23 ms·

This is getting ridiculous. It's been three weeks of highly public complaining/pseudo-analysis about Google Reader. Now it's 'critical public infrastructure', o

This is getting ridiculous. It's been three weeks of highly public complaining/pseudo-analysis about Google Reader. Now it's 'critical public infrastructure', on par with public transit systems. Can we have a reality check? It's an RSS reader. It was really good. Now it's shutting down. Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children. Building a replacement doesn't require digging tunnels, buying trains, hiring drivers. The economic argument is interesting, but I'm wondering if this wins for 'Most Hyperbolic Google Reader Shutdown Article'.

martythemaniak 14y ago
It's important to note that he's not actually suggesting the government take over Google Reader, just giving an economics-based viewpoint on Google's situation. Combined with the linked article, it makes for good reading.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- sologoub 14y ago
  Krugman is completely over-generalizing here. The economic argument would have been sound, save for one detail - Search is massively profitable, and so are Google's core businesses, which is to say advertising. Their Google Apps, App Engine and related services are also very much commercial and face stiff competition. Hell, even search is highly contested, though Google has been able to stay ahead of this one. Google Reader had a massive user base when compared to other RSS readers, but it's hardly a monopoly. I'd understand the uproar if it was the ONLY RSS reader to ever exist, and ever to be possible. There are alternatives. The very definition of monopoly is that you do not have a choice. Remember the old Bell system? Now that was a monopoly. (It used to be illegal to plug in phones not bought from the phone company.)
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    This is my point; something like a municipal bus system has very high barriers to entry, even without a government-created monopoly. This extends to operating costs, specialized equipment, union negotiations, etc. Google was operating in a space with lots of players, they just happened to have large market share. They weren't doing anything anticompetitive, and there wasn't any barrier to entry beyond 'You have to do it better than Google, and get your name out there'.
  - fkdjs 14y ago
    Not only that, but it takes <1s to type in feedly.com, and lo and behold, a competitor. Not only that, but the site reveals an android app you can download. Any decent monopolist would have never allowed that. Krugman should really do some research on what monopolists do, starting off with Standard Oil. The internet is a highly competitive environment.
IanDrake 14y ago
>Now it's 'critical public infrastructure' Don't get riled up, this was a piece by Paul Krugman. He thinks government should own /control / regulate everything.
- martinced 14y ago
  Exactly. He's a Keynesian freak who lost it a long time ago.
  - 18pfsmt 14y ago
    Right. Because the steamboat ferries, railroads, interstate highway system, and the internet were created by the free market...
spinchange 14y ago
You seem to be responding emotionally to something you're tired of hearing about topically, not the substance of this piece which doesn't suggest any of the things you seem to feel it does. It's about economics, particularly as they apply to something with fixed-to-increasing costs but with users for whom the value has a fixed upper limit and is declining based on the intensity of their usage. There's a lot more here than complaining and pseudo-analysis. It's a Nobel Prize winning economist talking about pricing models as they apply to usage/cost/scale!
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  He has an interesting point, but he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value. In fact, they're just making news; they need to generate content, and this is something that requires no research, just a vitriolic rant. I suspect if we had a good way to measure 'willingness to pay', many of the loud complainers would suddenly end up in the 'low intensity' bucket. Less high intensity users means less network externalities, which comes back to my original point that the whole phenomenon is all smoke and no fire - lots of people complaining about the loss of a service that isn't terribly unique or widely used. He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant. It seems cheap and link-baity.
  - lostnet 14y ago
    > He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't > actually think they're relevant. I have to agree. Google is very efficient at profiting from casual users unwilling to pay, but clearly they just didn't exist.
  - jmesserly 14y ago
    > [...] he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value Right, that's the point. This is a common style in economic blogs. They often follow the form: assuming some set of data, what are the economic implications? > He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant. Right, they may or may not be relevant to this specific case (Reader), but I still found it interesting to learn about. > It seems cheap and link-baity. Hmmm, here we have a distinguished economist, who could no doubt live easily from his university job, instead spends time trying to bring scientific economic analysis to popular topics. Not sure how that is cheap and link-baity. He does have a knack for catchy titles, though. If you aren't familiar with his blog style, "evil google" probably sounds bad (and emotionally charged), but I really doubt it was meant to be taken literally.
RockyMcNuts 14y ago
It's not the RSS reader. It's the open publishing ecosystem. Most clients point to Reader as the central feed aggregator. Most publishers point to Feedburner as the central publisher. Google seized the commanding heights with Feedburner and Google Reader and captured all the publishers and the clients, and now they're killing the ecosystem. http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-crushed-and-abandoned-the-rss-industry-7000013025/ http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-cr... I don't see why they couldn't have integrated Reader into Plus without killing the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are moving into news aggregation, and Google is killing a successful news aggregation system. I don't understand their strategy, but it's seems sort of like, we want everyone on G+ and we don't care how heavy-handed we look or how early adopters feel, and we don't want an open ecosystem that people can use to pipe content into Twitter and Facebook.
- Evbn 14y ago
  People can pipe content into FB and Twitter using APIs. The only service you can't pipe content into is G+, which has no input API.
AJ007 14y ago
The NYT tends to have really good articles, but some of their columnists are so off the wall I can't figure out how they keep their jobs. Being a columnists gives the writer a self reinforcing celebrity factor then they just stick around way longer than they should.
- crander 14y ago
  FYI: Krugman is a Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist who is quite otherwise famous.
  - michaelwww 14y ago
    He's not just a columnist at the Times, he's the only columinst at the Times ;-) http://krugmantimes.com/ http://krugmantimes.com/
    - MaysonL 14y ago
      Just about the only one worth reading. And the one[0] [in just about the whole of the news industry] with the best track record as far as making testable and correct predictions. [0] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/130485/claim-krugman-is-top-prognosticator-cal-thomas-is-the-worst/ http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/130485/claim-kr...
      - michaelwww 14y ago
        Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Krugman fan. Even he had a good laugh at the Krugman Times and shared it on his blog.
  - 1337biz 14y ago
    quite otherwise famous = sadly enough by reinventing himself as a partisan talk show pundit.
lnanek2 14y ago
Well, the people the shutdown affects are also the people most likely to write articles. Everyday people may not get much out of Google Reader, but neither do they follow hundreds of sites looking for a good story to write like journalists do.
- MaysonL 14y ago
  Nor do hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands follow most everyday people.
rm999 14y ago
>Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children I don't think anyone uses that as the criteria of what should be made public. People rely on car companies and grocery stores to get home and feed their children, but economists aren't fighting to make those public. And federal parks are hardly critical infrastructure but I don't know many people who complain that they are public. The article is written from a purely theoretical economic perspective, it's not a real proposal, so it's worth addressing it from that perspective. Krugman's argument is basically that there are certain products that add global value but cannot exist without people being forced to pay for it. Many economists - not all - agree this is a good criteria of what should be made public (infrastructure and research would fall in this category). It's hard to imagine that web services could fall under this, but I suspect a lot of people forget that the internet is still in its infancy and companies like google have been able to subsidize loss-creators through insanely high profits. That won't last, google is already scaling back, and the result may be a global destruction in value. (To be clear I don't want to see things like google reader made public for idealogical reasons, and I think you and most people are the same way, but I think that's out of the scope of addressing Krugman's point)
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  The sore point for me was mostly that the article takes it for granted that Reader had this huge positive externality, because a lot of people are complaining. It's theoretically interesting to say that such a service might be worth publicly subsidizing. It's just annoying that he happened to use Reader as an example, because there has been a glut of news about Reader lately, and I think it's overblown.
  - samastur 14y ago
    Where does it do that? Basically it says following: * some people I know are upset * we know from economics, but often forget, that some products can be not viable even if people are willing to pay for them * historical solution is to make them public service which also to Krugman seems hard to envison Nowhere does he say anything about importance of Reader.
- 14y ago
rz2k 14y ago
A good deal of useful thinking involves models, and I don't particularly understand the anger that results. Google isn't a monopolist in this situation either, but it is useful to understand pricing dynamics where there is no competitor. It sheds light on price discrimination with coupons, for example. Krugman mischaracterizes the article[1], since it does not claim that Reader was crucial infrastructure, but he doesn't argue that it is crucial infrastructure himself either. They both talk about the dynamics of a product that has network effects and becomes a public good. We generally know from cognitive sciences how we economize in situations like having a reliably knowledgeable colleague. This has served as a counterpoint to the silly arguments about how Google is making us stupid, but nevertheless says that the specialization in our expertise that it facilitates has Google search's continued availability as a vital component. The original article talks about whether discontinuations will cause users to be more cautious about adopting services that create dependencies, and whether it will inhibit the success of new ones that involve network effects. >Google wants us to use its services in ways that provide it with interesting and valuable information, and eyeballs. If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it. >But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for "social" apps that rely on network effects. Even a crummy social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Anyway, the important issues aren't perfectly typified by Reader, but it is a situation people are familiar with at this moment. Personally, I think it is worth thinking about why more of the shuttered projects haven't been sold off or at least open sourced like Wave. Combine that with profitable businesses that are acquired for the talent, then neglected to death, and it sounds like a lot of effort is being needlessly trashed. It is not difficult to imagine that if books.google.com were able to give even more liberal access to its library, that struggling municipalities would be even less willing to fund their libraries. This hypothetical would be unambiguously good for the world if it lead to more access to information, but one can also imagine that this hypothetical could also lead to a dependency that was itself vulnerable. There are a lot of things that won't lead to the end of civilization, but they can still be nevertheless worse than an alternate outcome. [1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilities http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilitie...
sultezdukes 14y ago
Are you really surprised that someone like Krugman would argue "seems hard at this point to envision search and related functions as public utilities, but that’s arguably where the logic will eventually lead us." That is the "logical conclusion" for people of his ilk. And I'm not surprised by the first comment that I found on the article: It is the height of capitalist folly to insist that a profit-seeking corporation is the right form of organization for operating facitilites that become essential global public utilities. Why of course. This guy is just random article commenter, but you know your average, hardcore leftist thinks the same way. Facebook must come under UN or some other quasi-governmental control. It needs to be controlled. Well, duh...
mark_l_watson 14y ago
Probably it is correct that Google dropping Reader will hurt some people's businesses. In the last week I went through a lot of hassle moving my blog from Blogger to Wordpress (which I have more control over). Would Google ever drop Blogger? Probably not but who knows. I also stopped using GMail as my primary business email service. I recently blogged about the 5 Google services that were terminated that affected my customers' and my businesses. I like to use free services from Google, Twitter, and Facebook, but I certainly don't want to rely on them for business. An analogy: my family likes to support small local businesses. For web services, hosting, etc., I prefer using companies that I pay fairly for services and who support me.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children." That isn't true but why it isn't true is not immediately obvious. Google reader drives a ton of traffic, what that means in real terms is that there are a huge body of people who don't have time to regularly visit a blog, but they do have time to look quickly at what 10 or 15 blogs have recently posted. Thus they discover where there is an interesting article on "your" blog and visit. That is how it drives traffics to otherwise poorly visited blogs. It is more effective than G+, Organic Search, and Facebook in that regard. Those bloggers that benefit from this feed do feed themselves and possibly their family on income they get from their writing either in ad-clicks or affiliate links. When Reader goes away, a number of those blogs will be hurt, and those people will be scrambling to find other ways to drive traffic to their sites. Now this will also hurt Google because there is a crap ton of AdSense for Content advertising on those blogs, and I expect that what use there had been of Blogger will drop below the 'minimum sustainable point' and so Blogger too will get tossed into the spring cleaning trash bin. Now its probably not noticeable (much) the last time we (Blekko search engined) looked through the blog crawls in depth Google was the dominant ad network provider on those blogs, but they do something like 3.7B$ of revenue in 'Partner sites' [1] per quarter and 1% of that being tossed out the window is only 37M$ per quarter (or about 150M$ for the year) isn't a huge loss for them but its going to hit a number of their "partners" quite sharply. Unlike sites which are bogus flick-n-click ad reapers these folks are actually trying to use the system in the way it is supposed to work, they write quality content and Google helps them monetize it. The thing that few people "get" about Google isn't that they are a search monopoly (they aren't) it is that they are an advertising monopoly (which they are). They are synonymous with "internet advertising" and having dealt with a lot of advertising partners, they all seem to end up re-selling Google's ads in one way or another. Its like having three different pizza restaurants but only one kitchen. I'm hopeful that this will create opportunities for actually new advertising networks to appear> We'll have to wait and see though. [1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q4_google_earnings....
- bla2 14y ago
  For perspective: "huge body" is ~millions monthly actives (but: many of them journalists), very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have). YouTube just crossed 1 billion monthlies (http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/1553848/youtube-hits-1-billion-users http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil...), 100x that. Which of the two would you push?
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
"It's been three weeks of highly public complaining/pseudo-analysis about Google Reader." On March 13, Google announced it's killing Reader; that's 10 days a go. http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cle... I know I'll be complaining about this for quite some time to come.

martythemaniak 14y ago

It's important to note that he's not actually suggesting the government take over Google Reader, just giving an economics-based viewpoint on Google's situation. Combined with the linked article, it makes for good reading.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

sologoub 14y ago
Krugman is completely over-generalizing here. The economic argument would have been sound, save for one detail - Search is massively profitable, and so are Google's core businesses, which is to say advertising. Their Google Apps, App Engine and related services are also very much commercial and face stiff competition. Hell, even search is highly contested, though Google has been able to stay ahead of this one. Google Reader had a massive user base when compared to other RSS readers, but it's hardly a monopoly. I'd understand the uproar if it was the ONLY RSS reader to ever exist, and ever to be possible. There are alternatives. The very definition of monopoly is that you do not have a choice. Remember the old Bell system? Now that was a monopoly. (It used to be illegal to plug in phones not bought from the phone company.)
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  This is my point; something like a municipal bus system has very high barriers to entry, even without a government-created monopoly. This extends to operating costs, specialized equipment, union negotiations, etc. Google was operating in a space with lots of players, they just happened to have large market share. They weren't doing anything anticompetitive, and there wasn't any barrier to entry beyond 'You have to do it better than Google, and get your name out there'.
- fkdjs 14y ago
  Not only that, but it takes <1s to type in feedly.com, and lo and behold, a competitor. Not only that, but the site reveals an android app you can download. Any decent monopolist would have never allowed that. Krugman should really do some research on what monopolists do, starting off with Standard Oil. The internet is a highly competitive environment.

IanDrake 14y ago

>Now it's 'critical public infrastructure' Don't get riled up, this was a piece by Paul Krugman. He thinks government should own /control / regulate everything.

martinced 14y ago
Exactly. He's a Keynesian freak who lost it a long time ago.
- 18pfsmt 14y ago
  Right. Because the steamboat ferries, railroads, interstate highway system, and the internet were created by the free market...

spinchange 14y ago

You seem to be responding emotionally to something you're tired of hearing about topically, not the substance of this piece which doesn't suggest any of the things you seem to feel it does. It's about economics, particularly as they apply to something with fixed-to-increasing costs but with users for whom the value has a fixed upper limit and is declining based on the intensity of their usage. There's a lot more here than complaining and pseudo-analysis. It's a Nobel Prize winning economist talking about pricing models as they apply to usage/cost/scale!

alanctgardner2 14y ago
He has an interesting point, but he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value. In fact, they're just making news; they need to generate content, and this is something that requires no research, just a vitriolic rant. I suspect if we had a good way to measure 'willingness to pay', many of the loud complainers would suddenly end up in the 'low intensity' bucket. Less high intensity users means less network externalities, which comes back to my original point that the whole phenomenon is all smoke and no fire - lots of people complaining about the loss of a service that isn't terribly unique or widely used. He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant. It seems cheap and link-baity.
- lostnet 14y ago
  > He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't > actually think they're relevant. I have to agree. Google is very efficient at profiting from casual users unwilling to pay, but clearly they just didn't exist.
- jmesserly 14y ago
  > [...] he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value Right, that's the point. This is a common style in economic blogs. They often follow the form: assuming some set of data, what are the economic implications? > He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant. Right, they may or may not be relevant to this specific case (Reader), but I still found it interesting to learn about. > It seems cheap and link-baity. Hmmm, here we have a distinguished economist, who could no doubt live easily from his university job, instead spends time trying to bring scientific economic analysis to popular topics. Not sure how that is cheap and link-baity. He does have a knack for catchy titles, though. If you aren't familiar with his blog style, "evil google" probably sounds bad (and emotionally charged), but I really doubt it was meant to be taken literally.

RockyMcNuts 14y ago

It's not the RSS reader. It's the open publishing ecosystem. Most clients point to Reader as the central feed aggregator. Most publishers point to Feedburner as the central publisher. Google seized the commanding heights with Feedburner and Google Reader and captured all the publishers and the clients, and now they're killing the ecosystem. http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-crushed-and-abandoned-the-rss-industry-7000013025/ http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-cr... I don't see why they couldn't have integrated Reader into Plus without killing the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are moving into news aggregation, and Google is killing a successful news aggregation system. I don't understand their strategy, but it's seems sort of like, we want everyone on G+ and we don't care how heavy-handed we look or how early adopters feel, and we don't want an open ecosystem that people can use to pipe content into Twitter and Facebook.

Evbn 14y ago
People can pipe content into FB and Twitter using APIs. The only service you can't pipe content into is G+, which has no input API.

AJ007 14y ago

The NYT tends to have really good articles, but some of their columnists are so off the wall I can't figure out how they keep their jobs. Being a columnists gives the writer a self reinforcing celebrity factor then they just stick around way longer than they should.

crander 14y ago
FYI: Krugman is a Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist who is quite otherwise famous.
- michaelwww 14y ago
  He's not just a columnist at the Times, he's the only columinst at the Times ;-) http://krugmantimes.com/ http://krugmantimes.com/
  - MaysonL 14y ago
    Just about the only one worth reading. And the one[0] [in just about the whole of the news industry] with the best track record as far as making testable and correct predictions. [0] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/130485/claim-krugman-is-top-prognosticator-cal-thomas-is-the-worst/ http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/130485/claim-kr...
    - michaelwww 14y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Krugman fan. Even he had a good laugh at the Krugman Times and shared it on his blog.
- 1337biz 14y ago
  quite otherwise famous = sadly enough by reinventing himself as a partisan talk show pundit.

lnanek2 14y ago

Well, the people the shutdown affects are also the people most likely to write articles. Everyday people may not get much out of Google Reader, but neither do they follow hundreds of sites looking for a good story to write like journalists do.

MaysonL 14y ago
Nor do hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands follow most everyday people.

rm999 14y ago

>Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children I don't think anyone uses that as the criteria of what should be made public. People rely on car companies and grocery stores to get home and feed their children, but economists aren't fighting to make those public. And federal parks are hardly critical infrastructure but I don't know many people who complain that they are public. The article is written from a purely theoretical economic perspective, it's not a real proposal, so it's worth addressing it from that perspective. Krugman's argument is basically that there are certain products that add global value but cannot exist without people being forced to pay for it. Many economists - not all - agree this is a good criteria of what should be made public (infrastructure and research would fall in this category). It's hard to imagine that web services could fall under this, but I suspect a lot of people forget that the internet is still in its infancy and companies like google have been able to subsidize loss-creators through insanely high profits. That won't last, google is already scaling back, and the result may be a global destruction in value. (To be clear I don't want to see things like google reader made public for idealogical reasons, and I think you and most people are the same way, but I think that's out of the scope of addressing Krugman's point)

alanctgardner2 14y ago
The sore point for me was mostly that the article takes it for granted that Reader had this huge positive externality, because a lot of people are complaining. It's theoretically interesting to say that such a service might be worth publicly subsidizing. It's just annoying that he happened to use Reader as an example, because there has been a glut of news about Reader lately, and I think it's overblown.
- samastur 14y ago
  Where does it do that? Basically it says following: * some people I know are upset * we know from economics, but often forget, that some products can be not viable even if people are willing to pay for them * historical solution is to make them public service which also to Krugman seems hard to envison Nowhere does he say anything about importance of Reader.
14y ago

rz2k 14y ago

A good deal of useful thinking involves models, and I don't particularly understand the anger that results. Google isn't a monopolist in this situation either, but it is useful to understand pricing dynamics where there is no competitor. It sheds light on price discrimination with coupons, for example. Krugman mischaracterizes the article[1], since it does not claim that Reader was crucial infrastructure, but he doesn't argue that it is crucial infrastructure himself either. They both talk about the dynamics of a product that has network effects and becomes a public good. We generally know from cognitive sciences how we economize in situations like having a reliably knowledgeable colleague. This has served as a counterpoint to the silly arguments about how Google is making us stupid, but nevertheless says that the specialization in our expertise that it facilitates has Google search's continued availability as a vital component. The original article talks about whether discontinuations will cause users to be more cautious about adopting services that create dependencies, and whether it will inhibit the success of new ones that involve network effects. >Google wants us to use its services in ways that provide it with interesting and valuable information, and eyeballs. If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it. >But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for "social" apps that rely on network effects. Even a crummy social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Anyway, the important issues aren't perfectly typified by Reader, but it is a situation people are familiar with at this moment. Personally, I think it is worth thinking about why more of the shuttered projects haven't been sold off or at least open sourced like Wave. Combine that with profitable businesses that are acquired for the talent, then neglected to death, and it sounds like a lot of effort is being needlessly trashed. It is not difficult to imagine that if books.google.com were able to give even more liberal access to its library, that struggling municipalities would be even less willing to fund their libraries. This hypothetical would be unambiguously good for the world if it lead to more access to information, but one can also imagine that this hypothetical could also lead to a dependency that was itself vulnerable. There are a lot of things that won't lead to the end of civilization, but they can still be nevertheless worse than an alternate outcome. [1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilities http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilitie...

sultezdukes 14y ago

Are you really surprised that someone like Krugman would argue "seems hard at this point to envision search and related functions as public utilities, but that’s arguably where the logic will eventually lead us." That is the "logical conclusion" for people of his ilk. And I'm not surprised by the first comment that I found on the article: It is the height of capitalist folly to insist that a profit-seeking corporation is the right form of organization for operating facitilites that become essential global public utilities. Why of course. This guy is just random article commenter, but you know your average, hardcore leftist thinks the same way. Facebook must come under UN or some other quasi-governmental control. It needs to be controlled. Well, duh...

mark_l_watson 14y ago

Probably it is correct that Google dropping Reader will hurt some people's businesses. In the last week I went through a lot of hassle moving my blog from Blogger to Wordpress (which I have more control over). Would Google ever drop Blogger? Probably not but who knows. I also stopped using GMail as my primary business email service. I recently blogged about the 5 Google services that were terminated that affected my customers' and my businesses. I like to use free services from Google, Twitter, and Facebook, but I certainly don't want to rely on them for business. An analogy: my family likes to support small local businesses. For web services, hosting, etc., I prefer using companies that I pay fairly for services and who support me.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

"Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children." That isn't true but why it isn't true is not immediately obvious. Google reader drives a ton of traffic, what that means in real terms is that there are a huge body of people who don't have time to regularly visit a blog, but they do have time to look quickly at what 10 or 15 blogs have recently posted. Thus they discover where there is an interesting article on "your" blog and visit. That is how it drives traffics to otherwise poorly visited blogs. It is more effective than G+, Organic Search, and Facebook in that regard. Those bloggers that benefit from this feed do feed themselves and possibly their family on income they get from their writing either in ad-clicks or affiliate links. When Reader goes away, a number of those blogs will be hurt, and those people will be scrambling to find other ways to drive traffic to their sites. Now this will also hurt Google because there is a crap ton of AdSense for Content advertising on those blogs, and I expect that what use there had been of Blogger will drop below the 'minimum sustainable point' and so Blogger too will get tossed into the spring cleaning trash bin. Now its probably not noticeable (much) the last time we (Blekko search engined) looked through the blog crawls in depth Google was the dominant ad network provider on those blogs, but they do something like 3.7B$ of revenue in 'Partner sites' [1] per quarter and 1% of that being tossed out the window is only 37M$ per quarter (or about 150M$ for the year) isn't a huge loss for them but its going to hit a number of their "partners" quite sharply. Unlike sites which are bogus flick-n-click ad reapers these folks are actually trying to use the system in the way it is supposed to work, they write quality content and Google helps them monetize it. The thing that few people "get" about Google isn't that they are a search monopoly (they aren't) it is that they are an advertising monopoly (which they are). They are synonymous with "internet advertising" and having dealt with a lot of advertising partners, they all seem to end up re-selling Google's ads in one way or another. Its like having three different pizza restaurants but only one kitchen. I'm hopeful that this will create opportunities for actually new advertising networks to appear> We'll have to wait and see though. [1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q4_google_earnings....

bla2 14y ago
For perspective: "huge body" is ~millions monthly actives (but: many of them journalists), very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have). YouTube just crossed 1 billion monthlies (http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/1553848/youtube-hits-1-billion-users http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil...), 100x that. Which of the two would you push?

Samuel_Michon 14y ago

"It's been three weeks of highly public complaining/pseudo-analysis about Google Reader." On March 13, Google announced it's killing Reader; that's 10 days a go. http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cle... I know I'll be complaining about this for quite some time to come.