I'm sticking with Pocket. Google Saves is the equivalent of Google Keep. (I also use Evernote)
What if Google acquires Pocket?
What if Google acquired Groupon and Evernote?
Google Saves
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Google Saves
#72Oh, look, it's like Google Notebook, except worse. Give it 18 months and they'll kill it and dump all my content into monolithic Docs documents with no tags or other metadata, just like they did with Notebook.
And what's the point of this? Isn't this what Google Keep does? Keep, Save, what's the difference? It's inevitable that they'll realize this and kill one or the other soon. And Keep has more features than this already!
If Google wants me to use any new stuff, they'd better give me a guarantee that they won't kill it for at least 3 years, with at least 1 year's advance notice. Otherwise, why bother? I've been burned too many times. Bad, Google, bad!
Re: Google Saves
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step one: Make it self-hostable with zero requirement to connect back to the company. My rule of thumb for buying technology nowadays is: Can I use it on my "air gapped to the Internet" network at home?
The good news is depending on your air-gap setup, you can still participate in the global PII market. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-tha...
That's amazing. If anyone had predicted that a year or two ago, people would have called him a paranoid conspiracy theorist. But leave it to marketeers to push the envelope--as surreptitiously as possible of course.
Reason #47 to use ad-blocking tools on everything. If anything kills advertiser-supported content on the Internet, it will be the advertisers themselves.
Re: Google Saves
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this is way too niche, ill-defined, and overlapping with existing products to ever survive. Why don't they just make a convenient set of clients or extensions to map into a product that's not going to disappear next quarter, like Drive/Docs/whateverthehellitisnow.
If you use Google Chrome, there is a official Save to Google Drive extension which appears to do the same thing as Google Saves, and more, minus the Material layout. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-google-dri...
> minus the Material layout
Seriously, I wish there were a MaterialBlock extension for my browser. And for Android. And for...
Re: Google Saves
#75The problem I have with Google tech, especially after the new Nest stuff has to come to light, is that there's no guarantee they'll support it for very long. It's entirely possible that I'll incorporate this into my workflow, just for Google to kill it off a year later.
That's true for most free services without ads. These comments always have this sentiment that Google does something wrong, which is simply nonsense IMO.
It's not even a question of "wrong"--it's a question of whether it's worth my time. If past performance is an indicator, the answer is, "probably not worth my time."
Google Notebook did this--better--years ago. Hierarchical notebooks, tags, web clipper extensions and bookmarklets, sharing, blah blah blah.
Google killed it. Dumped all the data into monolithic Docs documents. If I wanted to use giant Word docs, I would have.
Now, this. Why? What about Keep? Save != Keep?
Google used to call everything "beta." It's too bad they stopped doing that. Now they should call everything "alpha." It would be more honest.
And that brings us back to the question of "wrong." Is it wrong to throw up a free, open service and invite people to rely on it, then yank the rug out from under them? "But it's not making them any money." But they're making billions upon billions of dollars. "But someone has to maintain it." But they have thousands of engineers.
Anyway, you can decide the ethics however you want. The bottom line is, it would be foolish to spend any time on any new Google service. I've already spent too much writing about it here.
Re: Google Saves
#76The problem I have with Google tech, especially after the new Nest stuff has to come to light, is that there's no guarantee they'll support it for very long. It's entirely possible that I'll incorporate this into my workflow, just for Google to kill it off a year later.
Should Google only work on things that it could guarantee to run for at least a few years no matter how it is performing?
> Should Google only work on things that it could guarantee to run for at least a few years no matter how it is performing?
Of course not, but it's gradually becoming self-fulfilling.
Early adopters in the 'tech community' are becoming wary of investing time in new Google experiments, which in turn affects promotion of the service to the mainstream community.
What might help is if they moved this sort of product back into the domain of Google Labs and gave it a minimum lifetime indication. I think people would be happier to give things a try if they knew it was experimental and might only last for 12 months.
Re: Google Saves
#77how about google save google wallet?
Hah. Wouldn't it be nice if you could put any arbitrary Google service in there. Final twist would be the service that saves the services would be deprecated. All of them would disappear at once! Although I think Google trashing Google saves would be more negative publicity than usual.
Haha, I can see it now. "Do you miss some of Google's sunsetted services? Now you can relive them with Google Google. Google Google allows you to use previously offered Google services, just like they used to be!" (Fast-forward 18 months.) "All good things... Google is sunsetting Google Google, effective 3 months from today. All your data will be available in our new service, Google Google Google. Thanks for using Google Google!"
Re: Google Saves
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google can do what they like -- but at this point, without such a guarantee, their history shows that it would be unwise to take the time to integrate their side projects into one's life or workflow.
What do you say is the percentage of their products that disappeared versus those that still exists? It seems like there are a lot of Google products out there that are 5+ years old.
Length of time isn't necessarily a good indicator. Google Reader ran for 7 years when they decided to shut it down.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader#Discontinuation
Re: Google Saves
#79Yeah, this definitely isn't going anywhere. I do look forward to idlewords's writing about it, though.
As in http://idlewords.com/ ? Why?
Re: Google Saves
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
For popular products (especially ones that have been purchased, re: Revolv), they should at least have an advanced warning and a lengthy "transitionary" period.
Was Revolv ever popular though? I thought the whole point was it wasn't popular - they were a home automation also-ran, who basically nearly went bankrupt in 2014 - got bought out in an acqui-hire, immediately ceased selling the product, then kept the servers on life-support for 2 more years. E.g. - http://www.cepro.com/article/theories_on_home_automation_hub... http://recode.net/2014/10/24/nest-acquires-home-automat…
If Revolv had actually gone bankrupt I'm not sure people would be nearly as mad as they are.
The fact is that Google is worth tons of money, and has access to a ton of hosting infrastructure. Is Google (or Alphabet, really) arguing that they can't spin up a single cloud-computer-engine-thing and run Revolv?