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This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince

This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done. Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of closed socialness and realname ridiculousness... but overall I always thought they were still on the right side of "Don't Be Evil". I'm totally convinced this quiet attack on RSS is a not-so-subtle attempt to push people into G+, and even though I casually use G+ (about the same as I casually use FB or Twitter), G+ is NOT a replacement for RSS, and it's not how I want to keep track of all the sites I read. I don't want to "like" them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit. Simple. RSS doesn't care if you're logged in. RSS doesn't care if you use your real name. RSS doesn't care if you're accessing it from work, home, or anonymously via an internet cafe. And that's exactly how it should be. Throw in the Picasaweb crap they're doing now too, FORCING you to use G+ Photos (which is a horrible horrible experience), and I'm done. I've just installed Firefox on all my home computers and my phone, for the first time since Chrome came out, and will be looking for a new RSS aggregator.

zanny 14y ago
I don't get where this sentiment comes from. Ever. They are a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Even if they hold onto their startup-esque purism for a decade after their founding, they of course fall from grace into the profit motive pitfall because that is how the investor driven market capitalism system works. Never put blind faith in a corporate entity, because they all transition from consumer-driven-product-with-creative-vision to maximize-stockholder-returns-and-short-term-profit. It is how you do business in the big leagues. Google just had the lucky case of having a slow transition, probably due to good decisions in the early years. I get that HN has this startup culture where creative people come up with "cool things" to sell, and are product oriented rather than profit oriented (though a lot of them seem to love the idea of selling the business off to a big business like Google, walking away with the pocket change, and watching it flounder into obscurity under corporate oversight...) but big business isn't run by people who have product vision, they have profit vision, and these companies are the amalgam of hundreds of managers and overseers that don't have collective vision and can thus only drive it towards what they can all agree on - making higher returns. It happens to the best of them.
- Andrenid 14y ago
  I guess I just never had any of Google's decisions really effect me in a negative matter until G+ came out and they started ruining products I use on a daily basis (such as Picasaweb, Reader, etc)... so I didn't think about it, or bother re-analysing Google to decide if they'd finally transitioned into a big-evil-company type entity... which they have now (to me).
mdm_ 14y ago
I suspect this as well, which is why I deleted my G+ account in protest the other day. It was remarkably easy to do, both practically (just click a couple buttons) and sentimentally (in ~2 years there has rarely been any activity from any of my contacts, and I follow most of them on Twitter anyway). I've heard people hem and haw over deleting their Facebook account; G+ offers no such difficulty.
- squidi 14y ago
  Could you detail what actually gets deleted? The support page [1] is brief on details and I'm especially interested if it deletes photo albums which were originally uploaded via Picassa [1] http://support.google.com/plus/answer/1044503?hl=en-GB http://support.google.com/plus/answer/1044503?hl=en-GB
  - mdm_ 14y ago
    AFAIK only G+ related things are deleted. I don't use Picassa, but my Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Wallet, Play Store, etc accounts are all unaffected.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  I have too much bound up on gmail to risk closing my account and may be one of the ten people world wide who actually use G+, although not that often.
ok_craig 14y ago
I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whatever your issues were. It seems kind of silly.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Well, if you don't approve of their practises, you shouldn't keep using their products, should you?
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  Chrome is created by an Ad company so that they can make more money selling Ads. People are willing to overlook this fact because they trust that Google wont put it's own desire to make profit over keeping the web open. People are losing the trust that this is the case. If somebody comes up with some new technology that makes the web better in some way, but also means it's more difficult or impossible to target advertising, do you think Google will implement it? Do you think the makers of Bing will? Am i the only one that thinks that a handful of Ad companies shouldn't be controlling how the web evolves?
  - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
    Does using Chrome or Chromium somehow serve Google and its nefarious goals?
    - ijk 14y ago
      I sure hope it serves Google's long term goals. Lest we forget, apparently Reader did not serve those goals, and got killed for it. They don't have to be nefarious, they just have to want to use you to sell ads.
    - pretzel 14y ago
mark_l_watson 14y ago
"I don't want to "like" them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit." +1 this nails it. I do share content links a few times a month on twitter and g+ but basically I want to read interesting stuff. I have also started to realize that I rely too much on HN and Prismatic - nice sources of interesting material, but still limited. This appropriate shit storm over google moving to a walled g+ garden has increased my use (again) of RSS.
- nonamegiven 14y ago
  I have this vague idea of an open, minimal social network that is little more than the internet: - If you want to just read, use an RSS reader and subscribe to ... stuff. - If you want to participate, get a personal page via someone like Wordpress that serves RSS, or run your own via your choice of technology if you want. - If you want to build relationships between RSS serving participants, use the missing RSS feature that allows client RSS readers and site RSS readers (another missing piece) to piece together inter-site RSS conversations and relationships. - Mix in some personal privacy and control, and you're done. EDIT: add missing word.
  - mark_l_watson 14y ago
    That sounds good to me. In the last day I have moved my blog and primary email service away from Google to my own servers: a little more of a hassle, but it seemed like a good thing to do.
fizzbar 14y ago
Slightly OT, but what do you find so bad about the G+ photo experience?

zanny 14y ago

I don't get where this sentiment comes from. Ever. They are a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Even if they hold onto their startup-esque purism for a decade after their founding, they of course fall from grace into the profit motive pitfall because that is how the investor driven market capitalism system works. Never put blind faith in a corporate entity, because they all transition from consumer-driven-product-with-creative-vision to maximize-stockholder-returns-and-short-term-profit. It is how you do business in the big leagues. Google just had the lucky case of having a slow transition, probably due to good decisions in the early years. I get that HN has this startup culture where creative people come up with "cool things" to sell, and are product oriented rather than profit oriented (though a lot of them seem to love the idea of selling the business off to a big business like Google, walking away with the pocket change, and watching it flounder into obscurity under corporate oversight...) but big business isn't run by people who have product vision, they have profit vision, and these companies are the amalgam of hundreds of managers and overseers that don't have collective vision and can thus only drive it towards what they can all agree on - making higher returns. It happens to the best of them.

Andrenid 14y ago
I guess I just never had any of Google's decisions really effect me in a negative matter until G+ came out and they started ruining products I use on a daily basis (such as Picasaweb, Reader, etc)... so I didn't think about it, or bother re-analysing Google to decide if they'd finally transitioned into a big-evil-company type entity... which they have now (to me).

mdm_ 14y ago

I suspect this as well, which is why I deleted my G+ account in protest the other day. It was remarkably easy to do, both practically (just click a couple buttons) and sentimentally (in ~2 years there has rarely been any activity from any of my contacts, and I follow most of them on Twitter anyway). I've heard people hem and haw over deleting their Facebook account; G+ offers no such difficulty.

squidi 14y ago
Could you detail what actually gets deleted? The support page [1] is brief on details and I'm especially interested if it deletes photo albums which were originally uploaded via Picassa [1] http://support.google.com/plus/answer/1044503?hl=en-GB http://support.google.com/plus/answer/1044503?hl=en-GB
- mdm_ 14y ago
  AFAIK only G+ related things are deleted. I don't use Picassa, but my Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Wallet, Play Store, etc accounts are all unaffected.
tomjen3 14y ago
I have too much bound up on gmail to risk closing my account and may be one of the ten people world wide who actually use G+, although not that often.

ok_craig 14y ago

I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whatever your issues were. It seems kind of silly.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Well, if you don't approve of their practises, you shouldn't keep using their products, should you?
mike-cardwell 14y ago
Chrome is created by an Ad company so that they can make more money selling Ads. People are willing to overlook this fact because they trust that Google wont put it's own desire to make profit over keeping the web open. People are losing the trust that this is the case. If somebody comes up with some new technology that makes the web better in some way, but also means it's more difficult or impossible to target advertising, do you think Google will implement it? Do you think the makers of Bing will? Am i the only one that thinks that a handful of Ad companies shouldn't be controlling how the web evolves?
- BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
  Does using Chrome or Chromium somehow serve Google and its nefarious goals?
  - ijk 14y ago
    I sure hope it serves Google's long term goals. Lest we forget, apparently Reader did not serve those goals, and got killed for it. They don't have to be nefarious, they just have to want to use you to sell ads.
  - pretzel 14y ago

mark_l_watson 14y ago

"I don't want to "like" them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit." +1 this nails it. I do share content links a few times a month on twitter and g+ but basically I want to read interesting stuff. I have also started to realize that I rely too much on HN and Prismatic - nice sources of interesting material, but still limited. This appropriate shit storm over google moving to a walled g+ garden has increased my use (again) of RSS.

nonamegiven 14y ago
I have this vague idea of an open, minimal social network that is little more than the internet: - If you want to just read, use an RSS reader and subscribe to ... stuff. - If you want to participate, get a personal page via someone like Wordpress that serves RSS, or run your own via your choice of technology if you want. - If you want to build relationships between RSS serving participants, use the missing RSS feature that allows client RSS readers and site RSS readers (another missing piece) to piece together inter-site RSS conversations and relationships. - Mix in some personal privacy and control, and you're done. EDIT: add missing word.
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  That sounds good to me. In the last day I have moved my blog and primary email service away from Google to my own servers: a little more of a hassle, but it seemed like a good thing to do.

fizzbar 14y ago

Slightly OT, but what do you find so bad about the G+ photo experience?