Comments on: How long should we expect Google Keep to last?

By: Russell Letson

Russell Letson — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:04:00 +0000

I realize that there are people whose work and working methods are net-centric, and I understand why they would be upset to see useful tools and services vanish at the whim of their corporate proprietors. But I wonder why anyone would not at least maintain some kind of backup or alternate function for when such services are withdrawn–or suffer outages or crashes or data loss. I would no sooner leave my research files in the cloud (or depend on an on-line app) than I would leave my wallet on the bar when I go to the john.

Just to “situate” myself: I’ve been getting information on line since you had to stick a telephone handset into an acoustic modem. I’ve worked through the transition from mailing in typescripts to submitting stories as [insert current industry-standard WP format here] files. Perhaps half of the research data for a long-term (13-years-and-counting) book project originated as on-line data of some sort.

I’ve had to migrate document and data files to new applications and struggled to keep useful but “obsolete” tools and utilities operational across corporate absorptions, OS upgrades, product-lifetime horizons, withdrawal of support, and other tech evolutions, but they all reside inside my own working environment, which I maintain and (more important) own. (Y’know, Sidekick 98 still works. . . .) Huge changes in the internet itself (or the complete vanishment of Word Perfect) would be very upsetting, but as long as I can send an e-mail, print a document, and save a file (and convert formats), I’m still in business. Though a competent search engine has thoroughly spoiled me, despite my old-school library skills. (Lordy, could I ever tear through a card catalog or reference room!)

By: mat

mat — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:19:00 +0000

When will they understand that we just want to search with Google? Search for words, search for places, search for translations, end of. Don’t put all your peas in one pot seems to be a good philosophy that we follow without even thinking about it :)

By: Otakumom

Otakumom — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:59:00 +0000

I am REALLY going to miss Google Reader. First they take away the social aspects of it because they want us to use Google+, now they just want to get rid of it. I wish I could change their minds.

By: Jonathan Roberts

Jonathan Roberts — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:07:00 +0000

I am aware that some (most) bloggers don’t do it for money, I was just trying to work out who gains and loses from this system. It seems the reader is the person who gains the most, while I’d have thought Google gains through the loyalty of its users (who would probably be disproportionally vocal online). Even if the tool itself isn’t making them money, having something like this would be good for Google’s image at least. For smaller bloggers, the increased readership (from people who wouldn’t otherwise have time to follow them) would probably outweigh any losses, while the comment tracking tools you mentioned and the benefit to bloggers as readers themselves should be more than enough to make up the difference. I’m just surprised that I haven’t heard any complaints from the ‘definitely for profit’ groups such as newspapers or larger sites that have paid staff and obviously get a lot of their funding from advertising.

By: Carl Johnson

Carl Johnson — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 21:37:00 +0000

Well, for starters, some bloggers still don’t blog for money (I know, very 20th century of us). Also, RSS is great for things like tracking Flickr groups and comments, pending comments on my blogs, sites that rarely update but I still want to keep track of, and the real news sites, which I’d visit much LESS if I weren’t seeing headlines of interest in my RSS reader.

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:58:00 +0000

That’s only the average of the products they’ve killed – it doesn’t average in the lifetime of the products they haven’t killed.

By: pejotu

pejotu — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:32:00 +0000

[Hmm, can't seem to reply onto Stooge's comment below, so I'll put it here:]

:)
Well, I’m certainly not implying that.

I’m rather trying to point out the universal faulty language of referring to all these services as “free”.
As a point of principle, I think we must start making a distinction between genuinely free services, and those funded by selling data on us.
It should also become common practice for companies to state this.
Admittedly, I did a very poor job at this.

So, in any case, your point on refunds stands, as we are not even customers, rather just users.

By: Stooge

Stooge — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:55:00 +0000

I certainly assumed so, in fact my post was predicated on precisely that. Unfortunately I also assumed that it was widely known (or at least could be deduced) that the worth to Google of a single user is trivially small. In your case, alas, I erred.

By: TheKaz1969

TheKaz1969 — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:15:00 +0000

Good point. It may be foolish, but perhaps Google has something better in store, and they are really just bad at communicating rather than bad at judging what services people use..?

I can always hope. Afterall, Arrested Development came back! :)

By: pejotu

pejotu — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:16:00 +0000

Partially, sure, but abandoning RSS seems just idiotic to most of us here – the utility of it is just amazing compared to the alternatives.

And, for the life of me, I’m am seriously unable to understand how Google couldn’t monetize on users accessing 100′s of feeds (=sites and blogs) all through their Reader – isn’t this what their core is, hundreds of people accessing sites and blogs through their Search!?

By: pejotu

pejotu — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:12:00 +0000

Hmm, how about this – someone up to mapping official/blog posts and product changes on Google services, and using the frequency of those for predicting the next Google product to die? Might save us all a heap of trouble to see the downward trend ahead of time and just transfer to another product earlier! ;)

By: pejotu

pejotu — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:07:00 +0000

But wouldn’t the satisfying solution, for both company and customerss, be to improve the product so that it will actually bring in money, or failing that, elegantly transfer the users onto a new product?
Google+ has much of the structure to support a Reader-like structure (for example – ‘circle’ your feeds etc…) so the interface on it could surely have been implemented into a mix of both.

By: pejotu

pejotu — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:00:00 +0000

“Free” services mostly monetize themselves by selling yur data to to target advertising – isn’t this a known fact by now?

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:07:00 +0000

Yes, but…uh, an RSS feed reader would STILL provide them the best way of getting what is there for them? You don’t HAVE to load it up with hundreds of feeds.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:14:00 +0000

how do people even use the internet without a feed reader?

This will probably seem inconceivable(!), but the vast majority of internet users aren’t invested in the whole “constantly connected, unending stream of information” model. They come online, do what they’re there for, then leave. An RSS feed serves no purpose for them. RSS has always been primarily a geek toy.

By: TheKaz1969

TheKaz1969 — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:30:00 +0000

Maybe I am wrong, but this whole thing to me sounds like people feeling jilted. It seems like everyone saying, “Fox cancelled Arrested Development, so I am never going to watch Fox again!” and then we all tuned in to watch The Simpsons the next week…

By: Adnan Doric

Adnan Doric — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 11:13:00 +0000

netvibes does all of this in browser and is way better then google reader imho. I don’t use readers on mobile so no idea if it is available.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 06:04:00 +0000

They don’t offer it because the vast majority of Internet users have no interest in using such services when offered by an ISP.

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 01:51:00 +0000

Yes, & my point is there are other X, too, where X is any service that Google provides. Why invest in an unstable ecosystem?

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 01:50:00 +0000

Like watching TV without a DVR.

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 01:50:00 +0000

Weird; I guess I just read more than 4 websites. Is only reading 4 websites “normal”?

By: Jonathan Roberts

Jonathan Roberts — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 01:22:00 +0000

I read BoingBoing on Google Reader with my Android phone. You have the headline and first paragraph to read through, then you can click through to the text with pictures from the article but no ads. If you want to see the comments you can click the link at the bottom to see just the comments without the article (and still without ads). There is a link to the main site, but unless you actually want to comment you can read everything without seeing any ads. I don’t know if it’s China, my phone or BB (probably China), but I can’t use the comment box that’s in the comment section itself.

By: Damien

Damien — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:16:00 +0000

That average figure is close to four years (two days short if you count leap-years).
To be fair, many of the products that were dropped weren’t that great, and the better features were integrated into related products.
When you look at the upgrade cycle of most software, and even a lot of hardware (looking at you Apple), four years is doing pretty well.

By: fencepost

fencepost — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:44:00 +0000

The question that concerns me is how long Google is going to let Google Voice live. Last official news on it is almost a year old (not counting “get a call from Santa” in December), it’s been much longer than that since there were significant improvements or changes, and performance (at least in terms of the Android app) has dropped through the floor – if you can listen to more than the first 0:01 (1 second) of a message on mobile without 3+ clicks on Play you’re a lucky soul, and transcription availability is worse than that.

And of course, Google Voice turned 4 on March 11, 2013 (based on their 2011 2-year birthday post). We’re on borrowed time.

By: Steve Clark

Steve Clark — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:29:00 +0000

do you still use your vhs?

By: Steve Clark

Steve Clark — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:26:00 +0000

I concur. Feedly blows at this point. its just way too slow to go through my 500+ articles

By: Steve Clark

Steve Clark — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:26:00 +0000

Google reader works well with IE6

By: Shadow Firebird

Shadow Firebird — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:16:00 +0000

“how long should we expect…” != “how long is it likely to…”

I have no idea how long it will last, but I think we should expect about a month.

By: Dominic Wrapson

Dominic Wrapson — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:41:00 +0000

Pretty sure this is what Twitter is for..? When used with the likes of Tweetdeck, or Seesmic. These are all either standalone, or operate in a single tab, and all have mobile versions. Heck, you can just use m.twitter.com. You can’t get the whole first paragraph necessarily, but a link, maybe an image, and a few words about it are all I need to assess whether or not I wanna click through. You can organise by groups, you can filter all you like. It’s RSS but punchier. Writers/developers have to put in a little more work (as they can’t have content subscribed and auto delivered like RSS allows) but there are many sites around that will auto-push updates when you post something on your blog/site. http://ifttt.com being one of the best.

By: VeryRealEmail

VeryRealEmail — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:28:00 +0000

The point is you can still use your NeXT computer, even if Steve Jobs still isn’t building them.