8 ms·

My 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.

My 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 ago
Keep is a feature, Drive is the App (apple/oranges).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - yanw 14y ago
    https://drive.google.com/keep/ https://drive.google.com/keep/ It's under the Drive umbrella.
    - qompiler 14y ago
      Wow, it's so useless and clunky.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
It 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 ago
  How is Now strategic?
  - niggler 14y ago
    Increases 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 ago
      The 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 ago
        For 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
        I find that even for topics related to money the top hits on Google are all completely useless spam. I was looking for information about companies selling software components and just found a bunch of "sellyourappnow.com" offering Fruit Ninja clones for a few hundred bucks. For whatever reason businesses that love their margins more than their customers find it's much more convenient to astroturf services like Yelp than to actually provide something worth buying. And services like Yelp always seem to find that it's more lucrative to extort money from businesses in exchange for reorganizing their ratings. I'd love to have a way for regular people to recommend things that was invulnerable to astroturfing but I have no idea what it would look like.
- tjbiddle 14y ago
  Now already has an option to update you on a story that you read earlier. I don't see why Reader couldn't play into this.
- vladikoff 14y ago
  Also Glass.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Ding ding ding. That's the progression I envision. Next is Google Glass. After that, automobiles with the same integration. I'm both scared and excited to see what Google will be able to do with all the data they have feeding into Now.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  This would be the Google Now that doesn't run on my Nexus One? :-)
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    I guess? The fact that the CM team doesn't even generate 10.1 builds for the Passion is a pretty good indicator that it's too weak. Or HTC won't upgrade the graphics drivers.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      That's probably the case, although I'm a bit lost on the distinction between what GN does and the regular reminders from my calendar/mail client etc. It's powerful enough to run maps with little 3d buildings and stuff, so I've never been wholly clear on why it's stuck on Android 2.3.
      - myko 14y ago
        The Nexus One? It barely has enough on device storage for 2.3 :(
      - Sayter 14y ago
        The system partition on the Nexue One is only 145 MB.
      - mcintyre1994 14y ago
        I 'upgraded' my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S to ICS, and it's absolutely ridiculously bad. I blame Sony for most issues, but the fact is ICS is bigger and uses way too much space for older devices that sold with none. I imagine JB even more so. On my HP Touchpad though, Jellybean runs like a charm. I think the real reason fragmentation was ever an issue is because so many devices shipped without enough space for apps. It doesn't help of course that Google and their strategic app partners (see Facebook) assume that every device has a tonne of space (which modern devices do of course) and grow ridiculously big. Chrome and Currents are both unusably big on an older device. Bit of a ramble, but in short you're getting a much much better experience by not upgrading, unless there's a way to hack that tiny storage partition?
- nchlswu 14y ago
  It baffles me that everyone is so focused on Evernote when the connection is so obvious (probably deceptively so)
mbreese 14y ago
Everyone 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    Maybe they did look at the logs and decided that Reader usage was low enough (at Google scale) that they did not care.
    - mbreese 14y ago
      At 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 ago
Keep 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    Reader.. 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 ago
      Assuming 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 ago
I'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 ago
  Google 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 ago
    Except apparently which blogs you're reading. But I guess they get that and more from Chrome now.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

yanw 14y ago

Keep is a feature, Drive is the App (apple/oranges).

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- yanw 14y ago
  https://drive.google.com/keep/ https://drive.google.com/keep/ It's under the Drive umbrella.
  - qompiler 14y ago
    Wow, it's so useless and clunky.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

It 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 ago
How is Now strategic?
- niggler 14y ago
  Increases 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      For 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
        I find that even for topics related to money the top hits on Google are all completely useless spam. I was looking for information about companies selling software components and just found a bunch of "sellyourappnow.com" offering Fruit Ninja clones for a few hundred bucks. For whatever reason businesses that love their margins more than their customers find it's much more convenient to astroturf services like Yelp than to actually provide something worth buying. And services like Yelp always seem to find that it's more lucrative to extort money from businesses in exchange for reorganizing their ratings. I'd love to have a way for regular people to recommend things that was invulnerable to astroturfing but I have no idea what it would look like.
tjbiddle 14y ago
Now already has an option to update you on a story that you read earlier. I don't see why Reader couldn't play into this.
vladikoff 14y ago
Also Glass.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Ding ding ding. That's the progression I envision. Next is Google Glass. After that, automobiles with the same integration. I'm both scared and excited to see what Google will be able to do with all the data they have feeding into Now.
anigbrowl 14y ago
This would be the Google Now that doesn't run on my Nexus One? :-)
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I guess? The fact that the CM team doesn't even generate 10.1 builds for the Passion is a pretty good indicator that it's too weak. Or HTC won't upgrade the graphics drivers.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    That's probably the case, although I'm a bit lost on the distinction between what GN does and the regular reminders from my calendar/mail client etc. It's powerful enough to run maps with little 3d buildings and stuff, so I've never been wholly clear on why it's stuck on Android 2.3.
    - myko 14y ago
      The Nexus One? It barely has enough on device storage for 2.3 :(
    - Sayter 14y ago
      The system partition on the Nexue One is only 145 MB.
    - mcintyre1994 14y ago
      I 'upgraded' my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S to ICS, and it's absolutely ridiculously bad. I blame Sony for most issues, but the fact is ICS is bigger and uses way too much space for older devices that sold with none. I imagine JB even more so. On my HP Touchpad though, Jellybean runs like a charm. I think the real reason fragmentation was ever an issue is because so many devices shipped without enough space for apps. It doesn't help of course that Google and their strategic app partners (see Facebook) assume that every device has a tonne of space (which modern devices do of course) and grow ridiculously big. Chrome and Currents are both unusably big on an older device. Bit of a ramble, but in short you're getting a much much better experience by not upgrading, unless there's a way to hack that tiny storage partition?
nchlswu 14y ago
It baffles me that everyone is so focused on Evernote when the connection is so obvious (probably deceptively so)

mbreese 14y ago

Everyone 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 ago
That 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 ago
  Maybe they did look at the logs and decided that Reader usage was low enough (at Google scale) that they did not care.
  - mbreese 14y ago
    At 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 ago

Keep 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 ago
It 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 ago
  Reader.. 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 ago
    Assuming 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 ago

I'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 ago
Google 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 ago
  Except apparently which blogs you're reading. But I guess they get that and more from Chrome now.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]