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Google Nixes Some Calendar Features and Other Software Offerings
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Friday announced it is shutting down a slew of features and services as part of its winter cleaning. Google Calendar will be losing a few features, Google Sync will be axed (on the consumer side), as will Google Calendar Sync, SyncML, the Issue Tracker Data API, and the Punchd app."
I hate it
iOS and android, I hate both versions
Might use yahoo again
I prefer to use rackspace. For $3 a month I can get quality email and mobile syncing of calendars, contacts, etc and without the data snooping and surprises of shit just disappearing when Google feels like it.
Yes it costs money but if you can't afford $3 a month then stick with the data snoop or consider getting a job.
Does this mean Android will FINALLY have decent out of the box carddav/caldav support?
That's one of the biggest things that I've preferred iOS to Android. That, and the stupid way applications are stored on the system partition so you 'run out of free space' despite having gigabytes free.
Some of them even refuse to die! now that's a product!
So, does this mean that the only valuable feature of Google I've found so far is going to stop today? That's the ability to sync all my Android device calendars through my gmail account. Gone? I won't be able to enter an appointment on my tablet and have it show up on my phone?
On other news sites, I read that Google today announces 18 new features. http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/google-communities-and-photos.html etc.
And here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/google-gives-google-end-of-year-update-adds-low-bandwidth-hangouts-full-size-mobile-photo-backups-better-event-planning-animated-gifs-and-more/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&source=email_rt_mc_body&ifp=0
Just Google it...
But on Slashdot, I read that drivel coming right out of Burston-Marsteller, or some other PR drone.
This is supposed to be a technology forum but somehow, some Slashdot editors perhaps seem to think that this is 'provoking' material, in the good sense of being humorous and driving up the number of comments?
But at what price? At what price, just in terms of credibility, for a beginning?
Could someone answer that?
Say what you want about Microsoft's shoddy products, at least they're consistent.
*cough* Plays4Sure *cough*
At least Google doesn't demand you pay for the services they discontinue.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Seems like every time I sign up for a non-Google service and get used to it, within a couple years Google pull the rug out from under me.
When I signed up for GrandCentral it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And then Google came in, brought the company, re-branded their service as Google Voice, and then shutdown GrandCentral. The problem is, Google Voice doesn't support Canadian numbers, but GrandCentral did. It's been 3 years since then and I'm still waiting for Google Voice to come up north to restore the service I lost 3 years ago.
I know, I know, it's a free economy and Google can buy whatever company they want. Neither GrandCentral nor Google owe me any service and they're in no obligation to provide any service to Canada. But I still wish Google hasn't done that.
Say what you want about Microsoft's shoddy products, at least they're consistent.
yeah... consistently shoddy
Seems like every time I sign up for a Google service and get used to it, within a couple years they pull the rug out from under me.
Apple is the same way - which is why I'm not relying on any of their services too heavily.
iTools became .Mac, which became MobileMe, which spawned iWork.com which shut down when MobileMe went away with the launch of iCloud.
Say what you want about Microsoft's shoddy products, at least they're consistent.
"Here is this new initative called Plays For Sure! "
*introduces the Zune*
"Plays for Sure is not supported on the Microsoft Zune®"
I am sad to see these go. Appointment slots have become increasingly useful in our department. We were getting ready to roll out a trial use of appointment slots to allow our students to self-reserve appointments with our department advisors... but now that's obviously not going to happen.
#DeleteChrome
No more push email for iOS (currently done via exchange)? That's the last reason I actually use any Google services.
I've been moving away from Google for about a year now because I feel that they have turned form only partially evil to complete evil. Eliminating push email is the final trigger to get me to completely eliminate Google services from my life.
Goodbye Google, and thanks for the years of services. Good luck with that G+ thing that you're pushing so hard. I'm sure someone likes it, since you've managed to alienate so many by forcing it upon us (and yes - I would say "forced" is adequate - the last gmail account I signed up for automatically had a G+ profile created...).
They aren't getting rid of push.
I agree. GrandCentral was a killer service. Since becoming Google Voice, every now and then I go to adjust a setting, only to find that the setting no longer even exists.
Google seems to be pissing me off on a pretty regular basis lately.
They fucked up GrandCentral, took away Browser Sync, and based on the article description, it looks like they're axing 2 or 3 features this time around that I use regularly.
Bastards.
Gotta spare up cycles for ingress.
(name withheld by request)
How does targeting advertising equate to spying? Google is no charity, but they aren't selling your data. Rather, they are selling access to a 'bucket' of users who are interested in "A", to advertisers who make a product like "A". Equating that to spying is as stupid as equating a copyright infringer with a pirate. It's hyperbole, and it's not helpful.
Google Calendar + Gmail is a nice alternative to Exchange nonsense. What are they thinking?
Is there anything else that can integrate with Thunderbird in a similar way that Google Calendar does with Lightning? Or is no one going to offer an alternative to Microsoft?
Turning off support for syncing Symbian/S60 devices will also cripple the non-Symbian devices that support Mail For Exchange; the N9, N900 and N950.
And exactly how do they do that without reading what you have on their services? That is the definition of spying. How they use the knowledge they gain is irrelevant and also your suggestion that they aren't selling it elsewhere doesn't mean they won't in the future. That is hardly hyperbole and if it isn't considered when deciding whether to use their services then that isn't helpful.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Can anybody can think internet without Google now a days....or pass a day without Google and the Internet?
TechNet (www.technetbd.com)
Without Google? Not a problem. I've had my own email on my own domain since 97 and currently use DuckDuckGo for my web search. (They don't track and don't filter bubble you.) I could live without Google maps.
Go a day without the Internet? OK now that would be a problem, especially considering how many services use the Internet to exchange data.
Everyone aggregates your data and then make business decisions off of it. It's the way of the world now. Based on housing prices, average income, population, cultural diversity, etc, is how a lot of businesses decide where to open up new branches. They don't just drop a pin on a map and hope. They aggregate data about groups of people and then target them to sell things to them. It's how the world works. See also: Preferred Customer Cards and your online puchasing accounts.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
I see.
So, since all companies spy on their customers now, it's not spying anymore.
This space available.
Welcome to the sweet world of Cloud. Where everything is cheap and available. Until it is not..
Lesson learned: If your business depends on specific tools or functionality, set up your own infrastructure.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
So right now the was I've been setting up iOS devices was by setting up an Exchange server pointing to m.google.com so that everything would work well. What's the best way now if they're discontinuing that?
Is there a problem with IMAP?
R.Mo
(Besides the lack of true push support, of course, but Google's app does support it--or at least I assume it does. I've never found a compelling reason get push notifications for e-mail on a mobile device, personally.)
R.Mo
You guys really need a dictionary.
spy /sp/
Noun: A person who secretly collects and reports information about an enemy or competitor.
Verb: Work for an organization by secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors.
Note the word 'secretly'. I dont think this counts as secret: https://www.google.com/dashboard/
TO be honest, someone should do it. Just block connection to google on a firewall, and try to use it. For example, no blogspot, no youtube. I think a few site research would not work out of the box. No google code for sure, no email from friend at gmail, if done right. That would be damn interesting.
I was trying to do this when I first got my iPhone...then Google did Exchange sync and all was well. And now this.
Still, the open-source stack is looking a lot better these days - time to do it again.
Welcome to the sweet world of Cloud. Where everything is cheap and available. Until it is not..
Lesson learned: If your business depends on specific tools or functionality, set up your own infrastructure.
Exactly.
It's the little things that really get to me. Logged into Google Docs not too long ago and discovered that all support for exporting as plain .doc files had been removed. No warning. Just gone.
"Just use .docx and join us in the 21st century!" I know. But the fact that the feature was taken away without asking, or even being told ahead of time... that's infuriating.
How many times have you kept a legacy piece of software around for a specific reason? Now imagine having it erased, along with all backup copies. Shitty, huh?
I use the hell out of Apple and Google products, but I'm really tired of hearing "Just trust us this time. This is the real cloud-based solution! We're not going to pull the rug out from under you again!"
I use the cloud for matters of convenience, not necessity. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
At least Google doesn't demand you pay for the services they discontinue.
From TFAnnouncement:
Sounds like paid-only availability to me.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Show me where Google clearly spells out that every single word you write using their service will be scanned. My word, legalese, trumps your word, secretly.
Every word you write to someone using Google mail, or who forwards your email to anyone who uses Google Mail essentially becomes property of Google too. Today it seems that only by running your own mail server and corresponding only with others who do will stop your communications from being aggregated and sold. (or profiled and sold with your name, address, employer, financial and browsing histories attached) With ISP sniffing, encryption may be required too.
I'm somewhat out of the loop with my protocols, so can anyone tell me what the advantages are of all the xDAV protocols over SyncML? That's the one bit of information I've been unable to find anywhere - e.g. why Apple decided CardDAV was required instead of just using SyncML, for example.
Boo.
I'm not so sure about that. Microsoft has a long history of killing products and platforms.
XNA, so I hear, is a recent victim. There have also been quite a few rumors about the impending demise of .NET for a little over a year now. A quick google search will turn up a host of other examples both old and new. The point, of course, is that they're no more stable now than they've been in the past.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Your argument is in error. Microsoft also discontinues services quite regularly.
The correct argument is that product solutions are superior to service solutions, and because Google doesnt offer very many product solutions (pretty much just Android), its hard to not get slammed by solution discontinuation when swimming in their pool. Product solutions, such as Exchange Server, continue to work no matter what Microsoft does to future versions of the product... just don't "upgrade."
The fatal flaw of service-based solutions is that you do not have the option to not upgrade, that you also do not have the option to continue to use the solution once the service has been discontinued.
This is why no sane business uses Google Docs. Its a "solution" that is guaranteed to only be temporary.
"His name was James Damore."
This is why I don't use cloud/web apps and specifically don't use Google products. If I'm using a tool to get my work done I don't want the maker suddenly yanking it or even features out from under me.
does it.
Microsoft's products are famously inconsistent.
Oh, okay, well the MS products I'm exposed to are the developer tools. The developer tools are famously short-lived and inconsistent. You probably meant stuff like Hotmail and Word.
...the cost to the user is reduced privacy. Instead of giving money to Google, you give a little bit of yourself. Google is primarily a data mining company -- they profit from the data they gather from watching the way you use their products and services by selling it to other people who are interested in knowing how you use those products and services. NB: They also have entered the appliance market with the Nexus brand, and are taking on other appliance makers like Apple. There are two reasons I can think of that explain why Google is deprecating Calendar and Sync. It could be because they've decided that mining that particular data field is no longer profitable for them, or it could be they are interested in competing more directly in the appliance market by reducing interoperability with competitor's devices. Either way, it will be interesting to see where Google shifts resources that were until now dedicated to mining Sync and Calendar data, and to see what the market does to fill the opening left by this shift.
Say what you want about Microsoft's shoddy products, at least they're consistent.
yeah... consistently shoddy
They are also consistently badly licenced and over priced. People are still using them,,,
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I suppose this announcement kills the future continued usage of all of my WM6.x phones... no more wireless calendar sync for them (which is essential for me)...
You do realize why they don't support Canadian numbers right? They'd have to be classified as a telecommunications company. Then they'd be subject to CRTC regulations, foreign ownership rules, etc..
They got whatever licences GrandCentral had, but haven't bothered trying to extend them or renew them.
Entering into the Telecommunications market in Canada can be a scary beast, especially if you're not canadian. Wind learned all about that.
If its so low bandwidth that your ISP doesn't care, just host at home on a VM for nothing. Its exactly what i do
Sure many complain about running 'servers' on a home account but if its for your personal use and not pushing TB's a month, i dont think any will care.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've tried to use DuckDuckGo, my main complaint though is that I find I use image search a lot more than I thought, and DuckDuckGo doesn't seem to have that feature. Do you have a viable alternative for that?
Apple is the same way - which is why I'm not relying on any of their services too heavily.
iTools became .Mac, which became MobileMe, which spawned iWork.com which shut down when MobileMe went away with the launch of iCloud.
To be fair, until iCloud came along, these were changes in name only. MobileMe pretty much had the exact same set of services (with some new ones) as iTools. And I'm not sure it's unreasonable that after 10 years iCloud finally dropped some services.
Sadly DDG started producing quite poor results for me when they changed the source from Google to Yahoo/Bing.
take this service that is widely supported and widely used across numerous platforms - a service that in no small part was a driving reason to use GMail/GCal - and throw it away
The exact opposite. The majority of people using gmail use the web interface. Most of the remainder - mobile devices - use the app. A relatively small number use IMAP. A far smaller that even that percentage use activesync - most people don't even know gmail has optional imap support, let alone activesync. Those who use activesync are largely business users, using google apps as a drop in replacement for exchange with outlook - specifically for the main purpose of activesync, that of syncing email, calendar and contacts all in one connection. Activesync isn't actually push email, it just checks much more often than non-IDLE IMAP does, so feels more like push.
Skilled technical users using activesync to get pseudo push email on their iphones in the Mail app? Pretty damn rare. Though obviously vocal...
The appropriate move would have been to deploy the new technology, put it in Android(under Google's umbrella) convince Apple to incorporate it(or at least provide an iPhone "plugin" app that incorporates it into the mail.app, and then slowly phase out the older technology. My wager is that sheeple will continue to be sheeple, begging to be sheered by massive conglomerates.
Ahahhahahahahahahah. IMAP IDLE is from 1997. It's far more of a standard than microsoft's activesync has ever been. Client devices support Activesync because older versions of Exchange didn't even support IMAP, or then did so so poorly that it was non-functional. They HAD to pay up on microsoft's patents. Now, even Exchange setups usually uses IMAP for non-outlook clients.
Apple is the one that refuses to allow well-established and supported standards. That you're calling other people sheeple in this circumstance... Oh, the ironing is delicious.
But you want to carry on using this obscure microsoft patented feature? Cough up the $50 a year to go to the commercial version of gmail, and hey, you won't even get adverts. Ya ungrateful cheapskate.
.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
None of the discontinued features or services would make you use the GMail app. You can use any IMAP mail reader.
But I still have all my MobileMe services available on iCloud. My mail, my contacts and everything else are still there. All except idisk which I didn't used anyway and they've warned a year before closing it down. They also offer me free 25GB instead of 5GB of standard iCloud because of my old MobileMe account.
How exactly do you get "Gotta use only their apps now" from them discontinuing support for proprietary sync technology (Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync) in favor of open protocols (CardDAV, CalDAV, IMAP)?
This really doesn't look much like legalese to me. Seems a lot like plain english. Let me guess, you never actually read it? http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Now, the question is imperative: can we trust Google as a platform we want to develop on, when they zap their own stuff, willy-nilly, *periodically* ???!!!
(They have a date for that ??!!!)
Thanks Google. As I was about to schedule a meeting with an associate, in order to develop a product that involves one of you now-dead features, I now realize you really are a liability.
Fuck you very much Google.
PS: More and more I realize the errors of my ways: I should stick with Apple. They're serious. You're not.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Should we create a Google Haters Usenet newsgroups? Oh, wait, Google practically killed Usenet (rampant spamming).
'Coz, boy, am I hating Google now!
And, BTW, all those fucked-brain so-called "business analysts" you see on, say, Bloomberg, saying "open is better", "Android will win". Do they even have a clue about how ruthless The GOOG is??? (Answer: no, they're clueless).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
...which is another way of saying: the GOOG shoots itself in the foot - ALL THE TIME!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
> Say what you want about Microsoft's shoddy products, at least they're consistent.
Like the Zune and the content database/service that accompanied it?
Imap and CalDAV exists for a long time... long before Google began to make Android... CardDAV is also a recognized standard. These are well known, stable and we can expect them to keep working the same way in 10 years
Exchange Active Sync is *not* a standard... it's a liability... Everyone knows that Microsoft is prone to *not* follow it's own standard... We've seen it with bad backward compatibility in the Office suite (sometimes, 3rd party word processors were doing a better job at converting Microsoft files from older to newer formats). We've seen it with ooxml (although it has been pushed through the troat of ISO, Microsoft DON'T follow it in it's office suite). Now that Microsoft has it's own smartphone environment, we see the risk of seeing some changes in EAS in order to give an advantage to WP8 over iOS and Android.
The move away from EAS and towards open standard is a good move, let's expect that Apple will do the good thing and go in the same direction... And, if everyone starts to use IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV instead of EAS, Microsoft *will* have to support them on it's outlook.com service if he don't want to become irrelevant. Eventually, it'll also help all Open Source projects who wil only have to support recognized open standard and not EAS.
About the changes in Calendar (reservable times on the calendar through appointment slots)... Well, I didn't even know these did exist... As most Google Calendar users... I guess that they had a good trace about which feature are in use and which are not in use and that they saw that nearly noone was using it...
Calendar via SMS in this time of smartphones is not a big loss... It's an US-only feature and I guess that those who were tech savvy (or addict) enough to have used that switched to a smartphone long ago...
I'm quite sure that Google knew what it was doing when he decided to axe these feature... And keep in mind that each extra (unused) feature is a potential source of bugs, takes time so slows down the development of other features and slows down the system running it... We see often people complaining about programs (or OS) who are slow, need insane computer power for what it do, ... Here, Google is taking the step needed to avoid that !!!
They got whatever licences GrandCentral had, but haven't bothered trying to extend them or renew them.
Well, this is exactly the problem GP was referring to: Google buys a service, then neglects to support its users as well as the previous owners did.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Prod me when the Gmail app for Android uses the open protocol you mention. I may want to try those rose-tinted glasses then.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
"people" are stupid