This one hurts because I recommended to and helped a number of business users to use Fusion tables as an alternative to building out something in-house.
It's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives.
> It's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives.
It would be really weird for them to do that, but the sentence you quote is immediately followed by a bulleted, annotated list of alternatives (stripped of descriptions, those listed are: Google BigQuery, Google Cloud SQL, Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, and an upcoming set of new map visualization tools that you can sign up for info about.)
Yes, I think it's fascinating! It seems to be a new euphemism for "shutdown" that they've been using (perhaps first internally?) for the past year or two.
It might be surprising to outsiders and perhaps it shouldn't spill out, but it's pretty normal lingo inside Google engineering. You turn up things (services, clusters, products) and later turn them down.
You are ascribing motives that don't exist. It's not double speak, if you're referring to 1984: it's just that "turning down" is the converse of "turning up". That's a fairly simple and straightforward explanation, no matter how unfortunate it turns out to be. Most of the time, it's used when an internal service moves: it turns up in X and turns down in Y. I'm not sure what your motives are, but I know that you're off mark here.
To expand on this a bit, it's likely that the etymology here is from SRE-land where they're dealing with turning up the resources for a service, and turn up is very similar to "spinning up", although inclusive of non-HDD resources.
There is a difference to me in turning down a service (you could turn it up again) and shutting down a service (not going to ever come back up (in the same incarnation.)) Even shuttering a service works.
Raymond Chen's excellent blog The Old New Thing has spent much time cataloging the weird permutation of English that has grown up among people at Microsoft, which he calls "Microspeak": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/microspeak
I'm guessing "turned down" is an emergent example of a new dialect, "Googlespeak."
Very sad about this. I was searching for a good online, collaborative database, where I can define clear schemas and provide certain views on it, for a small, public database a few friends and me are working on. Fusion Tables seemed to fit the bill as Google Sheets was basically too unstructured for this (basically I tried to find a free, collaborative, simple MS Access)
Airtable is almost exactly that: a collaborative, simple MS access. It's free for up to 1,200 records, then $10/user/month for more https://airtable.com/pricing
Thanks! I've considered it before but not sure anymore why I did not choose it. Though it probably relates to the fact that we are a small volunteer project with insecure funding (i.e. currently none) that tries to keep a records database of contact information up-to-date. This goes hand-in-hand with complex permission management/input controls (i.e. those listed should be able to submit a request for modification or for adding their record) and the possibility for integrating the result in a website. I don't think such integration tools are included in the free version
Try https://cloudbackend.appdrag.com
It's a serverless db (and API builder), with structured types and full sql support, also provide a cool UI, Visual SQL, an API and can be shared to co-workers.
You get 500 records for free and 50k records for $10/month (unlimited users)
Googling for airtable alternatives will pop up with dozens of others though who knows which will stay around. Airtable seems to have the mindshare to continue to be around.
Panoramio for me. Spent many hours uploading, locating and annotating photos from 30 years of photography. Many of which were of things that don't exist any more and of places most people didn't have access to. Never again Google.
It's better to rely on code-based data tools, like those I mentioned, than "experimental" Google projects that'll get "turned down" at the drop of a hat.
Even if you feel that way, could you please not post it on Hacker News, and instead comment civilly and substantively? This isn't the place uninformative inflammation.
What percentage market share does a Google product need to dip below to be culled? I was wondering this today when the G+ shutdown was accelerated - it was at 0.14%. Could this be used as an early warning sign?
I worked at Google for almost 10 years. In my experience, these end-of-life projects often get shutdown because nobody wants to work on them.
There are a ton of interesting projects at Google for people to work on, so people select for interesting things with potential high-impact. If a team can't be formed to own the product, maybe someone will volunteer to take care of it in their 20% time. But there are these company-wide mandates to move production systems from a storage system to a newer one, and a part-timer doesn't see the point of doing such thankless job.
Management can also play a role. If a VP wanted to support the product, it would get supported. But they use the basic heuristic as above ("is this an interesting project with high potential impact"). In this analysis a VP is just a proxy for 100 engineers making the same decision.
Whelp, there goes my laboratory updates repository. We were using each Google Fusion Table cell as a pre-formatted text-box which we could then sort and search. Does anyone know of any alternatives for this purpose? I made [a post](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/49546/2134) describing the requirements for what is essentially a "sortable and searchable pre-formatted text post publisher" and I keep running into related use cases.
It's a shame, but not a surprise. I used to teach Fusion Tables to journalists [0] as a gateway into the power of SQL/relationships. The merge functionality was an effective if watered-down version of a proper SQL join, but it got the point across in a way that VLOOKUP couldn't. But Fusion Tables's killer function was its integration with Google Maps. For novice users who couldn't build a simple HTML page to to save their lives, Fusion Tables was an incredible way to create a powerful interactive with data.
I stopped teaching FT because several years ago because it seemed clear, in an implicit way, that it wasn't getting the traction. I hardly ever heard anyone inside or outside of Google talk/tweet/etc about it, in the same way people do for Sheets or BigQuery. I missed the easy data-to-interactive-map workflow for teaching, but for production work, FT was just too clunky (and merge far too limited compared to a SQL join) to justify using as a data store.
Aww man, time to migrate my side-project. I used fusion tables essentially as a DB + Frontend. I scraped a bunch of review data on colognes / perfumes and sorted them based on sillage (projection) / longevity: http://fragrances.ziggymo.com/
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 95.3 ms ] threadIt's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives.
It would be really weird for them to do that, but the sentence you quote is immediately followed by a bulleted, annotated list of alternatives (stripped of descriptions, those listed are: Google BigQuery, Google Cloud SQL, Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, and an upcoming set of new map visualization tools that you can sign up for info about.)
Anyone else put off by the ridiculous use of "turned down" here? "Turned off", maybe.
A few other examples:
https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/announcing-turndown-...
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Deprec...
https://plus.google.com/+LesiaSliusarenkoCM/posts/AiyjSfWJjA...
I'm guessing "turned down" is an emergent example of a new dialect, "Googlespeak."
Maybe the “mint” with “turned down” saas apps would be the ability to export your data?
You get 500 records for free and 50k records for $10/month (unlimited users)
Other options - https://clickup.com/ https://www.obvibase.com/ https://www.caspio.com/ https://www.grubba.net/ https://sodadb.com/
Googling for airtable alternatives will pop up with dozens of others though who knows which will stay around. Airtable seems to have the mindshare to continue to be around.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are a ton of interesting projects at Google for people to work on, so people select for interesting things with potential high-impact. If a team can't be formed to own the product, maybe someone will volunteer to take care of it in their 20% time. But there are these company-wide mandates to move production systems from a storage system to a newer one, and a part-timer doesn't see the point of doing such thankless job.
Management can also play a role. If a VP wanted to support the product, it would get supported. But they use the basic heuristic as above ("is this an interesting project with high potential impact"). In this analysis a VP is just a proxy for 100 engineers making the same decision.
I stopped teaching FT because several years ago because it seemed clear, in an implicit way, that it wasn't getting the traction. I hardly ever heard anyone inside or outside of Google talk/tweet/etc about it, in the same way people do for Sheets or BigQuery. I missed the easy data-to-interactive-map workflow for teaching, but for production work, FT was just too clunky (and merge far too limited compared to a SQL join) to justify using as a data store.
[0] http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping...