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.

Comments

Dependance on vendor service bites users in ass

[schklerg]

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.

Lessons learned?

[SuperKendall]

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.