I really want to reserve judgement here...I want to wait and see how it actually functions, etc. But reading the description, (and my immediate reflex is to state that) it really looks extraneous, and definitely overlap for what G+ should/could be (or maybe is?). Unless i'm mis-reading, it basically is the definition of a type of social network:
1. Have/find content.
2. Have a desire to share/discuss content with friends, acquaintances.
3. Trigger some function/feature to share on a time line of sorts, so friends, acquaintances can see/interact with said content.
Not to sound so dismissive, (I hate to be critical for someone's hard work) but is that all that this new product is? Basically another (centralized) social network?
I think Google should instead develop an open source, federated protocol for maybe standardizing sharing via decentralized social networks. This would open it up to myriad apps/clients. Oh sure, there are some out there...but having it (the protocol) associated to Google would give it some authority - and by extension attract more devs to its ecosystem; though still keep it open/free. Side benefit, if Google sponsored and supported this federated protocol, they can begin to dive into the decentralized (dare i call it) movement. They could then position themselves to provide search (their original strength) across decentralized nodes, etc. Owners of their own decentralized nodes could choose to "play with Google" or not.
Who knows, maybe Google developing a federated protocol may not be ideal...but anything seems better than what this new product appears to be. (Seriously trying not to judge too soon though. ;-)
G+ and Wave didn't stick. They're giving up on those already.
Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. Moxie's latest blog on Open Whisper Systems goes just as much for Google and carries even more weight there.
So they just keep throwing darts at the (centralized) social network space and hope that something will stick eventually. It wasn't a website yesterday, it might be an app today, maybe it'll be a VR/AR environment tomorrow.
> Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier.
I see what you mean but having a decentralized network where google can get a decent market share is still better than what they have now compared to facebook which is close to 0% market share if you don't count youtube. Think of it like gmail, thanks to imap and smtp being open and decentralized, Google was able to grab a sizable part of the market with gmail (they have 100M users now I think). So a decentralized social network with a google hosted endpoint would definitely be much more interesting than whatever they have right now. However, problem is that Facebook already won and also Google already tried this decentralized strategy with open social and google buzz and they were huge failures.
Also google suck at social mostly because the ceo doesn't care about social and is admittedly bad at it. Also Spaces is probably the worse name possible as it is really asking for MySpace jokes.
I consider Federated and decentralized to be very different solutions.
pertaining to google wave specifically, by joining the federation there is still a heiarchy of how connections are made.
If you join a federation for google wave all of your messages still go through the top tier of that federation, to my knowledge this was by design (obviously this is all deprecated) if my statement is incorrect please let me know, but I see federated and decentralized as have some similarities but at the core are different solutions.
I am referring to this message [0] from Apache Wave mailing list in regards to how the Wave federation was designed, I took it as face value but do not know how to verify for accuracy.... above my head.
They make their money off of advertising. Facebook is competing with them in this regard and if they can't replace them, the next best thing would be to undercut the competition.
I think that's the scenario the parent was thinking of. But, as you said, Google is still going for replacing Facebook. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out...
Google gives up on messaging, realizing they will not beat Facebook, WhatsApp, etc? Then they should create an open protocol! "If I cannot have it, then nobody should."
I keep a close eye on Apache wave but the movement needs some new vitality, I see it hanging on a small handful of courageous and incredible volunteers albeit, needs more devs.
While I don't recall Wave being specifically designed for social network, I did used to think how innovative it was for its time as a platform for many types of communication and interaction paradigms. Further, there is even an open source social network platform based on it, namely Kune:
I'm more than slightly burnt on Google, but I see a few items of promise here.
G+'s original organising conceit was Circles. These have all but disappeared in latest iterations of G+, as the complaints of critics from the first days of G+ have pretty much born out: Circles organise people but not content, they're unidirectional, those you have circled don't know where they are put. A very frequent statement early in G+, from all sorts, was "you're using Circles wrong". Which, quite frankly, should have been a massive indication of a fundamental architectural error.
Google have insisted on maintaining the regardless.
Another early observation was that G+ lacked a construct of warrens vs. plazas. There were specific areas that small groups could discuss items, but far less so for large discussions. Most of which quickly became utterly untenable.
Instead, what emerged are what I've termed "salons" -- specific hosts (Google's on Yonatan Zunger is among the better) who would come up with and foster intelligent discussion. This does mean hauling out the trash and active moderation, but when it works, it works well.
"Spaces" suggests that the new model has an intrinsic concept of, well, social space, an understanding Google have proven highly resistant to understanding. In particular, a social space is define by what it includes and excludes.
Among the spectacular failures of G+ were its immensely misguided and ill-fated mergers with Gmail (no, random asshats from public fora shouldn't populate my email autocomplete entries), and YouTube (no, my work and family contacts shouldn't know what my video watching habits are, nor do my G+ comments belong in YouTube space nor vice versa).
Google took loads of criticism for this, much from me. I have little hope of the lessons actually sticking, but I'm open to the possibility.
My concern with Spaces is that it will prove too structured, rigid, and fragmented. If it's aping another service, that would be Reddit, and it's helpful to remember that Reddit emerged as a single forum, splitting off into multiples only with time. Today, the challenge on Reddit is finding the appropriate middle ground -- a warren large enough that there's an actual conversation, but not a plaza so large that it precludes any structure from emerging.
I'd also very much like to see an open source, federated protocol, and have suggested as much myself. https://redd.it/1t21cj
Some interesting parallels with your excellent comments on circles: The old Windows NT domain structure was based on one-way trust: Domain A could choose to trust domain B, while B might not trust A (along with a set of include/exclude rules which allowed for even more complexity). This is the kind of idea that might look like a great way to implement principle of least privilege. But it turns out, that it's just too hard to maintain - and even if you have an organization with such high demand for compartmentalization, you rarely need one-way trust; you can get most of the same/better result with isolated systems on one hand, and federated systems on the other (eg: you have a "red room" that isn't networked, with strict protocols of what goes in/out for sensitive stuff). Couple that with the fact that "one way trust" doesn't really work - if you can pull in something dangerous like a spreadsheet, you've open yourself up to dangers from the "untrusted" subsystem.
I think it is similar with circles: It doesn't make all that much sense for me to list someone as a "close friend" and they to have me in their "random co-worker" group. With network effects (people who are actual friends, talk together and show people stuff in the real world) - there's no way to really keep stuff that's shared with group A secret from group B - it might not give a false sense of security (hopefully most people by now realize that if something is shared, it's no longer secret), but I think it does give a false sense of control.
As to your point about salons - this is my experience with Facebook groups as well. FB is a terrible medium for discussion, but apart from the UI/UX - it's where people can be found, and moderated groups can and do work rather well. And they basically work like you describe salons.
My argument to Google has been that independent controls for tagging content topic and controlling distribution are what's needed.
In the real world our informational transactions are largely determined by place, and we assume different roles by those. Home, work, gym, mosque, store, school, concert (performer or audience?), beach, etc. And how and who you (or others) are known varies -- the idea of single unitary identity is often quite absent.
Size of groups also matters hugely, and I think often of how dynamics change with scale. See the old Budapest String Quartet joke. Expertise, qualifications, and intent of participants also matters.
The best online communities I've been a part of have been the focused ones built around concrete discussions. I have problem X, let's talk about some solutions A, B, and C, that kind of thing.
There doesn't seem to be a way of involving small groups of people in small discussions that don't require a lot of attention. Someone else mentioned D&D groups -- that's exactly my use case. I don't want to send out tons of email to my players about stuff they might not be interested in. I do want a place that I can dump interesting things that they can later choose to participate in, low attention kind of stuff. Making a G+ community for five people feels like overkill.
For me and most of my friends, Slack has filled that gap - but more for groups of friends, with overlapping subsets of interests. (e.g., I'm in a NYC redditors slack team with 52 people, and we have over a dozen channels.)
For smaller interests, a lot of people tend to use Google Hangouts - I'm in one with mostly people I know focused on the game Star Realms.
Slack's harsh message retention limits and steep slope from free to paid surely are going to limit it's reach for many communities that a) can't persuade participants to pay £5/month and b) grow to the point that 10000 messages means almost no retention at all.
It's happened to more than two Slack groups I've been part of and they are both looking for a new platform.
Hmmmm. As much as I wish Slack would become more attractive to non-commercial communities - Spaces doesn't even come close. No integrations, no @mentions, none of the UI niceties, no 'presence'.
I would imagine that for a lot of small groups, lack of retention is just fine. If I'm chatting with friends about playing Star Realms, I don't need to see what was said two months ago.
My one successful use of G+ has been for a roleplaying group. The early days with always-on notifications and a lot of other small annoyances were a bit uncomfortable, but as we were using Hangouts for actual sessions, it kinda-sorta worked. And yeah, we had that as a G+ community.
I hate to say, but this looks like a bunch of people sat around and went "everyone seems to be using WhatsApp, what's WhatsApp missing?"
Except everyone uses WhatsApp, because it doesn't have all that stuff - it's just simple. And everyone else is on it. Case in point - Telegram is kinda nice. Has some good features, and it's pretty simple. But I probably wouldn't have it installed, if it wasn't for the one group I need to use it with. Literally everyone else I converse with daily with through WhatsApp. My friends, my colleagues, my relatives, my parents.
Trying to persuade anyone to try something new is hard. Trying to get my parents to use something new, and then trying to explain how to set up an account, what this does, what that does - just not going to happen. Especially if everyone else is using something else.
But good luck to Google, I look forward to giving it a try :-)
That WhatsApp vs Telegram user comparison is interesting... nearly everyone in my social group uses Telegram, I don't think I've ever even installed WhatsApp. I know WhatsApp has significantly more users worldwide, but for whatever reason my tribe has chosen Telegram.
If I want to bring together a group of people, I have lots of options, from very structured - "I have a Facebook group for the sports team / political campaign I run and want to share information with players, get them to do things" - to the very ad hoc "I have a group of buddies who I get together with once in a while and to save time we've got a WhatsApp group." Both of these work well because they're linked with something I use all the time anyway - Facebook and WhatsApp. If I want to connect with random people on subjects I care out, there are subreddits.
The use case for this, on the other hand, is what? "I'm going to use a specific service that I'm going to have to persuade all of my friends to use, with no real added benefit?". I just don't get it.
Think study groups, DnD sessions, or other document-collaboration type use cases. Facebook does not make that particularly easy, and how mature is Facebook's enterprise support? Facebook For Work is much less of a sure thing than their personal offerings.
People already use the heck out of Google Docs for collaboration, this provides a bit of formality and structure to that collaboration. Before, Docs sharing was a bit of a Docs + Hangouts + informal process around discussion. Now it's... whatever this does.
I'm excited to see how this works out. I'm using Docs collaboration to help plan a trip I'm going on in a few months, I might try to use this to enhance that collaboration.
From my understanding, Spaces doesn't require any kind of membership anywhere. No accounts.
This could become a big deal if true and possibly rival Twitter for when you suddenly have an interest in something for a few hours/days but want to drop out later.
Because of how much of Google's business relies on tracking people's movements across devices, there's almost no chance that this will not be tied to a Google account. Google has no interest in building a Twitter killer per se.
Glad I'm not the only skeptic here. It will likely find a way to count towards storage limits, or find some subtle way to try and monetize like charging for history or slapping ads similar to Twitter's discover or promotional stuff that requires add-ins to remove. Honestly once they went to the intrusive format of hangouts / killed gchat, I lost an valuable means of informal contact with a lot of folks who just turned it off entirely. Gonna nurse that one for a while longer.
Perhaps not its intended purpose but to me it looks like an upgraded version of Google Keep. As someone who likes to collect resources and notes on topics for both research papers and personal projects I see this as a useful tool for that. I don't imagine any of my 'spaces' having more than one or two other people in them.
In reference to all the 'Google will kill this soon' posts. I agree there seems to be a growing list of discontinued products but their Takeout [1] service almost always lets you get your content out. While things like social interactions on G+ might hold value on the platform itself, as long as I have my notes/photos/data at the end of the day, I am happy to treat these products like I would a text editing app, just a tool to work with the data.
I feel like I keep getting burned by using Google things. Unless it's Gmail, Chrome or Android I always worry that whatever I use of theirs is just going to go away almost overnight. This is why I don't use Google Keep and while I've been thinking about moving domains out of Google Domains.
I mean it's an interesting concept though it takes me out of my normal flow of using a web browser or getting my news through various apps so I can't see how I would ever get a chance to use it. I like how it's a more integrated experience, however. Good integrations always trump multiple apps as far as usability is concerned.
Btw I love the lack of self awareness with the blog entry.
> Group sharing isn’t easy. From book clubs to house hunts to weekend trips and more, getting friends into the same app can be challenging.
So here is yet another app to get your friends into!
One of the top comments had a reply that mentioned a site that tracked Google retired products[1], so I figured I would take a look to see what portion of them were out of beta. I suspect it's generally beta projects that get retired. Google tends to keep things in beta a long time, but I think that's a somewhat separate problem. I noticed that a lot of the retired products actually have become successful companies:
- Sidewiki - Seems similar to Genius, as it's becoming, where you can annotate any site.
- Jaiku - Micro-blogging and life-streaming, apparently comparable to twitter, founded a month before Twitter was founded, launched the same month Twitter launched.
- Dodgeball - Like Foursquare. It's founder left to form foursquare.
I think it is very smart to go after Facebook Groups. To me that looks like the sticky feature of Facebook that makes people keep using it and it brings in people not really using the service. If you want to keep up on the activities in your own or your kids soccer teams, you have to be on Facebook. Groups is the feature that will keep us on Facebook for the next 10 years.
But to me Spaces seem to take the usual too complicated approach from google. Making a new text post is two clicks away before you can start typing? Both Google search and youtube get more prominent positions then text when creating posts. They call it a group sharing service, so maybe they did the right thing and maybe this is what their mvp should be.
Feature requests:
- Events, and add to users calendar if they rsvp.
- Integration with google docs. And let it sync/control the permissions from within the spaces app.
This doesn't seem to work with Google Apps for Domains accounts. Another interesting service I can't use. At this point I wish they'd release a tool or some mechanism for me to move my account to a normal GMail account.
I'd be very curious why this is? How are the Apps for Domain accounts (technically) different from standard Google accounts? I honestly thought the only motivation Google had for all these various services was user growth, it seems like a bit of a wast not to force-feed Gmail accounts down everyone's throats. They explicitly say that they'll keep all metadata on your use, and index all your content, as far as I know, for all their services -- so I can't imagine there's all that many reasons to the difference be anything more than a tag/group membership to flag any old google user as also an Apps for Domain user?
At this point I just assume that any new Google service won't work for me. There's no rhyme or reason for the exclusions so there's no way to predict them aside from a roll of the dice.
I'd be inclined to think this would be successful if Google used it internally. As a Google Apps admin I spent quite a bit of time arguing with Google product folks about hangouts and Google+ only to find out they didn't use either of the services internally. It's the only way you can explain some of the terrible ideas about either of those products.
As somebody working at Google... how don't people at G use hangouts? Like, we use it every day. It's the #1 tool we use to communicate with our coworkers in an async way (other than emails).
Are there actually people at the company that never use Hangouts?
That's what I used to use Google+ for... sharing personal stuff with small group (i.e. family)
then they rebuilt the photo albums from G+ as Google Photos, regressed all the features, and redesigned G+, regressing the photo sharing story even further
I don't know wtf they're trying to do at Google but it seems after G+ failed to dislodge Facebook they don't know what to do and just make everything worse
Given the potential and success of Facebook groups [http://alexmuir.com/facebook-is-the-new-excel] Google had to come up with something to compete. Wont be surprised by "I need Spaces invite" all over the internet in coming days but personally wont rush into using it.
That's great, but I want to talk/share things with anonymous strangers who aren't my friends who share the same disease I have. That's my need, not this. This is superfluous.
Reddit has a lot of active, helpful communities hidden away in smaller subreddits. It's really only the default subreddits and other huge subreddits that are bad.
Allowing anonymous users would be great. For example I would like to create such a group/space for my family even though some of them do not have google accounts.
I'm getting more and more lost in the Google ecosystem these days. I will still try it out, but not sure what it can offer me unless it has actual features..
Tried it - they are unbundling social. It's group sharing as simple as starting a Google doc. You open a new one and add them by email or FB invite. A lot of people have gotten disgruntled with FB due to unclear privacy and people who aren't using FB yet, so this might work better.
I may try it for sharing stuff with close family - stuff I wouldn't share on facebook because the context is too personal. Finding myself emailing and texting people in too many environments lately, if they can keep my stuff private (and I don't mean get ads for furniture if I share a funny video about ikea private), it might work.
Glad you described it because I wasn't making any sense out of that blog.
Won't be using it because it's not a core part of Google and so at a high risk of being cancelled. Also noone else is using it (yeah yeah, I know, but that's not my problem) and i don't do unpaid Google evangelism.
It came out a blink ago and their landing page doesn't even work (the button to get started wasn't clickable for me on Chrome, another google product). I managed to see the product by somehow finding an internal link to it. Reserving judgement till after I've seen its use by non-techie friends. Not even close to being a google advocate, but Facebook is riding the coat-tails of network effects and I'm betting money and time that they won't be the last social network there is. All experiments in the space are interesting to me till the underlying problem's solved.
Sounds like an attempt at competing against group chat on Facebook messenger except nearly all of my friends are already on Messenger and this doesn't seem to add anything new.
No, compared to FB products, its more competing with Facebook Groups than group chat on Facebook Messenger.
There's lots of UX issues with existing group-shared-content solutions that could be addressed, but until we actually see this I'm not sure what it offers new in the space.
Happy to finally have a viable alternative to Facebook Groups, not particularly bothered about overlapping functionality with G+ (which nobody I know uses).
Does anyone remember Facebook Rooms? Seems to be taking that app and throwing in better share functionality.
Rooms died for the reasons many others are mentioning here - why would you use a new app, when the functionality (kinda) exists between FB groups, Whatsapp, Messenger?
I'm not sure if this will have a web client, but if it does maybe this can be a group-based Pocket / Pinboard competitor?
So this sounds kinda like Google+ Communities, but detached from Google+? It seems Google is now approaching social as "throw endless piles of new social apps out there until one actually becomes popular". They recently added chat capabilities directly into YouTube and Photos, rather than relying on Hangouts, for example.
It seems to really be the strategy that was discussed early on for Google+ which was hampered by the existence of a special G+ app and, moreso, the need for an "enhanced" G+ account: the social layer is tying together existing Google accounts and products, with added social functionality both in the individual products and in new products which tie them together in new ways.
Even FB has given up the "one app to rule them all" approach to social, and Google was never very good at that.
Believe me I want to have any tool I can get for Collaboration and Sharing... however Spaces from Google, I worry so much that they may kill it someday , FAST. That is the first thought came to my mind when i saw this story. I feel bad to have this thought really. I want to give it a try but just a feeling...
Based on the very preliminary website, this seems to be a way to quickly set up invite-only ad hoc interest groups, bypassing the infrastructure and membership requirements of a full networking service like Facebook, Yahoo!Groups, and old style chatboards.
This could be useful for people who boycott or otherwise have no use for social networks. I'm not sure how big that market really is, but my own parents come to mind, plus some curmudgeonly old friends who only do email.
Another Google experiment that will run its course and either succeed or be relegated to the attic which is full of interesting but unsuccessful ideas. I'm glad someone's trying to think ahead of the curve and bypass the social networks, which are such a time sync for me at least.
I agree, probably would require a Google account, but what if it's only for the group founder? If it requires everyone to have a Google login then it's just like Plus. If not, then it's actually a rather appealing idea. "Join my group, and you're not required to set up an account." Just a quick, spur of the moment thing.
Yet another Resume-Driven Development product from Google. I mean how would possibly this product bring a dime to Google's multi-billion dollar revenue?
It seems they are doing some clever analysis of the data stored.
I created a space and added a link to the foursquare page of a local coffee shop that doesn't have "coffee" in the name or url. Then searched for "cafeteria" and got that result back. Tried the same with a local bar.
Drowned by a dozen WhatsApp groups, I'm for anything that improves small groups communication. Unfortunately, to make people adopt it will be really difficult. When I'm managing something, I can't even make people fill a simple Google Form.
Like any of these products (including FB), they are great when everyone uses them but if you don't have enough friends/people you know using them then they are absolutely useless.
I won't bother taking the time to find out more about it, let alone download and use it, because it'll only disappear in a few years' time. I've already had my fingers burned by integrating previous Google services into my workflow.
> I won't bother taking the time to find out more about it, let alone download and use it, because it'll only disappear in a few years' time.
Everything will only disappear in a few years time, including you.
I don't see why this is any more likely with a Google project than a similar project from any other firm (a Google project is more likely to be discontinued while Google is still a going concern than offerings most other firms, but only because Google is likely to be around longer as a company.)
The fact that you're tired of people complaining about Google discontinuing products tells me that Google may have a problem convincing people to adopt new services. If the majority of people don't believe Google is really invested in products until it's successful, it's going to be an uphill battle for Google when it comes to launching new services.
Google's strategy to discontinue services comes with natural consequences. One of those consequences is it burns bridges with certain types of early adopters and creates distrust when those early adopters complain in popular forums like Hacker News.
UPDATE: It may be in Google's best interest to start publically committing to a service's life span and support to preemptively address the leftover feelings of abandonment from other discontinued services.
> The fact that you're tired of people complaining about Google discontinuing products tells me that Google may have a problem convincing people to adopt new services.
Exactly that, IMO. Arguably, people who voice their negative opinions are doing Google a favour by at least trying to draw attention to the problem.
It's entirely up to Google as to which products they create, operate and terminate. I've no argument with their right to do whatever they want in that respect - it's their time, money and resources which are being expended. But equally, it's users' time and effort being sunk in to discovering a product, learning about it, integrating it into their lives and using it. There are only so many instances of being jerked around that they'll tolerate before consciously swerving new products.
I think Keep is a pretty handy tool that's convenient and helpful. But I won't be using it. I relied on Notebook, until that was killed off. The lesson I took from seeing services being killed off that I or friends/colleagues used was that it's just a bit safer to use equivalent established services from dedicated providers. They might not be as tightly integrated with other Google services, but it's a trade-off I'll make for continuity's sake.
> The fact that you're tired of people complaining about Google discontinuing products tells me that Google may have a problem convincing people to adopt new services.
Or there's a very vocal minority of people here on Hacker News that are really upset about Reader being shut down and use any opportunity to mention about it. I highly doubt it's a majority of people who distrust Google products because they might get shut down at some point in the future.
> I highly doubt it's a majority of people who distrust Google products because they might get shut down at some point in the future.
I used to think that, but I found myself questioning using certain Google products because I questioned their long term viability, and I've never been the "victim" of any service shutdowns. It's not rational, but the thought was there and I suspect I'm not the only one.
UPDATE: Look at the number of posts where people joke how long it will take before it gets shut down. Google has effectively branded itself as a company that creates ill conceived social applications in a vacuum only to shut them down or superficially rebrand them 19 months later. They have an image problem.
> It may be in Google's best interest to start publically committing to a service's life span and support
For paid services, they often do this, its called the "deprecation policy".
For other services, they may not at launch. Then again, the complaints may be from a loud group on internet fora, but they may not represent, despite their loudness, a significant barrier to adoption in Google's experience, so addressing them may not be something worthwhile for Google to do.
> but they may not represent, despite their loudness, a significant barrier to adoption in Google's experience
You might be right, but I'd argue that measuring for this is probably trickier than it seems.
Complaints from loud groups may not initially represent quieter groups, but persistently loud groups have a tendency to shape the thinking of quieter people. Influence is usually slow and gradual at first, but with enough persistence, the message tends to sound more true over time. Repeated ideas tend to quickly overtake if nobody has a vested interest in challenging them. They become these subconscious truisms that people parrot when they hear keywords. By the time that's spread, it's probably too late.
And yet this thread is the first time I've ever seen sentiments similar to my own (or the first time I've expressed them). I'm sorry for you that my opinion is passé.
No, no, its SpaceBook. Wait, no its Space+. Well, let's hope they get plenty of users...else it will turn into a SpaceGhostTown...yeah, acknowledged it was a cheesy joke (what can i say, i'm a Dad ;-)
For me, the biggest downside of Google shutting down Reader is that from now until eternity every post to Hacker News about a new Google service will be chock full of comments pointing out that it will probably just get closed down.
The actual number of genuinely useful services that Google has shuttered is relatively small.
Their much bigger sin consists of either long-term neglect, re-launching a new version with half the features missing or as other commenters here have pointed out - launching something that confusingly overlaps with another service.
I'd also add that it raises a serious point: if we cannot depend on products to exist past the team that creates them, are we really producing products at all? Or merely engineering time leased at the rate you consume advertising?
Wow, that is longer than I expected. Here it is in one paragraph:
Google Answers, Google Deskbar, Writely, Google Click-to-Call, Related Links, Public Service Search, Google Video Marketplace, Google Browser Sync (Firefox), Google Lively, Hello, SearchMash, Send to Phone, Audio Ads, Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Ride Finder, Shared Stuff, Google Page Creator, Marratech e-Meeting, GOOG-411, Google Labs, Google Buzz, Google Dictionary, Google PowerMeter, Real Estate, Google Directory, Squared, Google Sets, Google Pack, Google Fast Flip, Desktop, Google Image Labeler, Aardvark, Directory, Gears, Google Notebook, Google Apps standard edition, Google Code Search, Google Health, Google Website Optimizer, TV Ads, Google Friend Connect, Google Insights for Search, Knol, Google Wave, Picnik, Jaiku, Nexus Q, Slide.com, Google Mini, Picasa Web Albums Uploader, Google Cloud Connect (Microsoft Office plugin), Google Building Maker, Google Calendar Sync, Meebo, Google Reader, Google Latitude, Google Talk, SMS service, iGoogle, GIS tools for Google Maps, Google Schemer, Google Notifier, YouTube My Speed, Orkut, QuickOffice, "discussion search", Google Moderator, Wildfire by Google, BebaPay, Google Helpouts, Google Code, Picasa, Google Compare.
Agreed. I've yet to find anything remotely as fast as the Picasa app (even running under Wine) for organizing photos. The gap is somewhat filled by the rise of SSDs (even slow apps are faster when disk speed increases) - but I would've loved for them to open source the thing rather than kill it off.
Of course, real desktop apps goes against the need for all content to be in the Google cloud where it can be mined by Gooogle, so I'm not surprised. I guess Total Information Awareness makes for great ad sells.
> For me, the biggest downside of Google shutting down Reader is that from now until eternity every post to Hacker News about a new Google service will be chock full of witty comments about how it's going to get shut down.
I'd argue that most of them aren't witty[1] and it's not just Reader either. Plenty of things shut down before and afterwards[2].
Apologies - I edited my original post to take out the overly-sarcastic 'witty' just before you posted. I also added a touch more substance to my comment.
The actual number of genuinely useful services that Google has shuttered is relatively small.
"Genuinely useful" is a subjective term... Reader and the nontrivial list of other things Google has bought or started and then left to die on the vine definitely gives me pause before signing up for one of their services.
Example: They started doing domain registration about a year or two ago? I'm not going to use it because it's not a core part of their business and I don't want to be in the position of doing a forced migration with associated costs when they inevitably decide to scuttle it with no concern for the users.
So, people should just stop trying to improve things?
XKCD 927 should be considered harmful, as while it is true that's how things sometimes happen, to start quoting it everywhere is to try to shut down people from innovating, and that's anything but helpful.
From what I can recall or determine, I don't think Google's ever really given a product or service less than a year from release to shutdown. But a lot of them get killed between the one and two year marks.
Not to sound so dismissive, (I hate to be critical for someone's hard work) but is that all that this new product is? Basically another (centralized) social network?
I think Google should instead develop an open source, federated protocol for maybe standardizing sharing via decentralized social networks. This would open it up to myriad apps/clients. Oh sure, there are some out there...but having it (the protocol) associated to Google would give it some authority - and by extension attract more devs to its ecosystem; though still keep it open/free. Side benefit, if Google sponsored and supported this federated protocol, they can begin to dive into the decentralized (dare i call it) movement. They could then position themselves to provide search (their original strength) across decentralized nodes, etc. Owners of their own decentralized nodes could choose to "play with Google" or not.
Who knows, maybe Google developing a federated protocol may not be ideal...but anything seems better than what this new product appears to be. (Seriously trying not to judge too soon though. ;-)