Comments on: James Fallows doesn't trust Google not to kill each new product it spawns

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:40:00 +0000

No! I had no idea!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0KoQw6RBM

That’s excellent. Thanks!

By: kiptw

kiptw — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:25:00 +0000

James, probably not in and of themselves, but just in my lack of understanding. Is there a web page you could point me to that would explain it? I also just realized I haven’t looked at Gracchus’s link yet — in my defense, I’m getting in some kinda work-like stuff on my day off, but still.

By: elusis

elusis — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:20:00 +0000

I am still mourning the loss of their crepe mix that was a clone of the stuff IKEA carries that is often out of stock.

By: James Churchill

James Churchill — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:38:00 +0000

And now I’m very worried about Google Groups and through it access to the old dejanews usenet archive…

By: James Churchill

James Churchill — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:34:00 +0000

Is there some reason the standard POP and IMAP support is insufficient to get your mail out of Gmail?

By: James Churchill

James Churchill — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:29:00 +0000

Although this seems rather like Google Notebook. Which they killed after I got used to using it.

I’m beginning to wonder whether they’re deliberately reviving it under another name to bag another load of suckers who will be caught out when they inevitably kill it again.

By: Anton Gully

Anton Gully — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:23:00 +0000

I’m with you. $10 bucks a year to have kept Reader – no problem. I don’t even understand how G+ is close to being a substitute for it. In fact I had a quick look at my G+ account to see if they’d added something but nothing doing. Am I just supposed to follow the sites G+ feed?

I used Reader for keeping track of webcomics (and a limited number of blogs) – if anyone can tell me how to use G+ for that, where I don’t have to read a lot of babble as well, then I’m quite prepared to try it.

Meanwhile I’m developing a love of Feedly – and they can have my ten bucks a year, or maybe even a bit more, if they ever get around to charging for their service.

And of course the minute I heard about Google Keep I downloaded it because I’m stupid and I have learned nothing.

By: Sphericam

Sphericam — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:05:00 +0000

“They have to be able to monetise their services,”

Unless it’s Maps. Or Earth. Or Streetview. Or Google+.

By: kiptw

kiptw — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:24:00 +0000

I went to Takeout for my Reader info, and didn’t see Gmail anywhere in the list of backable applications.

After I wake up, I’ll look at your link above. Thanks in advance.

By: kiptw

kiptw — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:23:00 +0000

It’s possible, though I don’t know how offhand. Outlook’s a free download, I trust.

By: gracchus

gracchus — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:39:00 +0000

I doubt they’ll pull GMail anytime soon, but you can probably back up using POP and Thunderbird:
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/03/how-to-backup-gmail-using-thunderbird.html

I don’t know if it will archive it in “conversation” format, but it should capture what you need.

Google Takeout may also work better for Gmail than it did for Reader’s starred items.

By: teapot

teapot — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:07:00 +0000

Dont forget to leave flowers on the graves of your most dearly departed Google services:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html

(tongue-in-cheek grave for google glass is already dug)

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:08:00 +0000

I never trusted Evernote because of the privacy issues – they have to have cleartext access to your data so they can do things like format conversion, OCR, and audio transcription, and while they might have a Don’t Be Evil policy, it’s tougher to have a Don’t Get Subpoenaed policy. They do charge money for some services, unlike Google, so they probably don’t have the privacy issues about advertising, but there’s still risk.

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:58:00 +0000

Did you know you can sing f u th a r k to the usual alphabet song?

By: Egypt Urnash

Egypt Urnash — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:56:00 +0000

Let’s see. I have a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone. And I have two years of notes and bits and fragments in Evernote. And a paid subscription – not because I need any of the paid features, but because I want to make sure the servers keep running. I can even search for text in sketchbook pages full of scribbled story notes.

Google Keep, meanwhile, is free. But it only has an Android client. It seems to have some sort of half-assed hack to access your notes from the web via Google Drive. And a history of closing down stuff that never quite caught on.

The video of the client looks very colorful and Windows 8ish. I don’t think that’s a compelling argument to migrate from Evernote.

Iiii am thinking that Keep is going to be quietly closed down a year or three from now.

By: traalfaz

traalfaz — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:23:00 +0000

I’m reading this article on a Google Reader (RSS reader) clone that I’m writing, because I don’t like any of the alternatives and I realize that any of the services might go away at any time, or be filtering what I see or selling my data.

By: wilberfan

wilberfan — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:14:00 +0000

Trader Joe’s shoppers are well acquainted with this syndrome. Have a favorite (insert product here), and TJ’s will discontinue it after, oh, about 6 weeks following your discovery.

By: Ladyfingers

Ladyfingers — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:54:00 +0000

Save it as an Outlook PST?

By: Joel Emmett

Joel Emmett — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:49:00 +0000

As soon as a company gets big enough to not care about individual customers, they seem to undergo a shift where they regard ALL their customers as just another individual that they can afford to lose.

And then they act with institutional sociopathy.
My daughter still has nightmares over Disney closing down Virtual Magic Kingdom; she lost most of her friends. Disney killed them all, at once.

By: kiptw

kiptw — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:03:00 +0000

How can I back up my data from years of using GMail? I don’t want to be stuck with nothing when they decide to pull that away.

By: elusis

elusis — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:50:00 +0000

Exactly. I’d pay $5 or $10 a year to use Reader. But I’m not going to go read everything through G+ because [insert all the ways in which G+ is not an RSS feed reader].

Just found out yesterday that you can no longer leave reviews on Google Maps unless you want to do so with your “integrated” Google profile either. No, Google, I don’t want people searching for my professional identity to know that I complained about the crappy drive-through service at my local McDonald’s, thanks, because it would get in the way of what they’re looking for. Isn’t good search about narrowing results, not turning everything into a giant stew of indistinguishable results?

By: GlyphGryph

GlyphGryph — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:28:00 +0000

I realized this years ago when they killed off Notebook, which is still the best notekeeping tool for my own personal workflows I’ve ever used. I find evernote… frustrating, for example.

And why did they kill off notebook? To promote Google Wave. And then they killed off Wave!

I just assume at this point that any Google product I like is one that is doomed to die, and that it is better to avoid them completely.

By: chenille

chenille — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:31:00 +0000

On the other hand, if you weren’t a Reader user, it’s certainly good news for Google to stop spending money on stuff that isn’t important so they can focus on the stuff that is!

Maybe short term, but seeing a service ignore what its users want is never a good sign. Even if you only used Google+, the one thing they are sure to keep right now, it’s another warning they may well decide you have to use it differently.

By: Glenn Rice

Glenn Rice — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:31:00 +0000

Funny, I switched to Evernote because Google killed their Notebook service.

By: gerbalblaste

gerbalblaste — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:25:00 +0000

If the big unified messaging push many are expecting for Google IO flops, i expect Voice will be on the chopping block within 18 months.

By: Jonathan Badger

Jonathan Badger — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:24:00 +0000

It’s called Google Keep — of *course* they aren’t going to kill it — if they were, they’d call it Google Discard, wouldn’t they?

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:07:00 +0000

I mean, I am seriously looking at my over-reliance on the Google ecosystem, & figuring out how to disengage. Similarly, I’m not inclined to try out their new services, because– here is where they get into a no-win scenario– WHAT IF I LIKE THEM? If Google puts out a bad service, I won’t use it. If they put out a good service, I am concerned they’ll just trash it, so I won’t use it. Lose/lose.

By: Charlie McHenry

Charlie McHenry — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:57:00 +0000

Entirely agree. Then there’s Wave. Abandoned after a bunch of us had standardized on it. No trust left.

By: bkad

bkad — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:38:00 +0000

You’re certainly not alone, but I think the response to this is going to be personal. If you had an important service pulled out from under you, you certainly need to think about what you are trusting with Google. On the other hand, if you weren’t a Reader user, it’s certainly good news for Google to stop spending money on stuff that isn’t important so they can focus on the stuff that is!

But Fnordius is right, at the end of the day. You can’t trust the cloud. Unfortunately, you can’t trust local storage either, because if you aren’t burnt by DRM restrictions (e.g. ebooks), you can be burnt by old fashioned software obsolescence. I recently helped migrate a user with a 10 year old mac filled with Appleworks documents to a Windows PC — impossible to do perfectly, inconvenient and time consuming to do well.

The answer is to spend time and money having a plan for managing obsolescence, which will happen. Whether that means having another solution waiting for deployment, keeping good backups, or paying a lot of money to bind the vendor in contracts — that’s up to you.

By: Paul Parkinson

Paul Parkinson — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0000

I’m with Evernote and Dropbox for these reasons – I can grab my stuff back – painful for sure but do-able.

Gmail would be more complicated still but I think that one is a stay-er within the Google world view. I’m not using anything else of theirs to any great extent except, maybe, Maps.

I’ve now finished my OPML import to OldReader as a stop gap solution. I may go to Feedly (I’m trying that too) if they complete their server side solution. I would pay for that too…

I just need a reliable solution which won’t collapse if the company providing gets bored…