I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+.
Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.
I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done.
Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of closed socialness and realname ridiculousness... but overall I always thought they were still on the right side of "Don't Be Evil".
I'm totally convinced this quiet attack on RSS is a not-so-subtle attempt to push people into G+, and even though I casually use G+ (about the same as I casually use FB or Twitter), G+ is NOT a replacement for RSS, and it's not how I want to keep track of all the sites I read. I don't want to "like" them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit. Simple.
RSS doesn't care if you're logged in. RSS doesn't care if you use your real name. RSS doesn't care if you're accessing it from work, home, or anonymously via an internet cafe. And that's exactly how it should be.
Throw in the Picasaweb crap they're doing now too, FORCING you to use G+ Photos (which is a horrible horrible experience), and I'm done.
I've just installed Firefox on all my home computers and my phone, for the first time since Chrome came out, and will be looking for a new RSS aggregator.
I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox.
There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whatever your issues were.
Chrome is created by an Ad company so that they can make more money selling Ads. People are willing to overlook this fact because they trust that Google wont put it's own desire to make profit over keeping the web open. People are losing the trust that this is the case.
If somebody comes up with some new technology that makes the web better in some way, but also means it's more difficult or impossible to target advertising, do you think Google will implement it? Do you think the makers of Bing will?
Am i the only one that thinks that a handful of Ad companies shouldn't be controlling how the web evolves?
> I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox.
Did you know that the Google Chrome New Tab page will occasionally display an advertisement for an entirely unrelated Google product? The latest one that I saw was for the Pixel! (NB: I've never seen this happen in Chromium.)
It's about taking every potential data point they can have about you away from them (and thus the ability to monetize it). I switched to Firefox just the other day after reading that article about Chrome vs Firefox and also because the dev channel seems to have a tray icon in Windows now.
The tray icon has been coming and going for a very long time on many platforms. It seems to appear when you install extensions that are supposed to run in the background.
I don't get where this sentiment comes from. Ever. They are a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Even if they hold onto their startup-esque purism for a decade after their founding, they of course fall from grace into the profit motive pitfall because that is how the investor driven market capitalism system works. Never put blind faith in a corporate entity, because they all transition from consumer-driven-product-with-creative-vision to maximize-stockholder-returns-and-short-term-profit. It is how you do business in the big leagues. Google just had the lucky case of having a slow transition, probably due to good decisions in the early years.
I get that HN has this startup culture where creative people come up with "cool things" to sell, and are product oriented rather than profit oriented (though a lot of them seem to love the idea of selling the business off to a big business like Google, walking away with the pocket change, and watching it flounder into obscurity under corporate oversight...) but big business isn't run by people who have product vision, they have profit vision, and these companies are the amalgam of hundreds of managers and overseers that don't have collective vision and can thus only drive it towards what they can all agree on - making higher returns. It happens to the best of them.
I guess I just never had any of Google's decisions really effect me in a negative matter until G+ came out and they started ruining products I use on a daily basis (such as Picasaweb, Reader, etc)... so I didn't think about it, or bother re-analysing Google to decide if they'd finally transitioned into a big-evil-company type entity... which they have now (to me).
"I don't want to "like" them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit."
+1 this nails it. I do share content links a few times a month on twitter and g+ but basically I want to read interesting stuff.
I have also started to realize that I rely too much on HN and Prismatic - nice sources of interesting material, but still limited. This appropriate shit storm over google moving to a walled g+ garden has increased my use (again) of RSS.
I have this vague idea of an open, minimal social network that is little more than the internet:
- If you want to just read, use an RSS reader and subscribe to ... stuff.
- If you want to participate, get a personal page via someone like Wordpress that serves RSS, or run your own via your choice of technology if you want.
- If you want to build relationships between RSS serving participants, use the missing RSS feature that allows client RSS readers and site RSS readers (another missing piece) to piece together inter-site RSS conversations and relationships.
- Mix in some personal privacy and control, and you're done.
That sounds good to me. In the last day I have moved my blog and primary email service away from Google to my own servers: a little more of a hassle, but it seemed like a good thing to do.
I suspect this as well, which is why I deleted my G+ account in protest the other day. It was remarkably easy to do, both practically (just click a couple buttons) and sentimentally (in ~2 years there has rarely been any activity from any of my contacts, and I follow most of them on Twitter anyway). I've heard people hem and haw over deleting their Facebook account; G+ offers no such difficulty.
Could you detail what actually gets deleted? The support page [1] is brief on details and I'm especially interested if it deletes photo albums which were originally uploaded via Picassa
That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature.
Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla is embarrassing them with emscripten and asm.js.
I was with you on the first paragraph but the second goes off the rails on the second sentence. It's hard to say that Google isn't also championing the open web unless you claim that Chrome isn't a Google product - NaCL and Dart are interesting experiments but it's not like Google hasn't poured a TON of expensive, high-quality time into creating an industry-leading JavaScript engine (along with CSS, HTML5, etc. support) and put a similar amount of time into evangelism, developer outreach, etc.
Even if Google cancelled Chrome tomorrow, the entire open web community would owe them a debt of gratitude for administering the coup de grace to IE's reputation as the only significant desktop browser and pushing Mozilla to heavily invest in performance and the user experience – they cared about them before but as we can see now, setting your goal as “better than IE” was still too low.
There were a bunch of nice things which happened around that time – Firefox, Safari, iPhone, etc. – but the thing which really opened the desktop market moving was Chrome shipping a radically fast, user-friendly browser which you could install even on typical corporate IT-mismanaged desktops and which you never needed to think about updating. Web standards advocates had spent years preaching using standards first and fallbacks for compatibility and related ideas but the rise of Chrome seems to be what got the mainstream web developer to really internalize that idea and start coding with the assumption that the browser would improve before they revisited a site.
> Google started their proprietary ... Dart project because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is
No, they didn't. Google started Dart because they had a bunch of Java programmers who were having good success building JavaScript web apps such as Gmail with Google Web Toolkit. They thought to formalize it with Dart instead of using a hacked up Java dev environment. I have a client who needed a web app fast, so I took a chance on Dart and did it in half the time. The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level. There's a bright side to all the dislike and misinformation about Dart though, because it gives me a competitive edge.
>The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level.
I would feel very uncomfortable about that unless it's the sort of client that doesn't really have the tech background to assume you're writing it in JS in the first place. I think if someone is paying to have software written for them, they have a right to have some control over what language it's written in and what libraries it uses. After all, if they need to hire someone else to maintain it or add to it later on, they're going to have a far easier time finding a JS developer to do that than a Dart developer (at least for now).
And, of course, you have the right to charge twice as much to do it in JS if it's going to take you twice as long.
I agree with you, but this client really doesn't care, only that it is done quickly and it works. They're pretty happy and are lining up more work for me. I'd say the greatest experience I had with it besides real types, code completion and intellisense, is that it ran first time on iPad (Safari, Chrome, FF), Mac and Windows FF and Chrome. I had a slight problem with IE9 and 10, but nothing too hard to fix. The client had paid someone to do it in ActionScript/Flash but the project had to be cancelled when Flash on mobile was mostly deprecated. I didn't look at the ActionScript code, but later found out there is a lib for that (haven't tried it and won't unless I have to someday) http://www.dartflash.com/
>Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is
I don't remember them saying that. I remember them saying that JS has insurmountable performance problems, but that's very different from saying that JS is as fast as it can get.
As for asm.js, it's another approach to the same problem. An insurmountable problem for a VM usually means that there's a limit to how well the VM can reason about arbitrary code. The clever thing about asm.js is that it gets around that by just restricting the language rather than inventing a new one. The clever thing about Dart is that you would rather write in it than kill yourself.
And yes, of course asm.js is meant to be written by compiling via emscripten, but that means trading far more dynamicness for speed than you would with Dart.
You know, I keep seeing this "proprietary NaCl" statement around, and having played with it myself, I have a bit of a soapbox. There's nothing proprietary about NaCl: all the specs are open, and Google actively wants Mozilla and others to support them.
To be charitable, though, I guess what most people mean by "NaCl is not open like Javascript" is that it's low-level--compiled binaries instead of readily-accessible script. And that's true; it exposes less to the user--and although it would be perfectly possible for every NaCl module to be debuggable through the browser with embedded symbols, just like Javascript is, it hasn't happened yet.
But you know, NaCl isn't for that, as far as I can tell. It's not a thing to write the business-domain logic of your web app in. It's far too clunky to develop with, if that were the intent.
Instead, what NaCl seems perfectly suited as, to me, is an architecture for writing pluggable scripting-language virtual machines. In other words, to give freedom of choice to use a backend other than V8 to write your web app against. Java-in-the-browser, Ruby-in-the-browser, Erlang-in-the-browser; any of those would be possible, and just as transparent+useful as Javascript-in-the-browser (in fact, V8 itself could be lifted out to being just another NaCl module.) And since the site would deliver the "runtime" for the scripts itself[1], any compatible browser could pull it down and execute it, instead of waiting for IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. to all adopt the new language before anyone can start using it (a Sisyphean wait.)
There's already one perfect example of how this all would work: Adobe Flash. Flash is, in Chrome at least, an NaCl (PPAPI) module. Now, Flash isn't a shining example of openness--but using a custom interpreter is not where it goes wrong.[2] You can easily imagine Flash without that problem: a world where you can have <script type="text/actionscript"> and the Flash runtime will reach in and execute that code, just like the Javascript runtime reaches in and executes your JS.
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[1] This doesn't necessarily have to be true, though. The browser can come with default language runtime modules, and then the webapp can suggest a site-specific runtime module, but the browser doesn't have to take that suggestion. Which is exactly the way a thing that is considered "open" on the web works: fonts! Think of an NaCl module as being no more or less than a custom @font-face rule for the execution of a script.
[2] Flash goes wrong by embedding its programs into proprietary binary asset packages [SWFs]; goes wrong again by drawing everything onto a single canvas, not allowing for anything like DOM manipulation; and then goes wrong a third time by having only one de-facto implementation with no open standard.
NaCl and Dart were not created in the open. Both were secret projects within Google before their alpha versions were released; Dart was in development for at least 2 years before it was announced to the world. By that time there was no way a third party could have an affect on any of the fundamentals.
Also, for the record, PNaCl doesn't have a spec. It only has a reference implementation.
> By that time there was no way a third party could have an affect on any of the fundamentals.
It's not like NaCl is a market-dominating monopoly format like MS Word .doc now or anything. Going by usage, it's basically still a prototype. Anyone (e.g. Mozilla) who disagrees with the fundamentals of the design so thoroughly that they don't want to work with what Google came up with, could create a competitor to NaCl using the same basic idea (native-speed code execution using a pre-checked subset of machine instructions), and their version would have roughly 99% as good a chance of becoming dominant as if NaCl hadn't yet existed.
There are two alternatives when coming up with a standard: drag people through a committee forever to pin down every little feature--or just have one of the concerned parties throw together a working implementation that everyone else can then point at and say "well, this part is good, but that part is crap, I think I'll make a version of my own without that part", and shake thoroughly until a stable ecosystem settles out of it.
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As an aside--it seems like most of the good things in technology (e.g. HTML) come out of the latter process, and yet everyone somehow sees the former as fundamentally "fairer" or something. What's so wrong with making a bunch of incompatible forks, and then competing to merge all the best features of one-another so that your thing will be the "most compatible", and therefore see the greatest adoption? :)
> could create a competitor to NaCl using the same basic idea (native-speed code execution using a pre-checked subset of machine instructions)
That's pretty much exactly what asm.js is. It is currently slower, but it is also a younger project. They both even use LLVM as part of their standard toolchain.
> Anyone (e.g. Mozilla) who disagrees with the fundamentals of the design so thoroughly that they don't want to work with what Google came up with, could create a competitor to NaCl using the same basic idea (native-speed code execution using a pre-checked subset of machine instructions), and their version would have roughly 99% as good a chance of becoming dominant as if NaCl hadn't yet existed.
> There are two alternatives when coming up with a standard: drag people through a committee forever to pin down every little feature--or just have one of the concerned parties throw together a working implementation
You can do #2 in the open. This is what Mozilla is doing with it's Web APIs. Doing it in the open hasn't slowed them down at all.
Developed communally, as part of the Chromium project. Not as a vendor-neutral working group or anything of the sort yet, mind you. But there's no reason it wouldn't move to become that if any other vendor was actually interested in coordinating on it--they're not hiding their cards inside Google's walled garden or anything.
You're incorrect, that's not how NaCl or Dart were developed. They were developed in secret years before released. They're alpha versions had all of the fundamentals established when finally presented to the public.
I don't see how the way in which something is developed before its first release has any bearing on whether its current development is community-driven. Everything was designed in secret at some point: within the head of whoever was thinking about it, before they decided to start talking about it.
> I don't see how the way in which something is developed before its first release has any bearing on whether its current development is community-driven.
You don't? Go look at the nacl commit logs and count how many non-Google employees are contributing. That it was developed in secret is precisely the reason for this (not because they are against outside contributors today).
If you develop a supposedly open technology in secret it either needs to be 1) really good or 2) really popular. XHR is successful because it fits into both. Whatever you may feel about NaCl, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't think it's good.
> Whatever you may feel about NaCl, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't think it's good.
Microsoft and Apple have very obvious reasons to avoid supporting NaCl, whatever they think of it--it is the last step in nullifying the relevance of Operating Systems. A browser that runs code at native speed is an operating system, fullstop.
Mozilla is, as far as I can tell, just doing that same overly-idealist thing that Debian and the FSF do, where anything that's not specifically "the best kind of open" (GPLed) is a horrible monstrosity not to be allowed to besmirch the beauty of the web. Meanwhile, I don't expect to see a Photoshop or a Crysis for Firefox OS any time soon ;)
"Mozilla is, as far as I can tell, just doing that same overly-idealist thing that Debian and the FSF do, where anything that's not specifically "the best kind of open" (GPLed) is a horrible monstrosity not to be allowed to besmirch the beauty of the web. Meanwhile, I don't expect to see a Photoshop or a Crysis for Firefox OS any time soon ;)"
No, Mozilla is pushing asm.js as the solution for Photoshop or Crysis, because it's (IMHO) a technically better solution with better survival characteristics (backwards compatibility) than NaCl.
No, Mozilla legitimately doesn't think NaCl is a good idea and thinks they can achieve similar results with asm.js which has a far lower maintenance burden. Google is quick to come up with ideas that only they have the engineering budget to maintain.
> A browser that runs code at native speed is an operating system, fullstop.
You could give some people a stroke with that statement. They probably would mind that a supposedly sandboxed browser is fully controlling the hardware.
NaCl (in particular PNaCl) is merely a different approach. I would call asm.js crazy, but that's just me.
Something similar could be said about Dart, but there the language itself is not so interesting (merely not insane). The VM is potentially the language-independent bytecode and stdlib in a browser we've all been waiting for.
While Google have been behavin evil-ly lately, in particular related to Google+, NaCl and Dart are not examples of this.
Nacl is not merely a different approach, it's a wholly backwards incompatible approach based on techniques that tried and failed in the 80s (try searching for ANDF).
A lot of things were tried in the past, but they fail for a variety of reasons. Some are picked up later and work because the fatal problems were addressed. I couldn't find much on ANDF. Can you be more specific about why it failed?
I've actually been wondering if there's a pattern to these closures related to some scaling issue on the Google infrastructure. Google tends to build services tightly integrated with a common fabric. Scaling issues might cause the design of smaller services to take more than their share of resources.
Consider that Reader and other small services needing event and data synchronization, were often started by independent "20%" teams, earlier on in google's infrastructure build out. So maybe services at a higher priority are needing those resources. Or maybe they're looking at upgrading the "google fabric" in an incompatible way and if you have to redesign fundamental assumptions through the code of smaller services, you might stop and take a hard look at seeing if a large rewrite is worth it.
For years I've used gchat & status (& temporarily used buzz) as a light social network for friends, and it worked great. But now they've made it so mouseovers on the status don't work as well, and generally cramped up the design so status messages aren't as visible... could be part of the same plan.
Atom: see http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared for details but it basically boils down to RSS having gaps and inconsistencies which are compounded by the spec being essentially fossilized and David Winer being famously difficult to deal with.
It's a neglected platform at best, and it too encroaches on some partial functionality that could be offered by G+.
Picasa is in the process of being absorbed completely into G+. We're in the middle of a massive consolidation. They're closing down and walling off everything they can. When the smoke clears Google will have transformed from an open standards company into exactly the same walled garden everybody else is offering.
+1 This is what I have been concerned about also. I rely a lot on Blogger, Gmail, and (now) G+ photo albums. I like the way Blogger is easily mapped to a sub domain (blog.markwatson.com) and I don't have to run blogging software myself. GMail has been central in my workflow and I like the convenience of taking pictures on my droid phone and have all pictures auto uploaded to G+.
However, I have been thinking of starting an open source project that would be a one JAR deploy that would support personal photo album with easy sharing, blogging, live messaging (ironically I would like to use Apache Wave), and perhaps email (but probably not). I believe that since most technical people have their own servers and many of us are tired of walled gardens that this might garner a few users besides myself.
Also: for many years I have forwarded email from my own domain to GMail. I am going to stop doing that even though I really like their anti spam service. It probably makes more sense to just use my gmail account for access to customer's shared google docs, etc. in other words, still use useful Google services but stop relying too much on them.
I also now prefer paid services. Evernote and Dropbox, for examples, are clearly motivated to support me because I am a customer not a product.
I set up my own domain (hosted by InMotion, who have fantastically good customer service) and run my email through that. My initial reservation was that I'd be relying on spam filters that were inferior to Google's. In practice, it hasn't been a problem at all. Obviously, this is anecdotal, but the light-years ahead advantage in spam filtering that Google one had seems to have eroded to the point where it's no longer enough to keep me on gmail.
I still have my gmail account, but it's no longer primary.
This is one of my concerns as well. I use blogger for clients as well.
They've shut down or are shutting down a few things I've used a decent amount, iGoogle, Reader, occasionally Code Search, and now their XMPP usage is in doubt (https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-backslides-on-fede...) which I use for OTR instant messaging. I really liked being able to go explore Google Labs as well.
While losing any of the above isn't crippling, I certainly didn't expect to lose them, and it will make me have additional questions about using other Google products.
I guess it magnifies the difference between web and desktop apps.
They've already been neutering it for a while now, the site is still on design that pre-dates the G+ visual overhaul, and Google is clearly actively looking to snub RSS now.
Someone should create a site with estimates of how long it will be before google products are shut down based on when they last had a new feature added or were blogged about, in a similar (although opposite) vein to the predictions on http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Extend works fine here. Google product's are chock-full of extensions to open standards, which is why we have so many Gmail-only email clients floating around out there, etc.
I don't understand what people use to see new information from multiple websites at once if they aren't using RSS. Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually? Do "normal" users stick to just a few websites?
>Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually?
Some do. My brother, for example, has several dozen political or gun-related blogs that he reads religiously. He doesn't even keep a bookmark list--he just remembers all of them, and visits them one by one when it's time for reading, keeping track of which posts are new. I showed him Google Reader and suggested it would streamline things greatly, but he just grunted it off and said he liked doing things the way he liked doing things.
I consider myself a very technical person, but I never saw a reason to use RSS feeds (or Reader for that matter).
There are not a lot of "content websites" that I follow (Fefes Blog, Beautiful Pixels, MacRumors...) but rather content aggregation websites like HackerNews or Reddit, which I use to get my daily dose of news (not just tech but all kinds of categories). And yes, I check those manually, often on my phone in the respective apps, and it does not at all feel like a hassle. I've tried using Google Reader and other feed managers like Feedly but never got used to them.
For personalized news I look at the two social sites I follow (App.net and Twitter).
Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're interested in regardless of popularity. If I come across a particularly insightful, well-written blog on some obscure programming topic I'd like to read more of what that person has to say without having to remember to check back at some point or cross my fingers that enough cool kids upvote it on an aggregator.
And the best part about Reader (and now The Old Reader, for me)? The comments come from people I mostly know or are vouched for by people I do, so there's a distinct lack of inane Reddit-y comments.
Most of the time the author has a Twitter account you can follow and they post not only links to their new articles but also random interesting thoughts you wouldn't necessarily get through RSS.
The twitterverse is a very small subset of reality, although it is very easy to believe otherwise, as it is used by "us" and "our multipliers". As far as my (of course limited) observations go, twitter is filling the social communication need of a certain part of the population and is rejected because of practical considerations by the rest.
If you wonder what the practical problems are, consider a person that has the (possibly job-related) constraint that they cannot look at their twitter client whenever they want. If that person now wants to stay informed about something without missing an update, they are essentially screwed with twitter and other information-stream based services. At this point I am very certain that what I just described is not an outlier but rather the reality for a large section of the general population.
Twitter's single timeline format is very much not designed for following all updates from someone (which is what I'm interested in for a blog). There are ways around it (keeping your subscriptions count very low, list tricks, etc), but it's complicated compared to just using rss.
That just plain isn't true. Even if it were, Twitter is singularly unsuited to that kind of information consumption.
I don't need everyone to find RSS as useful as I do and I'm fine with the fact that others have different usage patterns and preferences. But I wish everyone saying "meh, what's the big deal" would realize that others find RSS to be the best fit for them and are well-justified in worrying about its decline.
It would be damn annoying for me to check fefe several times, find the last link I read and start above it. And that's for his somewhat low-update blog. Stuff like techdirt is way worse with ~50 or so posts per day.
My wife just starts typing the name of the site she wants from memory and the browser auto-completes it. No readers, no bookmarks. I would guess quite a lot of people browse the web this way.
bookmarks dont update themselves automatically when new articles are available ,dont tell you what you've already read or not and are not an open protocol to share information across websites.
I visit sites manually, and the overhead of doing so is one of the ways I maintain self-control over being overly consumerist about my information. I didn't actually get any benefit from using an RSS reader 5 years ago and I don't think I'd really get much benefit today.
Don't tell me what I need. A lot of people like following more than just content that gets picked up by the hype machine, just like some people aren't satisfied only listening to top-40 music. Aggregators are good for new discovery, but they don't know more about what I'm interested in than I do.
HN and such aggregators are nice for fluff content, which appeals to a broad range of people. More specific content either isn't aggregated, or the aggregators themselves are so niche that they only update once in a while (e.g. Lambda-the-Ultimate). And frankly, while obviously none is indispensable for my life or well-being, I'd rather miss out on HN than on the smaller blogs and feeds.
>The extension, which previously placed a small, orange RSS icon next to the website’s URL in the Chrome address bar, no longer functions even on Chrome browsers where the extension is installed and enabled.
So how have they disabled it in browsers where it was already installed? Does it use some backend service that they have taken down? Or was it disabled by a silent Chrome update?
It, RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) v2.2.0, is still installed and working in my Chrome. It does not seem to use any backend service. It just reads RSS information on a webpage and creates subscription links for you that go to the RSS webreader of your choice (I've been using Google Reader with it).
They have said they're planning to get rid of it sometime soon, though. Sucks for people like me who used Google Reader to keep track of Twitter RSS feeds, ha. Google Reader is really easy to replace, at least. I'm much more upset about Twitter.
Who said anything about indispensable? There are lots of things I like that aren't indispensable. One of those things is being able to follow a few people on Twitter in the same place that I follow all the rest of my RSS feeds. I don't think I'll kill myself if I can no longer do that, though.
I disabled it on my blog a long time ago because I want people to actually come to my website to read my posts. See the "related" posts and the "comments" section etc...
I guess it's even more obvious if you have ads on the website.
If you don't have a news feed, how would a reader know to check for new posts?
If you expect readers to check your site daily, that doesn't scale very well. I follow 200+ blogs; I would never be able to remember/bookmark all of them to visit regularly.
But why disable something that you don't have to even support, most (if not all) blog time sites provide an easy way to provide RSS.
You are alienating maybe a minority, but I think maybe a more valuable part of you readers - large part of HN readers use RSS (at least it seams so based on latest Google Reader deprecation).
There is no value in removing RSS, you are just crippling your site.
You can have an RSS feed that doesn't include the full post, just a title and maybe the first sentence or two. A lot of sites do that (Salon.com comes to mind immediately).
It's also a great way to piss people off and have them go "fuck this guy and his shitty blog with no RSS feed" and mentally assign it to bin 13 and never come back.
When I visit a blog or site with no RSS feed, I know my first thought is something like "What a bunch of amateurs, why would I waste my time with this?"
Now, of course, people like me (and other HN readers) may not be your target audience, and your decision may actually work out best for you in the long run. It's your choice, I just hope it was made with full consideration for how some people will react to it. :-)
I feel like you're over reacting. It's really not a game changer feature. I know I'll hurt the feeling of 1% of my visitors by not including it, the clever rest of the RSS users will first judge whether the content is worth it or not.
Could be. But lots of people "overreact". Not everyone who reacts differently than you expect or anticipate is "overreacting".
But, again, if you've made a conscious decision that it's OK to alienate a certain subset of potential visitors, and your business can withstand that, then you've made a rational - and possibly quite correct - decision.
I don't begrudge you the right to make that decision, although I might say I dislike it or whatever.
A blog almost never grabs me immediately. Usually, if I get sent back there a time or two, I subscribe. If I can't subscribe, you have to have some extraordinary content for me to return. As in "man I've got to read as much as I have time for". Usually even for my favorite stuff, that's not the case. For even my favorite blogs, I rarely read more than 1/2. Most of the stuff I sub to is more like 1/10.
Basically, for users like me (which I'm guessing a lot of HN users are), you're killing your blog in the cradle. Especially given that there isn't a lot of likelihood that your blog is entirely unique, I'll likely just go with an alternative that I can subscribe to, and click through when I want to read something.
Anyway, my two cents. I also recognize that I am definitely not the average user. But if you're catering to a technical crowd...
But whether or not it is a game changer depends on the value of your users time and mental real estate. When you tell the rss crowd that they should remember to regularly come to your site, what you are actually telling them is that you consider your output to be so valuable that other people should regularly reserve time and effort just to see it. You are basically saying that you consider yourself at least as interesting as sites such as reddit.
I'm of course not sure, but it might well be a really bad move to not offer a rss feed, although feed subscriber numbers are not that high. People using rss are people that consciously manage the way they interact with inforation and the internet. It is possible that these people are also more valuable as multipliers.
I have a handful that I visit often, reddit (heavily changed which subreddits I follow), hn, facebook, a local news site and google.
Anyway your site is never going to make that list, but I am prepared to go visit it if it shows up in my feed - that is the reason I have a feed in the first place.
If you have amazing updates daily, I might do that. If I'm seeing the same thing I read a week ago 90% of the time, and I can't have a feed reader ping me when there's a reason to come back, forget it.
They're not at all surprised, can I ask where they said that? I'd love to see how a company that makes billions by knowing as much as possible about their user base words the idea they're surprised by a quantity of users on a product of theirs.
I'll go out on the limb and suggest that google is trying to kill the ecosystem that nurtured it and focus on more mainstream nanny and media for to be cosumable for ages 10-14 or some such number. News papers target groups with lower intelligencer ratio and TV goes even further.
With that I don't think google wants to support independent internet anymore - it does not go well with investors and profitability. And can roust some smart minds that just might bring the whole google empire to its knees(or more aptly make it irrelevant). At this point google can be called the internet in some sense. And if such status can be argued for then it is not interest for google to support resources out side of its "google is the internet" domain.
Most companies go through such cycles and it seems that google is sort of outgrowing itself. It is sort of popular with G+ but largely it has failed in the social arena. I has captured some market share with lowcost android phones. But there is no certain future in Silicon Valley. One can say google is tired and is withdrawing from being rapacious inventor and instigator of new technologies.
Less people reading rss => More people reading on actual web sites => More people exposed to, and maybe click, embedded adsense ads from google + More user behavior data from google statistics.
As I noted recently, Google Currents is an Android application which uses RSS. And it is a product which has been getting updates, and is available at the Play Store here:
So if people think Google is getting out of the RSS business, here's a counter-example. Personally, this is how I browse my favorite news/blog sites each morning, looking for interesting content (which can be easily shared via G+ or other any other link sharing service; unlike iOS, it's easy for any Android application, including Google Currents, to share content with other Android applications, whether it be G+, or Evernote, or Digg, etc.)
When Google announced they were killing off Reader, the big problem was that there was no obvious alternative. That's not the case when they remove features I like from Chrome. I hear Firefox is pretty good these days, I'll probably try switching over and see how I like it.
i've forked the google rss extension, updated it and loaded it to the chrome store - so that it works with feedly, newsblur and theoldread
* have removed google reader, igoogle etc.. from the list
Not the browser extension, but when I check a Feedburner feed in Chrome I see, in order: MyYahoo, NewsGator, MyAOL, Bloglines, Netvibes, Google Reader, Pageflakes, and then a dropdown for other options.
I know from some of the parties that have shown interest in my company that the highest levels of media are very concerned about being not just marginalized, but trivialized.
We have made ZERO deals for, always, one or both of two reasons:
1) The investors want to control the content and under the CDA/DMCA definitions be publishers.
2) The belief that people are unwilling to pay for news.
Up until 2012, there were doubters that online subscription is the only bet the industry can make to persist. What the interested parties will absolutely never agree to is a system that they don't retain absolute control of the message with.
It is just my speculation now, but I believe they thought I wouldn't get an actual information exchange built without their resources and assistance. I did and now there is some panic because we are one break-out event away from changing the news industry forever. I say forever because people will see a different future and want that once they understand it.
After six months in open beta I know what needs to be done and it isn't pivoting. Mostly UI and colors with some feature polishing. This next iteration will polish the foundation of the nwzPaper system and then we will integrate the facilities to complete the incentive structure and adapt the article ranking as volume builds.
We will be doing some new licensing arrangements to balance the need for producers to earn something with the need for news information to be public, accessible, available and free.
As a developer, you should look at nwzPaper as a central locking agent in a distributed system.
Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.