13 ms·
Predicting Google Product Shutdowns
- orbitur 14y agoInteresting post, but oh my god, the styling on this site is hurting my brain.
- gwern 14y agoI know I designed the styling mostly to appeal to myself, but serious question: what's wrong with black text on white background? That's basically how books have been printed for hundreds of years.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- orbitur 14y agoMade an imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/8XUDP http://imgur.com/a/8XUDP First is with AdBlock on, the second is AdBlock off. It's better once you've scrolled down, but everything is poorly mashed together at the top. Multiple words in the left column are badly wrapped.
- xnxn 14y agoJust checking: is it supposed to look like this? http://i.imgur.com/PWbZHW5.png http://i.imgur.com/PWbZHW5.png The color is totally fine, it's really just that sidebar that's odd.
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoInteresting, on Chrome 26 for OS X 10.8, it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/OnRL0h1.png http://i.imgur.com/OnRL0h1.png I agree, the colors are alright, but the layout could use some TLC. The sidebars could be wider and need some padding, the line height should be increased and uniform for all the different styles so that the blocks line up, headlines shouldn’t to be uppercase as that decreases readability, and the indents for quotes and unordered lists could be smaller.
- alecdbrooks 14y agoThe font difference probably comes from the A/B testing Gwern is doing: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts.
- slater 14y agoThe issue is not black text on white background, but the layout choices. This is what it looks like when I load the page: http://i.imgur.com/kmMsyEg.png http://i.imgur.com/kmMsyEg.png And here's how it looks after some fiddlin': http://i.imgur.com/JhwwjfY.png http://i.imgur.com/JhwwjfY.png
- molecule 14y agoGreat article and analysis. One answer to your question, "what's wrong with black text on white background?": http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/ http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/
- pizza 14y agoEh, sometimes you don't want things to look natural for the sake of looking natural. Plus, given that there's basically just black and white on Gwern's site, a dark blue would have the same 'overpowering' effect as a black, since there is nothing else that is similar in color to it.
- jsnell 14y agoThat answer would be a more convincing if the page itself wasn't a great demonstration of the opposite. I'm sure #554 with a spindly font looks great on a retina MacBook, but it's just not all that readable on most systems, especially for people with less than perfect vision. I just don't get what issue designers have with contrast. You'd kind of think that the point of text is for it to be readable, not for it to look soothing.
- dnr 14y agoMonitors are not paper. They're much brighter.
- chops 14y agoThe spacing (or lack thereof) on the site is very distracting. The left menu has zero pixel spacing from the content, and so the side menu basically runs right into the content. The table of contents on the right isn't obvious that it's a table of contents for the article, it just looks like another menu of some sort on the right. I did some quick restyling just to satisfy my curiosity with some notes. I know it kind of makes it looks like wikipedia, but wikipedia is easy to read. http://imgur.com/G5QfOua http://imgur.com/G5QfOua
- gwern 14y agoI've added a 'padding: 1em;' to the sidebar so hopefully that deals with your left menu issue. Looking at your screenshot, I think I like what you did with the table of contents. Could you post the CSS you used to do that? (Maybe it's obvious to you how to do that, but I know very little CSS so it's a mystery to me.)
- itafroma 14y agoIt's not really that bad, just a few quirks: - Left sidebar has no right padding - The right sidebar loses its left padding in narrow viewports If you want to go hardcore, there are a couple of other things, based off of James Felici's Complete Manual of Typography : - The measure (line length) at its max width is about double what it should be for the font size (which is inheriting the browser default, usually 16px). Measure in picas (1/6 inch) should be 2-2.5 times the font size in points (1/72 inch, but a straight conversion of 16px = 12pt is usually fine). - Currently, the line height is set to 130%. If using your current measure, the leading should be about 5 points, for a line height of about 141%. If you halve the measure, the leading would be about 1.5, for a line height of 109%. However, I'd still set the line height to be ~140% because you have a lot of superscript and your links have underlines that go below the descenders. Leading in points should be Measure in picas / font size in points, rounded to the nearest half point. Increase if you have things that go beyond the descenders (like you do) or decrease if you don't have any descenders (e.g., all caps).
- gwern 14y ago> - Left sidebar has no right padding...- The measure (line length) at its max width is about double what it should be for the font size (which is inheriting the browser default, usually 16px). Fixed or wontfix, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5654011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5654011 Fixed. > - The right sidebar loses its left padding in narrow viewports Don't know how to fix this. > - Currently, the line height is set to 130%. If using your current measure, the leading should be about 5 points, for a line height of about 141%. If you halve the measure, the leading would be about 1.5, for a line height of 109%. However, I'd still set the line height to be ~140% Done.
- antoinec 14y agoNothing's wrong for black on white for books. The thing is I don't read your site on a piece of paper but on a screen (and I'm probably not the only one).
- mratzloff 14y agoWell, there are several problems. First, to address your point. Paper is not pure white, and ink is not pure black. Books are also not backlit. If you want to recreate the experience of reading a book, use a slightly off-white color and a dark colored ink (for example, a very dark blue or brown). Second, most everything on the page is way too cramped. Third, you need to constrain text width. It's a lot of work to scan 1000 pixels for each line. I made some quick changes in CSS to address the basic readability problems, and uploaded a screenshot: http://new.tinygrab.com/d5ac58cc253b078fa42a97b3c35417d28563d71043.png http://new.tinygrab.com/d5ac58cc253b078fa42a97b3c35417d28563... (I was playing around with the links before I decided I was getting too far into the weeds, but the links in #content should have the underline. The links on the side shouldn't.) CSS changes: html { background-color: #FCFCFC; } html, a { color: #303C3C; } blockquote { font-style: italic; } #header { margin-top: 50px; margin-bottom: 30px; } #sidebar { width: 150px; margin-right: 50px; } #content { width: 550px; margin-left: 200px; padding-left: 0; line-height: 150%; } #TOC { width: 200px; margin-right: -235px; } #TOC li { margin-top: 0; }
- gwern 14y ago> Third, you need to constrain text width. It's a lot of work to scan 1000 pixels for each line. It's funny you criticize that, because it's one of the only parts of my site design that I actually have A/B tested: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#max-width http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#max-width The smaller widths did not do well. > Books are also not backlit. If you want to recreate the experience of reading a book, use a slightly off-white color and a dark colored ink (for example, a very dark blue or brown). Hm, this sounds plausible. html { background-color: #FCFCFC; } html, a { color: #303C3C; } Done. blockquote { font-style: italic; } No; I use blockquotes too much and they're too long to make them italics. The background shading seems like enough for now. #header { margin-top: 50px; margin-bottom: 30px; } I'll try it. #content { width: 550px; margin-left: 200px; padding-left: 0; line-height: 150%; } Duly stolen. And the TOC changes look like an improvement too.
- yew 14y agoI actually like it quite a bit . . . The lack of triple-nested faux windows is nice and I usually set things to display compactly anyway, so there's that. It looks like some people are having font issues, though. I'm not seeing any overlap between the columns, but there's a lot visible in some of the linked images.
- bifrost 14y agoIts definately a bit hard to read as it is, its a bit more academic doc vs blog. For lulz I fired it up in Lynx and wow does it look bad there too...
- veb 14y agoI usually try and use Readability to read long and interesting articles... but it did not like Gwern's site. http://www.readability.com/articles/5jqxbits http://www.readability.com/articles/5jqxbits
- gwern 14y agoHah, what's going on there? I don't understand how it can take nice regular Pandoc markdown-generated HTML and crop it down to nothing but the source code. Maybe you should file a bug on Readability.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- The_Sponge 14y agoI don't think that Google Voice will get shutdown. Google needs a unified communication product, tying Google Talk, Voice, and Hangouts together.
- w1ntermute 14y agoThis is said to be coming in "Babel."
- jonemo 14y agoThis is the first time I heard about changes to Voice and I really really hope they just leave Voice alone. This is the one Google product that is deeply integrated into my life and I rely on it continuing to work (it's also the only Google product I pay for). Sure it could become better, but lately when Google makes things better they usually get worse (at first, or forever).
- Terretta 14y agoI fat fingered a down vote for you on my iPad, sorry. I hope two passers by give you up votes to make up for it. Google Voice is quietly used by a high percentage of colleagues as a "Line 2" to keep work comms under control and out of their personal SMS and VM, and by others as a way to have a truly portable personal number. The only downside is occasional but serious VOIP quality issues even when landline to landline (routed through a GV number). If Google fixed that, sure seems to me GV could become a defacto identity endpoint for the mobile device generation.
- bifrost 14y agoI think this actually fits with what I think about Google overall. Search is great, everything else is just a mediocre tie in to search dollars. Google is attracting more "nesters" and less "innovators" from what I see as an outsider, which is likely good for long term products but bad for everything else. Glass is already a bad word (RE: glassholes), Plus is a wasteland, Voice is only popular due to branding, as is Calendar and Docs. I've seen announcements of products that appear to be more functional than Voice/Cal/Docs on HN with better security and performance, but I think the likelihood of those taking over is probably low until Google gets out of those markets. The products are better, but the mindshare isn't there yet.
- turing 14y agoGlass is piquing more interest than any consumer electronics device since the iPhone, Plus is thriving, and Docs is by far the best cloud office suite I've seen. I am by no means saying that Google is the best in every market they enter--some of their offerings are pathetic compared to the competition-- but your claims of across the board mediocrity in their non-search products is severely overblown.
- zone411 14y agoGoogle+ doesn't appear to "thriving" to me. Here is one indicator: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=google%20%2B%2C%20google%20plus&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=google%20%2B%2C%20goo... (flat line). For comparison, add "imgur" or "hotmail" to the input. Here is another where it looks a bit better: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/plus.google.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/plus.google.com/. However, considering the amount of integration with their other products, I can't see it as anything more than a disappointment for Google.
- CatMtKing 14y agoThat's looking at search queries though, right? Why would any one Google for g+, when there's a link to it on the top left corner of Google's search page?
- jere 14y agoI skipped ahead to the "10 most risky and likely to be shutdown products", read it, then did a double take "wasn't I supposed to be reading about Google?" Never heard of any of those. Interesting poems. I was certain Ozymandias would show up though.
- gwern 14y ago> Never heard of any of those. Yes, and that'll be reflected in the hits data and be one reason they'll be rated so risky... I love 'Ozymandias', but unfortunately it's become so overused it's cliche. So I picked poems that I was reasonably sure almost no reader would ever have seen (the exceptions: the _Julius Caesar_ quote, which I parodied; and the Basho haiku, which I gave my own rendering of) but were hopefully still good.
- tomkarlo 14y agoThat's because he's using search hits as a primary measure of how much services are being used, which (maybe) kind of works for consumer services but doesn't work at well at all for services used by developers (at the least, they should be judged on their own scale). Which is why you see Cloud Messaging popping up in that list - it's just not something many people talk about, but that doesn't mean it's not heavily used.
- nijk 14y agohttp://www.google.com/ig/directory http://www.google.com/ig/directory Ozumandius was never shut down, it was left up in ruins.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoI have some thoughts about the spikes on the death dates. September: all of the interns go back to school. These people who exist on the fringes of the system manage to get a lot of work done, possibly because they are free of most of the overhead facing real employees. Once they leave, it's up to the FTEs to own whatever was created, and that doesn't always work. I wish I could have kept some of them and swapped them for some of the full-timers. March/April: Annual bonus time? That's what it used to be, at least, and I say this as someone who quit in May, and that was no accident. Same thing: people leave, and that dooms whatever they left.
- obviouslygreen 14y agoMarch/April: Annual bonus time? I'm not sure if it's good or bad that I somehow never managed to work for an employer that offered any kind of bonus, ever. It granted a perspective of "this is what you get, and no more, unless you fight for it," which... again... can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. I wonder how many 20- and 30-somethings are now or have recently been in a position where bonuses are reasonably common, and how that correlates with the size/type of company they're working for.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- philwelch 14y agoAt some companies, signing bonuses are starting to become standard.
- gresrun 14y agoBonuses are the norm in the finance industry. I worked at a financial research company for five years and got a bonus of roughly 10-20% of my salary each year, depending on that year's profits.
- consz 14y agoFunny, I have the opposite opinion. Without a bonus, it just seems like "this is the work you need to do, and no reason to make any effort to do more". With bonuses that scale with your contribution, I have far more incentive to put in effort above and beyond.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- molecule 14y agoFor anyone else that is wondering which Google product lived for one day ("Days: Min: 1"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X
- bernardlunn 14y agoGreat find. It must have been total chaos - good chaos - in those days.
- nijk 14y agoSeems more like a Doodle (homage to OS X and its dock) then a product that lived for one day. Although the March 15 2005 date was a bit off any OS X anniversary I knowm
- timmm 14y agoYou do realize that the 30% that Google takes from Android Developers from App sales doesn't go to Google right?
- throwaway2048 14y agowhere does it go?
- timmm 14y agoTo the respective mobile carriers.
- dudus 14y agoWhat makes you think that?
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago[Citation needed]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- gwern 14y agoNo, I don't. But even if they don't, Google is still serving ads to Android users AFAIK. While browsing on exactly that topic (pondering whether to flip the profit bit on the Android entry), I ran across an estimate of $1 billion: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/02/08/googles-android-a-billion-dollar-ad-business-in-2012/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/02/08/googles-an... This made the decision an easy one.
- dudus 14y agoYou do realize it does right?
- chris_wot 14y agoAh, a study based on something Charles Arthur said? I once had an email conversation with Charles Arthur, it didn't go well... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ta_bu_shi_da_yu/Charles_Arthur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ta_bu_shi_da_yu/Charles_Ar...
- gwern 14y agoMore like, 'a study prompted by noting serious flaws in an Arthur column and deciding to do better, while borrowing perhaps <1/10th of the final dataset from Arthur's data' (he had ~30, I wound up with 350).
- mountaineer 14y agoDefinitely agree with Feedburner and Alerts being likely targets based on how well (or not well) they're supported currently.
- jensenbox 14y agoIf anyone is interested in helping out, I have created a timeline for browsing such services: http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/ http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/
- gwern 14y agoThat's a nice start. (It's a good idea - I was actually trying to do a similar 'stacked lines' plot to show the lifespans of all entries in my dataset, but I gave up at the time because it looked too hard and grotty to do in R.)
- benaiah 14y ago> Gmail seems like a service for the ages; but once upon a time, so did Hotmail (even in 2012, 8 years after Gmail’s launch, still the #2 email service) - yet, RIP Hotmail (1996-2013). That's silly. Hotmail didn't go away; it was rebranded. All the email and accounts were transparently migrated - you could even use both front-ends at the same time for a short period. The important part is, Microsoft still runs email and nobody lost data. Comparing it to the Reader shutdown (or a shutdown of Gmail in a similar fashion) is an apples-to-oranges comparison of the first degree.
- gameshot911 14y ago>The important part is, Microsoft still runs email and nobody lost data. Unless you fail to log in at least once every 270 days, at which point your entire account and everything in it is wiped.
- jacquesm 14y agoThat's probably a safety precaution but if it is like you describe it is also a risk. It could be a safety precaution to make sure that accounts do not eventually become compromised in the case of deceased person. But if the account is deleted entirely that could indicate the address can be re-used and in that case any password reset mails and other important email might land in the new owner of the address' inbox.
- hga 14y agoWasn't that true before the Hotmail -> "Outlook" transformation? I.e. a Microsoft free email policy that as jacquesm notes could have good reasons behind it.
- eli 14y agoIt's always been that way. In fact, I'm almost certain the time was shorter in the early days.
- Proleps 14y ago> That's silly. It is. The rebranding and new interface are a huge improvement and a sign Microsoft is taking there email service more seriously. I don't really get how someone could interpret it as the loss of a service.
- cremnob 14y agoGoogle Finance is definitely not being maintained and I wouldn't be surprised if it's killed.
- robk 14y agoPicasa seems unnaturally safe in this model. It's also stopped iterating generally and Google's acquired a totally separate mobile app for photos (Snapseed). And Google really doesn't make any material amount of money off Picasa either.
- buro9 14y agoAnd Linux support (which was only through Wine) was officially dropped. Even before the recent spate of services being shut-down, shortly after the Linux support was dropped, I moved Picasa to a kill list and started migrating what I was using it for to something else (Dropbox for storage and sharing). I presume it's going to be killed, to me that's what the product state signals.
- jcastro 14y agoDropbox also has photos now, when you log in on the bottom left there was an opt-in for the beta testing. It's really nice compared to Picasa/G+'s "2 different photo services but not really" design.
- abraham 14y agoPicasa is slowly getting replaced with Google+ photos. I don't expect it to be around all that much longer.
- gwern 14y agoYes, Picasa's rating seems wrong enough to me that I called it out in the discussion as probably wrong. (Not sure how one would improve the model... how do you objectively rate or quantify something like 'stopped iterating generally'?) And it make not make 'any material amount of money', but it is still selling advertising and whatnot on Picasa: https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/166073?hl=en https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/166073?hl=en So the binary variable for 'profit' gets flipped... Snapseed is not doing any better, though. IIRC Google already shut down an app for Snapseed. I think Picasa might wind up being merged totally into Google+, although by my established criteria that would not count as a shutdown.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoWe just launched our Google FeedBurner replacement in anticipation of its upcoming doom: http://feedsnap.com http://feedsnap.com (release info http://neosmart.net/blog/2013/worried-google-will-kill-your-feedburner-introducing-feedsnap/ http://neosmart.net/blog/2013/worried-google-will-kill-your-... ) We're planning on "launching it" on Monday.
- newnewnew 14y agoWhen will blogger be killed and rolled into Google plus?
- gwern 14y agoIf you believe the model, roughly 'when hell freezes over'. I find it a little hard, but I guess we'll know who to believe during the next 5 years if Blogger is indeed killed.
- k3n 14y agoRegardless of the actual subject, it looks like an excellent analysis. I haven't verified the maths, but I like that he includes every possible calculation, source code, and external reference that was used. A very academic and data-driven approach.
- EdiX 14y agoAm I the only one who sees Google Groups at risk? It could be seen as a competitor to Google Plus the update it's getting is awful and looks like something designed in 2009, the updated before that happened a decade ago, it's not very popular with the general public... it sounds a lot like Google Reader to me.
- gwern 14y agoYou'd think so, but the comparison to Google+ doesn't seem very apt - it shouldn't be a threat any more than Gmail is (but something to be leveraged).
- klapinat0r 14y agoIt's been a few years since my 3 stats courses, so pardon if I'm wrong, but aren't his p-values for the logistic regression kind of... important? Intercept and log(hits) sure, but the rest have rather high p values indicating that it's likely to be present even if it has no effect (lower p-value, more robust, < 0.05 => < 5% chance of incorrectly stating it has an effect (when it does not)). Or am I missing something basic here?