13 ms·

Lockdown

625 points by mh_ 13y ago

505 13y ago
If you work for Google, and you have a neat idea for an online service, resist the temptation to do it within Google.
jmduke 13y ago
I think it's interesting to note here that despite Facebook, Google, and Twitter's best intentions, new social networks grow faster today than ever before. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat exploded in a manner of weeks.
- mrtron 13y ago
  It also shows the opportunity for a new open standard to emerge very quickly. The timing feels right. The battleground seems to be photo sharing this time, not links.
- magic_haze 13y ago
  There was a great post a few weeks back here about why whatsapp, viber et al had such a dramatic growth. Basically, the hypothesis was these apps have access to the entirety of the user's contact data on their phones, which allows them to reconnect with our friends automatically (or fallback to sms/email). Ironically, I think this is something where Google+'s circles could come in very useful for us (meaning, normal users): if Google stopped pushing Plus as an end goal unto itself and instead started integrating it at a lower level in android and provide APIs accessible to other websites, it could have massive privacy and usability advantages for us. Cyanogenmod is doing something similar, but I think they're implementing it as a everything-or-nothing switch for apps. Providing more granularity (and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed) is something that's sorely needed if we want to move away from facebook's monopoly on our social graph.
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    >and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed I should hope they got circles right as it was the most obvious thing in social networking ever. 30 seconds into my very first usage of facebook and I already realized it was missing what google calls "circles".
- eitland 13y ago
  WhatsApp and Snapchat are examples of growing by doing the exact opposite thing of twitter: make a useful service for all of us who doesn't want the world to know about our every move but still have group chats with 10-20 people at a time. They also tell us up front how they are going to make money. They have earned my trust despite of their authentication issues a while back, - and, unlike twitter they have a lot of space to move in (pay for api access anyone? Voluntarily subscriptions to feeds? )
tlrobinson 13y ago
You'd think they could at least have slowly integrated Reader with their G+ vision rather than alienating a good portion of the users who have championed them for years.
- ecspike 13y ago
  They did slowly integrate some parts of Reader into Google+ and it was met with resistance. Google+ Sparks was a kind of RSS/StumbleUpon thing. Flopped. Reader sharing became sharing into Google+. Many in the Reader crew defiantly cried out against it and said they wouldn't share things if they had to use Google+ to do it. It wouldn't have been all roses no matter how you cut it. I think people are in the bargaining phase of dealing with their post-Reader era grief.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    Sparks didn't have RSS... did it?
- stevewilhelm 13y ago
  I think you miss the point. Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't want publishers to use RSS/Atom. They want them to publish using their respective, proprietary APIs.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    I suppose that's why -- since about the time Buzz was introduced -- Google's been pushing an open push publishing specification (PubSubHubbub).
    - rsynnott 13y ago
      ... Which is not used or supported by Google+. PubSubHubbub was very much part of a different era.
      - 13y ago
indraneel24 13y ago
>Well, fuck them, and fuck that. But—I'm curious to see what everyone thinks—are we too late for this attitude to change anything?
- th0ma5 13y ago
  No, I don't think so. The web at its core has to remain open, and it does allow for spam, but I don't see the whole web getting locked down anytime soon. I also don't know if I'd call it an attitude but more an alignment towards the actual situation. Many have compared the various services mentioned to AOL and the walled garden, but they all still thrive on open, crawlable, & indexed links.
- rjd 13y ago
  I've been humming and harring on starting a decentralized RSS based social network idea I've had bugging me for awhile, probably two years now. There where a few of these around 2007 and Facebook brought them out and shut them down. But I'm hearing the same complaint all over the place, so I'm starting to think I might not be alone. I've just been put off by the idea that maybe I'm an outsider and people don't want that, and it'll be months of work potentially for nothing. Maybe I should start some thing even if I just hand it off. I dunno, would love to see what the thirst is out there.
hayksaakian 13y ago
Good read, but it fizzled at the end. Creating openness is not good enough. There were business reasons to support every long lasting open technology, and with the dominance of proprietary social media platforms, that business reason (for RSS at least) is dead. The web opened up e commerce, and modern social media lowered the barrier to entry for online communities. Its the same problem cryptography has, if its not dead simple and obviously useful don't expect it to stick around (at least at mass appeal)
- bobbles 13y ago
  Yeah I was looking forward to reading through what he thought could be done to try and turn the tide on the issue, but to essentially just write 'fuck y'all' kinda made it feel like someone rambling on.
- samstokes 13y ago
  I was thinking "this is a great analysis and inspiring call to arms, I can't wait to see what Marco's proposing". Then I scrolled down and realised the call to arms was "keep doing what you're doing". Um.
- pfortuny 13y ago
  Yes, the "fuck you" and the last paragraph are definitely anti-climatic. You do not need such a post to say that. Of course, Larry stated very clearly that if something does not help + then something must disappear...
toyg 13y ago
> Then you spend twice as much time figuring out how to deal with poorly crafted feeds, ambiguities, and edge cases — especially for Atom, which is a huge, overengineered pain in the ass Funny: that's what most people said of RSS 0.x (poorly crafted), 1.x (over-engineered) and 2.x (ambiguous and full of badly-specified edge-cases). Atom was supposed to fix all that.
- epaga 13y ago
  That's the problem with open standards, isn't it? (obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/)
- jfb 13y ago
  Many if not all of the open standards are terrible. Engineering virtue is orthogonal to implementation freedom.
drivebyacct2 13y ago
I hope he's wrong, because I hope Google wasn't so stupid. My usage patterns/goals/content/etc on G+ are nothing like they are with {my new RSS reader}. In fact, I'm looking at unsubscribing from all but my smallest communities because the big linux distro and android based communities are overrun with individuals spamming religious, political, and just random personal images in them. (edit, oh and Adiós!, apparently!)
Yhippa 13y ago
The gravitational pull of Google, Facebook, and Twitter is just too big. If you're a business and not creating content on those sites these days you aren't getting noticed. So you cater all of your activities towards their locked-in APIs and you don't have resources to maintain an RSS feed nobody uses. As long as content continues to be centralized in those three companies interop is toast.
- paranoiacblack 13y ago
  > locked-in APIs > interop is toast Between your post and the author's, I feel like we're talking past each about what the above two phrases mean. First of all, what do you call a "locked-in API"? I would imagine it'd be an API written in a proprietary language or only works on certain systems or browsers. Personally, I haven't seen that from any of the mentioned companies. Afaik, most of Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's API work on any browser available, any computer that can run those browsers, including mini-computers and smartphones, even some dumb phones. Where's the lock-in? The fact that you put your data in their databases? The fact that there isn't a single format shared between each? About interoperability being "toast," to what extent? I could probably point you to a large amount of websites and web services that have integration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sometimes all at the same time. Sounds like that they can operate together to me. Perhaps, you want them to provide integration between each other?
  - epsylon 13y ago
    Interoperability == open standard. If Facebook or Google provides an API that's not an open standard, you're locked-in because the day they decide to remove the API, or to charge high prices, or deprecate a crucial feature, you can't switch easily to another platform.
- wyclif 13y ago
  Does maintaining an RSS feed require a lot of resources? I suppose it depends on what you're talking about specifically. Once you set up RSS it doesn't require much at all to maintain.
paranoiacblack 13y ago
I agree that Facebook started a "war", but I don't think any of these companies want to "close us in" any more than they did when they first started. Sure, you can look at the closing of Google Reader as the antithesis of openness and RSS but you'd somehow seem to miss that Google, Facebook, and Twitter still support a lot of APIs that promote openness and interoperability. Actually, they continue to release more and more APIs as do other startups (i.e. Github). Openness and interoperability aren't going away, they're merely being refined. That might mean taking away the hacker's toy for a bit while some kinks get worked out (i.e. Google's Jabber issue and the switch to Blink). It might also mean that we live in a monoculture for a while (Webkit). But regardless, the web is steadily improving and no matter how much you all try to spin it, RSS and Google Reader really aren't the martyrs you claim them to be. It sucks that even a successful product can be mercilessly shut down by the evil Google tyrants, but it shouldn't be surprising at all. Sometimes companies make decisions that hurt a part of their user base for some perceived benefit for other users. Did Google fuck up by closing Reader? Probably. But it's not the end of the world.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Of course they want to close us in. Or, more technically, they feel commercially compelled to do so. There are only so many eyeballs, and right now being very sticky is an obviously viable strategy for dominance. Google didn't get into phone operating systems because they knew or cared much about them. They did it because their revenue base was under long-term threat. (Hell, Google is trying experiments to see if they can get in front of your actual eyeballs, intermediating your entire waking life.) And Facebook tried taking over people's phones for exactly the same reason. Talk to the Googlers who have left over the last few years, and you'll hear very clearly that things have changed internally.
  - paranoiacblack 13y ago
    What you're saying is that a company wants you to use their product and no one else's. Sure, that's how companies work. They aren't compelled to allow anyone from the outside to contribute. This is not closing us in. Unless I'm missing something, people are still able to choose the applications they install and use on their mobile phones, and I don't see that as a lock-in in the slightest. I understand the internal changes that have happened over the years at Google, but to say that Google no longer supports or does not plan to support openness or interoperability is either the word of a prophet or Google Reader-inspired sensationalism.
th0ma5 13y ago
Brilliant piece. Perhaps we'll always have shifts to and from the mainframe as it were, in some senses, and I for one really enjoy the ride.
cnbuff410 13y ago
Isn't it the same strategy Apple has been played all the time for its OS? And looks like Marco Arment has been enjoying it quite a lot? There is no freedom in terms of interoperability in your daily system and suddenly you are mad at "losing it"?
- embolism 13y ago
  Apple'a OS isn't the web. But I guess we've given up on the web now that Google is no longer championing openness.
- chipotle_coyote 13y ago
  This seems to be a common snark whenever someone known for (gasp) using Apple products complains about lack of openness. Because clearly these two things are connected, except for the part about them not being connected at all. (Frankly I have no idea what "no freedom in terms of interoperability in your daily system" even means. What is it my Mac and iPad are failing to interoperate with?) If I construct a popular online social network, I could run it on Debian, code it in Emacs, have all the source code on Github, genuflect to a picture of Richard Stallman daily, and still have no open APIs for users to interact with their data. If most major players on the Internet lock your data down, then many common uses of the Internet will in a very real sense become proprietary even if it is running entirely on free software. I'm sure it's fun to smugly go "well, you use iOS so you should like closed things," but it kinda betrays a significant distance between you and the point.
  - cnbuff410 13y ago
    Really? "What is it my Mac and iPad are failing to interoperate with"? Can you share your iCloud stuff with others not using Mac system? Marco was blaming Google/Twitter/Facebook locking down devs/users in their own eco-system and your point is you get the interoperability within Apple's own garden? Come on. BTW, you give a perfect example of what being hypocrite looks like. Sure, you can enjoy your time by hosting a closed service on top of open source infrastructure, that's hypocrite. You can also enjoy your time in a closed eco-system ever since from day 1 with absolutely no interoperate and still manage to find way to fuck those closed web based eco-system. That's also hypocrite. Interoperate means what? Choice and competition. I see no spirit of either in Apple's eco-system. And somehow Marco always find a way to blame other companies for that.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
res0nat0r 13y ago
Entitlement. I has it. Why does HN continue to think that companies on the web who give their services to millions of users away for free (please don't repeat the you are the product being sold meme), are entitled to direct said companies to keep any project you deem useful around for as long as you deem it important (to said $RANDOM_MILLION_USER)? With a userbase the size of Google there will be millions of people complaining about removing every single product they've ever released. Google isn't the Oracle of the world where Oracle releases a product, charges you out the wazoo, gives you 24/7 support and only enter the market of said product after researching if it is a good business investment or not. Google is the one who experiments, tests, lets you use for free, and either retires or promotes projects which turn out to be good for the company (either tech wise, or to the dismay of HN money wise). That's their MO. Google and Facebook allow you to export your data for most of their services, and I think we can all agree that Google at least are good at giving users a fair amount of heads up before they sunset a product (or should we call it an experiment?). It seems the prevailing notion on HN anymore is once you are a big company (bad), any service you offer the internet no matter how long ago, should be kept around indefinitely, because you are a big company (bad) and you now make a lot of money (bad). Therefore you should let everyone free ride on your platform so that fellow (broke) startups can bootstrap themselves off your prior work (good). But once said (good, broke) startups start making lots of cash, they will then become (bad) and fall into the same category of other (bad) internet giants.
- zanny 13y ago
  Because of trust. When Google started reader, and more importantly, when they put the sign out front saying "come hither for a hassle free web RSS client that keeps a backup of all the feeds you visit even if they go down and everyone said "hells yeah" because it was from a web supergiant and those don't very often go under since 2001. So we got dependent. And they pulled the rug out. People only got dependent on the assumption it would be persistent. Google's entire business is making things that don't make them money but give them more avenues for ads. And your freaking news feed from Google is the best place I can imagine for targeted advertising and to figure out a users browsing habits. My emails are stuffed with spam, my google searches could be anyone, but you can reliably say I'm browsing my reader feeds and I'm interested in the articles I am opening and those are the ultimate target for advertising. I'd say something about how social networks factor in, but I don't use any them (or Twitter) so I could care less. But I highly doubt that Google got its desired outcome from killing Reader - they lost a vast swathe of technical users and lost confidence from even more, and they won't see these people move over to consuming content on Google Plus because they don't give a crap how many dog treats the neighbors dog ate yesterday, they care about xkcd strips or gamasutra article feeds. You get a wall of shit on Google+ that you can at least curate in the RSS world. Why I would ever want to use it I have no idea. If I want to talk or interact with people, I'll use XMPP or SMTP. If I want to consume textual or image based media with consistent publication, I'll use RSS. Notice how I keep quoting protocols - because they are open and interoperable. I can expect other people to be ably to reliably target said protocols and distribute their content to anyone that wants it because you have a myriad of tools to access them. That share on G+ button only works with G+, and like the article said, Google wants you stuck on their services. So I switched the default search engine on my grandparents, mother, cousins, and neighbors to duckduckgo. I'm looking for free web email services that compete with gmail to drop that too, because who knows when Google will rip that rug out from under us as well. "Why are you sending emails? Just send G+ messages! You are all on G+ right? It is expensive to keep a copy of all those email attachments!"
olalonde 13y ago
Conspicuously missing: any sort of criticism directed at Apple.
- javert 13y ago
  The post wasn't actually a criticism of anyone, and Apple has nothing to do with it, since it's not a Web giant.
- bruceboughton 13y ago
  No criticism of the NSA either... he must be a sympathiser.
  - olalonde 13y ago
    > [...] they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely [...] It's very hard not to think of Apple when reading this sentence. This article is about openness and interoperability, not about spying or government agencies - not sure your analogy stands. Plus, I think it's a pretty well known fact that Marco is indeed a sympathiser of Apple (hence the "conspicuously missing" bit).
    - dasil003 13y ago
      It seems like you have an axe to grind. Apple is not germane because Apple is not a major web player.
- rahoulb 13y ago
  > Apple dragged Google into a similar war for extreme mobile-OS lockdown (although it is a footnote)
zmmmmm 13y ago
Well, for once I agree with Marco. But I find it a little strange coming from him - he seemed to care not much about it at all when making his apps exclusive to Apple's locked down, ultra closed platforms.
- andycroll 13y ago
  ...and the web. Sure he didn't do an app for Android (until someone did for him) and is a bit snarky about it as a platform, but the web version of Instapaper existed before the app did and powered the whole thing. Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in). His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related, but he's originally (and still) a PHP web guy.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    > His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related I always thought of Marco's attitude about iOS as Windows PTSD.
  - MBCook 13y ago
    > Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in). He discussed that at some point, I think it might have been on Accidental Tech Podcast. As I remember the idea was that since The Magazine wasn't terribly important (security wise) he could avoid having to give people another username/password. He said it was something of an experiment and he probably wouldn't do it again. I think Casey and Siracusa both said they found it odd and confusing at first.
- madeofpalk 13y ago
  His apps are exclusive to the Apple platform? Instapaper has an open API, and The Magazine is available online.
  - jimhart3000 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure Nursing Clock was an iOS exclusive.
mlchild 13y ago
Whether you agree or disagree with the piece, I think it's perhaps more interesting to try to put together the clues about Marco's next project. My guess would be something like a new publishing standard or system that makes it easy to package good writing into an immersive mobile form, possibly via Newsstand. But just spitballin' here.
brudgers 13y ago
I've come up with a charitable interpretation of Google shutting down Reader. And I am not known for being charitable toward Google. I just have a gut feeling that shutting down Reader may have made life easier for Google when it comes to National Security Letters, subpoenas, warrants or whatever. Turning over a list of what someone has read, does seem a bit evil. Maybe I am being naive in attributing a positive motivation to them on this issue. But it just feels more plausible in light of the backlash of negative feelings the shutdown has created, who harbors such feelings, and the rather trivial resources required to maintain the service. If they were turning over logs from Reader - and why wouldn't they have been requested - what options would Google have? Carry on or shutdown or lawyer up, are about it. Would the backlash when such a practice was disclosed be less than that for shutting down Reader? I doubt it. People who didn't use Reader, like me, don't care about its shutdown. But I'd probably be full of condemnation and brimstone when commenting on a story about Google turning over reading lists to the government.
- xyzzy123 13y ago
  This seems extremely unlikely to me. While would be Orwellian to hand over a list of what someone has read, it pales beside handing over their private chats, emails and social graph.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I find that entirely implausible. If the NSA is getting as much data as we expect, then they can get people's reading lists from their ISPs. So Google shutting down Reader wouldn't have kept much of anything out of federal hands. Further, if Google had a sudden attack of nobility, then it would be Gmail or Google Voice that they'd be shutting down. That's where the real private information is, and that's what most people are angry about. Not what a small fraction of Google's audience gets in their daily papers.
zer0gravity 13y ago
What we need is a user owned facebook. We need to find a way to shrink the whole Facebook functionality to run on a system the size of a router.
- debt 13y ago
  Diaspora is a thing. was.
Kiro 13y ago
"Over the years, comma usage after prepositional phrases has also apparently declined." The prepositional phrase is not in the beginning of the sentence and is less than four words so no comma needed!
- kivikakk 13y ago
  Also a tad ironic in light of his subsequent invocation of "belive".
rounak 13y ago
Find it strange that he doesn't once mention Apple, iMessage or iCloud, which rank really low on the data interoperability front.
- chipotle_coyote 13y ago
  He does, in a footnote, which refers to Apple having an "extreme mobile-OS lockdown" they dragged Android into a war over.
- rahoulb 13y ago
  He does mention Apple in a footnote. However, Apple doesn't really make claims about openness (apart from a brief marketing push around OSX 10.2), whereas Twitter's success came from liberal access to its API and Google makes a big deal out of its openness.
josteink 13y ago
This has to be the first ever Marco post I've read which didn't leave me wanting to toss sharp items at my monitors. I actually fully agree with him on this. The open web is increasingly being threatened and locked down. We need to oppose that.
- lawdawg 13y ago
  Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until developers stop chasing a big payday, and follow their principles instead. Unfortunately, principles don't feed your family or put a roof over their head. It's always easy to spout how we need to push forward open standards, but what we've seen instead is developers falling over themselves to develop for Apple and Facebook. The very people who are needed to push forward the open web are the very same people who spend their time and energy expanding the every growing empire of closed ecosystems.
- esolyt 13y ago
  It's ironic though, that this post is coming from Macro. He hates Chrome (open source and free software) and uses Safari. He hates Android (open source and free software) and uses and develops for iOS. I sense hypocrisy.
  - forgotAgain 13y ago
    Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
  - throwaway2048 13y ago
    chrome is not "open source and free software" it is distributed with a ton of proprietary code.
    - esolyt 13y ago
      Chrome is Chromium with Flash and a proprietary PDF reader. "A ton of proprietary code" isn't an accurate statement. You are also free to use Chromium (100% open source and free software), like I do.
netcan 13y ago
The type of interactions that Facebook focused on are naturally inclined to be closed. You need to manage who sees what. BTW this was a revolution that got the late adopters online and got people comfortable using their own names. Anyway, my point is that this isn't a conspiracy. Google+ might have all sorts of potential for moneymaking but its not google's main business at this point. This trend towards more closed systems is largely emergent. These closed environments are we're people like to interact.
georgemcbay 13y ago
Re: Google+ Is their overall strategy to drive adoption working these days? I know their number of users must be quite large now, but AFAICT it is pretty much hugely inflated by being a catch-all for anyone with any kind of Google account. I actually like Google+ quite a bit and have a lot of people in my circles and I'm in quite a lot of other people's circles, but I never actually go to Google+ anymore (unless I'm following a link to some Linus post or something from somewhere else) because it simply never hit the required critical mass of actual mainstream usage for me to switch. Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook, ergo I'm stuck on Facebook even though I don't particularly care for it. Even among the smallish subgroup of people I know IRL who did embrace Google+ at first, they are virtually all like me now, with accounts that scarcely ever get used. I'm not sure what Google+ has to do to make converts of the masses, but at least among my circles they aren't doing it currently despite whatever collateral damage they are causing in trying to force people there.
- richardw 13y ago
  > Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook FB is for IRL friends/family, G+ as long-form Twitter. It's Twitter for people who don't get 140 characters. I'd say the strategy is working, given the amount of G+ links I see. Personally I'm more interested in what my G+ links say than FB (because they're interests of mine, not just IRL'ers talking about their nail polish), although I check both every so often.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Isn't tumblr the long-form twitter? Real names gives G+ a very different tone.
    - Wilya 13y ago
      Tumblr is more of a pics-form twitter. Other types of content don't get much love there. I don't know what social network would qualify as long-form twitter, to be honest.
medell 13y ago
First the hardware war, then the OS war, followed by the browser war and search engine war, and now the mobile war and social network war. This won't be the last... or could it? Will we be using Facebook daily 5 years from now? 10 years? 20? Or is the next war in augmented reality, which Google has a head start? (but using which social network?) Anyone have good links to futurist thinkers on these topics?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
wyclif 13y ago
This plan is particularly problematic because Google+ is, relatively, a clear failure so far An absurd statement on the face of it (even with the weasel-word qualifier), given Google+'s large number of active users. In fact, given the traffic there, I suspect his ridiculous Cupertino fanboism is to blame for not considering Google+ a smashing success.
- rsynnott 13y ago
  > for not considering Google+ a smashing success. Huh? Does _anyone_ consider Google+ a smashing success? On what basis?
  - abenga 13y ago
    Google+ is the 2nd largest social network, with more active users than Twitter. Probably not smashing maybe, but that's success of some sort.
- kryptiskt 13y ago
  Go to any article on the web with social media buttons, compare the number on the Facebook, Twitter and Google buttons. One of them is one or two magnitudes lower than the others, which?
  - wyclif 13y ago
    So Google+ is not nearly as big as Facebook. That much is obvious. But Marco interprets that as "failure." Any service with 400 million active users is not one I'd label that way.
- sbuk 13y ago
  Banding around expressions like "Cupertino fanboism " makes you just as bad, possibly worse.
hanspeide 13y ago
Is this worth reading? Whenever I see marco.org I think to myself: "Apple love, Google hate as usual" and move on.
- wyclif 13y ago
  Yes, it's true his fanboism shows through when you see him call Google+, a service with 400 million active users, a "failure." If that's failure, then please let me fail.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    It wouldn't be a failure for you or me. Google started out with far more active users than that, so they have to be judged on a different basis. They shut off other services to force those users into G+, and significant numbers of those users posted a couple of times and then never looked at G+ again. Something about Google's actions turned them from regular G-Reader users into regular users of non-Google services. That smells like failure. If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that.
    - slantyyz 13y ago
      >> If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that. I'm not a fan of Marco, but you're right. If Marco really was a rabid fanboi, more than half of his blog would be pointless claim chowder posts.
jwr 13y ago
This was exactly what I thought when I heard about Google closing down Reader. I'm glad Marco put this into a coherent article. It is in Google's best interest to have RSS and individual blogs die. Amusingly enough, it is also what Facebook wants, so the two giants are fully alinged on this one. About 6 months ago I quit Facebook and Google+, deciding to publish my stuff on my pages and my blog alone, instead of throwing them into closed gardens. I do not regret that decision, even though readership dropped significantly.
- tejaswiy 13y ago
  I don't get it. Even if all of us RSS reading dinosaurs were to be forced into the information age, we'd probably go to Twitter / Facebook and not G+. So why exactly is the death of RSS in Google's best interest unless they're actively trying to send users away to their competition ?
  - wmf 13y ago
    By their thinking that social is strategic, to admit that G+ can't win is to admit that Google is dead.
mmahemoff 13y ago
"It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people." Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses. It's hard for most of us to comprehend, but ready-made revenues of a few million bucks, even if it was $100M (unlikely), is not of interest to Google unless it's growing fast. Which RSS, isn't. Welcome to Extremistan. Black Swans like Google do things that aren't intuitive. "The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability" Yes. This is indeed the direction Google has been moving, and it's a problem for those of us who enjoyed an open web, as users and developers. Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down. They tried with other standards too, e.g. PubSubHubbub, WebFinger. Most people have never heard of them. There's no conspiracy theory needed here. Google tried with Reader too, for 8 years. It just didn't take off. Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier. Not the kind of people who read HN, but the kind of people who are too busy to figure out what seem like trivial technologies to early adopter types. So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running. All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. For a giant company focused on growth, that's all the reason you need to turn it off.
- nemesisj 13y ago
  "Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses." You know, I've seen this statement on almost every thread about Google Reader, and it seems to be one of those things that everyone is just giving a pass to. Google's entire hiring and organisational model is (or at least should be) predicated on hiring great people to get things done. This is how every well run technical company operates. This idea that we all need "senior management attention" or "product manager" love is something that comes out of dysfunctional organisations without a shared vision. Could you imagine this statement being made about some of the tech company darlings here (37Signals, Github, Stripe etc.)? If you're going to put a product in maintenance mode (or even slow growth) with a team who understands it, you don't need senior management attention from on high. Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now - that's not going to go away any time soon and you better believe that it was much worse than someone coming along later and saying "Oh no, Google reader is so unchanged from 3 years ago, I hate Google." Anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps. All these arguments are poor. Or, at best, if they're true, they signal that Google has really lost its way - it's now a behemoth organisation that requires senior management oversight on every single product offering, and any non-spectacular product could at any instant bring the entire organisation down with its combination of toxic legal and toxic risk.
dt7 13y ago
If Google want us to move from Reader to Google+, why are they not pushing it as a replacement? Do they think RSS users are a lost cause?
- rsynnott 13y ago
  RSS users were always a tiny minority, and have become more tiny with social networks (especially Twitter).
WA 13y ago
The article reads as if RSS itself was dead. Come on guys, I know many of you loved Google Reader, but it was just a damn client for RSS. There are millions of RSS clients out there. Just use another one. The article got that ass backward. With Google Reader, you were locked in Google's ecosystem. Without Google Reader, you are free to use whatever RSS client you can find. I think the role of Google Reader for RSS is truly overrated but please show me how I'm wrong.
- itafroma 13y ago
  > With Google Reader, you were locked in Google's ecosystem. Without Google Reader, you are free to use whatever RSS client you can find. This is (or was) a false dilemma. You could, with Google Reader, use a vast multitude of RSS clients: you didn't have to use Google Reader proper. And, because nearly everyone supported Google Reader as a common sync API, you could switch between clients without losing your place or your data. Want to try X flavor-of-the-month RSS app? No problem: just log in with your Google account. Don't like it? No problem either: switch back to your other RSS client and everything—even what articles you've read and starred—are right where you left off. Now, there's at least a half dozen competing and incompatible sync APIs and numerous perfectly-adequate RSS clients rendered obsolete because they haven't been updated to support other sync services. Because of the lack of a common and ubiquitous sync API, choosing an RSS client now that Google Reader is gone will be more locked down than before, at least for the foreseeable future. Which is Marco's point: companies don't want you to be able to freely move your data around. They want you to use their service. Yes, there's more choice, but choosing one service over another winds up making it harder to make a different choice down the line.
  - WA 13y ago
    Thanks a lot for clarification. I never used Google Reader and it wasn't clear to me that the whole fuss was about the syncing API.
- smackfu 13y ago
  >There are millions of RSS clients out there You think? Before the Google Reader shutdown was announced, pretty much every mobile RSS client was just a front end to reader, using it to manage the feeds. And pretty much every other web RSS reader died off. Safari killed RSS integration. Net News Wire stagnated. I mean, honestly, was there a single healthy RSS client at the end of 2012, being actively developed?
aet 13y ago
I've never used a "Reader" before. Question: Were content providers able to server ads via the Reader?
- brown9-2 13y ago
  Yes
- smackfu 13y ago
  Most common monetization options are to either put "ad articles" in the stream, or to not provide the full article text in the stream, so people had to follow the link to the full site with ads. The former strategy was pretty good for getting around people's ad blocking, since it was essentially a long form text ad.
rsheridan6 13y ago
If Google wants to kill off internal competitors to Google+, I suppose blogspot is next on the chopping block.
MatthewPhillips 13y ago
> Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down. Why does Google have to "slow down" Facebook? What does that even mean? Is Google only successful if no other successful web companies exist?
- pgeorgi 13y ago
  Google is successful if it has free access to web content. Unfortunately Facebook locks out Google (and pretty much everyone else in a non-consumer role), and so someone at Google felt the need to do something about that.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    But they still don't have free access to Facebook or Twitter content. Is Google not successful? Are they going to become unsuccessful in the foreseeable future because of this issue? When?
esolyt 13y ago
An Apple fan complaining about Google not being "open" enough. Wow. Remember everyone: "Open web" is very important! But your browser itself doesn't need to be open source. Use Safari instead of Chrome. Your OS doesn't need to be open source either. Use and develop for OSX. Use and develop for iOS. Refuse developing for Android and make iOS-exclusive apps. Buy all Apple products and support Apple. Then open a blog to advocate openness and bash companies that build open source tools.
- Afforess 13y ago
  One can like and enjoy using Apple devices without wholeheartedly embracing every aspect of their corporate decisions and culture. Don't present a false-dilemma.
- smackfu 13y ago
  Pretty much the definition of ad hominem here.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - esolyt 13y ago
    My argument is that he is an hypocrite. I'm not trying to disprove his argument. In fact I agree with it 100%.
- rafitorres 13y ago
  He is arguing for interoperability ("RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs"). It is not about open/closed source.
  - Kylekramer 13y ago
    We are talking about a person who responded "LOL" to questions about whether his magazine's articles would be able to be sent to competing read it later services (he has since just changed that to "No"). There is a definite disconnect between what is being said and what has been done.
davidp 13y ago
Similar to Scott Hanselman's "Your Words Are Wasted", a more impactfully written (IMO) piece about the same problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403558
webwanderings 13y ago
.....Well, fuck them, and fuck that..... Amen.
pizu 13y ago
And here is a further proof that Google wants to become the one-stop shop for all your internet needs: https://www.google.co.uk/flights https://www.google.co.uk/flights
xenonite 13y ago
On the contrary. Google requires the access to the open web, because its advertising and its search engine need that access, as I will show below. Reader was not known to most people, but to many technical folks. Among them are many bloggers. Shutting down Reader certainly removed one big plus of the open blogging world. Thereby people have less arguments to blog openly. How is that a problem for Google? If people choose to move over to closed platforms, that content becomes inacessible to both Google's crawler, and to Google ads on blogs. Thus, by turning off Reader, Google actually hurts itself not only directly, but indirectly by treating the openness of the web less favorably.
programminggeek 13y ago
I think Reader was a great, if neglected product, but I don't think it matters that Google maintains it. What moved the needle for google 5 years ago is not what will move the needle today. Google will focus more on search, g+, android, apps, cloud, because those things can make an impact relative to Google's current scale.
antitrust 13y ago
What's good for business is a centralized standard format which makes it easy for consumers to browse without thinking. What's good for the net is the opposite, which is the kind of decentralized it-just-routes-around system that the internet was designed to be in the first place. To my chagrin, most of my clients, friends and family prefer the standardized and sanitized sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, *.google.com, Reddit and Digg. I miss the anarchy days, when every site was a random gesture thrown up by someone possessed of the spirit of an idea or a plan, and not all websites were standardized web apps that are just too "perfect" to be fun, or to permit evolution. /off my lawn
psionides 13y ago
The thing I don't understand is that for me, Twitter and Facebook aren't a competition for blogs and RSS. They're different things and they're complementary. Twitter and Facebook are for posting links to things you've found or broadcasting short messages up to a few sentences. Twitter is for doing those things publicly, Facebook is for doing those things within the circle of your friends. Blogs (and RSS) are for posting longer pieces of text, articles and such things. When you want to post an article, you don't put it on Twitter (for obvious reasons) or Facebook (because it limits your audience), you put it on your blog (self-hosted or on a service like Blogger or Wordpress) and you post links to it to Twitter and/or Facebook. And when you want to invite your friends to a movie, you don't post that to your blog, you post that on Facebook. So I'm not worried that Twitter and Facebook don't have RSS feeds - I wouldn't even want to see my friends' FB posts when I'm reading longer articles in my RSS reader. And I'm not worried about Facebook killing blogs and RSS - yes, most people post stuff on Facebook and not on their blogs, but that's because most people don't write anything that would resemble an article. (I do agree though that Twitter should have some open API for getting someone's public tweets in a machine-readable form, but it doesn't have to be RSS, JSON is just fine.)
alexirobbins 13y ago
If we want an openweb, advocacy won't cut it over the long haul. open is currently just less efficient at distributing + monetizing content. That's what we need to change, not the minds and paychecks of developers.

625 points by mh_ 13y ago

505 13y ago

If you work for Google, and you have a neat idea for an online service, resist the temptation to do it within Google.

I think it's interesting to note here that despite Facebook, Google, and Twitter's best intentions, new social networks grow faster today than ever before. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat exploded in a manner of weeks.

mrtron 13y ago
It also shows the opportunity for a new open standard to emerge very quickly. The timing feels right. The battleground seems to be photo sharing this time, not links.
magic_haze 13y ago
There was a great post a few weeks back here about why whatsapp, viber et al had such a dramatic growth. Basically, the hypothesis was these apps have access to the entirety of the user's contact data on their phones, which allows them to reconnect with our friends automatically (or fallback to sms/email). Ironically, I think this is something where Google+'s circles could come in very useful for us (meaning, normal users): if Google stopped pushing Plus as an end goal unto itself and instead started integrating it at a lower level in android and provide APIs accessible to other websites, it could have massive privacy and usability advantages for us. Cyanogenmod is doing something similar, but I think they're implementing it as a everything-or-nothing switch for apps. Providing more granularity (and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed) is something that's sorely needed if we want to move away from facebook's monopoly on our social graph.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  >and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed I should hope they got circles right as it was the most obvious thing in social networking ever. 30 seconds into my very first usage of facebook and I already realized it was missing what google calls "circles".
eitland 13y ago
WhatsApp and Snapchat are examples of growing by doing the exact opposite thing of twitter: make a useful service for all of us who doesn't want the world to know about our every move but still have group chats with 10-20 people at a time. They also tell us up front how they are going to make money. They have earned my trust despite of their authentication issues a while back, - and, unlike twitter they have a lot of space to move in (pay for api access anyone? Voluntarily subscriptions to feeds? )

tlrobinson 13y ago

You'd think they could at least have slowly integrated Reader with their G+ vision rather than alienating a good portion of the users who have championed them for years.

ecspike 13y ago
They did slowly integrate some parts of Reader into Google+ and it was met with resistance. Google+ Sparks was a kind of RSS/StumbleUpon thing. Flopped. Reader sharing became sharing into Google+. Many in the Reader crew defiantly cried out against it and said they wouldn't share things if they had to use Google+ to do it. It wouldn't have been all roses no matter how you cut it. I think people are in the bargaining phase of dealing with their post-Reader era grief.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  Sparks didn't have RSS... did it?
stevewilhelm 13y ago
I think you miss the point. Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't want publishers to use RSS/Atom. They want them to publish using their respective, proprietary APIs.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  I suppose that's why -- since about the time Buzz was introduced -- Google's been pushing an open push publishing specification (PubSubHubbub).
  - rsynnott 13y ago
    ... Which is not used or supported by Google+. PubSubHubbub was very much part of a different era.
    - 13y ago

indraneel24 13y ago

>Well, fuck them, and fuck that. But—I'm curious to see what everyone thinks—are we too late for this attitude to change anything?

th0ma5 13y ago
No, I don't think so. The web at its core has to remain open, and it does allow for spam, but I don't see the whole web getting locked down anytime soon. I also don't know if I'd call it an attitude but more an alignment towards the actual situation. Many have compared the various services mentioned to AOL and the walled garden, but they all still thrive on open, crawlable, & indexed links.
rjd 13y ago
I've been humming and harring on starting a decentralized RSS based social network idea I've had bugging me for awhile, probably two years now. There where a few of these around 2007 and Facebook brought them out and shut them down. But I'm hearing the same complaint all over the place, so I'm starting to think I might not be alone. I've just been put off by the idea that maybe I'm an outsider and people don't want that, and it'll be months of work potentially for nothing. Maybe I should start some thing even if I just hand it off. I dunno, would love to see what the thirst is out there.

hayksaakian 13y ago

Good read, but it fizzled at the end. Creating openness is not good enough. There were business reasons to support every long lasting open technology, and with the dominance of proprietary social media platforms, that business reason (for RSS at least) is dead. The web opened up e commerce, and modern social media lowered the barrier to entry for online communities. Its the same problem cryptography has, if its not dead simple and obviously useful don't expect it to stick around (at least at mass appeal)

bobbles 13y ago
Yeah I was looking forward to reading through what he thought could be done to try and turn the tide on the issue, but to essentially just write 'fuck y'all' kinda made it feel like someone rambling on.
samstokes 13y ago
I was thinking "this is a great analysis and inspiring call to arms, I can't wait to see what Marco's proposing". Then I scrolled down and realised the call to arms was "keep doing what you're doing". Um.
pfortuny 13y ago
Yes, the "fuck you" and the last paragraph are definitely anti-climatic. You do not need such a post to say that. Of course, Larry stated very clearly that if something does not help + then something must disappear...

toyg 13y ago

> Then you spend twice as much time figuring out how to deal with poorly crafted feeds, ambiguities, and edge cases — especially for Atom, which is a huge, overengineered pain in the ass Funny: that's what most people said of RSS 0.x (poorly crafted), 1.x (over-engineered) and 2.x (ambiguous and full of badly-specified edge-cases). Atom was supposed to fix all that.

epaga 13y ago
That's the problem with open standards, isn't it? (obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/)
jfb 13y ago
Many if not all of the open standards are terrible. Engineering virtue is orthogonal to implementation freedom.

drivebyacct2 13y ago

I hope he's wrong, because I hope Google wasn't so stupid. My usage patterns/goals/content/etc on G+ are nothing like they are with {my new RSS reader}. In fact, I'm looking at unsubscribing from all but my smallest communities because the big linux distro and android based communities are overrun with individuals spamming religious, political, and just random personal images in them. (edit, oh and Adiós!, apparently!)

Yhippa 13y ago

The gravitational pull of Google, Facebook, and Twitter is just too big. If you're a business and not creating content on those sites these days you aren't getting noticed. So you cater all of your activities towards their locked-in APIs and you don't have resources to maintain an RSS feed nobody uses. As long as content continues to be centralized in those three companies interop is toast.

paranoiacblack 13y ago
> locked-in APIs > interop is toast Between your post and the author's, I feel like we're talking past each about what the above two phrases mean. First of all, what do you call a "locked-in API"? I would imagine it'd be an API written in a proprietary language or only works on certain systems or browsers. Personally, I haven't seen that from any of the mentioned companies. Afaik, most of Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's API work on any browser available, any computer that can run those browsers, including mini-computers and smartphones, even some dumb phones. Where's the lock-in? The fact that you put your data in their databases? The fact that there isn't a single format shared between each? About interoperability being "toast," to what extent? I could probably point you to a large amount of websites and web services that have integration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sometimes all at the same time. Sounds like that they can operate together to me. Perhaps, you want them to provide integration between each other?
- epsylon 13y ago
  Interoperability == open standard. If Facebook or Google provides an API that's not an open standard, you're locked-in because the day they decide to remove the API, or to charge high prices, or deprecate a crucial feature, you can't switch easily to another platform.
wyclif 13y ago
Does maintaining an RSS feed require a lot of resources? I suppose it depends on what you're talking about specifically. Once you set up RSS it doesn't require much at all to maintain.

paranoiacblack 13y ago

I agree that Facebook started a "war", but I don't think any of these companies want to "close us in" any more than they did when they first started. Sure, you can look at the closing of Google Reader as the antithesis of openness and RSS but you'd somehow seem to miss that Google, Facebook, and Twitter still support a lot of APIs that promote openness and interoperability. Actually, they continue to release more and more APIs as do other startups (i.e. Github). Openness and interoperability aren't going away, they're merely being refined. That might mean taking away the hacker's toy for a bit while some kinks get worked out (i.e. Google's Jabber issue and the switch to Blink). It might also mean that we live in a monoculture for a while (Webkit). But regardless, the web is steadily improving and no matter how much you all try to spin it, RSS and Google Reader really aren't the martyrs you claim them to be. It sucks that even a successful product can be mercilessly shut down by the evil Google tyrants, but it shouldn't be surprising at all. Sometimes companies make decisions that hurt a part of their user base for some perceived benefit for other users. Did Google fuck up by closing Reader? Probably. But it's not the end of the world.

wpietri 13y ago
Of course they want to close us in. Or, more technically, they feel commercially compelled to do so. There are only so many eyeballs, and right now being very sticky is an obviously viable strategy for dominance. Google didn't get into phone operating systems because they knew or cared much about them. They did it because their revenue base was under long-term threat. (Hell, Google is trying experiments to see if they can get in front of your actual eyeballs, intermediating your entire waking life.) And Facebook tried taking over people's phones for exactly the same reason. Talk to the Googlers who have left over the last few years, and you'll hear very clearly that things have changed internally.
- paranoiacblack 13y ago
  What you're saying is that a company wants you to use their product and no one else's. Sure, that's how companies work. They aren't compelled to allow anyone from the outside to contribute. This is not closing us in. Unless I'm missing something, people are still able to choose the applications they install and use on their mobile phones, and I don't see that as a lock-in in the slightest. I understand the internal changes that have happened over the years at Google, but to say that Google no longer supports or does not plan to support openness or interoperability is either the word of a prophet or Google Reader-inspired sensationalism.

th0ma5 13y ago

Brilliant piece. Perhaps we'll always have shifts to and from the mainframe as it were, in some senses, and I for one really enjoy the ride.

cnbuff410 13y ago

Isn't it the same strategy Apple has been played all the time for its OS? And looks like Marco Arment has been enjoying it quite a lot? There is no freedom in terms of interoperability in your daily system and suddenly you are mad at "losing it"?

embolism 13y ago
Apple'a OS isn't the web. But I guess we've given up on the web now that Google is no longer championing openness.
chipotle_coyote 13y ago
This seems to be a common snark whenever someone known for (gasp) using Apple products complains about lack of openness. Because clearly these two things are connected, except for the part about them not being connected at all. (Frankly I have no idea what "no freedom in terms of interoperability in your daily system" even means. What is it my Mac and iPad are failing to interoperate with?) If I construct a popular online social network, I could run it on Debian, code it in Emacs, have all the source code on Github, genuflect to a picture of Richard Stallman daily, and still have no open APIs for users to interact with their data. If most major players on the Internet lock your data down, then many common uses of the Internet will in a very real sense become proprietary even if it is running entirely on free software. I'm sure it's fun to smugly go "well, you use iOS so you should like closed things," but it kinda betrays a significant distance between you and the point.
- cnbuff410 13y ago
  Really? "What is it my Mac and iPad are failing to interoperate with"? Can you share your iCloud stuff with others not using Mac system? Marco was blaming Google/Twitter/Facebook locking down devs/users in their own eco-system and your point is you get the interoperability within Apple's own garden? Come on. BTW, you give a perfect example of what being hypocrite looks like. Sure, you can enjoy your time by hosting a closed service on top of open source infrastructure, that's hypocrite. You can also enjoy your time in a closed eco-system ever since from day 1 with absolutely no interoperate and still manage to find way to fuck those closed web based eco-system. That's also hypocrite. Interoperate means what? Choice and competition. I see no spirit of either in Apple's eco-system. And somehow Marco always find a way to blame other companies for that.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

res0nat0r 13y ago

Entitlement. I has it. Why does HN continue to think that companies on the web who give their services to millions of users away for free (please don't repeat the you are the product being sold meme), are entitled to direct said companies to keep any project you deem useful around for as long as you deem it important (to said $RANDOM_MILLION_USER)? With a userbase the size of Google there will be millions of people complaining about removing every single product they've ever released. Google isn't the Oracle of the world where Oracle releases a product, charges you out the wazoo, gives you 24/7 support and only enter the market of said product after researching if it is a good business investment or not. Google is the one who experiments, tests, lets you use for free, and either retires or promotes projects which turn out to be good for the company (either tech wise, or to the dismay of HN money wise). That's their MO. Google and Facebook allow you to export your data for most of their services, and I think we can all agree that Google at least are good at giving users a fair amount of heads up before they sunset a product (or should we call it an experiment?). It seems the prevailing notion on HN anymore is once you are a big company (bad), any service you offer the internet no matter how long ago, should be kept around indefinitely, because you are a big company (bad) and you now make a lot of money (bad). Therefore you should let everyone free ride on your platform so that fellow (broke) startups can bootstrap themselves off your prior work (good). But once said (good, broke) startups start making lots of cash, they will then become (bad) and fall into the same category of other (bad) internet giants.

zanny 13y ago
Because of trust. When Google started reader, and more importantly, when they put the sign out front saying "come hither for a hassle free web RSS client that keeps a backup of all the feeds you visit even if they go down and everyone said "hells yeah" because it was from a web supergiant and those don't very often go under since 2001. So we got dependent. And they pulled the rug out. People only got dependent on the assumption it would be persistent. Google's entire business is making things that don't make them money but give them more avenues for ads. And your freaking news feed from Google is the best place I can imagine for targeted advertising and to figure out a users browsing habits. My emails are stuffed with spam, my google searches could be anyone, but you can reliably say I'm browsing my reader feeds and I'm interested in the articles I am opening and those are the ultimate target for advertising. I'd say something about how social networks factor in, but I don't use any them (or Twitter) so I could care less. But I highly doubt that Google got its desired outcome from killing Reader - they lost a vast swathe of technical users and lost confidence from even more, and they won't see these people move over to consuming content on Google Plus because they don't give a crap how many dog treats the neighbors dog ate yesterday, they care about xkcd strips or gamasutra article feeds. You get a wall of shit on Google+ that you can at least curate in the RSS world. Why I would ever want to use it I have no idea. If I want to talk or interact with people, I'll use XMPP or SMTP. If I want to consume textual or image based media with consistent publication, I'll use RSS. Notice how I keep quoting protocols - because they are open and interoperable. I can expect other people to be ably to reliably target said protocols and distribute their content to anyone that wants it because you have a myriad of tools to access them. That share on G+ button only works with G+, and like the article said, Google wants you stuck on their services. So I switched the default search engine on my grandparents, mother, cousins, and neighbors to duckduckgo. I'm looking for free web email services that compete with gmail to drop that too, because who knows when Google will rip that rug out from under us as well. "Why are you sending emails? Just send G+ messages! You are all on G+ right? It is expensive to keep a copy of all those email attachments!"

olalonde 13y ago

Conspicuously missing: any sort of criticism directed at Apple.

javert 13y ago
The post wasn't actually a criticism of anyone, and Apple has nothing to do with it, since it's not a Web giant.
bruceboughton 13y ago
No criticism of the NSA either... he must be a sympathiser.
- olalonde 13y ago
  > [...] they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely [...] It's very hard not to think of Apple when reading this sentence. This article is about openness and interoperability, not about spying or government agencies - not sure your analogy stands. Plus, I think it's a pretty well known fact that Marco is indeed a sympathiser of Apple (hence the "conspicuously missing" bit).
  - dasil003 13y ago
    It seems like you have an axe to grind. Apple is not germane because Apple is not a major web player.
rahoulb 13y ago
> Apple dragged Google into a similar war for extreme mobile-OS lockdown (although it is a footnote)

zmmmmm 13y ago

Well, for once I agree with Marco. But I find it a little strange coming from him - he seemed to care not much about it at all when making his apps exclusive to Apple's locked down, ultra closed platforms.

andycroll 13y ago
...and the web. Sure he didn't do an app for Android (until someone did for him) and is a bit snarky about it as a platform, but the web version of Instapaper existed before the app did and powered the whole thing. Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in). His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related, but he's originally (and still) a PHP web guy.
- dasil003 13y ago
  > His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related I always thought of Marco's attitude about iOS as Windows PTSD.
- MBCook 13y ago
  > Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in). He discussed that at some point, I think it might have been on Accidental Tech Podcast. As I remember the idea was that since The Magazine wasn't terribly important (security wise) he could avoid having to give people another username/password. He said it was something of an experiment and he probably wouldn't do it again. I think Casey and Siracusa both said they found it odd and confusing at first.
madeofpalk 13y ago
His apps are exclusive to the Apple platform? Instapaper has an open API, and The Magazine is available online.
- jimhart3000 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure Nursing Clock was an iOS exclusive.

mlchild 13y ago

Whether you agree or disagree with the piece, I think it's perhaps more interesting to try to put together the clues about Marco's next project. My guess would be something like a new publishing standard or system that makes it easy to package good writing into an immersive mobile form, possibly via Newsstand. But just spitballin' here.

brudgers 13y ago

I've come up with a charitable interpretation of Google shutting down Reader. And I am not known for being charitable toward Google. I just have a gut feeling that shutting down Reader may have made life easier for Google when it comes to National Security Letters, subpoenas, warrants or whatever. Turning over a list of what someone has read, does seem a bit evil. Maybe I am being naive in attributing a positive motivation to them on this issue. But it just feels more plausible in light of the backlash of negative feelings the shutdown has created, who harbors such feelings, and the rather trivial resources required to maintain the service. If they were turning over logs from Reader - and why wouldn't they have been requested - what options would Google have? Carry on or shutdown or lawyer up, are about it. Would the backlash when such a practice was disclosed be less than that for shutting down Reader? I doubt it. People who didn't use Reader, like me, don't care about its shutdown. But I'd probably be full of condemnation and brimstone when commenting on a story about Google turning over reading lists to the government.

xyzzy123 13y ago
This seems extremely unlikely to me. While would be Orwellian to hand over a list of what someone has read, it pales beside handing over their private chats, emails and social graph.
wpietri 13y ago
I find that entirely implausible. If the NSA is getting as much data as we expect, then they can get people's reading lists from their ISPs. So Google shutting down Reader wouldn't have kept much of anything out of federal hands. Further, if Google had a sudden attack of nobility, then it would be Gmail or Google Voice that they'd be shutting down. That's where the real private information is, and that's what most people are angry about. Not what a small fraction of Google's audience gets in their daily papers.

zer0gravity 13y ago

What we need is a user owned facebook. We need to find a way to shrink the whole Facebook functionality to run on a system the size of a router.

debt 13y ago
Diaspora is a thing. was.

Kiro 13y ago

"Over the years, comma usage after prepositional phrases has also apparently declined." The prepositional phrase is not in the beginning of the sentence and is less than four words so no comma needed!

kivikakk 13y ago
Also a tad ironic in light of his subsequent invocation of "belive".

rounak 13y ago

Find it strange that he doesn't once mention Apple, iMessage or iCloud, which rank really low on the data interoperability front.

chipotle_coyote 13y ago
He does, in a footnote, which refers to Apple having an "extreme mobile-OS lockdown" they dragged Android into a war over.
rahoulb 13y ago
He does mention Apple in a footnote. However, Apple doesn't really make claims about openness (apart from a brief marketing push around OSX 10.2), whereas Twitter's success came from liberal access to its API and Google makes a big deal out of its openness.

josteink 13y ago

This has to be the first ever Marco post I've read which didn't leave me wanting to toss sharp items at my monitors. I actually fully agree with him on this. The open web is increasingly being threatened and locked down. We need to oppose that.

lawdawg 13y ago
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until developers stop chasing a big payday, and follow their principles instead. Unfortunately, principles don't feed your family or put a roof over their head. It's always easy to spout how we need to push forward open standards, but what we've seen instead is developers falling over themselves to develop for Apple and Facebook. The very people who are needed to push forward the open web are the very same people who spend their time and energy expanding the every growing empire of closed ecosystems.
esolyt 13y ago
It's ironic though, that this post is coming from Macro. He hates Chrome (open source and free software) and uses Safari. He hates Android (open source and free software) and uses and develops for iOS. I sense hypocrisy.
- forgotAgain 13y ago
  Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
- throwaway2048 13y ago
  chrome is not "open source and free software" it is distributed with a ton of proprietary code.
  - esolyt 13y ago
    Chrome is Chromium with Flash and a proprietary PDF reader. "A ton of proprietary code" isn't an accurate statement. You are also free to use Chromium (100% open source and free software), like I do.

netcan 13y ago

The type of interactions that Facebook focused on are naturally inclined to be closed. You need to manage who sees what. BTW this was a revolution that got the late adopters online and got people comfortable using their own names. Anyway, my point is that this isn't a conspiracy. Google+ might have all sorts of potential for moneymaking but its not google's main business at this point. This trend towards more closed systems is largely emergent. These closed environments are we're people like to interact.

georgemcbay 13y ago

Re: Google+ Is their overall strategy to drive adoption working these days? I know their number of users must be quite large now, but AFAICT it is pretty much hugely inflated by being a catch-all for anyone with any kind of Google account. I actually like Google+ quite a bit and have a lot of people in my circles and I'm in quite a lot of other people's circles, but I never actually go to Google+ anymore (unless I'm following a link to some Linus post or something from somewhere else) because it simply never hit the required critical mass of actual mainstream usage for me to switch. Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook, ergo I'm stuck on Facebook even though I don't particularly care for it. Even among the smallish subgroup of people I know IRL who did embrace Google+ at first, they are virtually all like me now, with accounts that scarcely ever get used. I'm not sure what Google+ has to do to make converts of the masses, but at least among my circles they aren't doing it currently despite whatever collateral damage they are causing in trying to force people there.

richardw 13y ago
> Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook FB is for IRL friends/family, G+ as long-form Twitter. It's Twitter for people who don't get 140 characters. I'd say the strategy is working, given the amount of G+ links I see. Personally I'm more interested in what my G+ links say than FB (because they're interests of mine, not just IRL'ers talking about their nail polish), although I check both every so often.
- lmm 13y ago
  Isn't tumblr the long-form twitter? Real names gives G+ a very different tone.
  - Wilya 13y ago
    Tumblr is more of a pics-form twitter. Other types of content don't get much love there. I don't know what social network would qualify as long-form twitter, to be honest.

medell 13y ago

First the hardware war, then the OS war, followed by the browser war and search engine war, and now the mobile war and social network war. This won't be the last... or could it? Will we be using Facebook daily 5 years from now? 10 years? 20? Or is the next war in augmented reality, which Google has a head start? (but using which social network?) Anyone have good links to futurist thinkers on these topics?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

wyclif 13y ago

This plan is particularly problematic because Google+ is, relatively, a clear failure so far An absurd statement on the face of it (even with the weasel-word qualifier), given Google+'s large number of active users. In fact, given the traffic there, I suspect his ridiculous Cupertino fanboism is to blame for not considering Google+ a smashing success.

rsynnott 13y ago
> for not considering Google+ a smashing success. Huh? Does _anyone_ consider Google+ a smashing success? On what basis?
- abenga 13y ago
  Google+ is the 2nd largest social network, with more active users than Twitter. Probably not smashing maybe, but that's success of some sort.
kryptiskt 13y ago
Go to any article on the web with social media buttons, compare the number on the Facebook, Twitter and Google buttons. One of them is one or two magnitudes lower than the others, which?
- wyclif 13y ago
  So Google+ is not nearly as big as Facebook. That much is obvious. But Marco interprets that as "failure." Any service with 400 million active users is not one I'd label that way.
sbuk 13y ago
Banding around expressions like "Cupertino fanboism " makes you just as bad, possibly worse.

hanspeide 13y ago

Is this worth reading? Whenever I see marco.org I think to myself: "Apple love, Google hate as usual" and move on.

wyclif 13y ago
Yes, it's true his fanboism shows through when you see him call Google+, a service with 400 million active users, a "failure." If that's failure, then please let me fail.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  It wouldn't be a failure for you or me. Google started out with far more active users than that, so they have to be judged on a different basis. They shut off other services to force those users into G+, and significant numbers of those users posted a couple of times and then never looked at G+ again. Something about Google's actions turned them from regular G-Reader users into regular users of non-Google services. That smells like failure. If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that.
  - slantyyz 13y ago
    >> If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that. I'm not a fan of Marco, but you're right. If Marco really was a rabid fanboi, more than half of his blog would be pointless claim chowder posts.

jwr 13y ago

This was exactly what I thought when I heard about Google closing down Reader. I'm glad Marco put this into a coherent article. It is in Google's best interest to have RSS and individual blogs die. Amusingly enough, it is also what Facebook wants, so the two giants are fully alinged on this one. About 6 months ago I quit Facebook and Google+, deciding to publish my stuff on my pages and my blog alone, instead of throwing them into closed gardens. I do not regret that decision, even though readership dropped significantly.

tejaswiy 13y ago
I don't get it. Even if all of us RSS reading dinosaurs were to be forced into the information age, we'd probably go to Twitter / Facebook and not G+. So why exactly is the death of RSS in Google's best interest unless they're actively trying to send users away to their competition ?
- wmf 13y ago
  By their thinking that social is strategic, to admit that G+ can't win is to admit that Google is dead.

mmahemoff 13y ago

"It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people." Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses. It's hard for most of us to comprehend, but ready-made revenues of a few million bucks, even if it was $100M (unlikely), is not of interest to Google unless it's growing fast. Which RSS, isn't. Welcome to Extremistan. Black Swans like Google do things that aren't intuitive. "The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability" Yes. This is indeed the direction Google has been moving, and it's a problem for those of us who enjoyed an open web, as users and developers. Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down. They tried with other standards too, e.g. PubSubHubbub, WebFinger. Most people have never heard of them. There's no conspiracy theory needed here. Google tried with Reader too, for 8 years. It just didn't take off. Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier. Not the kind of people who read HN, but the kind of people who are too busy to figure out what seem like trivial technologies to early adopter types. So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running. All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. For a giant company focused on growth, that's all the reason you need to turn it off.

nemesisj 13y ago
"Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses." You know, I've seen this statement on almost every thread about Google Reader, and it seems to be one of those things that everyone is just giving a pass to. Google's entire hiring and organisational model is (or at least should be) predicated on hiring great people to get things done. This is how every well run technical company operates. This idea that we all need "senior management attention" or "product manager" love is something that comes out of dysfunctional organisations without a shared vision. Could you imagine this statement being made about some of the tech company darlings here (37Signals, Github, Stripe etc.)? If you're going to put a product in maintenance mode (or even slow growth) with a team who understands it, you don't need senior management attention from on high. Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now - that's not going to go away any time soon and you better believe that it was much worse than someone coming along later and saying "Oh no, Google reader is so unchanged from 3 years ago, I hate Google." Anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps. All these arguments are poor. Or, at best, if they're true, they signal that Google has really lost its way - it's now a behemoth organisation that requires senior management oversight on every single product offering, and any non-spectacular product could at any instant bring the entire organisation down with its combination of toxic legal and toxic risk.

dt7 13y ago

If Google want us to move from Reader to Google+, why are they not pushing it as a replacement? Do they think RSS users are a lost cause?

rsynnott 13y ago
RSS users were always a tiny minority, and have become more tiny with social networks (especially Twitter).

WA 13y ago

The article reads as if RSS itself was dead. Come on guys, I know many of you loved Google Reader, but it was just a damn client for RSS. There are millions of RSS clients out there. Just use another one. The article got that ass backward. With Google Reader, you were locked in Google's ecosystem. Without Google Reader, you are free to use whatever RSS client you can find. I think the role of Google Reader for RSS is truly overrated but please show me how I'm wrong.

itafroma 13y ago
> With Google Reader, you were locked in Google's ecosystem. Without Google Reader, you are free to use whatever RSS client you can find. This is (or was) a false dilemma. You could, with Google Reader, use a vast multitude of RSS clients: you didn't have to use Google Reader proper. And, because nearly everyone supported Google Reader as a common sync API, you could switch between clients without losing your place or your data. Want to try X flavor-of-the-month RSS app? No problem: just log in with your Google account. Don't like it? No problem either: switch back to your other RSS client and everything—even what articles you've read and starred—are right where you left off. Now, there's at least a half dozen competing and incompatible sync APIs and numerous perfectly-adequate RSS clients rendered obsolete because they haven't been updated to support other sync services. Because of the lack of a common and ubiquitous sync API, choosing an RSS client now that Google Reader is gone will be more locked down than before, at least for the foreseeable future. Which is Marco's point: companies don't want you to be able to freely move your data around. They want you to use their service. Yes, there's more choice, but choosing one service over another winds up making it harder to make a different choice down the line.
- WA 13y ago
  Thanks a lot for clarification. I never used Google Reader and it wasn't clear to me that the whole fuss was about the syncing API.
smackfu 13y ago
>There are millions of RSS clients out there You think? Before the Google Reader shutdown was announced, pretty much every mobile RSS client was just a front end to reader, using it to manage the feeds. And pretty much every other web RSS reader died off. Safari killed RSS integration. Net News Wire stagnated. I mean, honestly, was there a single healthy RSS client at the end of 2012, being actively developed?

aet 13y ago

I've never used a "Reader" before. Question: Were content providers able to server ads via the Reader?

brown9-2 13y ago
Yes
smackfu 13y ago
Most common monetization options are to either put "ad articles" in the stream, or to not provide the full article text in the stream, so people had to follow the link to the full site with ads. The former strategy was pretty good for getting around people's ad blocking, since it was essentially a long form text ad.

rsheridan6 13y ago

If Google wants to kill off internal competitors to Google+, I suppose blogspot is next on the chopping block.

MatthewPhillips 13y ago

> Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down. Why does Google have to "slow down" Facebook? What does that even mean? Is Google only successful if no other successful web companies exist?

pgeorgi 13y ago
Google is successful if it has free access to web content. Unfortunately Facebook locks out Google (and pretty much everyone else in a non-consumer role), and so someone at Google felt the need to do something about that.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  But they still don't have free access to Facebook or Twitter content. Is Google not successful? Are they going to become unsuccessful in the foreseeable future because of this issue? When?

esolyt 13y ago

An Apple fan complaining about Google not being "open" enough. Wow. Remember everyone: "Open web" is very important! But your browser itself doesn't need to be open source. Use Safari instead of Chrome. Your OS doesn't need to be open source either. Use and develop for OSX. Use and develop for iOS. Refuse developing for Android and make iOS-exclusive apps. Buy all Apple products and support Apple. Then open a blog to advocate openness and bash companies that build open source tools.

Afforess 13y ago
One can like and enjoy using Apple devices without wholeheartedly embracing every aspect of their corporate decisions and culture. Don't present a false-dilemma.
smackfu 13y ago
Pretty much the definition of ad hominem here.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- esolyt 13y ago
  My argument is that he is an hypocrite. I'm not trying to disprove his argument. In fact I agree with it 100%.
rafitorres 13y ago
He is arguing for interoperability ("RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs"). It is not about open/closed source.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  We are talking about a person who responded "LOL" to questions about whether his magazine's articles would be able to be sent to competing read it later services (he has since just changed that to "No"). There is a definite disconnect between what is being said and what has been done.

davidp 13y ago

Similar to Scott Hanselman's "Your Words Are Wasted", a more impactfully written (IMO) piece about the same problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403558

webwanderings 13y ago

.....Well, fuck them, and fuck that..... Amen.

pizu 13y ago

And here is a further proof that Google wants to become the one-stop shop for all your internet needs: https://www.google.co.uk/flights https://www.google.co.uk/flights

xenonite 13y ago

On the contrary. Google requires the access to the open web, because its advertising and its search engine need that access, as I will show below. Reader was not known to most people, but to many technical folks. Among them are many bloggers. Shutting down Reader certainly removed one big plus of the open blogging world. Thereby people have less arguments to blog openly. How is that a problem for Google? If people choose to move over to closed platforms, that content becomes inacessible to both Google's crawler, and to Google ads on blogs. Thus, by turning off Reader, Google actually hurts itself not only directly, but indirectly by treating the openness of the web less favorably.

programminggeek 13y ago

I think Reader was a great, if neglected product, but I don't think it matters that Google maintains it. What moved the needle for google 5 years ago is not what will move the needle today. Google will focus more on search, g+, android, apps, cloud, because those things can make an impact relative to Google's current scale.

antitrust 13y ago

What's good for business is a centralized standard format which makes it easy for consumers to browse without thinking. What's good for the net is the opposite, which is the kind of decentralized it-just-routes-around system that the internet was designed to be in the first place. To my chagrin, most of my clients, friends and family prefer the standardized and sanitized sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, *.google.com, Reddit and Digg. I miss the anarchy days, when every site was a random gesture thrown up by someone possessed of the spirit of an idea or a plan, and not all websites were standardized web apps that are just too "perfect" to be fun, or to permit evolution. /off my lawn

psionides 13y ago

The thing I don't understand is that for me, Twitter and Facebook aren't a competition for blogs and RSS. They're different things and they're complementary. Twitter and Facebook are for posting links to things you've found or broadcasting short messages up to a few sentences. Twitter is for doing those things publicly, Facebook is for doing those things within the circle of your friends. Blogs (and RSS) are for posting longer pieces of text, articles and such things. When you want to post an article, you don't put it on Twitter (for obvious reasons) or Facebook (because it limits your audience), you put it on your blog (self-hosted or on a service like Blogger or Wordpress) and you post links to it to Twitter and/or Facebook. And when you want to invite your friends to a movie, you don't post that to your blog, you post that on Facebook. So I'm not worried that Twitter and Facebook don't have RSS feeds - I wouldn't even want to see my friends' FB posts when I'm reading longer articles in my RSS reader. And I'm not worried about Facebook killing blogs and RSS - yes, most people post stuff on Facebook and not on their blogs, but that's because most people don't write anything that would resemble an article. (I do agree though that Twitter should have some open API for getting someone's public tweets in a machine-readable form, but it doesn't have to be RSS, JSON is just fine.)

alexirobbins 13y ago

If we want an openweb, advocacy won't cut it over the long haul. open is currently just less efficient at distributing + monetizing content. That's what we need to change, not the minds and paychecks of developers.