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Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself
- ghshephard 14y agoMy favorite comment from the post: "And by the way – how is this app strategic for you guys and Reader is not? A little clarity would certainly be appreciated." I too would love to know what Google is thinking here.
- yanw 14y agoKeep is a feature, Drive is the App (apple/oranges).
- drivebyacct2 14y agoIt ties into Google Now. It's already super convenient for me. Swipe up "Google, note to self, pick up milk". Now I have a TODO. Combine that with what Google already knows (that I leave work at 5 and drive within half a mile of a grocery store), think about the intelligence they could bring to my Todo list. (I know lots of people aren't going to like the privacy implications, my comment isn't meant to apologize or touch on that aspect)
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoHow is Now strategic?
- niggler 14y agoIncreases appeal of Android devices and provides another advertising opportunity ("find place to eat" -> bam! hyperlocal recommendation. Restaurants would pay significant amounts of money for that type of targeted advertising)
- donall 14y agoThe parent observation is really on the money. Hyperlocal recommendations are very interesting, but _paid_ recommendations are a potential gold mine that I think people are only now starting to catch on to. What I find particularly interesting about it is the potential to produce genuinely relevant advertising. As a simple example, imagine I ask my smartphone where I can find the nearest fast food joint and it tells me there is a McDonald's around the corner. It might also serve an ad that says there is a Burger King one block further away and if I go there and show the ad I will get free fries and a drink with my sandwich. There are some very interesting possibilities here that we have only begun to scratch the surface of.
- tadfisher 14y agoFor things like that, such a service makes complete sense. But for things that I spend real money on, I've already developed a filter in my brain to weed out anything that looks like paid shilling. This is why I stopped using Google Shopping after it went paid-only, and why I skip the first page of Google Search when researching products. Now if they could make this a social thing, where real, authenticated, non-paid people recommend a good place to eat or get my suit tailored, I would be on board. Sadly, there is no money in that sort of service, as Yelp found out pretty quickly.
- cliffu 14y ago
- mbreese 14y agoEveryone assumes that this was a big strategic decision to scrap Reader and ditch RSS. But from what I've heard, it was more of a practical decision to drop an unmaintained project because no one knew how to update it for new backend infrastructure. But I'm sure that they misjudged the importance that people put into Reader. All in all, it seems like a wasted opportunity and a massive amount of lost good will.
- czr80 14y agoThat may be true as the reason, but I cannot believe they could misjudge the importance of Reader to its users - they have all the logs and know exactly what the usage is. They just decided they didn't care enough, and could accept the negative publicity.
- whatprojectnext 14y agoMaybe they did look at the logs and decided that Reader usage was low enough (at Google scale) that they did not care.
- mbreese 14y agoAt the very least, by looking at raw numbers, usage probably was pretty low. But the people that used it, used it a lot. I think that they just wanted to get rid of a project that they couldn't maintain anymore and sorely misjudged how vocal the users of it would be.
- signed0 14y agoKeep and Reader are built for different groups of users. Reader was a niche product used by a small (but vocal) subset of all Google users. Keep is a product built for everyone.
- just2n 14y agoIt also turns out that Keep will provide them with a LOT more information about users that advertisers would pay through the nose to obtain. Reader.. not so much.
- corresation 14y agoReader.. not so much. How so? Show me someone's blog subscriptions, and then metrics on entries they clicked on, how long they viewed it, and the clicks that they followed, and I could quickly get a very accurate profile of the person.
- just2n 14y agoAssuming people were to ONLY use this for todo lists, that would be infinitely more useful than what feeds and stories a person is interested in. They probably also get a lot of that information already with Google News and Google Analytics. I suspect there will be a lot more than just todo lists, so the possibilities are really endless.
- jseims 14y agoI'm building something on top of Hangouts, and I had an exchange that this reminded me of. I was finally connected with a developer evangelist, and I sent an email saying something like "would love to know more about Google's strategic goals with Hangouts". Her response was "I'm sure you're aware that Google doesn't discuss its strategies outside the company". What a striking cultural difference from startups, where we're constantly discussing our strategies together.
- joedevon 14y agoGoogle doesn't want anyone to know what they're up to. Ironically, they want to know EVERYTHING about what YOU are up to.
- fluidcruft 14y agoExcept apparently which blogs you're reading. But I guess they get that and more from Chrome now.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- psbp 14y agoIs this also a warning to Evernote to never remove features? I'd hate to be a company that makes products that Om uses.
- taligent 14y agoI don't know any company who would remove features that millions of people use every single day.
- adeaver 14y agoMicrosoft removed wordcount from Word way back when. Journalists bitched because they used it every day and it got put back.
- fpgeek 14y agoYes, you only know a company that would remove a feature hundreds of millions of people use every day, from a product they've paid for to boot (see: Apple Maps).
- ishansharma 14y agoWe are talking about removing products that are widely used. Reader was not just a feature but a full product that Google killed.
- lubujackson 14y agoProducts are different than features. And the point is, if Google is "going social" and streamlining everything to Google+, why did this product even get released? Why isn't it just some new social storage feature on Google+? The reality is that Google is the new "Old Yahoo". New product come out with a big fanfare, some techies get excited for a month, and then 2 years later it gets unplugged for some "bold new direction." The point is, every product costs a user something. If not money, then at least their time and energy learning to use the product. When a user comes to rely on that product and it gets deleted (especially when the company is making money like crazy), users lose faith in the company.
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- jinushaun 14y agoAnyone else remember Google Notebook? Yeah, they killed that too. Pretty much Evernote before Evernote got big. No thanks, Google.
- mgkimsal 14y agoYeah, notebook was one of the first times I was seriously starting to use a 3rd party service, then it was yanked. And now it's back, as 'keep'. And in 2-3 years it'll be gone again. And Reader will be back as some 'feature' in Google Drive (or it'll be called 'Docs' again, or still remain as 'Docs' as some of the google drive/docs pages still point out).
- dredgreg 14y agoI loved Notebook and have yet to find something comparable.
- smokinjoe 14y agoI used Google Notebook extensively and wasn't surprised. It was laden with layout issues and paste with styles bugs. It was great while it lasted, but I personally didn't find it that shocking when it was closed. There were plenty of other notebooks on the internet that actually had more features that worked better, a lot of them had methods to import from Google Notebook as well. Notebook was fading with Google Docs gaining steam (and I know they both had different feature sets). They did keep Google Notebook running for a fairly significant time before they finally closed the doors and migrated the data to Drive.
- Kiro 14y agoSo this is a Google Notebook version 2 remade based on what they learnt the first time. I only see benefits.
- ishansharma 14y agoI fully agree with Om here. In fact, I have found myself avoiding Google services as much as possible now. GMail is the only one I am using regularly and which does not have good alternatives. I also agree that Google is becoming like Microsoft, trying everything. I'm going to stay with companies like Evernote.
- mooreds 14y agoAnd the nice thing about gmail is that, if you had to move off of it, you could (as long as they keep the imap interface around: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/417/export-gmail-messages-to-text-or-html-files http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/417/export-gmail-... ). There may be no feature complete alternatives, but there sure are a lot of email readers out there if you had to move off of it.
- mattmaroon 14y agoSeems far easier to move from Google Reader to an alternative than that, and yet look at the amount of bitching.
- benbeltran 14y agoAs you do with google reader. You can fully export your feeds and move elsewhere. At /least/ they're letting you keep your data. I'm not saying it didn't feel like a dick move... but at least they make it easy to move away. I already switched to another reader and I'm getting more used to it every day. We may be emotionally attached, but the world moves on. How many of these small companies you give money to give you the freedom to download your data?
- mooreds 14y agoMy understanding is that there are saved stories and meta data that you can't export from google reader (mostly based on comments on this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 because I don't use Google Reader and never have). Is my supposition incorrect?
- dudus 14y agoGoogle Reader had an easy and clear migration path to export your data. I can't understand why people keep bashing Google for it. Just take your data to somewhere else. If tomorrow Keep goes away they'll do the same.
- niggler 14y agoSome people were/are emotionally invested in Reader, and to an extent it was so good that many people were dissuaded from building a better RSS reader.
- yanw 14y agoThen they'll build one now.
- niggler 14y agoIt's almost too late to do that. Products that were slowly grinding are now seeing much more traction, and the initial exodus has passed. There may be a second one when it is officially stopped, but it would be difficult to compete with those products that grabbed customers already.
- WalterSear 14y agoThey've lost a lot of goodwill with this action.
- ktsmith 14y agoI'm going to miss reader as much as anyone but it just seems like a buch of spoiled brats with a sense of entitlement whining at this point. Reader was provided as a free service. Google is shutting it down and giving everyone enough time to find an alternate service and access their OPML data via takeout. While some things may be lost forever via their article caching, Google doesn't owe anything to the Reader user base.
- yew 14y agoOf course, the Reader use base doesn't owe anything to Google. If Google isn't playing the game of social obligations, talking about 'entitlement' won't get them very far.
- msprague 14y agoI hope this satire. They discontinued Reader and added a new feature to Drive. Get over it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
- manicbovine 14y ago> The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned. I think this explains why Reader was killed... It competes with G+. Want updates from your favorite website? Follow them on G+. It's a turn away from open formats and interoperability.
- angryasian 14y agothe tech community is curious sometimes. When a startup pivots, for a chance for something better its celebrated. When Kevin Rose shuts down oink cause it doesn't meet his initial expectations its applauded. Yet everyone wants to speculate how important Reader was to a vocal few (only google knows active user number) and they are the bad guy for possibly shutting down a niche service for a few to focus on bigger ambitions. Export and maybe one of the newer products are better, yet no one wants to event try that and would rather attack a reasonable business decision.
- senthilnayagam 14y agoIf a start up does not pivot it potentially dies, but google with its multi billion dollar revenue and infrastructure can keep it alive . They won't do it, because they don't get it. G+ is a failure, as was wave and so many others from google stable. But G+ is important to this one guy, he is willing to sacrifice everything for this one.
- angryasian 14y agobut I think you proved my point. How many dead end services can google continue at their scale before it starts hurting much like microsoft ? Google kills things quickly and tries something new. I applaud them on taking this mindset. G+ is far from a failure. The only people that say this are people that haven't tried it yet
- senthilnayagam 14y agoPeople don't live in ghost town. Facebook has won agree that gracefully
- p_l 14y agoFB is a ghost town for me, despite having bigger amount of "friends" there than on G+... The difference is that the occasional content on FB is utterly lost between tons of "apps" and ads, to the point that I can count the amount of times I visited FB in 2012 on fingers. FB's last "pro" is Messenger... which I use actually to talk to only one person.
- creativityland 14y agoGoogle Plus. Google Plus. Google Plus.
- fmitchell0 14y agoGive it to me for freeeeee!!!! But listen to me when I tell you how to run your service that costs money. Riiiiigghhhttt.
- yanw 14y agoThis is ridiculous. How hard is it to import an OPML file into any of the other feed services that already exist on the web, or those popping up everyday. Do we really need to keep regurgitating this story?! it's been dominating the front page for a week now. Here are the differences between Reader and Keep: Reader was an abandoned and an unclaimed product, kept on life support. Keep is a feature of Drive, a product which actually is acknowledged to be under someone's management I hope Evernote will exist as it is now forever and that the author won't have eat his words someday.
- wslh 14y ago> How hard is it to import an OPML into any of the other feed services that already exist on the web, or those popping up everyday. Do we really need to keep regurgitating this story? I think you have missed previous discussions about the irreplaceable parts of Google Reader. Hints: going back in time for articles that are not present in the current feed, autotranslation of posts.
- ishansharma 14y agoWell, the issue is not closing one service but how they just closed one widely used product and are keeping Google+ around, which sends less traffic around the web. Apart from that, it's about Google's departure from "we do what's best for users" to "we will keep only a few things around and kill others even if you use them daily". Personally, I never used Reader that much. Instead, I went for Feedly which used Reader as back end and Feedly is going to transition smoothly, so I am not affected. And even if they allow exporting, how long is it before they start killing other features/apps that I use? That's my(and others') concern here. Re:Microsoft, they are the favorite scapegoat for tech press. Apple, Google and everyone else is becoming next MS. ;)
- jcampbell1 14y agoGoogle served a giant turd sandwich to a bunch of journalists by closing Reader. Now Google is eating the shit it created. Google is going to continue eating shit until they grovel. Unfortunately for Google, no one is responsible for closing Reader, thus no one will step up to the plate and fix this PR disaster. There is a clear path to fix this mess, and I guarantee no one at Google has the humility to fix the problem.
- duggan 14y agoMerits of whether Keep is comparable to Reader aside - I wonder how long we're going to be seeing the "...but Google Reader" refrain from pundits. The camps of opinion I've seen on how Google should behave: 1) Pundits: Support an increasingly burdensome array of fringe services which cost them more than they gain (in their opinion) 2) HN: Reduce their experimental forays and leave (for now) private/small companies to their niches. 3) Coders: open source the services when shuttering. 1 and 2 would seem anathema to Google - the next Facebook could be hiding in either the organizational lethargy created by the former or the failure to act on the latter. 3 is going to be prohibitively expensive or difficult depending on how the service was built. I'm just not sure there's anything other than a lot of sound and fury in the future of these discussions, which makes them boring.
- raylu 14y agoCan I instead be in 4) whatever [0] As a user of Google Reader since too long ago to remember, I'm annoyed that I have to find an alternative but it also shouldn't be sparking a discussion about high-level, long-term Google strategy. [0]: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/17/google-reader/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/17/google-reader/
- tomkarlo 14y agoReader generated a disproportionate media outcry because it was such a great service for news junkies - and reporters in general tend to be news junkies. The response was greatly disproportionate when compared to say, the shutdown of Posterous or even other Google service shutdowns over the years... I suspect because of human nature, where reporters assume that everyone else is like them and reads 100 publications a day. Open sourcing it sounds great, but folks are saying that with zero knowledge of what the service actually looks like under the hood. I can only think they're assuming it looks like a common web service stack like LAMP or rails or something that would actually make sense to anyone if they got the code.
- imperialdrive 14y agoKeep is great - this is music to my ears... since buying a Nexus 4 I couldn't believe there wasn't a built-in app for notes, and I don't feel like paying for such a simple tool (sorry evernote) so I was using Gtasks... now that this is out, I'm happy (for now) still... damn u google for the inability to use BT and WIFI at the SAME TIME on a Nexus!!!!
- jck 14y agoever note has a free version.
- Draco6slayer 14y agoI don't see how dropping one product == become untrustworthy. This is like if you went to the supermarket every day to buy milk, flour, sugar, beans, and lettuce. And then the supermarket realises that it is uneconomical for them to provide lettuce, so they drop it, but they do start selling eggs. And you look at those eggs and say 'Yeah, Right. I'm not going to buy those. I remember what happened to the lettuce.'
- MaysonL 14y agoIt's more like if Walmart opened one of its big stores in your small home town and drove almost all of the smaller retailers for miles around out of business and a few years later said "Oh, this location sucks." and closed up shop.
- Draco6slayer 14y agoOnly if it took one week for another shopowner to start up again, and they gave 3 months notice. There was never even a cut in functionality; I'm already using Feedly instead of Google Reader, and Reader's still going to be around for another few months yet.
- curiousfiddler 14y agoIf at this point Google reinstates Reader, I can tell you they will win many hearts and goodwill. I don't remember a product being brought back from grave and if they were to do it, they will be viewed as a genuinely considerate company (IMO).
- anonfunction 14y agoI wouldn't hold your breath.
- chii 14y ago> If at this point Google reinstates Reader, I can tell you they will win many hearts and goodwill. except these good will and hearts from various people who complained won't be paying any money to google (at least, for this particular product).
- dombili 14y agoI'd be extremely surprised if they reinstate Reader. They'd only reinstate it if they genuinely didn't expect this much of an outcry, but I'm sure they did. Google knew that Reader was a product mostly used by tech savvy people and it was obvious that people were gonna criticize Google over this decision (rightly so). Hard part is almost over for them anyway. There are some people who lost respect to Google and some of them always gonna be skeptical before using any of Google's products (I'm one of them), but they'll be in the minority and I'm sure Google doesn't give a fuck about them anyway.
- danleech 14y agoI hope Google don’t renege. Now they’ve said they are shuttering Reader it has made the market for alternatives viable again. Developers are actually building real alternatives for us to switch to, which is a good thing.
- tlogan 14y agoRSS reader on the side I dont get the idea of Google Keep. It does not seem the notes are saved to Google Drive. Can I access them offline? Are they sync'd with my phone?
- hacker_beta 14y agoPeople that want reader are not using +. It's awesome! And any way I can increase ROI on my Adwords I support. If google can suggest my brand more often to the proper peeps based off data collected that means greater sales for me. Know the user!
- hackernewbie 14y agoMy impression of google from age ~15 was of a company who had balanced profitability with genuine altruistic intent. They had so many products, tools, services, libraries... everything and pretty much all of it was free and freely available. It hasn't really changed that much, but jesus, my perception has. Charging for Google Maps was a warning sign, though it only really applied to companies, fair game. Wave was flippant, it came and went too fast to understand the gesture. Google Notes always needed some love and attention it was never going to get. But Google Reader? It was/is uniquely useful. Widely supported, widely loved, widely used (as far as I can tell). It was the kind of thing that made me feel Google had your best interests at heart, I can't imagine it made them much money. Just to clarify, I'm not upset about Google Reader, far from it http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ looks entirely capable of picking up the slack. It's just upsetting to see a company that I really thought was different is just a company with margins and directives and the rest. I guess I'm an idiot.
- T_T 14y agoQuestion I would ask: How would you feel if Google acquired Feedly tomorrow? Reason I ask: Google scrapped Notebook (http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html) a while back, and has now released Google Keep. To me, this is a tear down and rebranding. I can't speak to the reason of it, but I would guess Google Keep already has more users than Notebook did. I can't speak for Google, but I certainly know their goal is not to lose 500k users to Feedly. My guess being, they likely want to take the smoothest, but also cheapest, way out of a product that they can no longer maintain.
- brianhc 14y agoFirst impression: Keep needs drag and drop photo uploading.
- jalilnawaz 14y agoIron Man 3 http://www.ostwarez.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11215&p=12128#p12128 http://www.ostwarez.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11215&p=...
- ufmace 14y agoThis has probably been said 100 times already on 100 other HN threads, but so what? Quit the whining. I have been using Reader for years, and I'm mildly disappointing that they're closing it. I know perfectly well that there will be a dozen solid replacements that probably have more features before Reader actually dies. That's the way the tech world works - services close all the time for any number of reasons. None of them is all that special, though - if the service genuinely added value for lots of people, then there will be replacements, and if there isn't one, then make one yourself and bask in the profitability. If you're that upset about it, then what do you really want from the tech world? A world where no service is ever killed or changed in a way that makes it less useful to you? We wouldn't have all of the awesome stuff that we have now if thousands of companies weren't willing to kill or change stuff that was unprofitable and take a chance on something new. At least Google is being pretty nice about it - we have months of notice and easy ways to get our feed lists out of Reader. They could have just up and pulled the plug without telling anyone or giving anyone a chance to get data out. Lots of services have been killed in just that way before. Personally, I'm waiting a few weeks for all of the other services to settle down and get used to the massive traffic influx. After that, I expect I'll find something better than Reader and get used to that. And then that will be killed someday too, and I'll have to find yet another thing. Life goes on.
- ghshephard 14y agoA lot of people just don't want to go the hassle of discovering, learning and configuring new tools. If I look at my daily toolset - between social networking, document management/creation, task tracking, work tools - I have on the order of 40 - 50 different tools. Each one of those tools has taken me some amount of effort to really come up to speed on so that I'm productive. For example - I use Evernote for tracking meetings, and I use Omnifocus for personal task tracking. It took me 6-10 hours to learn the ins and outs of each of those tools - and I'm pretty happy with the way they work for me. More importantly, I'm reasonably certain that both of those tools/services will be around several years from now, so I can continue to use them, track my tasks, without having to pick up a new tool. This concept of tool persistence is really important and valuable for a certain segment of the population - and I think it's what Om is expressing here. He doesn't really trust that Google will persist their attention to "Keep", because they've started shutting down other popular services after a few years, so what's to prevent them from doing the same thing with "Keep". He'll stick with evernote, and I can understand why. It's really an attempt to make it clear why Evernote should be successful in the face of an attack by Google.
- bradgessler 14y agoEvernote isn't exactly an angel. They butchered Skitch into a buggy piece of software that barely works.
- whatshisface 14y agoI think the point is they don't have to be an angel for you to trust them. If they were to do what Google is doing now, they would loose a tremendous amount of money. I think we all trust them to not want to loose money.
- v-yadli 14y agoThe latent support for this post: you won't lose Evernote 7 years later. But who knows?
- ChrisLTD 14y agoThe question is whether or not that's more or less likely than Keep being around for that same amount of time. In Om's mind that balance has clearly shifted.
- kercker 14y agoIf Google keep creating new things, how can it manage so many products? Killing some old products is a good option for them, though bad for users.
- johnpowell 14y agoI think part of the reader problem is that, like me, many people think of reader as a few servers on the bottom of a rack at a huge datacenter. Just a few blinking lights next to the floor that nobody thinks about or has to really do anything to keep them blinking. I'm sure people worked on it but in the grand scheme of things it was a drop in the bucket.
- vzhang 14y agoIf Google kills Reader, http://ifGoogleKillsReader.tumblr.com/ http://ifGoogleKillsReader.tumblr.com/
- shoopy 14y agoIn order to have me as a user, you're going to maintain this until the heat death of the universe. I don't care if it's free! I deserve it!
- marcamillion 14y agoSo this is the ugly side of "ship fast, ship often". At some point, when you have a ton of resources and people are shipping products out the wazoo.....you have to kill products. When you kill products, you lose confidence for future product announcements and skew your engagement numbers. What is a company like Google to do, when their larger products command most of their resources?
- hrayr 14y agoI pride myself on being very calm and patient, even while my 9 month old is screaming in my ear and smashing the keyboard while I try to type this. I don't normally comment much, and when I do I try not to be negative. One thing I discovered in the last few days is that I have absolutely no patience for whining, especially when coming from grown man. This post, and a lot of comments around here sound like whining to me. These are my feelings regarding the recent Google Reader news and the comments surrounding it.. I want to be clear, I know why people are pissed off, some are angry because their beloved product was taken away, and for some, their trust was broken, perhaps more than once. It has certainly struck a nerve, and I want to have these conversations, but something about the tone of the people has really turned me off. </end of whine>
- andyl 14y agoBefore Google+ came along, Google had many great products and embraced the OpenWeb. Now Google has abandoned Open Standards like RSS and CalDAV, and I think Google is more interested in building their own walled garden.
- mindcrime 14y agoBingo. It's very unfortunate too, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web. Who else has the clout to do it now, as well as the motivation? Does anybody see Marissa moving Yahoo that way? I'm guessing "no" but would love to be proven wrong. It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't that big and could wind up acquired by Oracle tomorrow for all we know. And they aren't that into services and web-apps. Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped. Amazon? Nope, don't see them stepping up to defend the Open Web. Facebook? Hell no. LinkedIn? No. Sun? Maybe if they hadn't been acquired by Oracle. IBM? Maybe not totally ridiculous, but history doesn't paint the best picture of IBM in this regard. And they also don't really offer services over the web, like a search engine. Maybe they could scale Watson up to webscale and make that the new Google? Wolfram? No. DuckDuckGo? Right spirit, but I don't think they are influential enough. Opera? Not influential enough. Canonical? No. Novell? Eh, no. HP? No. This isn't looking too promising.... :-( Edit: Duh, I missed a big one! The Wikimedia Foundation! They are probably one of the strongest backers of the Open Web, and definitely have a little bit of influence, thanks to WIkipedia and related projects.
- cddotdotslash 14y agoYou forgot Mozilla - pretty much the only company left that supports what you mentioned.
- mindcrime 14y agoMozilla is mentioned. :-) End of the first paragraph: Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped.
- cinbun8 14y agoWhy stop with Google Reader and Keep ? The article seems to suggest that just because Google pulled the plug on Reader that it will pull the plug on any product it releases. Yes pulling down Reader was a bad idea but this is an overreaction.
- fpgeek 14y agoAnyone in the "Just let me pay for Reader" brigade (I'm not sure whether or not Om is a member, though it seems likely given the "How much would you pay" poll I saw on one of his posts) has no basis for complaining about Keep. Keep, unlike Reader, is a paid service. A big point of Keep is to encourage people to use Drive - a storage service you pay for, once you fill up your introductory tier (keeping audio notes might help with that).
- mcintyre1994 14y agoI'm not sure Keep lets you actually store an audio note. I believe it's just speech to text. Of course nothing stops you dropping a recorded note into Drive, but I don't think the Keep interface supports them. EDIT: Looks like it both transcribes and keeps the audio available. http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57575465-285/get-started-with-google-keep/ http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57575465-285/get-started...
- donniezazen 14y agoIt is absurd to expect a business to not to shift its priorities. Google did more harm to RSS technology by letting it deteriorate over years. Now that it's gone, I am very hopeful that RSS will evolve and deliver content in better and new ways.
- ChrisLTD 14y agoMost businesses are singularly focused and don't shift priorities. Think restaurants, stores, manufacturers, even small software companies. Only large companies can even afford to think about shifting priorities rather than staying laser focused on their original mission.
- utopkara 14y agoDoes anybody remember Google Notebook? It did almost exactly what Keep does. I used notes extensively, and one day... You know the drill. Good luck to those who will jump on Keep. After notebook, I switched to MacJournal, it works great for me, and I am not thinking of switching to an online alternative. There are other tools that are better suited for keeping stuff, such as DevonThink (check Macupdate Promo).
- utopkara 14y agoTo give you a sense of how important the notes were for me: I kept all the literature search for my thesis research, and my reviews in notes. Thankfully, they let me download the stuff I had in there. But, the data was useless in itself.
- abalone 14y agoHey you know what would be super xtra cool? If this Keep thing let you keep clipping links, like, automatically, from the same site, whenever new stuff is published, into your Google Drive(TM), which is super cool b/c it syncs down to your computer so you can read those clips offline... OH NEVERMIND.
- dewiz 14y agoMy two cents: trust only apps that allows to export 100% of your data, or even better saves your data in an open format accessible through API. At the end of the day it is not about Google or Microsoft or Evernote, but about not losing data You created.
- jemeshsu 14y agoFor those who are upset by Reader shutdown and want more, check out Schemer https://www.schemer.com https://www.schemer.com, a site that is more strategic than Reader to Google.
- Heliosmaster 14y agoYou are also welcome to stop using Google Search, Gmail (and contacts), Google Drive/Documents, Google+, Google Calendar, and YouTube, ... Because, you know, they are from the same company responsbile for the demise of Google Reader, and the less you get DEPENDENT on them, the least you will suffer from the demise of another product as this. Or you can move on.
- xradionut 14y agoThere's alternatives to all of the Google services, although some will be harder to replace in the short term than others. In terms of usefulness, Reader, as an information sieve, is a tool that saved me hours a week. If Google had offered a paid version to keep Reader going instead of shutting Reader down, I would have paid. Now I don't trust any "free" service they offer to be there in the long term. I guess Google "free" isn't "free". Explains why both OSS and commercial software(with long term agreements) are better choices.
- zaptheimpaler 14y agoIs it just me or did Google become a lot more focused on monetization and a lot less on protecting the open web and making great products as soon as Marissa Mayer left?
- EFathy 14y agoThe man got a point!
- nicholassmith 14y agoWithout going into the whole debate of 'why should I use it when they're just going to Reader it?', does anyone else think this is a massive PR strategy failure? Seriously, the worst time to announce a product must be just after you've decided to shut one down that has a, granted not overwhelmingly large, vocal user base currently flogging the company on all platforms. Super bad timing, the product is tainted with negativity already, if they'd given it even a fortnight to die off it'd be a much better play.
- triplesec 14y agoThis is the fundamental problem for any cloud services. You don't know if a small company like Evernote is going to go bust, too, and many have, sometimes bought to kill by Google and its ilk. So it's no safer than using large company products. And if not Evernote, some other service you once used, like say delicious. Or they don't update it as fast, and it gets clunky, like flickr (not coincidentally both bought and ruined by yahoo) For real security of data and use: either 1. Download and install with local storage only 2. whatever service you do use, save all the things locally frequently, in multiple open data formats.
- HugoDias 14y agoI just have an image for you: http://cl.ly/image/2K2X1U1X0g2r http://cl.ly/image/2K2X1U1X0g2r
- RexRollman 14y agoPersonally, I have grown weary of the Google intelligence umbrella. I recently closed my Google account, as my CR-48 finally died, and moved my email to another company. I use Evernote for my notekeeping and Flickr for photos. I use Google only for search these days. Now, would it be nice to have all of that under one company? Sure, but there are too many privacy issues when doing so under Google.
- unhe 14y agoF. U. Google...i once admired you for your innovations, but you are just becoming the next microsoft.
- Tactic 14y agoExpecting services to continue forever is like expecting that you will never be laid off. It is a rude awakening when it happens, but it should hardly be surprising for anyone that has been around for a while.