I think it's interesting to note here that despite Facebook, Google, and Twitter's best intentions, new social networks grow faster today than ever before. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat exploded in a manner of weeks.
It also shows the opportunity for a new open standard to emerge very quickly. The timing feels right. The battleground seems to be photo sharing this time, not links.
There was a great post a few weeks back here about why whatsapp, viber et al had such a dramatic growth. Basically, the hypothesis was these apps have access to the entirety of the user's contact data on their phones, which allows them to reconnect with our friends automatically (or fallback to sms/email). Ironically, I think this is something where Google+'s circles could come in very useful for us (meaning, normal users): if Google stopped pushing Plus as an end goal unto itself and instead started integrating it at a lower level in android and provide APIs accessible to other websites, it could have massive privacy and usability advantages for us. Cyanogenmod is doing something similar, but I think they're implementing it as a everything-or-nothing switch for apps. Providing more granularity (and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed) is something that's sorely needed if we want to move away from facebook's monopoly on our social graph.
>and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed
I should hope they got circles right as it was the most obvious thing in social networking ever. 30 seconds into my very first usage of facebook and I already realized it was missing what google calls "circles".
WhatsApp and Snapchat are examples of growing by doing the exact opposite thing of twitter: make a useful service for all of us who doesn't want the world to know about our every move but still have group chats with 10-20 people at a time. They also tell us up front how they are going to make money. They have earned my trust despite of their authentication issues a while back,
- and, unlike twitter they have a lot of space to move in (pay for api access anyone? Voluntarily subscriptions to feeds? )
You'd think they could at least have slowly integrated Reader with their G+ vision rather than alienating a good portion of the users who have championed them for years.
They did slowly integrate some parts of Reader into Google+ and it was met with resistance.
Google+ Sparks was a kind of RSS/StumbleUpon thing. Flopped.
Reader sharing became sharing into Google+. Many in the Reader crew defiantly cried out against it and said they wouldn't share things if they had to use Google+ to do it.
It wouldn't have been all roses no matter how you cut it.
I think people are in the bargaining phase of dealing with their post-Reader era grief.
No, I don't think so. The web at its core has to remain open, and it does allow for spam, but I don't see the whole web getting locked down anytime soon.
I also don't know if I'd call it an attitude but more an alignment towards the actual situation. Many have compared the various services mentioned to AOL and the walled garden, but they all still thrive on open, crawlable, & indexed links.
I've been humming and harring on starting a decentralized RSS based social network idea I've had bugging me for awhile, probably two years now. There where a few of these around 2007 and Facebook brought them out and shut them down.
But I'm hearing the same complaint all over the place, so I'm starting to think I might not be alone.
I've just been put off by the idea that maybe I'm an outsider and people don't want that, and it'll be months of work potentially for nothing. Maybe I should start some thing even if I just hand it off. I dunno, would love to see what the thirst is out there.
Creating openness is not good enough. There were business reasons to support every long lasting open technology, and with the dominance of proprietary social media platforms, that business reason (for RSS at least) is dead.
The web opened up e commerce, and modern social media lowered the barrier to entry for online communities.
Its the same problem cryptography has, if its not dead simple and obviously useful don't expect it to stick around (at least at mass appeal)
Yeah I was looking forward to reading through what he thought could be done to try and turn the tide on the issue, but to essentially just write 'fuck y'all' kinda made it feel like someone rambling on.
I was thinking "this is a great analysis and inspiring call to arms, I can't wait to see what Marco's proposing". Then I scrolled down and realised the call to arms was "keep doing what you're doing". Um.
Yes, the "fuck you" and the last paragraph are definitely anti-climatic. You do not need such a post to say that. Of course, Larry stated very clearly that if something does not help + then something must disappear...
> Then you spend twice as much time figuring out how to deal with poorly crafted feeds, ambiguities, and edge cases — especially for Atom, which is a huge, overengineered pain in the ass
Funny: that's what most people said of RSS 0.x (poorly crafted), 1.x (over-engineered) and 2.x (ambiguous and full of badly-specified edge-cases). Atom was supposed to fix all that.
I hope he's wrong, because I hope Google wasn't so stupid.
My usage patterns/goals/content/etc on G+ are nothing like they are with {my new RSS reader}. In fact, I'm looking at unsubscribing from all but my smallest communities because the big linux distro and android based communities are overrun with individuals spamming religious, political, and just random personal images in them.
The gravitational pull of Google, Facebook, and Twitter is just too big. If you're a business and not creating content on those sites these days you aren't getting noticed. So you cater all of your activities towards their locked-in APIs and you don't have resources to maintain an RSS feed nobody uses.
As long as content continues to be centralized in those three companies interop is toast.
Between your post and the author's, I feel like we're talking past each about what the above two phrases mean.
First of all, what do you call a "locked-in API"? I would imagine it'd be an API written in a proprietary language or only works on certain systems or browsers. Personally, I haven't seen that from any of the mentioned companies. Afaik, most of Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's API work on any browser available, any computer that can run those browsers, including mini-computers and smartphones, even some dumb phones. Where's the lock-in? The fact that you put your data in their databases? The fact that there isn't a single format shared between each?
About interoperability being "toast," to what extent? I could probably point you to a large amount of websites and web services that have integration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sometimes all at the same time. Sounds like that they can operate together to me. Perhaps, you want them to provide integration between each other?
If Facebook or Google provides an API that's not an open standard, you're locked-in because the day they decide to remove the API, or to charge high prices, or deprecate a crucial feature, you can't switch easily to another platform.
Does maintaining an RSS feed require a lot of resources? I suppose it depends on what you're talking about specifically. Once you set up RSS it doesn't require much at all to maintain.
I agree that Facebook started a "war", but I don't think any of these companies want to "close us in" any more than they did when they first started. Sure, you can look at the closing of Google Reader as the antithesis of openness and RSS but you'd somehow seem to miss that Google, Facebook, and Twitter still support a lot of APIs that promote openness and interoperability. Actually, they continue to release more and more APIs as do other startups (i.e. Github).
Openness and interoperability aren't going away, they're merely being refined. That might mean taking away the hacker's toy for a bit while some kinks get worked out (i.e. Google's Jabber issue and the switch to Blink). It might also mean that we live in a monoculture for a while (Webkit). But regardless, the web is steadily improving and no matter how much you all try to spin it, RSS and Google Reader really aren't the martyrs you claim them to be. It sucks that even a successful product can be mercilessly shut down by the evil Google tyrants, but it shouldn't be surprising at all.
Sometimes companies make decisions that hurt a part of their user base for some perceived benefit for other users. Did Google fuck up by closing Reader? Probably. But it's not the end of the world.
Of course they want to close us in. Or, more technically, they feel commercially compelled to do so.
There are only so many eyeballs, and right now being very sticky is an obviously viable strategy for dominance. Google didn't get into phone operating systems because they knew or cared much about them. They did it because their revenue base was under long-term threat. (Hell, Google is trying experiments to see if they can get in front of your actual eyeballs, intermediating your entire waking life.) And Facebook tried taking over people's phones for exactly the same reason.
Talk to the Googlers who have left over the last few years, and you'll hear very clearly that things have changed internally.
What you're saying is that a company wants you to use their product and no one else's. Sure, that's how companies work. They aren't compelled to allow anyone from the outside to contribute. This is not closing us in. Unless I'm missing something, people are still able to choose the applications they install and use on their mobile phones, and I don't see that as a lock-in in the slightest. I understand the internal changes that have happened over the years at Google, but to say that Google no longer supports or does not plan to support openness or interoperability is either the word of a prophet or Google Reader-inspired sensationalism.
You're misreading what you quoted. I'm telling you that the company that sells you milk doesn't want you to drink anyone else's milk because that's how businesses work. They might sell some cheese too, but they also don't want you eating anyone's else's cheese. Also, perhaps that is one of the founding ideas of capitalism, but our modern day version is far away from that. Capitalism screws people over by the day in America.
Internet is such a big space (unlike milk) that if an Internet-company wants you to use their Internet-stuff and no-one else's Internet-stuff .. well, I don't know what will happen, but it can't be good.
Capitalism screws people over by the day in America
I am saying that Google's commitment to openness has declined substantially over the years, and that this is due to their interpretation of the commercial context.
The problem is that you are depending on commercial entities for basic Internet infrastructure: search, social graph & newsfeed, and real time communications.
These companies' goals are not necessarily aligned with goals of an interoperable Internet. This has been repeated over and over again: Twitter locking down its API, the percentage of ads on Google search, lack of privacy on Facebook, etc...
You probably need open source/Wikipedia style alternatives to prevent abuse. They don't have to replace the commercial ones, just provide counterbalance. I think people have tried to create open versions of Twitter, Facebook, and possibly Google but they haven't succeeded.
Wikipedia is an outlier in that it is a non-commercial service versus primarily being code or protocols. Services have ongoing costs which make it much harder for non-commercial entities to survive.
Isn't it the same strategy Apple has been played all the time for its OS? And looks like Marco Arment has been enjoying it quite a lot? There is no freedom in terms of interoperability in your daily system and suddenly you are mad at "losing it"?
This seems to be a common snark whenever someone known for (gasp) using Apple products complains about lack of openness. Because clearly these two things are connected, except for the part about them not being connected at all. (Frankly I have no idea what "no freedom in terms of interoperability in your daily system" even means. What is it my Mac and iPad are failing to interoperate with?)
If I construct a popular online social network, I could run it on Debian, code it in Emacs, have all the source code on Github, genuflect to a picture of Richard Stallman daily, and still have no open APIs for users to interact with their data. If most major players on the Internet lock your data down, then many common uses of the Internet will in a very real sense become proprietary even if it is running entirely on free software.
I'm sure it's fun to smugly go "well, you use iOS so you should like closed things," but it kinda betrays a significant distance between you and the point.
Really? "What is it my Mac and iPad are failing to interoperate with"? Can you share your iCloud stuff with others not using Mac system?
Marco was blaming Google/Twitter/Facebook locking down devs/users in their own eco-system and your point is you get the interoperability within Apple's own garden? Come on.
BTW, you give a perfect example of what being hypocrite looks like. Sure, you can enjoy your time by hosting a closed service on top of open source infrastructure, that's hypocrite. You can also enjoy your time in a closed eco-system ever since from day 1 with absolutely no interoperate and still manage to find way to fuck those closed web based eco-system. That's also hypocrite.
Interoperate means what? Choice and competition. I see no spirit of either in Apple's eco-system. And somehow Marco always find a way to blame other companies for that.
Why does HN continue to think that companies on the web who give their services to millions of users away for free (please don't repeat the you are the product being sold meme), are entitled to direct said companies to keep any project you deem useful around for as long as you deem it important (to said $RANDOM_MILLION_USER)?
With a userbase the size of Google there will be millions of people complaining about removing every single product they've ever released. Google isn't the Oracle of the world where Oracle releases a product, charges you out the wazoo, gives you 24/7 support and only enter the market of said product after researching if it is a good business investment or not. Google is the one who experiments, tests, lets you use for free, and either retires or promotes projects which turn out to be good for the company (either tech wise, or to the dismay of HN money wise). That's their MO.
Google and Facebook allow you to export your data for most of their services, and I think we can all agree that Google at least are good at giving users a fair amount of heads up before they sunset a product (or should we call it an experiment?).
It seems the prevailing notion on HN anymore is once you are a big company (bad), any service you offer the internet no matter how long ago, should be kept around indefinitely, because you are a big company (bad) and you now make a lot of money (bad). Therefore you should let everyone free ride on your platform so that fellow (broke) startups can bootstrap themselves off your prior work (good). But once said (good, broke) startups start making lots of cash, they will then become (bad) and fall into the same category of other (bad) internet giants.
Because of trust. When Google started reader, and more importantly, when they put the sign out front saying "come hither for a hassle free web RSS client that keeps a backup of all the feeds you visit even if they go down and everyone said "hells yeah" because it was from a web supergiant and those don't very often go under since 2001.
So we got dependent. And they pulled the rug out. People only got dependent on the assumption it would be persistent. Google's entire business is making things that don't make them money but give them more avenues for ads. And your freaking news feed from Google is the best place I can imagine for targeted advertising and to figure out a users browsing habits. My emails are stuffed with spam, my google searches could be anyone, but you can reliably say I'm browsing my reader feeds and I'm interested in the articles I am opening and those are the ultimate target for advertising.
I'd say something about how social networks factor in, but I don't use any them (or Twitter) so I could care less. But I highly doubt that Google got its desired outcome from killing Reader - they lost a vast swathe of technical users and lost confidence from even more, and they won't see these people move over to consuming content on Google Plus because they don't give a crap how many dog treats the neighbors dog ate yesterday, they care about xkcd strips or gamasutra article feeds. You get a wall of shit on Google+ that you can at least curate in the RSS world. Why I would ever want to use it I have no idea. If I want to talk or interact with people, I'll use XMPP or SMTP. If I want to consume textual or image based media with consistent publication, I'll use RSS. Notice how I keep quoting protocols - because they are open and interoperable. I can expect other people to be ably to reliably target said protocols and distribute their content to anyone that wants it because you have a myriad of tools to access them. That share on G+ button only works with G+, and like the article said, Google wants you stuck on their services.
So I switched the default search engine on my grandparents, mother, cousins, and neighbors to duckduckgo. I'm looking for free web email services that compete with gmail to drop that too, because who knows when Google will rip that rug out from under us as well. "Why are you sending emails? Just send G+ messages! You are all on G+ right? It is expensive to keep a copy of all those email attachments!"
The issue here isn't so much entitlement, as it is interoperability. And, ironically, I think Marco's assessment is that, from a game-theoretic-approach, what Facebook/Twitter/Google are doing, in locking down their environments, and making sure that user (meta)data isn't easily accessible from outside the ecosystem, is entirely logical.
He just doesn't want to play that game.
His article is a call to action, basically saying, "If we want an open web, we'll have to (continue to) build it."
> "If we want an open web, we'll have to (continue to) build it."
That should be totally obvious to everyone. The web was nice and open when ads ruled the world, but now companies -- the same ones that pay our salaries either directly or by proxy -- have to make money to pay those salaries in ways that aren't display ads.
Google/FB/Twitter/etc have plenty of ways to get data out of their systems via API. If you don't want to use a proprietary API to get the data out then don't put the data in proprietary systems.
You want an open web? Great. I'll make a response that's common in f/oss: submit a patch. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to do. I don't mean to be too snarky, but stuff like this grinds my gears:
> That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them...
Right, right, they stood on the shoulders of giants and whatever. But guess what, your curated news feeds and carefully cultivated twitter feeds and everything else -- they all cost someone somewhere something to build, money or time or both, and without that world to build on, you wouldn't have them.
I would have paid for it. They didn't ask. Because the problem here is not them making a product choice, it's them blatantly not giving a shit.
Also, I hate, hate, hate this line of argument. It gets trotted out every time an immensely powerful corporation does something that upsets people. It's universal applicability makes it universally pointless.
My friends aren't entitled to anything from me either. But if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch, and I am perfectly fine with that.
> if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch
This never happened. It's more like, "if I decide to stop showing up because it no longer benefits me and give my friends a month's notice, they're going to bitch." Sure, that's true, but it seriously doesn't make you evil or mean the end of all friendships ever like Marco would make it seem. It just doesn't work like that.
Also, If something is universally applicable, it might have a nugget of truth somewhere, by the way.
If I had my own discussion site, I'd permaban anyone who used that fucking word.
Unless someone is demanding legislation to force Google to keep Reader alive, stop with the entitlement bullshit. We are entitled to dislike business models and approaches, we are entitled to criticize them, and we are entitled to not use projects from companies which follow them.
Edit: If you did, and that's your takeaway, I think you started with a predefined notion about its content. Please read it again and try to forget about reader. Reader is not the point. (I'm not the author btw ;)
The GP complains about the entitlement directed towards the shutdown of Reader. The OP complains about the word entitlement being used at all and I agree with him, except that the GP is right that no one is entitled to Reader. I then go on to say that people should stop complaining about it.
I think the type of entitlement the OP is talking about goes far beyond your examples. It's one think to dislike a company and criticize its decisions, but it's another thing entirely to say they have an "ethical responsibility" to keep old products alive, which some in this thread are doing. Google owes you nothing as a user and your more then welcome to leave their platform as I'm sure a statistically insignificant amount of people did after Reader got shut down.
It's more about companies taking an open platform, co-opting it's userbase with a good solution, and then kill or stagnate the platform in one way or another...
Microsoft did something similar with IE back in the day: it was better than Netscape and it quickly dominated, but then they kept adding proprietary hooks (ActiveX etc) and the open web started to stagnate - until Firefox saved the day with a faster, more secure alternative that slowly gained back hard-won market share.
I don't think this phenomenon of hurting open platforms is necessarily intentional, perhaps it's a side-effect near-monopoly products in a given space.
It is worth noting that Google did not start charging a monthly fee for Reader. If they had, I suspect the vast majority of users - including API users - would have gladly paid for it. Rather, they pulled the plug completely, and the only reason they did that was because they simply did not give a shit. It was an utterly disrespectful thing to do to users who came to rely on the service.
There's also the fact that Reader crushed most of its competition after it came out[1]. It was like a Walmart that opened smack in the middle of a town - none of the smaller shops could compete with it and they closed. In the case of Reader, this was okay with most people, since it was free at the time. But then Google said, "welp, this isn't making us any money" and shut it down. Too bad the noteworthy competitors were long gone by then. That's the absurdity of this whole thing.
To go back to the Walmart example, it's like a Walmart that comes into town, forces the smaller shops to close, and then leaves town a few years later. Where will the townspeople do their shopping now?
I know it isn't a perfect analogy, but I think it is accurate enough to get the point across: if you come out with a free service and end up displacing everyone else in the market, then you have an ethical responsibility to at least try to continue the service in some shape or form. Start charging for it and explain why you are doing it. Some may complain but most will understand and agree to pay since they have come to appreciate it and rely on it. Or serve ads, somehow. But whatever you do, don't just shut it down citing lack of profits. Because that just makes you look like a tool.
[1]Interestingly enough, while I was searching past HN submissions to find that story, I came across this one from 4 years ago, titled "Is Google Reader next on the chopping block?" The article itself seems gone but the comments are still there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435555. The comments themselves are chilling, but even more so because of their similarities to the ones on the more recent "With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?" submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434021
> if you come out with a free service and end up displacing everyone else in the market, then you have an ethical responsibility to at least try to continue the service in some shape or form
This is exactly the kind of entitlement the OP mentions. Also, how would you know your product you wanted to release was going to displace everyone in the market? Does this apply only to large companies or is it small shops as well? What if they lose interest or what if they lost users when they add this magically and universally loved paid solution? There is no such ethical responsibility and they shouldn't be because it is ridiculous. Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.
>>Also, how would you know your product you wanted to release was going to displace everyone in the market? Does this apply only to large companies or is it small shops as well?
This is a funny question because I thought I was very clear in my original post. I said with great power comes great responsibility. The kind of great power I am talking about here is the kind Google has as one of the world's largest (read: richest) and most influential tech giants.
>>Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.
This is ironic, because Google Reader was shut down not because it cost Google any noticeable amount of money to operate, but because it didn't fit some Google exec's ideological vision. The precedence I'm trying to establish is at least ethical in the sense that it puts the well-being of users first.
>>The precedence I'm trying to establish is at least ethical in the sense that it puts the well-being of users first.
Companies have a responsibility to put the desires of their owners first, and as a public company that generally means profits. This is hardly an ideological vision, but more of a long term business plan, and even if reader was costing them nothing to maintain it still doesn't fit that plan.
Ok, so it's just if Google does it then, because they are the only ones with "great power?" Although "with great power comes great responsibility" is a cool catch line, it's extremely nebulous, especially as presented. What you are saying is that if any company provides a widely used product, say like Instapaper, they are ethical mandated to continue providing it, etc. Why would I create something for fun then, if I'm morally obligated to dedicate to it in the off chance it becomes popular? When can products close down?
Also, your solution is hardly more ethical than theirs, even if it puts the "well-being" of users first. It's just more binding than what already exists. In my opinion, it was perfectly ethical that Google gave its users a good head's up to the situation and that they even provide a way to find other services that might replace Reader. It's not like it randomly stopped existing one day or like they promised it would always be there. No moral code was broken and no ethics or rights were trampled on. It just sucks and you have every right to be upset. To be a proponent of "you either support it forever in some way or you're (ethically? morally?) evil" isn't really helping though.
>>What you are saying is that if any company provides a widely used product, say like Instapaper, they are ethical mandated to continue providing it, etc. Why would I create something for fun then, if I'm morally obligated to dedicate to it in the off chance it becomes popular? When can products close down?
If you want to close down a product, you can at least open-source it. Which is another thing Google could have done with Reader. It would have given another party the opportunity to pick it up and develop/maintain it.
Honestly, I would be surprised if this wasn't definitely considered by Google before closing Reader. The thing is, when the tool is so closely tied in to Google's internal infrastructure, it would take a large effort to open-source it. IMO, it probably wasn't worth the trouble.
Nope. It's more like Googlewater came into town, made a great deal with the mayor to run the water service. Then poisoned the well and left town. Now no one trusts tap water, but Googlewater is more than happy to sell you bottled water from their vending machines.
Even though it's possible for another watercompany to come in and clean up the well, too many people distrust well water, and hell, all the cool kids are now drinking bottled Googlewater.
No, they don't distrust RSS/Atom, they distrust any service that springs up to provide Reader like services. For users who have multiple devices, Reader was an incredibly easy way to sync state. Whether other companies can be profitable providing similar services remains to be seen.
Stripped down to essentials, this would be an online list of URLs, with appropriate auth (and maybe some representation of when something was read?). Such a service couldn't serve adds, but it wouldn't cost as much to run as a G-Reader or NewsBlur. Actually, if the clients were smart enough the described service could just be another RSS feed, which would take pushes from clients rather than polling sites. Either clients or other servers could then integrate this "read" feed with the other feeds.
This separation of concerns makes it clear that more than one trust issue is implicated. I think you're saying that users might distrust a service's permanence (frankly all services should be suspect on this point), but it seems other users might distrust a service's discretion with their reading habits. By separating this aspect of RSS consumption from all others, so that e.g. the really paranoid could just run their own service, everybody would be able to arrange a suitable situation.
Let's not get too carried away here. It's about doing the same thing we've been doing for the history of the web. Hackers will continue to hack on stuff and find holes, etc, etc. Content curators will get use to APIs and integrate these services into their own. As it has always been. There's no fight to be had, only some latent bitterness over Google Reader and RSS and privacy.
People used to like, if not love Google because they were about the free and open web. Many hackers would openly evangelize Google products and services because they were such a great company. Moves like this make it clear that they're becoming ever more concerned with the corporate agenda (pushing G+ in this case) than the hacker spirit.
One issue in this specific case might be that Google has way more than enough money to keep Reader alive, whereas many people on HN see their own startups fail due to financial troubles, and if they do make it to an exit their products are often killed by acquihires. Wealth is wasted on the wealthy and all that.
It feels like a betrayal because we thought Google shared our values. Really I don't think this is about entitlement at all. Using that word in this context amounts to shaming people about the anger they feel over a breach of trust. Entitlement is more like having your parents fly in to demand the university raise one of your grades so you can get in to medical school.
Ok, so the particular value I'm thinking of is don't kill off tools that a broad spectrum of hackers and non-hackers alike care about unless truly necessary. There are obviously shared values besides that one, and it's unrealistic to paint any organization as all good or all bad.
>Moves like this make it clear that they're becoming ever more concerned with the corporate agenda (pushing G+ in this case) than the hacker spirit.
The frustrating thing for some of us was that this is how it has always been and trying to point it out to people just got you shouted down. Google has always been about making money, what else? Watching otherwise intelligent hackers get so genuinely bamboozled by a simple motto has been surprising, to say the least.
Yeah, it's not a new thing, but I wouldn't say always. Like many of us I've been using Google for its entire lifetime. The motto got introduced at around the halfway mark in 2005 or 2006 if I remember correctly. That was also the time the censorship in China scandal erupted. I think before this there was less concern about their motivations, but I may just be misremembering.
I've been around for the whole lifetime as well and what I remember was technical people gushing all over google for every little thing. I don't remember when the motto came out but I remember that being the point where I knew I didn't like google anymore: to me that sort of thing is just blatant manipulation, which is intelligence-insulting.
We're on the same page. Honestly I'm not even that upset about Reader, I mean it's hardly a surprise.
I looked it up and they announced the motto with the IPO in 2004. Sometimes I think I compare their actions now to my expectations of the pre-IPO company; it doesn't really make sense.
Well, there is making money and making money. What's particularly frustrating and different about this one is that they used to be smart about it, but now they have deliberately destroyed a useful service with a fanatical following in favor of corporate buzzword dream that so far appears to be dead on arrival just like its two predecessors. A few years before that, they made a name making money off of something that actually was useful and disruptive.
Are you even responding to the article? Because it seems like you've completely missed the point.
This is a discussion of the trend we increasingly see of big companies abandoning interoperability in favor of their own locked down protocols, APIs, etc. That's why the article is titled "Lockdown".
Marco nailed it with his closing statement: "We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership."
If you're arguing against that, honestly, I'm going to straight up now call you wrong.
Sorry, that's a cheap shot. This isn't about entitlement or whether services are free or paid, or even about Google reader specifically, and it's certainly not related to entitled users on HN.
From the article:
That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.
He's talking about whether we should accept the ongoing corralling of the web into walled gardens where there is one gatekeeper and landowner, and everyone else producing goods for the public is a sharecropper, and the public can only buy what's on offer - take it or leave it. There's a real danger in building or living inside the walls of these corporate communities (twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever Apple's equivalent to eWorld is called these days). The tension between large corporations and their users (free or not) is of course as old as the hills, but that doesn't mean we should give in to their latest attempts to lock users into one ecosystem that they control.
This instinct is why Apple prevents Amazon from selling on its iOS platform, why Amazon wants to be the world marketplace for everything, why Facebook encourages people to put their online lives exclusively behind a FB login, and why Google wants to channel everything through G+ and require an account for any activity on the web. It's a natural instinct for corporations, but not one we should accept or buy into.
There is something to your last statement, in that this behaviour seems to be tied to the size of a corporation - once it grows to a certain size, priorities inevitably change, the staff changes, and the drive to seek rent from customers and partners becomes overwhelming. So in a sense this is a natural cycle that it's difficult or impossible for companies to avoid. That doesn't meant that we as customers and developers should acquiesce to the brave new world, and start building our products or lives around services like reader - as many have found out this week, that's a bad strategy, because large corporations don't really care about the service, or the value to users, all they care about is the lock-in.
That means we can happily use these services, but should always remember they may be withdrawn by fiat, and never build a business on them - for example if you build your company dependent on a twitter, FB or G+ login, don't be surprised in a few years when they start to charge for the privilege of growing on their land. The open web is a better place to build in my opinion, it's hard to get started, but infinitely more rewarding to have your own space, as a reader or as a developer.
> [...] they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely [...]
It's very hard not to think of Apple when reading this sentence.
This article is about openness and interoperability, not about spying or government agencies - not sure your analogy stands. Plus, I think it's a pretty well known fact that Marco is indeed a sympathiser of Apple (hence the "conspicuously missing" bit).
Well, for once I agree with Marco. But I find it a little strange coming from him - he seemed to care not much about it at all when making his apps exclusive to Apple's locked down, ultra closed platforms.
Sure he didn't do an app for Android (until someone did for him) and is a bit snarky about it as a platform, but the web version of Instapaper existed before the app did and powered the whole thing.
Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in).
His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related, but he's originally (and still) a PHP web guy.
> Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in).
He discussed that at some point, I think it might have been on Accidental Tech Podcast. As I remember the idea was that since The Magazine wasn't terribly important (security wise) he could avoid having to give people another username/password. He said it was something of an experiment and he probably wouldn't do it again. I think Casey and Siracusa both said they found it odd and confusing at first.
The web is a different animal. We can have closed operating systems and hardware (gaming consoles, for example) coexist with the inherently open nature of the web.
Whether you agree or disagree with the piece, I think it's perhaps more interesting to try to put together the clues about Marco's next project.
My guess would be something like a new publishing standard or system that makes it easy to package good writing into an immersive mobile form, possibly via Newsstand. But just spitballin' here.
I've come up with a charitable interpretation of Google shutting down Reader. And I am not known for being charitable toward Google.
I just have a gut feeling that shutting down Reader may have made life easier for Google when it comes to National Security Letters, subpoenas, warrants or whatever. Turning over a list of what someone has read, does seem a bit evil.
Maybe I am being naive in attributing a positive motivation to them on this issue. But it just feels more plausible in light of the backlash of negative feelings the shutdown has created, who harbors such feelings, and the rather trivial resources required to maintain the service.
If they were turning over logs from Reader - and why wouldn't they have been requested - what options would Google have? Carry on or shutdown or lawyer up, are about it.
Would the backlash when such a practice was disclosed be less than that for shutting down Reader? I doubt it. People who didn't use Reader, like me, don't care about its shutdown. But I'd probably be full of condemnation and brimstone when commenting on a story about Google turning over reading lists to the government.
This seems extremely unlikely to me. While would be Orwellian to hand over a list of what someone has read, it pales beside handing over their private chats, emails and social graph.
If the NSA is getting as much data as we expect, then they can get people's reading lists from their ISPs. So Google shutting down Reader wouldn't have kept much of anything out of federal hands.
Further, if Google had a sudden attack of nobility, then it would be Gmail or Google Voice that they'd be shutting down. That's where the real private information is, and that's what most people are angry about. Not what a small fraction of Google's audience gets in their daily papers.
However, Apple doesn't really make claims about openness (apart from a brief marketing push around OSX 10.2), whereas Twitter's success came from liberal access to its API and Google makes a big deal out of its openness.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until developers stop chasing a big payday, and follow their principles instead. Unfortunately, principles don't feed your family or put a roof over their head.
It's always easy to spout how we need to push forward open standards, but what we've seen instead is developers falling over themselves to develop for Apple and Facebook. The very people who are needed to push forward the open web are the very same people who spend their time and energy expanding the every growing empire of closed ecosystems.
It's ironic though, that this post is coming from Macro. He hates Chrome (open source and free software) and uses Safari. He hates Android (open source and free software) and uses and develops for iOS.
Chrome is Chromium with Flash and a proprietary PDF reader. "A ton of proprietary code" isn't an accurate statement. You are also free to use Chromium (100% open source and free software), like I do.
You didn't say Chromium. You said Chrome. The parent's point is absolutely true, and really you have no idea what proprietary code Google has in the close-source (even if derived from open source) Chrome. It isn't a good example of an alternative, especially how deeply it tries to push Google services.
> and really you have no idea what proprietary code Google has in the close-source
On my Arch Linux, I use Chromium with a separate PDF reader and I don't use Flash. I suggest everyone do the same. For all intents and purposes, you will be using Chrome.
> especially how deeply it tries to push Google services.
Can you clarify what you are talking about? You can login with your Google account if you want tab sync etc. If you don't, you don't have to.
> For all intents and purposes, you will be using Chrome.
But you aren't. You are using Chromium.
> Can you clarify what you are talking about?
Google's AppStore, and their Apps on the new tab page (I forget if they had anything installed by default). Honestly, I don't feel like setting up a fresh install of Chrome to check. But you could answer your own question by doing this.
The point is, he has open source and free alternatives to Safari, that are equally good or arguably better. If he really cares about openness, I wonder why it hasn't influenced his decision.
I don't really see it as that terribly inconsistent to care more about open protocols and open content than about open source software for your personal use.
Maybe not. But it's hypocritical of him to not criticize Apple for pushing for an app-oriented mobile experience and using patents to block the progress of HTML5 APIs.
The point of this article isn't about open source-- it's about open standards. In fact, it doesn't mention open source or free software at all. He actually says "The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability." Chrome, Safari, Firefox, even IE are all interoperable; by working together on open standards, users have a nice selection of choices, regardless of opinions on FOSS/Closed-source.
I'm working on the full RMS. The only obstacle so far is nivida cards, but nouveau is improving at every release.
The OP was calling for distributed social interactions using open and standardised peer protocols/applications. All for that. Not clear that this precludes proprietary implementations.
even if nouveau is finished, there is still software running on the card that you don't, and won't, have the source code to. same with your BIOS. stallman uses a laptop where all of the software in the BIOS is open source, as well as firmware software in the processor ... good luck with those unknown-format microcode blobs for Intel CPUs...
Absolutely, if and when the Lemote people get marketing sorted in the UK, and when I retire and need not use large monitors/large storage/media codecs, moving off binary blobs is the goal.
Until then, crusts must be earned. Trivia of the week: blackberry handsets support .ogg files. Wonderful.
Why not call out Google then for not having an open source search engine or adsense or maps? Or maybe that's because Google doesn't open source anything that makes them money?
The open web has nothing to do with OS software or hardware. Unless you're typing this comment on a Stallman-approved machine, you're a sanctimonious hypocrite.
Go and read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and then come back with your views about hypocrisy.
Salient quote:
You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? … Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
It is sad that even though FB, Twitter and numerous other services have popped up to facilitate new ways of communicating with people, none of them are part of any (widely accepted?) standards. Could emails have survived so long if it were just a service offered by a corporation?
We, the developer community should probably focus more time on standards based tools, than Twitter/FB/Google Apis - all we are doing is just help them gain more traction.
I think the idea of opposing lockdown is a bit silly, except what we can control ourselves. It is fully within our power to create a corner where we keep it alive.
There are enough of us to keep a vibrant ecology going, but we'd have to commit to putting our energy there.
The type of interactions that Facebook focused on are naturally inclined to be closed. You need to manage who sees what. BTW this was a revolution that got the late adopters online and got people comfortable using their own names.
Anyway, my point is that this isn't a conspiracy. Google+ might have all sorts of potential for moneymaking but its not google's main business at this point. This trend towards more closed systems is largely emergent. These closed environments are we're people like to interact.
Is their overall strategy to drive adoption working these days? I know their number of users must be quite large now, but AFAICT it is pretty much hugely inflated by being a catch-all for anyone with any kind of Google account.
I actually like Google+ quite a bit and have a lot of people in my circles and I'm in quite a lot of other people's circles, but I never actually go to Google+ anymore (unless I'm following a link to some Linus post or something from somewhere else) because it simply never hit the required critical mass of actual mainstream usage for me to switch. Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook, ergo I'm stuck on Facebook even though I don't particularly care for it. Even among the smallish subgroup of people I know IRL who did embrace Google+ at first, they are virtually all like me now, with accounts that scarcely ever get used.
I'm not sure what Google+ has to do to make converts of the masses, but at least among my circles they aren't doing it currently despite whatever collateral damage they are causing in trying to force people there.
> Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook
FB is for IRL friends/family, G+ as long-form Twitter. It's Twitter for people who don't get 140 characters. I'd say the strategy is working, given the amount of G+ links I see. Personally I'm more interested in what my G+ links say than FB (because they're interests of mine, not just IRL'ers talking about their nail polish), although I check both every so often.
"Don't get 140 characters" . . . congratulations! That's glib and dismissive.
The G+ posts are basically blog posts that are in Google's walled garden. Not much unlike Twitter or Facebook. You have the power to say what you want. For now. As long as you use their systems. And don't expect to own your data or your own online presence.
Regardless of how you separate all the food on your own personal plate so that it never touches, the problem is the proprietary lunch trays. Not everyone likes those.
> "Don't get 140 characters" . . . congratulations! That's glib and dismissive.
Many people don't like the 140 character restriction and I've read many who don't get Twitter. For about two accounts I didn't either and only found it "working" on a third, partly due to the people I was interacting with. That doesn't diminish those who don't like or get it, it just means they don't. Life goes on. I personally prefer G+ for depth. For example, neither your nor my replies would fit into Twitter, so we'd be stuck with glib and dismissive.
Google+ must be one of the most misunderstood things Google's ever done.
It's not supposed to be a social network like Facebook. The thing you see when you visit G+ - people microblogging and sharing pics etc - is just a fraction of the whole point of G+.
G+ is Google's social layer. In data terms, it turns people into "first-class citizens" across Google's estate, instead of every project just shoehorning in their own "user" structure. That's why you see G+ in Play reviews, YouTube comments, integrated into email, and so on.
That may be Google's internal philosophy, but their external face on it is a service that looks just like Facebook, at the website plus.google.com, with a title of Google+. They couldn't be trying any harder to make it misunderstood.
I've heard some of their executives explain it as a social layer for Google, but you're right that the messaging is predominantly about the actual Plus website/apps.
The problem is that Google built it to function like Facebook, and once it was released into the wild it was used more like a hybrid of Twitter and forums. Maybe they dogfooded it wrong.
I'm increasingly feeling like the problem with Google+ is that it didn't start with a minimum idea. They went straight for the concept of 'Facebook' and didn't give users enough incentive to make the switch.
Maybe they could have made a "Facebook Export" importer to populate streams with existing posts, friends, and photos. Maybe they could have made it more social and personal.
Or maybe Facebook's momentum prevented people from actually making the switch. Enough people are satisfied by Facebook that they wouldn't abandon it for a couple of friends.
Google just didn't play the cards right, and I feel like Google+ has gotten too complicated for anyone to just jump in and figure it out.
Your explanation hasn't helped me; I still don't understand the point of G+. Why can't my "YouTube comments" persona be different from my email persona? (Actually, it is: YouTube has asked me several times to retire my old YT username in favor of my @gmail, but it hasn't forced the issue yet.)
> Because one day, you're going to type into Google's Search engine "what's for dinner?" And it is going to tell you.
The idea is really more that you'll go to look at Google Now when you wonder what's for dinner, and there'll be a card telling you that, and you won't even need to ask.
Though the search bit might be an intermediate step on the way there.
First the hardware war, then the OS war, followed by the browser war and search engine war, and now the mobile war and social network war. This won't be the last... or could it?
Will we be using Facebook daily 5 years from now? 10 years? 20?
Or is the next war in augmented reality, which Google has a head start? (but using which social network?)
Anyone have good links to futurist thinkers on these topics?
This plan is particularly problematic because Google+ is, relatively, a clear failure so far
An absurd statement on the face of it (even with the weasel-word qualifier), given Google+'s large number of active users. In fact, given the traffic there, I suspect his ridiculous Cupertino fanboism is to blame for not considering Google+ a smashing success.
Go to any article on the web with social media buttons, compare the number on the Facebook, Twitter and Google buttons. One of them is one or two magnitudes lower than the others, which?
So Google+ is not nearly as big as Facebook. That much is obvious. But Marco interprets that as "failure." Any service with 400 million active users is not one I'd label that way.
Yes, it's true his fanboism shows through when you see him call Google+, a service with 400 million active users, a "failure." If that's failure, then please let me fail.
It wouldn't be a failure for you or me. Google started out with far more active users than that, so they have to be judged on a different basis. They shut off other services to force those users into G+, and significant numbers of those users posted a couple of times and then never looked at G+ again. Something about Google's actions turned them from regular G-Reader users into regular users of non-Google services. That smells like failure.
If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI should hope they got circles right as it was the most obvious thing in social networking ever. 30 seconds into my very first usage of facebook and I already realized it was missing what google calls "circles".
- and, unlike twitter they have a lot of space to move in (pay for api access anyone? Voluntarily subscriptions to feeds? )
Google+ Sparks was a kind of RSS/StumbleUpon thing. Flopped.
Reader sharing became sharing into Google+. Many in the Reader crew defiantly cried out against it and said they wouldn't share things if they had to use Google+ to do it.
It wouldn't have been all roses no matter how you cut it.
I think people are in the bargaining phase of dealing with their post-Reader era grief.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't want publishers to use RSS/Atom. They want them to publish using their respective, proprietary APIs.
The blogpost at http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/pubsubhubbub-... also mentions a Feed API.
I'm confused, I guess this means that only the sync + ui for reader is dead.
So, what?
> PubSubHubbub was very much part of a different era.
PubSubHubbub is very much part of now, which is why they just released a new version of the spec.
But—I'm curious to see what everyone thinks—are we too late for this attitude to change anything?
I also don't know if I'd call it an attitude but more an alignment towards the actual situation. Many have compared the various services mentioned to AOL and the walled garden, but they all still thrive on open, crawlable, & indexed links.
But I'm hearing the same complaint all over the place, so I'm starting to think I might not be alone.
I've just been put off by the idea that maybe I'm an outsider and people don't want that, and it'll be months of work potentially for nothing. Maybe I should start some thing even if I just hand it off. I dunno, would love to see what the thirst is out there.
Creating openness is not good enough. There were business reasons to support every long lasting open technology, and with the dominance of proprietary social media platforms, that business reason (for RSS at least) is dead.
The web opened up e commerce, and modern social media lowered the barrier to entry for online communities.
Its the same problem cryptography has, if its not dead simple and obviously useful don't expect it to stick around (at least at mass appeal)
Funny: that's what most people said of RSS 0.x (poorly crafted), 1.x (over-engineered) and 2.x (ambiguous and full of badly-specified edge-cases). Atom was supposed to fix all that.
My usage patterns/goals/content/etc on G+ are nothing like they are with {my new RSS reader}. In fact, I'm looking at unsubscribing from all but my smallest communities because the big linux distro and android based communities are overrun with individuals spamming religious, political, and just random personal images in them.
(edit, oh and Adiós!, apparently!)
As long as content continues to be centralized in those three companies interop is toast.
Between your post and the author's, I feel like we're talking past each about what the above two phrases mean.
First of all, what do you call a "locked-in API"? I would imagine it'd be an API written in a proprietary language or only works on certain systems or browsers. Personally, I haven't seen that from any of the mentioned companies. Afaik, most of Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's API work on any browser available, any computer that can run those browsers, including mini-computers and smartphones, even some dumb phones. Where's the lock-in? The fact that you put your data in their databases? The fact that there isn't a single format shared between each?
About interoperability being "toast," to what extent? I could probably point you to a large amount of websites and web services that have integration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sometimes all at the same time. Sounds like that they can operate together to me. Perhaps, you want them to provide integration between each other?
If Facebook or Google provides an API that's not an open standard, you're locked-in because the day they decide to remove the API, or to charge high prices, or deprecate a crucial feature, you can't switch easily to another platform.
Openness and interoperability aren't going away, they're merely being refined. That might mean taking away the hacker's toy for a bit while some kinks get worked out (i.e. Google's Jabber issue and the switch to Blink). It might also mean that we live in a monoculture for a while (Webkit). But regardless, the web is steadily improving and no matter how much you all try to spin it, RSS and Google Reader really aren't the martyrs you claim them to be. It sucks that even a successful product can be mercilessly shut down by the evil Google tyrants, but it shouldn't be surprising at all.
Sometimes companies make decisions that hurt a part of their user base for some perceived benefit for other users. Did Google fuck up by closing Reader? Probably. But it's not the end of the world.
There are only so many eyeballs, and right now being very sticky is an obviously viable strategy for dominance. Google didn't get into phone operating systems because they knew or cared much about them. They did it because their revenue base was under long-term threat. (Hell, Google is trying experiments to see if they can get in front of your actual eyeballs, intermediating your entire waking life.) And Facebook tried taking over people's phones for exactly the same reason.
Talk to the Googlers who have left over the last few years, and you'll hear very clearly that things have changed internally.
Uhm, what?
So the company selling my milk want me to drink milk, just milk and nothing but milk?
I thought one of the founding ideas of capitalism is that you can strike deals that benefit everyone. That you don't have to screw anyone over.
Internet is such a big space (unlike milk) that if an Internet-company wants you to use their Internet-stuff and no-one else's Internet-stuff .. well, I don't know what will happen, but it can't be good.
Capitalism screws people over by the day in America
Finally something we can agree on
I am saying that Google's commitment to openness has declined substantially over the years, and that this is due to their interpretation of the commercial context.
These companies' goals are not necessarily aligned with goals of an interoperable Internet. This has been repeated over and over again: Twitter locking down its API, the percentage of ads on Google search, lack of privacy on Facebook, etc...
You probably need open source/Wikipedia style alternatives to prevent abuse. They don't have to replace the commercial ones, just provide counterbalance. I think people have tried to create open versions of Twitter, Facebook, and possibly Google but they haven't succeeded.
Wikipedia is an outlier in that it is a non-commercial service versus primarily being code or protocols. Services have ongoing costs which make it much harder for non-commercial entities to survive.
I think the Firefox(?) mobile os is a good start.
Wikipedia is a bad example, as there is plenty of abuse there [1].
[1] http://www.smoblogger.com/wikipedia-sucks/ http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog/archives/... http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100506025259AA...
Many more, but it's hard to find them since putting "wikipedia" in your search now causes google to look up those words on wikipedia itself first...
If I construct a popular online social network, I could run it on Debian, code it in Emacs, have all the source code on Github, genuflect to a picture of Richard Stallman daily, and still have no open APIs for users to interact with their data. If most major players on the Internet lock your data down, then many common uses of the Internet will in a very real sense become proprietary even if it is running entirely on free software.
I'm sure it's fun to smugly go "well, you use iOS so you should like closed things," but it kinda betrays a significant distance between you and the point.
Marco was blaming Google/Twitter/Facebook locking down devs/users in their own eco-system and your point is you get the interoperability within Apple's own garden? Come on.
BTW, you give a perfect example of what being hypocrite looks like. Sure, you can enjoy your time by hosting a closed service on top of open source infrastructure, that's hypocrite. You can also enjoy your time in a closed eco-system ever since from day 1 with absolutely no interoperate and still manage to find way to fuck those closed web based eco-system. That's also hypocrite.
Interoperate means what? Choice and competition. I see no spirit of either in Apple's eco-system. And somehow Marco always find a way to blame other companies for that.
Why does HN continue to think that companies on the web who give their services to millions of users away for free (please don't repeat the you are the product being sold meme), are entitled to direct said companies to keep any project you deem useful around for as long as you deem it important (to said $RANDOM_MILLION_USER)?
With a userbase the size of Google there will be millions of people complaining about removing every single product they've ever released. Google isn't the Oracle of the world where Oracle releases a product, charges you out the wazoo, gives you 24/7 support and only enter the market of said product after researching if it is a good business investment or not. Google is the one who experiments, tests, lets you use for free, and either retires or promotes projects which turn out to be good for the company (either tech wise, or to the dismay of HN money wise). That's their MO.
Google and Facebook allow you to export your data for most of their services, and I think we can all agree that Google at least are good at giving users a fair amount of heads up before they sunset a product (or should we call it an experiment?).
It seems the prevailing notion on HN anymore is once you are a big company (bad), any service you offer the internet no matter how long ago, should be kept around indefinitely, because you are a big company (bad) and you now make a lot of money (bad). Therefore you should let everyone free ride on your platform so that fellow (broke) startups can bootstrap themselves off your prior work (good). But once said (good, broke) startups start making lots of cash, they will then become (bad) and fall into the same category of other (bad) internet giants.
So we got dependent. And they pulled the rug out. People only got dependent on the assumption it would be persistent. Google's entire business is making things that don't make them money but give them more avenues for ads. And your freaking news feed from Google is the best place I can imagine for targeted advertising and to figure out a users browsing habits. My emails are stuffed with spam, my google searches could be anyone, but you can reliably say I'm browsing my reader feeds and I'm interested in the articles I am opening and those are the ultimate target for advertising.
I'd say something about how social networks factor in, but I don't use any them (or Twitter) so I could care less. But I highly doubt that Google got its desired outcome from killing Reader - they lost a vast swathe of technical users and lost confidence from even more, and they won't see these people move over to consuming content on Google Plus because they don't give a crap how many dog treats the neighbors dog ate yesterday, they care about xkcd strips or gamasutra article feeds. You get a wall of shit on Google+ that you can at least curate in the RSS world. Why I would ever want to use it I have no idea. If I want to talk or interact with people, I'll use XMPP or SMTP. If I want to consume textual or image based media with consistent publication, I'll use RSS. Notice how I keep quoting protocols - because they are open and interoperable. I can expect other people to be ably to reliably target said protocols and distribute their content to anyone that wants it because you have a myriad of tools to access them. That share on G+ button only works with G+, and like the article said, Google wants you stuck on their services.
So I switched the default search engine on my grandparents, mother, cousins, and neighbors to duckduckgo. I'm looking for free web email services that compete with gmail to drop that too, because who knows when Google will rip that rug out from under us as well. "Why are you sending emails? Just send G+ messages! You are all on G+ right? It is expensive to keep a copy of all those email attachments!"
He just doesn't want to play that game.
His article is a call to action, basically saying, "If we want an open web, we'll have to (continue to) build it."
That should be totally obvious to everyone. The web was nice and open when ads ruled the world, but now companies -- the same ones that pay our salaries either directly or by proxy -- have to make money to pay those salaries in ways that aren't display ads.
Google/FB/Twitter/etc have plenty of ways to get data out of their systems via API. If you don't want to use a proprietary API to get the data out then don't put the data in proprietary systems.
You want an open web? Great. I'll make a response that's common in f/oss: submit a patch. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to do. I don't mean to be too snarky, but stuff like this grinds my gears:
> That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them...
Right, right, they stood on the shoulders of giants and whatever. But guess what, your curated news feeds and carefully cultivated twitter feeds and everything else -- they all cost someone somewhere something to build, money or time or both, and without that world to build on, you wouldn't have them.
I forgot what my point was. Rant /off.
Also, I hate, hate, hate this line of argument. It gets trotted out every time an immensely powerful corporation does something that upsets people. It's universal applicability makes it universally pointless.
My friends aren't entitled to anything from me either. But if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch, and I am perfectly fine with that.
> if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch
This never happened. It's more like, "if I decide to stop showing up because it no longer benefits me and give my friends a month's notice, they're going to bitch." Sure, that's true, but it seriously doesn't make you evil or mean the end of all friendships ever like Marco would make it seem. It just doesn't work like that.
Also, If something is universally applicable, it might have a nugget of truth somewhere, by the way.
Unless someone is demanding legislation to force Google to keep Reader alive, stop with the entitlement bullshit. We are entitled to dislike business models and approaches, we are entitled to criticize them, and we are entitled to not use projects from companies which follow them.
Edit: If you did, and that's your takeaway, I think you started with a predefined notion about its content. Please read it again and try to forget about reader. Reader is not the point. (I'm not the author btw ;)
Microsoft did something similar with IE back in the day: it was better than Netscape and it quickly dominated, but then they kept adding proprietary hooks (ActiveX etc) and the open web started to stagnate - until Firefox saved the day with a faster, more secure alternative that slowly gained back hard-won market share.
I don't think this phenomenon of hurting open platforms is necessarily intentional, perhaps it's a side-effect near-monopoly products in a given space.
I'm sorry, but it is true.
It is worth noting that Google did not start charging a monthly fee for Reader. If they had, I suspect the vast majority of users - including API users - would have gladly paid for it. Rather, they pulled the plug completely, and the only reason they did that was because they simply did not give a shit. It was an utterly disrespectful thing to do to users who came to rely on the service.
There's also the fact that Reader crushed most of its competition after it came out[1]. It was like a Walmart that opened smack in the middle of a town - none of the smaller shops could compete with it and they closed. In the case of Reader, this was okay with most people, since it was free at the time. But then Google said, "welp, this isn't making us any money" and shut it down. Too bad the noteworthy competitors were long gone by then. That's the absurdity of this whole thing.
To go back to the Walmart example, it's like a Walmart that comes into town, forces the smaller shops to close, and then leaves town a few years later. Where will the townspeople do their shopping now?
I know it isn't a perfect analogy, but I think it is accurate enough to get the point across: if you come out with a free service and end up displacing everyone else in the market, then you have an ethical responsibility to at least try to continue the service in some shape or form. Start charging for it and explain why you are doing it. Some may complain but most will understand and agree to pay since they have come to appreciate it and rely on it. Or serve ads, somehow. But whatever you do, don't just shut it down citing lack of profits. Because that just makes you look like a tool.
[1]Interestingly enough, while I was searching past HN submissions to find that story, I came across this one from 4 years ago, titled "Is Google Reader next on the chopping block?" The article itself seems gone but the comments are still there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435555. The comments themselves are chilling, but even more so because of their similarities to the ones on the more recent "With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?" submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434021
This is exactly the kind of entitlement the OP mentions. Also, how would you know your product you wanted to release was going to displace everyone in the market? Does this apply only to large companies or is it small shops as well? What if they lose interest or what if they lost users when they add this magically and universally loved paid solution? There is no such ethical responsibility and they shouldn't be because it is ridiculous. Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.
This is a funny question because I thought I was very clear in my original post. I said with great power comes great responsibility. The kind of great power I am talking about here is the kind Google has as one of the world's largest (read: richest) and most influential tech giants.
>>Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.
This is ironic, because Google Reader was shut down not because it cost Google any noticeable amount of money to operate, but because it didn't fit some Google exec's ideological vision. The precedence I'm trying to establish is at least ethical in the sense that it puts the well-being of users first.
Companies have a responsibility to put the desires of their owners first, and as a public company that generally means profits. This is hardly an ideological vision, but more of a long term business plan, and even if reader was costing them nothing to maintain it still doesn't fit that plan.
Also, your solution is hardly more ethical than theirs, even if it puts the "well-being" of users first. It's just more binding than what already exists. In my opinion, it was perfectly ethical that Google gave its users a good head's up to the situation and that they even provide a way to find other services that might replace Reader. It's not like it randomly stopped existing one day or like they promised it would always be there. No moral code was broken and no ethics or rights were trampled on. It just sucks and you have every right to be upset. To be a proponent of "you either support it forever in some way or you're (ethically? morally?) evil" isn't really helping though.
If you want to close down a product, you can at least open-source it. Which is another thing Google could have done with Reader. It would have given another party the opportunity to pick it up and develop/maintain it.
Even though it's possible for another watercompany to come in and clean up the well, too many people distrust well water, and hell, all the cool kids are now drinking bottled Googlewater.
This separation of concerns makes it clear that more than one trust issue is implicated. I think you're saying that users might distrust a service's permanence (frankly all services should be suspect on this point), but it seems other users might distrust a service's discretion with their reading habits. By separating this aspect of RSS consumption from all others, so that e.g. the really paranoid could just run their own service, everybody would be able to arrange a suitable situation.
Let's not get too carried away here. It's about doing the same thing we've been doing for the history of the web. Hackers will continue to hack on stuff and find holes, etc, etc. Content curators will get use to APIs and integrate these services into their own. As it has always been. There's no fight to be had, only some latent bitterness over Google Reader and RSS and privacy.
One issue in this specific case might be that Google has way more than enough money to keep Reader alive, whereas many people on HN see their own startups fail due to financial troubles, and if they do make it to an exit their products are often killed by acquihires. Wealth is wasted on the wealthy and all that.
It feels like a betrayal because we thought Google shared our values. Really I don't think this is about entitlement at all. Using that word in this context amounts to shaming people about the anger they feel over a breach of trust. Entitlement is more like having your parents fly in to demand the university raise one of your grades so you can get in to medical school.
The frustrating thing for some of us was that this is how it has always been and trying to point it out to people just got you shouted down. Google has always been about making money, what else? Watching otherwise intelligent hackers get so genuinely bamboozled by a simple motto has been surprising, to say the least.
I looked it up and they announced the motto with the IPO in 2004. Sometimes I think I compare their actions now to my expectations of the pre-IPO company; it doesn't really make sense.
This is a discussion of the trend we increasingly see of big companies abandoning interoperability in favor of their own locked down protocols, APIs, etc. That's why the article is titled "Lockdown".
Marco nailed it with his closing statement: "We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership."
If you're arguing against that, honestly, I'm going to straight up now call you wrong.
Sorry, that's a cheap shot. This isn't about entitlement or whether services are free or paid, or even about Google reader specifically, and it's certainly not related to entitled users on HN.
From the article: That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.
He's talking about whether we should accept the ongoing corralling of the web into walled gardens where there is one gatekeeper and landowner, and everyone else producing goods for the public is a sharecropper, and the public can only buy what's on offer - take it or leave it. There's a real danger in building or living inside the walls of these corporate communities (twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever Apple's equivalent to eWorld is called these days). The tension between large corporations and their users (free or not) is of course as old as the hills, but that doesn't mean we should give in to their latest attempts to lock users into one ecosystem that they control.
This instinct is why Apple prevents Amazon from selling on its iOS platform, why Amazon wants to be the world marketplace for everything, why Facebook encourages people to put their online lives exclusively behind a FB login, and why Google wants to channel everything through G+ and require an account for any activity on the web. It's a natural instinct for corporations, but not one we should accept or buy into.
There is something to your last statement, in that this behaviour seems to be tied to the size of a corporation - once it grows to a certain size, priorities inevitably change, the staff changes, and the drive to seek rent from customers and partners becomes overwhelming. So in a sense this is a natural cycle that it's difficult or impossible for companies to avoid. That doesn't meant that we as customers and developers should acquiesce to the brave new world, and start building our products or lives around services like reader - as many have found out this week, that's a bad strategy, because large corporations don't really care about the service, or the value to users, all they care about is the lock-in.
That means we can happily use these services, but should always remember they may be withdrawn by fiat, and never build a business on them - for example if you build your company dependent on a twitter, FB or G+ login, don't be surprised in a few years when they start to charge for the privilege of growing on their land. The open web is a better place to build in my opinion, it's hard to get started, but infinitely more rewarding to have your own space, as a reader or as a developer.
It's very hard not to think of Apple when reading this sentence.
This article is about openness and interoperability, not about spying or government agencies - not sure your analogy stands. Plus, I think it's a pretty well known fact that Marco is indeed a sympathiser of Apple (hence the "conspicuously missing" bit).
(although it is a footnote)
Sure he didn't do an app for Android (until someone did for him) and is a bit snarky about it as a platform, but the web version of Instapaper existed before the app did and powered the whole thing.
Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in).
His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related, but he's originally (and still) a PHP web guy.
I always thought of Marco's attitude about iOS as Windows PTSD.
He discussed that at some point, I think it might have been on Accidental Tech Podcast. As I remember the idea was that since The Magazine wasn't terribly important (security wise) he could avoid having to give people another username/password. He said it was something of an experiment and he probably wouldn't do it again. I think Casey and Siracusa both said they found it odd and confusing at first.
Instapaper has an open API, and The Magazine is available online.
My guess would be something like a new publishing standard or system that makes it easy to package good writing into an immersive mobile form, possibly via Newsstand. But just spitballin' here.
I just have a gut feeling that shutting down Reader may have made life easier for Google when it comes to National Security Letters, subpoenas, warrants or whatever. Turning over a list of what someone has read, does seem a bit evil.
Maybe I am being naive in attributing a positive motivation to them on this issue. But it just feels more plausible in light of the backlash of negative feelings the shutdown has created, who harbors such feelings, and the rather trivial resources required to maintain the service.
If they were turning over logs from Reader - and why wouldn't they have been requested - what options would Google have? Carry on or shutdown or lawyer up, are about it.
Would the backlash when such a practice was disclosed be less than that for shutting down Reader? I doubt it. People who didn't use Reader, like me, don't care about its shutdown. But I'd probably be full of condemnation and brimstone when commenting on a story about Google turning over reading lists to the government.
If the NSA is getting as much data as we expect, then they can get people's reading lists from their ISPs. So Google shutting down Reader wouldn't have kept much of anything out of federal hands.
Further, if Google had a sudden attack of nobility, then it would be Gmail or Google Voice that they'd be shutting down. That's where the real private information is, and that's what most people are angry about. Not what a small fraction of Google's audience gets in their daily papers.
The prepositional phrase is not in the beginning of the sentence and is less than four words so no comma needed!
However, Apple doesn't really make claims about openness (apart from a brief marketing push around OSX 10.2), whereas Twitter's success came from liberal access to its API and Google makes a big deal out of its openness.
I actually fully agree with him on this. The open web is increasingly being threatened and locked down. We need to oppose that.
It's always easy to spout how we need to push forward open standards, but what we've seen instead is developers falling over themselves to develop for Apple and Facebook. The very people who are needed to push forward the open web are the very same people who spend their time and energy expanding the every growing empire of closed ecosystems.
I sense hypocrisy.
On my Arch Linux, I use Chromium with a separate PDF reader and I don't use Flash. I suggest everyone do the same. For all intents and purposes, you will be using Chrome.
> especially how deeply it tries to push Google services.
Can you clarify what you are talking about? You can login with your Google account if you want tab sync etc. If you don't, you don't have to.
But you aren't. You are using Chromium.
> Can you clarify what you are talking about?
Google's AppStore, and their Apps on the new tab page (I forget if they had anything installed by default). Honestly, I don't feel like setting up a fresh install of Chrome to check. But you could answer your own question by doing this.
This isn't really what I've observed. Do you have a source?
The OP was calling for distributed social interactions using open and standardised peer protocols/applications. All for that. Not clear that this precludes proprietary implementations.
Until then, crusts must be earned. Trivia of the week: blackberry handsets support .ogg files. Wonderful.
Why not call out Google then for not having an open source search engine or adsense or maps? Or maybe that's because Google doesn't open source anything that makes them money?
The open web has nothing to do with OS software or hardware. Unless you're typing this comment on a Stallman-approved machine, you're a sanctimonious hypocrite.
Salient quote:
You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? … Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
I personally want both and think both are quite tightly linked but it's not hypocrisy to value one and not the other.
We, the developer community should probably focus more time on standards based tools, than Twitter/FB/Google Apis - all we are doing is just help them gain more traction.
There are enough of us to keep a vibrant ecology going, but we'd have to commit to putting our energy there.
Anyway, my point is that this isn't a conspiracy. Google+ might have all sorts of potential for moneymaking but its not google's main business at this point. This trend towards more closed systems is largely emergent. These closed environments are we're people like to interact.
Is their overall strategy to drive adoption working these days? I know their number of users must be quite large now, but AFAICT it is pretty much hugely inflated by being a catch-all for anyone with any kind of Google account.
I actually like Google+ quite a bit and have a lot of people in my circles and I'm in quite a lot of other people's circles, but I never actually go to Google+ anymore (unless I'm following a link to some Linus post or something from somewhere else) because it simply never hit the required critical mass of actual mainstream usage for me to switch. Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook, ergo I'm stuck on Facebook even though I don't particularly care for it. Even among the smallish subgroup of people I know IRL who did embrace Google+ at first, they are virtually all like me now, with accounts that scarcely ever get used.
I'm not sure what Google+ has to do to make converts of the masses, but at least among my circles they aren't doing it currently despite whatever collateral damage they are causing in trying to force people there.
FB is for IRL friends/family, G+ as long-form Twitter. It's Twitter for people who don't get 140 characters. I'd say the strategy is working, given the amount of G+ links I see. Personally I'm more interested in what my G+ links say than FB (because they're interests of mine, not just IRL'ers talking about their nail polish), although I check both every so often.
I don't know what social network would qualify as long-form twitter, to be honest.
The G+ posts are basically blog posts that are in Google's walled garden. Not much unlike Twitter or Facebook. You have the power to say what you want. For now. As long as you use their systems. And don't expect to own your data or your own online presence.
Regardless of how you separate all the food on your own personal plate so that it never touches, the problem is the proprietary lunch trays. Not everyone likes those.
I feel like Richard Stallman at lunchtime.
Many people don't like the 140 character restriction and I've read many who don't get Twitter. For about two accounts I didn't either and only found it "working" on a third, partly due to the people I was interacting with. That doesn't diminish those who don't like or get it, it just means they don't. Life goes on. I personally prefer G+ for depth. For example, neither your nor my replies would fit into Twitter, so we'd be stuck with glib and dismissive.
It's not supposed to be a social network like Facebook. The thing you see when you visit G+ - people microblogging and sharing pics etc - is just a fraction of the whole point of G+.
G+ is Google's social layer. In data terms, it turns people into "first-class citizens" across Google's estate, instead of every project just shoehorning in their own "user" structure. That's why you see G+ in Play reviews, YouTube comments, integrated into email, and so on.
I'm increasingly feeling like the problem with Google+ is that it didn't start with a minimum idea. They went straight for the concept of 'Facebook' and didn't give users enough incentive to make the switch.
Maybe they could have made a "Facebook Export" importer to populate streams with existing posts, friends, and photos. Maybe they could have made it more social and personal.
Or maybe Facebook's momentum prevented people from actually making the switch. Enough people are satisfied by Facebook that they wouldn't abandon it for a couple of friends.
Google just didn't play the cards right, and I feel like Google+ has gotten too complicated for anyone to just jump in and figure it out.
Because one day, you're going to type into Google's Search engine "what's for dinner?" And it is going to tell you.
How? Because it knows who your wife is, and it knows your wife's phone number, so it texts her saying "what's for dinner."
Example is crude, I know. But I can't think of a better way to explain what I see Google's end game is with G+.
The idea is really more that you'll go to look at Google Now when you wonder what's for dinner, and there'll be a card telling you that, and you won't even need to ask.
Though the search bit might be an intermediate step on the way there.
Will we be using Facebook daily 5 years from now? 10 years? 20?
Or is the next war in augmented reality, which Google has a head start? (but using which social network?)
Anyone have good links to futurist thinkers on these topics?
An absurd statement on the face of it (even with the weasel-word qualifier), given Google+'s large number of active users. In fact, given the traffic there, I suspect his ridiculous Cupertino fanboism is to blame for not considering Google+ a smashing success.
Huh? Does _anyone_ consider Google+ a smashing success? On what basis?
If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that.
I'm not a fan of Marco, but you're right. If Marco really was a rabid fanboi, more than half of his blog would be pointless claim chowder posts.