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Ask Slashdot: Which Google Project Didn't Deserve To Die?
Nerval's Lobster writes "When Google announced the shutdown of Google Reader, its popular RSS reader, it sparked significant outrage across the Web. While one could argue that RSS readers have declined in popularity over the past few years (in fact, that was Google's stated reason for killing it), they remain a useful tool for many people who want to collect their Web content—articles, blog postings, and the like—in one convenient place. (Fortunately for them, there exist any number of alternative RSS readers, some of which offer even more features than Google Reader.) This wasn't the first time that Google announced a project's imminent demise, and it certainly won't be the last: Google Buzz, Google Health, Google Wave, Google Labs, and other software platforms all ended up in the dustbin of tech history. So here's the question: of all those projects, which didn't deserve the axe? If you had a choice, which would you bring back?"
How I miss thee...
Alas, poor DejaNews, we knew ye well.
Here are some of the ones that got killed by Google.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html
This space for rent.
my life is better for having evernote, but notebook was such a great thing to use!
google users are the *product* for google's advertising revenue. google doesn't owe anyone free service, it does owe its customers (advertisers) market large enough to be viable. google will axe those things that have too few users, as they should. most people doesn't use RSS, it's obscure geeky thing
The translate API was axed because it was too popular.
Support for the open document standard (.odf etc.) in Google Docs should never have been removed.
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
My favorite Google project was the idea that a company built brand loyalty by refusing to do evil, manipulative and underhanded things.
Ten years later, Google is doing those things. They're getting more aggressive with ads and invading personal information; they're cutting out useful projects that don't immediately monetize; they're trying to manipulate us into being better cash cows by signing up with our cell phones and handing over more ad-friendly information through Google+.
I don't begrudge them the right to make a profit. They were doing that, and continue to do so, without any of these manipulative activities. I just want the "do no evil" project to come back because that was a Google, Inc. I could believe in.
Which Google Project Deserves To Die?
-- Segmentation fault. Core dumped
How I'm dreading November 1st when iGoogle will be retired...
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664197
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
RIP
In other news Google Drive is down. Most Chromebooks are rendered useless because of paltry local storage and reliance on the Google Cloud for storing important stuff.
http://www.slashgear.com/google-investigating-google-drive-downtime-18274444/
This needs to happen again, before it gets owned by some shady proprietor.
Speaking of which, where's Google Vote?
I don't know why they killed the Nexus Q.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the-google-nexus-q-is-baffling/
If you’re having friends over, and they, too, have Android phones, and they, too, have bought songs from Google’s music store, then they can add their own songs to your Q’s queue.
Sounds interesting in theory. In practice, there’s a lot of spontaneity-killing setup. You have to go into Settings to turn on the feature. Then you have to invite your friend to participate by — get this — sending an e-mail message. Then your friend has to download the Nexus Q app.
If you or the friend then taps the name of a song in your online Google account, it starts playing immediately, rather than being added to the queue as you’d expect. A Google rep explained to me that you’re not supposed to tap a song to add it to the playlist; you have to use a tiny pop-up menu to add it. More bafflement.
Sounds like a great party addon!
Now all I get is search spam and the things they think I want.
The most important rule of any search system: If someone spell a word in a specific way THOSE HITS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ONES!!!!!! Especially if its in a sentence in quotes! Why the heck do I have to wade through pages of crap to get to it?
Aaron Swartz
What, this is an article about the death of RSS and no one is going to mention the elephant in the room???
Although it was only available in the Google Labs, Sets was really useful. Give it 3-4 related words and voilà, here are 5-10 more like that. I know the feature lives on in spreadsheets (Google Drive now...) http://googlesystem.blogspot.ca/2012/11/google-sets-still-available.html - I'm sad the whole Labs were shut down.
Finally, maybe Buzz got a lot of flak, but it had a semblance of openness, using PuSH and activity streams. Miss that too.
Maybe it never really existed, that so-called "Do No Evil" phase of google, and it's all just a post-hoc remythologizing of what google used to be...
....
but why couldn't they bring back the clean page search engine (they could keep the new search algorithms for pagerank, or revert back) that they used to be before they became the ad-sense and ad-word selling advertising behemoth? An actual search engine rather than a categorizer and tracker of all of our searches, and web-site travels, and telephone calls (sent or received), and emails (sent or received, even if you're not a gmail user, someone you send to may be a gmail user and bingo you're being tracked), and purchases, and travels and gps locations (hey all you andoid-phone users, that would pertain to you!), and soon-to-be everything-you-see-through your google glasses.
:>p
No thanks, I don't need an ever-present surveillance-corporation or an ever-present surveillance state.
as my homepage. It's still around but it will be gone in a few months. Better start looking for alternatives.
I'm still in doubt between "Google Flying car" and "Google Holodeck".
Oh wait... it seems we can only choose from a list of boring office applications.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
May you RIP.
Seriously though, it was really annoying when I set that up, it was discontinued a week later. Got stuck with Plupper.
The translate API was axed because it was too popular.
I think there's a serious fiscal-minded disconnect between Google and Google fans/consumers. Google appeared to give several services for free to users. The first being search. And when they monetized big time on ads by selling users' eyeballs, only the businessmen and engineers seemed to realize that.
... likewise you can say how great something was for the end user all you want. It doesn't mean it's going to survive. There is an old notion that good products survive because they sell and while that still applies to physical products, people are having a hard time transitioning that notion to software. Because it's not true when you think about it like Google's cash cows.
... where, in the petition, was the promise to pay a nominal yearly fee to use Reader? Or are we stupid enough to petition for publicly traded businesses to lose money? Where is the petition to have banks hand out $1 each time you visit them?
...
Now, when they find they cannot monetize on an decent implementation of a news reader or an API of translation tools (surprise, surprise) they do a cost benefit analysis and decide that they are losing money and -- like any business -- pull the plug. People bitch and moan (myself at the front of the line) but you have to realize that what's good for the consumer isn't always good for the business. If Starbucks offers free 12 oz coffee day or 7 Eleven does a free 32 oz slurpee day, you can't go back the next day and scream in outrage that they have baited you in and now switched it on you and discontinued your favorite product (that was conveniently free)
I found the Google Reader petition particularly amusing
Of course there's this weird notion on Slashdot that ad based revenue on the internet is a very bad thing and that the internet was better before it and there's some mythical better revenue model. And here we are on Slashdot, a site that (as far as I can tell) makes its money/breaks even on ads
I think this question should be "What acceptable revenue model would have saved these services or turned them into cash cows?" Keep in mind that if tracking your users is part of maximizing your profit to offer these services then you're facing pitchforks and torches -- I mean look at the stupid "scroogled" Microsoft mud slinging ads.
My work here is dung.
how else would they make money but by advertising? you voluntarily use google and they make you part of advertisers market. simple as that. don't like it, don't play. but they owe you nothing, cutting off a free service doesn't constitute being evil, just sensible.
Listen, I understand that Google's services are free and they are a business and need to do what they feel is necessary to make money; however, I am not sure why some of these went away.
Let's take for instance the fact that Google has killed off their RSS discovery plugin. I was a die hard Google Reader person and made the move to Feedly when Google Reader was killed. Killing Google Reader may have made sense to them; after all, they were supporting traffic and crawling feeds, and doing all those things that take money, time, engineering resources, and bandwidth. No worries there. But killing off the RSS plugin? I just can't fathom how that matters.
Leave the damn tool out there for people to use. It really doesn't harm anyone if it's something that works and can continue to work client side.
But I digress. Yes, Feedly (or any of the tools that will ultimately replace Reader) could make their own but killing it off in some misguided attempt at pushing users to use G+ (what I assume is their reasoning for it all) is just going to drive people farther away from Google's tools.
No, G+ (or any social network for that matter) does not operate in the same way Reader (or any RSS reader) did. I don't give a fuck what other people find interesting for the most part; I want to be able to pick and choose and provide that content back out to people on those networks, not the other way around.
Make your money in the way you see fit but I hope they're not surprised when there is a backlash against those changes. Oh and open source the damn RSS app and even Reader so people can continue on w/o Google's backing. That would fit the "do no evil" mantra.
I reached a point where they didn't support one of the features I came to love in search syntax, and I switched to duckduckgo. I give it a B- on searching, but an A+ on features and privacy.
It's not dead, but it's no longer free. I work with three volunteer organisations - they're not charities but social groups geared towards helping expats get settled in my city. Membership management, event planning and budgeting, publications and flyers. All were easy to collaborate on with Google Apps, but even the (seemingly) small subscription fees are a burden when we're explicitly non-profit and loosely organised. We could have two active users one month, ten the next, so no single pricing plan option is appropriate without serious overhead and/or possible overspend.
Very unfortunate.
Search worked so much better when they had Google Pigeons doing the search instead of all these servers.
Correction: it was "don't *be* evil" (emphasis added). There is a subtle semantic distinction between doing some evil and actually being evil. Such hair-splitting is probably what lets Google managers sleep at night.
More from the link:
Nice words they've got there.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"Google is not evil" is the project that didn't deserve to die.
IMO, google public data is a prime candidate to get the axe. we rely on it for our visualizations here at work. i vehemently argued against using this service because google can axe it at any time. it provides no discernable income for google (no ads appear anywhere), it has virtually no support whatsoever so it seems to function basically as a loss leader for google.
i argued for using a product such as tableau which may cost some upfront cash but is also less likely to dissapear than a free google product, since it has the backing of a large public company whose livelihood relies on producing and maintaining said product.
well, only time will tell if my prediction is right or wrong.,,
I wouldn't bring any of them back. The only services from Google that I really use are Gmail, Maps and the search engine (includes image search).
The thing is: Google is a bit too large imho. Them killing off a product that lots of people used just creates more room on that market, or perhaps it creates a new one altogether. Now, Google Reader competitors don't have to compete with Google Reader anymore, only among each other. Now, other people may be succesful. This idea sounds good to me.
I don't hope that Google ditches all these projects so much, don't get me wrong. I just think there's a nice upside to all of this. :)
Seeing how Google is taking their sweet time to fix Latitude for Blackberry users, is it the next product to be axed?
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/maps/PDx5fW-SiFI/77dIbvuMR5sJ
dude, this is not sensibility we're talking about here. It's not even that google has asked people what they should bring back. This is a fucking slashdot article about what people would like to see back at google. It's just a wishlist!!! So there's no need to bring sensibility or rationality or complaining about what a free service really needs to provide us!!! No need to be on a high horse; my post is completely on topic as to "what google project didn't deserve to die?". It's your comment that is "off-topic" and not useful.
Never really amounted to anything but I did use it a couple of times...
Oh never mind, Plus did not die yet.
One sign that something is wrong with how Google handles these products is that I first heard about most of them on slashdot posts announcing they've been killed. At least two of them sounded very useful, and I would have liked to try them out. You would think Google would understand the power of advertising, but maybe there's a disconnect between selling advertising and making use of advertising. (After all, Google's search popularity seemed to spread mostly by word of mouth.)
They forgot all of the companies they've bought and closed down, like Gizmo5
I would have to say that I miss Google 411 the most. It was easy to call and find what you wanted. Most of the time it recognized what you said without any problems. Google finally shut down the project after they got voice data from people all over to use in other voice technologies. You essentially let Google have your voice in return for the 411 service.
I was under the impression that much of this "closed down" functionality was going to migrate to the walled garden of Google Plus. The would mirror facebook's methodology and compete with them.
Spawned a million clones, all of which suck.
I will miss iGoogle when it's finally turned off.
Is anyone aware of an alternative?
I'm still pissed that they bought up SageTV and appear to have done absolutely nothing with the technology. One of the better comprehensive PC-based DVR/media streaming systems destroyed. Even with zero updates and little support for 2 years, I still use it. The HD300 is still an excellent media streaming box.
Noting that Google Drive is down and as such it tends to cripple the Chrome Books (and anyone else who makes significant use of Google Drive) makes the parent a Microsoft Shill? That kind of sweeping statement makes YOU sound like a Google Shill.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
And why should Google support these products at their expense when there are folks who are doing it for free?
It's a brilliant strategy.
Withing the old Google labs was a search called Google Sets. It was rarely used, but when you needed that capability it was the only place on the net you could do it. Why it or "labs" had to go away I don't understand.
For the uninitiated, Sets allowed to you enter 2 or 3 things of some type and it would return a list (15) of other things of that type. The example they used was to enter the titles of a few Tom Cruise movies and it would return a bunch more. In real world usage you could use it to identify alternative makers of various products, or alternatives to any number of things (programming languages for example) or even things where you don't know how the terminology that describes how they are related.
Just sayin'
definetely
is still the best option I have tried. very unobtrusiveness and does the basic job without the rest of nonsense.
After all, search is *so* nineties. Social is where it's at now, init?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Now that Github and Bit Bucket have far superior products, it's only a matter of time before Google Code gets the cut.
I'm really going to miss this as my start page when it goes offline in November.
It was a beginner friendly way to code android apps. I used it with my kids, who loved it.
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The project was led by Udi Manber of Google, announced December 13, 2007, and was opened in beta to the public on July 23, 2008 with a few hundred articles mostly in the health and medical field. Some Knol pages were opinion papers of one or more authors, and others described products for sale. Some articles were how-to articles or explained product use. Other people could post comments below an article, such as to refute opinions or reject product claims.
In November 2011 Google announced that Knol would be phased out. Content could be exported by owners to the WordPress-based Annotum. Knol was closed on April 30, 2012, and all content was deleted by October 1, 2012. Between these dates the content was not viewable, but was downloadable and exportable
Ponca City, We Love You
I'd really like to get back to a time where if you searched for a keyword in quotes, it was guaranteed to exist in the text of that page. I often find myself on pages that not only lack the exact query, but Google's cache lacks the query too, so you can't blame it on pages changing during inbetween updates.
No Google, I don't care if you think I misspelled it, that's what the quotes are for. No, I don't care if it's in the meta tags either. Give me my exact query in the text of the page, or nothing.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I can tell you instead which google project SHOULD die.
Those fucking glasses, they just need to go.
fuck google and their hipster surveillance society.
I have been a long time my.yahoo user. When iGoogle came out, I tried it, but liked my.yahoo.com better.
I haven't heard people mentioning them here as a replacement for iGoogle. Why is that?
While I understand why Google killed Health, I am personally so disappointed in losing it. It was so easy to sync up with my lab results and prescriptions to keep track of that stuff. When they said you could export to Microsoft HealthVault, I thought "no big deal, it will have more or less the same functionality." Boy was I wrong. I remember setting up the connection between my lab and GH as being a matter of moments. Trying to do the same for Microsoft HealthVault, I spent 15 minutes trying to find a link to do that. Finally, it pointed me to an app I had to download, which then told me it was incompatible with my device. Oh well! Meanwhile, though, it's clear to me that health is so important as a business area that I'm certain Google will be back.
And everyone *I* know doesn't use it.
Point is, only Google has the real numbers (facts) and it's not a good product. Or blame it on marketing - which brings back a post on /. a few months back about the uselessness of marketing: a good product will speak for itself.
Obviously, this didn't. Which is it, /.?
Already posting a similar thing in this thread, but give duck duck go a try. They support +keyword syntax that really does assure the keyword appears in the results. And their exact quotes work too.
I would like to know if Google employees are let go every time a project is cancelled.
whoops, shoulda paid more attention to the preview. this is the real url
Buzz was a Twitter clone, but it was too little too late. Anything you can do with Buzz, you can do with Google+.
Wave was an attempt to replace traditional email, but it only outperformed email under some circumstances, say, if you were collaborating on a group or something. There is a gap between Wave and Gmail but using Gmail saves the hassle of learning the whole new concept of communication. And for a communication tool, if it fails to archive mainstream adoption, it fails. You can't learn a cool new language while everyone's talking in legacy English.
For Reader, it's quite a different thing actually. Google does not provide a decent alternative. Some of you might say social networking sites can be used to get news, I think it's rarely the case for everybody, especially for international users outside of US/UK. I live in a country where every big sites support RSS but very few support social networks. All I can get from social networking sites is funny pictures and inspirational quotes, sometime unconfirmed rumors. Few to none news websites/journalists can be found on social networks, if there is, news is not reliable enough.
Once upon a time, Google was cool and they cared about making cool products before they even figured out how to make money with it. That day has now long gone.
And suddenly Google Calendar turned useless to me...
That "don't be evil" thing didn't deserve to die. Its killing also killed a lot of other good stuff.
I loved the integration with Google Bookmarks, and the easy translate options. The funny thing is that not even Chrome has it now.
RSS, Federated XMPP, and Google Wave are all federated protocols that Google's not working with anymore. We need better federated protocols to catch-on (by being well supported) now that email is looking ancient.
Everyone has an email address because anyone can run an email server, not because a handful of mega-tech companies elected to work together. Email has no central point of censorship or ad-scanning. The same isn't true for any discussion page, twitter, social media, etc.
HTTP is mostly decentralized (except DNS & SSL) and is the basis of today's Internet. Decentralized protocols make the world grow. Axing them kills progress.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
It might not be officially dead, but it may as well be. I would have paid money for it, but it's been unreliable, flaky with getting texts to other carriers, and hasn't been updated in years now. I can't even make IP voice calls from voice.google.com, I have to go to gmail.com to make a call from my Google voice number. There is no way that I would use my google voice number as my main number with it's issues, and it doesn't look like that is ever going to change now. It's a shame, it was the product for me, and I would be recommending it to all my friends and coworkers who travel internationally.
What a stupid idea. Having to prefix the words you are searching for, to tell the search engine that you really do want to search for them.
One of the great things about Google, was that it's default search operator was AND where as Alta Vista was OR. Meaning, you could search for "fast car" (without the quotes) on Google, and get Ferrari on top, where as on Alta Vista, you might get a page on bullet trains, and a Lada dealer. If you wanted to search for all of your search words on Alta Vista, you had to prefix each of them with a + sign. Then Google changed to use the + syntax, making it just as bad as Alta Vista. A while later, they changed it again, so now you need to use double quotes around each search word. Now, that's twice as much superfluous typing as what made Alta Vista crap.
How about a search engine that actually searches for what you type in, by default, like Google used to do? Heck, even a simple CGI page that automatically puts quotes around every word, then submits it to Google would do.
Uh, no, you're being obtuse. This is for EXACT words. So you search "fast car" you'll get articles for tuning a car for speed on duckduckgo(along with an infobox about a few things named "fast car") +fast +car changes the search to emphasize the words themselves rather than their meaning, and you get a lyric page for the song "fast car" which has "fast car" repeated often.
Both represent searches you might want to make, but google has decided the latter isn't important to anyone anymore. The GP was complaining about the lack of concern for the words themselves.
Google could have kept the content created by tens of thousands of volunteers, as static pages. OK, so no more updates to Knol, no more content editing or adding, but Google could have kept it as static content for nearly no cost. Maybe add some adlinks to make it marginally profitable.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I know google doesn't have much of a choice in this, but when they had real estate search it was the tip of the awesome iceberg. I wish they were allowed to "compete" in that space.
Would you complain if the fire department eliminated their free service of protecting your home? There are no free services. Some are paid for directly by the users of the service, some are paid for collectively by taxes or insurance premiums, some are paid for by handing over personal information or viewing advertising. The method used to pay for a service shouldn't affect your ability to complain when the service is removed.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
He could be a complete *rse at times, but he didn't deserve to die.
You better believe he was a Google project, someone Schmidt, Brin, and Page wanted to know all about.
http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/ - I know you can still find it and install, but still, I wish that it was still living on......
"As of September 14 (2011), Google Desktop will no longer be available for download, and existing installations will not be updated to include new features or fixes.
Thanks again to all of our users. It’s been a fun journey.
Posted by the Google Desktop Team"
Exactly, or the fact that you used to be able to use boolean. I want this word to be in the page so I tack on +searchterm, which was very useful. Now they want you to use that to search google plus. They tell you to use quotes now, but that doesn't even work right.
They've proven they're not trust worthy or a long term solution to your storage or other than trivial tech needs.
I will never trust Google the perverted clowd clown for any non-trivial tech need.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
At least 3 of the 4 alternatives listed are all client-side applications, instead of a browser-based reader you can access anywhere.
The remaining alternative, newsblur, I haven't been able to successfully evaluate yet because it keeps crapping out with 502 errors.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
iGoogle! I'm really upset they're shutting it down. Mostly, I don't understand why they'd shut it down. iGoogle has been my homepage for the past 4-5 years, and it's done exactly what I want a homepage to do.
I have started using other search engines over time to supplement Google for various reasons, but I honestly think the removal of iGoogle will have me using google search a lot less frequently. fwiw.
If they had stuck with it I am sure it would have been the next big thing.
Notebook, since apparently even google agrees enough to be testing a clone
I still miss the Real Estate function in Google Maps. When I was looking for a new place to live some years ago, it really helped me out. But now that I'm considering moving again, I have to search a dozen different sites from different brokers in order to find something in my area.
Random Signatures in Google Mail. It was a Google Labs offering...
Their 411 service was awesome and free, I used it a lot before it was shut down. Just recently I was in a situation where I needed a business's phone number while I was out and wish GOOG-411 was still around.
why the duck they keep Google+ open and kill iGoogle and reader
I wish they wouldn't shut down iGoogle. I have been using this as my default browser page ever since it was introduced (I think), and I'm really happy with it. It lets me put everything I use most often and some handy newsfeeds that keep me informed during the work day all in one place. I really dont understand why they'd nix it, especially since it doesn't seem like it's a big ressource draw.
You need to control your data! Now more than ever.
We hate Microsoft, but at least you have some control there. They sell you bad software, but at least you sorta have it in your possession (until they sunset the license / activation servers).
Luckily, I learned a few lessons early on with the loss of Yahoo Photos. I now have nicely named folders of the selected good family photos for relatively quick online upload (again) if I have to move services. Or I can roll my own web server if I had to, just for photos.
You need to be prepared to download your documents and switch your email if needed.
I was about to start up full-force with g+, but after this reader nonsense I went and make an account at joindiaspora.com and tried out Diaspora. It looks pretty solid now and they are trying to do it the way God intended for the internet, open standards and software so you can roll your own. I only use g+ now to bitch and moan about google...
I'd like to see IGOOGLE not die in November.
It is still available for paying customers, zero support was given for it for non-paying customers, I do not understand how this is a cost saver, other than a differentiator for its paid service. (Which was already differentiated by larger amounts of space, support, etc) Feels like a mean-spirited saving, one could probably demonstrate that it actually costs more to maintain the hiding of this option for non-paying Google Apps users.
Google used to offer search through a SOAP API. With no ads. They discontinued that. Then they offered search through a "Web Search API", again with no ads. That's deprecated, rate limited, and going away, although it still works if you have an old API key for it. ("Google Custom Search" does not support general web searches, and costs $5 per 1000 queries.)
Google Reader was the best app.
It was cool to share stuff with friends in a intelligent way.
I liked Google Reader because it was simple, organized and didn't throw a lot of glitz in your face.
Which alternative RSS reader is the closest to that?
I am not sure why goolge wave was killed. My suspicion is that they did not find an unintrusive way of placing advertisements.
IMHO google wave was what i expect of collaboration. Many emlais, revisions sendind forward and backwards document formats designed to fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk could be avoided.....
the new result page sucks +++.
Anyone @ Google to finally find our screens are wider than high ?!
So why the hell did they wipe out the left panel in favor of a bar ?
I'm going to really miss that, I've got mine chock full of little gadgets. Lots of magazines, movies, weather, gmail, wikipedia, etc. I'll just have to see if saving it as a "Web Page, complete" will work... (Nope :()
I was really interested in Google Wave. Got in the Beta, posted in some random thread... and that was it. No-one I knew signed up. Because no-one they knew was signing up. So I couldn't actually make use of it, at all. It was also really tricky explaining to people what exactly it was; I just couldn't come up with a nice, understandable metaphor to describe it, and I'm not sure Google could either.
I agree with your general sentiment that those who have replaced RSS with twitter/facebook are deluded in thinking that this is the answer for everyone.
On the other hand, RSS is not the be all/end all either.
I think the realization to be made is that a twitter account's stream and an RSS feed are really not that different.
You mention having to sift through people's personal tweets to find the ones that you actually find interesting. That's a good point - but mostly one that should be answered by "follow a different person" - somebody who has separate accounts for their professional work vs their personal affairs, for example. After all, if I 'subscribe' to Slashdot's frontpage RSS, the bulk of the articles that get thrown my way are still not really of interest - so perhaps I should subscribe to the RSS of a tech news site that is more focused on what I want to read about.
The (marginal) advantage to RSS (aside from technical*) is that RSS usually have at least a title and a summary with a link to content, whereas tweets are almost effectively title and summary in one.. and then no link to content if the tweet doesn't happen to link to whatever they're talking about.
* RSS's real power is that it is ubquitous, easy to write and to parse, and almost universally understood. If I wanted to make an RSS feed with all the latest products from my company, I could easily do so. If I then wanted to check out that RSS feed, there's dozens of programs, websites, mobile apps, etc. that will happily accept a link to the feed and display it in any number of forms.
Twitter, on the other hand, you can technically only read through twitter.com, embeds at other sites, and a scarce few officially sanctioned applications (the developer of which needs an API key and authentication to even be allowed to fetch the results, etc.)
But there are twitter-to-RSS solutions that largely break down this difference. I don't see them as opposites or mutually exclusive.. they can be complementary.
That's all as an aside to Google Reader, though - which was as much an aggregator as a client, to many. Yes, there's plenty of alternatives and no, developers probably shouldn't have relied on their users using Google Reader and not support other solutions - but just as with the 'weather API' on Android, it's a highly unpopular move for something that only costs them a pittance to (keep) supported.
Just to be on-topic for the story itself... I would guess that the 'google project' that didn't deserve to die would be open CalDAV API access, forcing developers to use the Google Calendar API instead (after telling those using MS EAS to use CalDAV instead) - unless you manage to get whitelisted.
The removal of Google Labs was more than just another product being retired. It was a sign of a massive shift of mentality from Google. This is when they started doing their own thing and not giving a damn what users think. Since then, it's becoming clearer and clearer that Google is not particularly worried about doing evil or not, and much less about what benefits the users. This is worrying for users, but investors and COs are probably thrilled.
Maybe I am a necrophile, but my favorite google services were: google note, google wave and google reader.
darn
exactamundo. I agree with you completely. And no fair getting rid of the boolean search capabilities on the main page, either. Don't make us go into the "advanced search" options capability to do it. Be a search engine, which is what you claim to be!!!! Khaaaann!!!! (shouting google into a spiraling ascending camera doesn't feel as good, since there are two syllables... :>) why is it that way?)
I would have paid money for it
I did pay money for it. $20 following integration with my Sprint cellular service (to keep my Google number as a permanent secondary contact), then another $10 for international dialing credit; the modest price has proved to be excellent value for the money.
hasn't been updated in years
I have the same complaint as you, though -- bugs and feature deficiencies which go unfixed for years, with no response from Google. For instance, while you can pay to change your Google Voice number, after integration with Sprint, my secondary contact number apparently cannot be deleted, un-linked, turned off, or changed, ever -- the option to do so disappears. As far as I can tell the only workaround to disentangle myself from it, is to de-integrate from Sprint and start over from a fresh Google account (and pray that the de-integration process doesn't gum up something in the process, as it has many other subscribers).
It's hard to say how much is Google's fault, and how much is Sprint's. In either case, I've heard Google is planning to roll out full Voice integration with additional mobile providers. For everyone's sake, I hope someone has learned some lessons, and the launch will be smoother for them, than it has been for us.
I use Google Reader OFTEN. Multiple times per day. I used it to bring me to this article. I also used Google Notebook heavily. When they retired it, it wasn't so bad, because they'd then started Google Docs (AKA Google Drive). However, Reader isn't being replaced, it's just being stabbed in the face and thrown in the dead-pile. I don't overly blame Google, as it probably doesn't pay for itself nor would I be willing to pay for it if they asked me to, I'd just spool up my own private web app, which I'm in the process of doing, btw. Still, I'm saddened by this attitude of optimizing margins and catering to the biggest level of user literacy. At least we still have Open Source software and the like.
Yes, I know OpenRefine "replaces" it.
iGoogle has been my homepage/portal for years! And it included RSS feed widgets! It just needed a few tweaks to make it great. Good one Google.
It won't do any good, but sign here anyway.
... in fact early reports showed that it was HOT .... as it OVERHEATED due to poor design.
How is there even a question here? Google Reader.
Google made a business decision for each of these projects. Their return on investment was too low to justify the project. They will probably not disclose any of the criteria or metric that they used to reach this decision, but I guarantee that each of these projects deserved the axe. Google is not there to provide free services to you. Google's business is to allow access to services that give their main business (advertisements) an advantage. If the money spent to keep the project going outweighs the number of users brought in, with some other metrics probably in there too, it gets the axe, and deservedly so.