably almost not used at all, whereas Google kills off products that still have plenty of users, even if not by the standards of Search or Gmail.

This is probably by design on Amazon’s part, in which case the lopsided outrage is entirely justified.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#54

Post by Gibbon1 »

saidajigumi wrote: post #18
scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

I wonder about the lifetimes and user engagement between examples from Amazon and Google. It's interesting that my off-the-cuff impression is that Google gets into hot water here by letting its experiments 1) run for a long time, 2) acquire a lot of users because "hey, it's free" and 3) sometimes suck the air out of a product segment because #2 (see: Google Reader). Likewise, my impression of Amazon's similar experim…

Maybe I'm wrong but I think the difference is Amazon always/mostly charges the primary users money. Googles business seems to be 'hey it's free' for primary customers, charge secondary customers $$$. Problem with that is much later when it becomes obvious there isn't enough money to be made by spying on the now quite large user base. Google then just tosses the thing over the side.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#55

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

_eht wrote: post #26
scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

Wave could have been UUUGE, though.

Wave was what Facebook is. No one jumped.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#56

Post by bensonn »

pgrote wrote: post #10

Really miss picasa. I know the world is moving away from tagging your photos with descriptive words, but I still do it. As with any Picasa related subject: Does anyone have a viable alternative desktop software that allows tagging of photos, some mild editing and allowing photos to be kept in folders that are the albums.

digikam is the closest I have found. UI is not nearly as clean and simple.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#57

Post by acutesoftware »

mattlondon wrote: post #43
ex3ndr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And backups

And time to apply security updates frequently and promptly.

and a credit card to pay monthly fees (which may or may not increase dramatically)

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#58

Post by acutesoftware »

peterwwillis wrote: post #13

As George Lopez would say, Why you crying? You chose to use someone's free platform to host and display your pictures with virtually no work on your part, and now you don't get the free lunch anymore. These scenarios are actually useful. They train people to use solutions that are open and portable, which will help them respond to unexpected disasters in the future. Use a self-hosted CMS to build, manage and publish…

I don't know why you got modded down, but this is the KEY point here. Yes, I loved Picasa and am pissed when Google drop cool services, but overall it is a good thing to make everyone more aware that their data is not permanently safe "in the cloud"

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#59

Post by nikanj »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #25
untog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm often one to criticise Google, but an entirely free cloud-based photo album was never going to be around forever. If you are very concerned with keeping an online record for all time you really shouldn't be depending on free stuff like Picasa.

Maybe, but it would also cost Google almost nothing to set up a 301 redirect from Picasa URLs to Google Photos. I wouldn't expect someone like Yahoo or Microsoft to bother, but being a “good web citizen” seems intrinsic to the Google corporate identity, after all.

The harder it is to find things via following links, the more you’ll resort to search. Google has a perverse incentive to break the links.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#60

Post by oarsinsync »

polishTar wrote: post #52
lawrenceyan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because people don't really use any of the products Amazon releases at scale. There's a reason why it's called Google scale and not Amazon scale. Also because as humans, we're generally more inclined to dogpile onto the Goliath and root for the David. Underdogs almost always get treated more leniently.

For what it's worth, Amazon is the same size as Google now (technically a little bit larger by market cap).

Google doesn't really have much of a retail division though, and is almost entirely services-based. When services disappear, the time and effort you've invested into them disappear.

When a shop stops selling a product, you can still keep using the product you have. They don't take it away from you.

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