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Annual reminder: the development effort spent adding an animated minion GIF to Gmail could have kept Google Reader running all year source: https://twitter.com

by huphtur 11y ago

Annual reminder: the development effort spent adding an animated minion GIF to Gmail could have kept Google Reader running all year source: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817

Godel_unicode 11y ago
Annual response: no it couldn't have. https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-than-making-it-a-paid-service https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-th...
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  Short version: Google couldn't keep Reader going because it would take money to get it working on the new Google+ infrastructure that failed spectacularly. Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
  - ddispaltro 11y ago
    This is my single biggest problem with the whole g+ thing. Very frustrating, never mess with contacts.
    - philovivero 11y ago
      Oh. Eye-opener. Is this why in the past year or two random contacts are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and I can't merge them, and sometimes one app (like Hangouts/messaging) won't know a phone number is attached to a contact while another (the phone app) will, etc? The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately. Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
      - ddispaltro 11y ago
        Randomly, I also notice sometimes I have to edit a contact's phone number then save again for it to register as a number that hangouts recognizes. Edit: I have Google Fi
  - brorfred 11y ago
    It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.
    - hobs 11y ago
      That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created. I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
      - JBReefer 11y ago
        Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back. They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
        hobs 11y ago
        Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them. Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space. More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
        cxseven 11y ago
        Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products. Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    > broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else. When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts. The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate. Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I don't understand how that proves anything one way or the other. Could they not have just left Reader on the old infrastructure?
  - euyyn 11y ago
    As someone's that maintained deprecated services, I can say that's easier thought than done. Each piece underneath you will eventually ask you to migrate off it, for any number of reasons: It is deprecated itself and being removed, or it has a bug that was fixed in another version, ... Then the replacement / new version won't support all your use cases, so you need to coordinate with them development of that support. And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure. The TL;DR is: Maintenance is never free.
    - Godel_unicode 11y ago
      This. Parents comment is typical of management, and frankly I applaud Google for having the confidence to ignore it rather than incurring all of the technical debt.
- sp332 11y ago
  "There was no manpower" so uh... hire a few interested engineers? Maybe pick from the thousands of angry people who were loudly complaining about it? Or at least give the data to an archive - that's what I'm angriest about personally. They had archives of tons of defunct blogs, and they just deleted them.
  - Mahn 11y ago
    Don't read too much into it, it was a business decision, not a question of resources. It's obvious that Google could have kept reader alive without much trouble if they wanted.
  - nunobrito 11y ago
    Likely not deleted. Just made private. If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
    - sp332 11y ago
      True. Doesn't help anyone else who wants to read the blogs though. And even thought the storage is redundant, the fact that it's controlled by a single company makes it a single point of failure. I also hope Geocities is around somewhere and is recovered at some point in the future.
      - Namrog84 11y ago
        There were definitely some good things lost with geocities :(
      - godshatter 11y ago
        A lot of Geocities was archived. You can access one of them at reocities.com. There is also a 650+ GB torrent out there containing the archived sites. It's still a work in progress, apparently, but perusing the "neighborhoods" on reocities.com brings back memories.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  That "answer" had no facts and doesn't pass the smell test for me. "Old infrastructure"? Not very specific... "Google+ infrastructure"? Huh? Maybe they mean updating the authorization infrastructure, but even that is probably <= the dev effort on these April Fools pranks.
- look_lookatme 11y ago
  Google Reader was, up until that point, the best Google had done at social discoverability and discoverability in a non-search ways. They had a foothold in the space and they just dumped it out and Facebook and Twitter won.
snowwrestler 11y ago
It's a good joke, and I recommend people follow @Pinboard on Twitter, but the reality is that Google killed Reader because they wanted to, not because they had. They're immensely profitable and fund crazy things like Google Glass or Calico to the tune of many millions of dollars. Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
siegecraft 11y ago
Does that include the operational cost though? I know it's probably trivial when you're at google's scale, but fetching every RSS feed on the internet every few minutes (or whatever their latency was, it seemed pretty low), processing and storing it seems fairly expensive.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Weren't they already doing that, for search?
Keyframe 11y ago
In other news, results are coming in of PR coverage of maintaining Google Reader vs Gmail OMG EPIC FAIL #MINION4LIFE... Jeff?
DiabloD3 11y ago
Honestly, I'm glad Google Reader is dead. Feedly is so much better than Google Reader ever was.
- Tyr42 11y ago
  It's really hard to build an ecosystem when you have to complete again a "good enough" free google reader. I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.
- thomasahle 11y ago
  Better than Reader was in the end, but when reader allowed you to see what your reader friends were reading, that was the peak.
- cxseven 11y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of blogs have shut down from a loss of traffic. Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.
dipnuggetron 11y ago
Why don't these aspies at Google hire some comedy professionals with actual senses of humor.
johansch 11y ago
It must be painful to be such a bitter person.

by huphtur 11y ago

Godel_unicode 11y ago

Annual response: no it couldn't have. https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-than-making-it-a-paid-service https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-th...

JohnTHaller 11y ago
Short version: Google couldn't keep Reader going because it would take money to get it working on the new Google+ infrastructure that failed spectacularly. Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
- ddispaltro 11y ago
  This is my single biggest problem with the whole g+ thing. Very frustrating, never mess with contacts.
  - philovivero 11y ago
    Oh. Eye-opener. Is this why in the past year or two random contacts are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and I can't merge them, and sometimes one app (like Hangouts/messaging) won't know a phone number is attached to a contact while another (the phone app) will, etc? The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately. Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
    - ddispaltro 11y ago
      Randomly, I also notice sometimes I have to edit a contact's phone number then save again for it to register as a number that hangouts recognizes. Edit: I have Google Fi
- brorfred 11y ago
  It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.
  - hobs 11y ago
    That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created. I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
    - JBReefer 11y ago
      Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back. They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
      - hobs 11y ago
        Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them. Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space. More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
        cxseven 11y ago
        Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products. Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
- zamalek 11y ago
  > broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else. When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts. The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate. Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CaptSpify 11y ago
I don't understand how that proves anything one way or the other. Could they not have just left Reader on the old infrastructure?
- euyyn 11y ago
  As someone's that maintained deprecated services, I can say that's easier thought than done. Each piece underneath you will eventually ask you to migrate off it, for any number of reasons: It is deprecated itself and being removed, or it has a bug that was fixed in another version, ... Then the replacement / new version won't support all your use cases, so you need to coordinate with them development of that support. And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure. The TL;DR is: Maintenance is never free.
  - Godel_unicode 11y ago
    This. Parents comment is typical of management, and frankly I applaud Google for having the confidence to ignore it rather than incurring all of the technical debt.
sp332 11y ago
"There was no manpower" so uh... hire a few interested engineers? Maybe pick from the thousands of angry people who were loudly complaining about it? Or at least give the data to an archive - that's what I'm angriest about personally. They had archives of tons of defunct blogs, and they just deleted them.
- Mahn 11y ago
  Don't read too much into it, it was a business decision, not a question of resources. It's obvious that Google could have kept reader alive without much trouble if they wanted.
- nunobrito 11y ago
  Likely not deleted. Just made private. If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
  - sp332 11y ago
    True. Doesn't help anyone else who wants to read the blogs though. And even thought the storage is redundant, the fact that it's controlled by a single company makes it a single point of failure. I also hope Geocities is around somewhere and is recovered at some point in the future.
    - Namrog84 11y ago
      There were definitely some good things lost with geocities :(
    - godshatter 11y ago
      A lot of Geocities was archived. You can access one of them at reocities.com. There is also a 650+ GB torrent out there containing the archived sites. It's still a work in progress, apparently, but perusing the "neighborhoods" on reocities.com brings back memories.
ohitsdom 11y ago
That "answer" had no facts and doesn't pass the smell test for me. "Old infrastructure"? Not very specific... "Google+ infrastructure"? Huh? Maybe they mean updating the authorization infrastructure, but even that is probably <= the dev effort on these April Fools pranks.
look_lookatme 11y ago
Google Reader was, up until that point, the best Google had done at social discoverability and discoverability in a non-search ways. They had a foothold in the space and they just dumped it out and Facebook and Twitter won.

snowwrestler 11y ago

It's a good joke, and I recommend people follow @Pinboard on Twitter, but the reality is that Google killed Reader because they wanted to, not because they had. They're immensely profitable and fund crazy things like Google Glass or Calico to the tune of many millions of dollars. Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

siegecraft 11y ago

Does that include the operational cost though? I know it's probably trivial when you're at google's scale, but fetching every RSS feed on the internet every few minutes (or whatever their latency was, it seemed pretty low), processing and storing it seems fairly expensive.

marssaxman 11y ago
Weren't they already doing that, for search?

Keyframe 11y ago

In other news, results are coming in of PR coverage of maintaining Google Reader vs Gmail OMG EPIC FAIL #MINION4LIFE... Jeff?

DiabloD3 11y ago

Honestly, I'm glad Google Reader is dead. Feedly is so much better than Google Reader ever was.

Tyr42 11y ago
It's really hard to build an ecosystem when you have to complete again a "good enough" free google reader. I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.
thomasahle 11y ago
Better than Reader was in the end, but when reader allowed you to see what your reader friends were reading, that was the peak.
cxseven 11y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of blogs have shut down from a loss of traffic. Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.

dipnuggetron 11y ago

Why don't these aspies at Google hire some comedy professionals with actual senses of humor.

johansch 11y ago

It must be painful to be such a bitter person.