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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 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.
most people doesn't use RSS, it's obscure geeky thing
What do most people use for the use cases for which geeks use RSS?
Nearly everyone I know used Reader.
It's not an "obscure geeky thing". It's a great way to follow multiple websites. You don't need to be a geek to figure it out or benefit from it.
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/
Support for the open document standard (.odf etc.) in Google Docs should never have been removed
How so? I can still download documents as ODT. I might be missing something since I don't use google docs all that much.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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!
You're like the person in old story who had a rich man come to the front door with $1,000 every month. the person was happy and said "thank you" each time. One day the rich man went to the person's neighbor instead of his house, and gave the neighbor $1,000. The person was angry, and yelled "Hey, where is my money!!??" Do you see the issue now? *You* are the one being an asshole and an ingrate. You were given something good free of charge for years, and now can only bitch.
I think there is some validity to what he said. From how I see it, people don't even know they are using RSS when they use Google Reader. All they know is there are feeds that you can subscribe to, so that you can get any new updates from a certain website. Take it with a grain of salt though, since I don't have any prove of the fact, it's just what I got from watching the reaction of people from this whole Google Reader thing.
as my homepage. It's still around but it will be gone in a few months. Better start looking for alternatives.
Support for the open document standard (.odf etc.) in Google Docs should never have been removed.
Say what? I can import and export OpenDocument files in Google Docs just fine.
Nothing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.,,
Actually a lot of people pay for Google these days. My work account and my ISP account are both by Google and are advertisement free.
Also - plenty of people listen to podcasts, which are mostly compiled via RSS. As a matter of fact that was my primary use of Google Reader - I used it to listen to podcasts and whatever computer I happened to be sitting down to without having to worry about syncing anything. All the ones I listed to were in the list and ready to go.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Essentially. They just have bookmarks/favorites and visit sites every day/hour using precious time/bandwidth because they don't know what a 'feed' is.
Granted I didn't really use RSS much either until iGoogle (another killed service, hooray) because I wanted an interface that was customizable and dense. I have since moved to netvibes because it's as good or better than iGoogle (and 100x better than Reader) at tons of dense feeds visible at once.
Really I don't know why reader is being lamented so much. It had a stupid, wasteful interface and wasn't very customizable. I've tried a couple times to make something useful of it but it's always been inferior.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
They forgot all of the companies they've bought and closed down, like Gizmo5
Spawned a million clones, all of which suck.
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.
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.
You're like the person in old story who had a rich man come to the front door with $1,000 every month. the person was happy and said "thank you" each time. One day the rich man went to the person's neighbor instead of his house, and gave the neighbor $1,000. The person was angry, and yelled "Hey, where is my money!!??" Do you see the issue now? *You* are the one being an asshole and an ingrate. You were given something good free of charge for years, and now can only bitch.
Wrong; it was a covenant: They got my personal data so they could sell me to advertisers as a precisely targeted demographic, and in return I got a useful tool. In addition, they got a certain amount of exclusivity in the marketplace, because anyone else trying to build this type of useful tool would have a hard time beating "free". They broke their end of the bargain; now I'm on the lookout for better tools that beat "free" by a long margin, by selling me a service rather than selling me to advertisers. Gmail, for example, is right out as of the immediate now. I would prefer an email address I can be reasonable sure will stay the same for the next decade at least.
He's right. Most people don't use RSS. The same way most people don't visit web pages other than Facebook and Twitter. It's hardly a justification for dismissing a protocol. RSS is a primary functionality of the web, now. It's offered on almost every website. It's the backbone of almost every podcast program.
The tech media and self-promoting personalities would tell us that they've long since replaced RSS with Twitter and Facebook and that's where they get all their links and news. I call bullshit on that. They seriously log into a website 24x7 and sift through all the trivial garbage their friends post for the few pieces of signal among the noise? Most of the people I know who use facebook have nothing to do with the news or industries I'm in or care about and seeing my stream full of their posts about NASCAR, network television shows, and Kim Kardashian amidsts the occasional ignorant political rant would serve me in absolutely no way.
RSS is my window to the world. I choose what sites I care about and I get their content delivered directly to me, quickly, stripped of any extraneous bullshit from their site. It's the kind of service that simply won't likely ever be replaced, because it is so simple and fulfills an important role.
As for Google Reader. Whatever. I used it for years and it was the best way they had to keep me associated with their services. Perhaps even more than my gmail account. However, I don't care that they got rid of it. Google is worth like half a trillion dollars. Just because they don't see a future in it, financially, for themselves -- that doesn't mean it isn't worth it for everyone else. Look at all the little guys out there. They don't need half a billion users for their RSS clients and infrastructures to be a success. They only need a tiny fraction of that. Google's choice to ax this is fantastic. It would be like Blizzard axing World of Warcraft -- an act that would breath fresh life into a genre that it is sucking the air out of. It would encourage others to step in and take their place and compete and innovate.
Already, we see plenty of these guys competing and offering new services and ways of interfacing with RSS. Syncing, different clients, magazine interfaces, clean stripped down interfaces. All sorts of stuff. And, hey, I bet some of them won't be utterly fucking broken the way Google was (where it would just not let you ever delete some entries in your feed, even after several years) -- and if they are, they'll probably have some form of god damn customer service so you can actually talk to a human about how their shit is broken.
PS: This move isn't going to get me to use G+ any more, either, Google. The only thing I need social networking for is work and that's what LinkedIN is for. I use G+ in the same way I use Facebook -- as a placeholder for my name so someone else can't take it and nothing more.
What do most people use for the use cases for which geeks use RSS?
Email notifications.
I'm astounded at how people want to get emailed anytime anyone on their Facebook friends list does anything. Their email inbox is effectively their RSS reader.
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
Don't forget Google Earth, Picasa, G+, Google Drive/Docs, Google Sites, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, GTalk, Google Mars, Google Moon, Google Sky, Google Books, Google Alerts, Blogger, Custom Search, Google Finance, Google Groups (their attempt to convince people that usenet is a Google service only), Google News, Google Shopping, Orkut, Patent Search, Scholar, Schemer, News Archive, Hotpot, Image Search, Web History, Google Video, Google Voice, Gmail, AdSense, AdWords, DoubleClick, Meebo, Google Web Optimizer, Google Plus, Goo.gl url shortner, Google Profile, Google Sites, Google Web Fonts, Youtube, App Engine, Dark, GO, OpenSocial, Google Code, Analytics, Public Data Explorer, Trends and Zeitgeist, Chrome, Google Toolbar, Latitude, Google Music, Google Play Store, Google Sync, Translate, turnkey enterprise search systems, Nexus cell phones, Google Glasses, Google Crisis Response, Google Fiber, Public DNS servers, Google Wallet, Google self-driving cars, Zagat/Places/etc.
. . . . and whatever else I've forgotten.
As we can see, Google is a very slim and trim company with limited but refined services. They just don't want to offer everything to everyone. Just three or four products that they do really well. :D
Thank you. i thought it was insulting to see columnists touting Twitter or Google+ as some answer/way forward for consuming information. They don't even begin to remotely serve the purpose that Google Reader did. And even if I could create a Twitter which managed to show me every article I was interested in from my current RSS collection, none of those other social sites do the tracking of what you've read, and what you haven't, so that you can make sure you don't miss things from sources you want to closely follow. How dumb to tech writers think we are that we'd see any sort of equivalence between those different platforms?
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?
And suddenly Google Calendar turned useless to me...
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.
You forgot one detail. The rich guy told me he would be giving me money for the rest of my life, so I could give up my job. That I have done and now he says it wasn't a real deal, because he crossed his fingers behind his back.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.