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Less Than a Month To Go Before Google Breaks Hundreds of Thousands of Links All Over the Internet (greenspun.com)
Philip Greenspun:Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums. They wasted a huge amount of humanity's time and effort by shutting down Picasa.
Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.
Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.
then they were never broken
if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Google does not want you to link to anything, they want you to google for it...
Is it me or is this news quite sensationalized ? I mean what its about is google shutting down a service not intentionally breaking peoples links,
So, I just want to chime in here on the poster - Phillip Greenspun. Most of you won't remember it, but for those of building out web pages back in 1993, there wasn't exactly a lot of content. Phillip had a ton of pictures online and an online gallery before that was even a thing. Jerry Yang was still updating his content list of Internet by hand. I feel like back then the web was small enough that you really could see nearly everything of interest. Anyway, that was just a name I hadn't seen in a long time.
----- obSig
Still!
if their is a god...
then they were never broken
if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
The garbage collection process begins, obviously.
Yes, Picasa was great. Yes, Google screwed it up. But Google drove Picasa into irrelevance long ago... at this point, I have my doubts very many people are going to notice these newly-broken links.
#DeleteChrome
Shocked I tell you! Because Google has never shut down a service with little regard to users. And in fact, no other company ever has either!!! And no trendy online startup has ever gone out of business either, with the end users being the only ones who get screwed. If you depend on some proprietary or online (or both) service, you're going to end up screwed eventually. Plan accordingly.
Be Excellent To Each Other
they could be deleting photos like Flickr is doing.
I guess that's always the risk of using other peoples computers (I mean cloud services)
The other thing you should think about is the EXIF information in your photos, like GPS location of where the picture was taken. You may also be concerned about cloud service manipulating your EXIF information for their own purposes...
This should be a warning about all "cloud" services. Make sure you have copies of your own data under your own control.
Does anyone need more evidence that Google really just does not care about anything but $$$$ and how quickly they can get to $100B stock market valuation.
Google could have been charging for Picasa & THEN shut it down.
As the wise said, "it's not the cloud, it's just someone else's computer".
It's simple, stop trusting google to keep anything. Just stop using their services, because at any point everything you've worked so hard for could go away. They have done this repeatedly over the years, and have shown that they really don't care about anything that they or you create.
I would hope people learn a few lessons from this and are not keeping any documents that need to survive long-term in Google Docs...
I have to say, there's no wasted time on my part since I saw the service probably wouldn't get much traction even from launch, and never used it.
There is one thing I find amusing about his post though - he states :
"Example: my review of an Antarctica cruise on the Ocean Diamond. It was so easy to publish the photos via Picasa"
Well that's the classic computer problem right there, you should have known it was wrong when it was "so easy". Anything easy is almost always not permanent, anyone who has been using computers as long as he (or I) have should know better about how long "Easy" lasts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They pulled Microsoft's E^3 strategy on Picasa: they embraced it, they extended it and then they pulled 'google' on it by extinguishing it. Can they at least open it up if they do not care about it? Probably afraid of it becoming a competitor to their on-line fiefdome?
4wdloop
"I told you so" -- or, actually, Mike Macgirvin told us all so. But we were all too busy playing with our toys - or other things - to think about what was happening all around us. This day should have been forseen, fortold, and warned about since the beginning of "big centralized services" ---
OH WAIT -- it was.
Mike's been working on this since his days working on Friendica (before that actually) and he has continued to push forward to provide a truly decentralized, nomadic network that keeps you and your data free from vendor lock in. While everybody has been chasing "market share" and seeking to make the next "Facebook killer," Mike has been building a solution that is far more SOLID than even Berners-Lee's current vaporware.
Hubzilla (and more recently ZAP) with running the ZOT6 protocol (with work on Zot8 already underway!) have been working to deal with this problem for the better part of a decade.
"Nomadic identity" (the ability to host your social media presence, files, data, and just about anything else with multiple different providers on multiple different servers - and log into any of them and continue working if one of them goes down for any reason) has been part of Hubzilla for a LOOONG time.
Now, with Hubzilla version 4.0 just released over the weekend, Hubzilla adds Nomadic Content addressing that separates content addressing from DNS within the ZOT network. Now, if you use Zot, you can move your content to a different server and there are no links to update - your traffic will just follow you to the new location.
The Zot network (called "the GRID") is a completely decentralized network that allows VERY granular access control and privacy options - in a solution that is MIT licensed and runs on a standard LAMP/LEMP stack. And the Hubzilla platform is as easy (I think easier) to extend with addons and custom modules as Wordpress is write plugins for.
The OP SHOULD be a "non-story" as all these challenges have been known for a long time.
The fact that we are lamenting this reality on SlashDot just shows how far we have fallen.
Many sites you go to on your iphone no longer work in iphone safari. Even some Redit pages don't work. instead you get a box to install chrome. The issue is google's accelerated server pages. Google sucks
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As a company, they seem to have the attention span of a two-year-old. One can't help but wondering what kind of a management layer they have? I mean, managers tend to be, by and large, useless; but those at Google seem to be worse than that.
I don't like relying on 3rd parties for anything.
Sure, plenty is unavoidable, but quite often I can do it better anyway.
Google could have been charging for Picasa & THEN shut it down.
Oh come on, you're probably thinking of Microsoft...
Once again, the cloud screws everyone. I love my simple, cheap NAS and its simple, easy-to-use features. It's really too bad that the marketing departments of Synology, Qnap, etc. didn't have the budget to sell everyone on a personal NAS instead of this cloud sh*t.
... where good technology goes to die.
Everyone posting photos to the web and not paying the ISP to maintain the URL is reaching the expected outcome.
ISP space is so cheap these days, why would you use someone else's soon to be deleted server?
Voluntarily breaking picasa links is annoying, but then again, Google insists on caching Pintrest pages -- which pretty much result in a whole page of broken image links 100% of the time that you click on one in the results, no matter if the page is from six days ago or six years ago.
I understand the transitory nature of what Pintrest provides--but it's silly for Google to bother to include Pintrest pages at all, for the same reason.
If you've seen one cat picture, you've seen them all. No great loss here.
It's relatively easy to delete your google account on your Android gear. If it's your phone just make sure to save your contacts to a local vCard file because Google wipes your contacts when you log out.
Your apps can still be updated on Aptoide. Which Google REALLY doesn't want to exist.
You're not paying for it other than with your privacy.
This is what happens when you don't retain full control over your data. People who pony up a few bucks a month for hosting don't have this problem.
The downside is that it takes more skill and effort to do, but that's the price of freedom.
How many times does this need to be said?
I actually liked Google+ because there were actually more intelligent posts and conversations on their than Spacebook. Now they are shutting the service down and leaving everyone out in the cold, not to mention the broken photo album links. Thanks for nothing Google!
How do Google et. al. make their money? By keeping you online, using their services while they show you ads. Think about it. Why shouldn't they break the products of 100s or 1000s of hours of your attention & effort? They want you to stop doing that & move on to doing this because they can make more money out of you this way. Now stop wasting their valuable profits & get with their business model, you ingrate!
"Links break on the internet ... some dude shocked!"
These massive internet companies create things that hundreds of millions of people come to depend on but they have the right to pull the plug any time they want to based on business needs. When do they actually become obligated to continue a service they provide? When are they a utility? Congress should look to the subject.
E Proelio Veritas.
I've often thought it would be better all around if content-oriented websites started by figuring out how they could structure everything as a static archive, and then worked backwards from there to layer in the dynamic parts.
Why would anyone be so stupid to upload files to a company's servers and delete the local files? Especially to Google -- they're known for deleting user content and killing whole projects at short or no notice.