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Comment by al_biglan | Hacker News Reader

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official Blog was a big clue...)

All that said... just as I was getting used to Wave... poof

Just as I was getting used to GOOG-411... poof

Google Talk...

Don't mind the innovation, but it seems that rather than releasing new versions of existing products to introduce new features and help folks migrate, you get an entire new product to learn/adopt. I can't believe I'm saying this but... I prefer Microsoft's approach to improving their product lines. (sigh)

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Picasa web albums has hardly disappeared. It was replaced by Google Photos (then Google+ photos) a couple years ago. They left the old interface around for years to allow people to transition over at their own pace, you can't really expect a better migration path than that.

Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.

That's kind of Google's modus operandi though, isn't it? They don't make desktop apps unless there is a distinct need for it (Google Earth, for example). They are all about the web!

Furthermore, Google Earth only existed on the desktop because Google bought Keyhole who made the app. Google would not have made it if it couldn't be on the web.

Same with Picasa desktop app.

I think that's the complaint though: Why take a perfectly fine working desktop application, move it to the web, then remove the desktop side?

Presumably, if I wanted the web version, I would have started with the web version.

Because a free great desktop app, paid for by a freemium (or free-for-ecosystem-lock-in) online service was quite a thing, but never a permanent/sustainable one. I suspect that I will use an utterly outdated version of picasa for quite a while, because it already wildly exceeds my demands for an offline snaps-management application in its current version. Hope they did not sneak in a kill-switch in a previous update.

by the way, I can find a million alternative cloud based photo services, all with comparable features. On the other hand, there are very few desktop picture managers, especially on windows and linux.

>not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp

google thinks you're wrong. me too.

Google of course thinks that wrong, they want you on their platform. Doesn't mean it's what I want as a consumer (with a DSLR and NAS full of RAW images)

You are not their target market - which is fine. There many good options for serious photographers.

90% of folks just want seamless backup and organization of their photos. Phone cameras are getting pretty amazing in quality these days. Google photos caters to that demand.

Is there any public information on how "unlimited" the unlimited storage is on Google photos? Is there a built in rate limit or max size per account?

Soon we'll all be running all our applications in facebook or googleplus or icloud, in a browser, in a virtual machine, on a proprietary-blob-driven all-in-one device.

Apps will be announced with huge fanfare (the most innovative thing ever), they'll show up in front of you without any action required on your part, they will change drastically in front of your eyes, corner cases will be buggy, and then in a few months to a couple of years they'll disappear forever.

yay, the future is almost here

Time to start working on the smaller, faster thing that gives its users more control on the other side of the pendulum.

> corner cases will be buggy

This is where you are wrong. It is much easier catch and fix bugs in cloud software.

But how much effort will you spend on edge cases?

Just as much as with other technology, but with web apps there are simply less of them.

I've got a rather large collection of large photo images. Images which I can and do want to work on, crop, tune brightness, contrast, etc, before publishing them. Webapps right now are amazingly primitive and crude for even the most basic of workflows, especially when you're working with raw images.

Additionally, in order to save the images I want how I created them, I'd have to pay a non-insubstantial amount of money to store them. By saving everything locally, I can have the full-resolution image for my own usage, and just pay the occasional cost to upgrade/replace hard drives.

Furthermore, I'm almost certainly going to have to have a copy of many of the images on my computer anyways. A lot of the images I make, I tend to want to share in 2 or more other places, not just a random web album. So again, the webapp usage story falls apart.

I'm also not always in a place where I have internet access which is particularly fast and reliable. So, needing a webapp in such a situation means that I can't edit and arrange my photos at all until I get to a location that has internet access. Not everyone wants to be hyperconnected all the time.

Webapps mean you're even more beholden to someone else for functionality than a desktop app. You are limited in how you can post your content, where you can post your content, and even what content you're allowed to post. A desktop application has none of these limitations, whereas they're inherent flaws in the webapp ecosystem.

Photoshop or Lightroom should meet your needs. Not free, but better they're not free: that means they'll stick around.

Yeah, I've been moving my stuff over to lightroom, this announcement will just accelerate that move.

Yup, Lightroom was tailor build for exactly this.

Digikam is good for photo management (though the facial recognition doesn't yet work as well for me as Picasa did 10 years ago).

There's Windows Photo Gallery with the obvious OS restriction.

I'm not a photo power user like you are by any means, but I've been using darktable[1] quite a bit lately and I've gotten to where I like it. Here's the blurb from their front page:

"darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."

1. http://www.darktable.org/

Darktable isn't half as useful as Picasa for photo management, and the UI is awful. It does have some nice editing features, but it's a very different product.

There is nothing on the web able to even enter the same ballpark as Photoshop.

Separately, when on travel, a web connection for your photos may be very hard to find and/or expensive.

Separately, again, Google photos downscales my photos. My hard drive does not.

Why do you think we should only have shitty tools with bad accessibility and low quality?

They only downscale if you choose the "free unlimited" option under settings. If you choose the "Original" option they don't -- or at least, I assumed they don't! Unfortunately if you want to store more than 14GB of "Original" images -- a quite trivial quantity for the serious photog -- you have to pay. I'd have to pay $10/mo for the 1TB if I wanted to put all my pics online.

At for example Smugmug.com you can have unlimited storage of original images with a VASTLY better UI for less than $4/mo.

> Being able to sort pics

Google Photos is amazing, but sorting photos in it is pretty lackluster. You can make albums... That's about it. It's sort of like Gmail; They want you to worry less about your complex organization system, and just use their fantastic search instead.

> fantastic search

Which is beaten by even PostgreSQL’s fulltext search in 'simple' mode. (At least for my mails).

Hilariously bad.

Photo search is pretty cool.

I just searched for "James in the Mountains" and got photos of my Son in the mountains.

I don't think postgres can do that :-)

Yeah, it's hilariously good actually. I find myself evangelizing the search. It's brilliant, and for the first time in my life, I don't feel a need to organize my photos.

It can, actually: https://github.com/postgrespro/imgsmlr :P

I love the search. My wife wanted a photo of my son at the park on the slide. So I searched for 'slide'. All my photos that I've taken with any slide in it show up.

Really? I've never not been able to find an email I was looking for in Gmail.

Exactly. If there's one thing Google is good at, is search. Especially in their own email.

any ref for that?

do you have an example?

Photo search is way-cool in Google Photos. Want to see every photo of beer? Search for it. Mountains, cars, places, a named person, animals, etc. I feel the need less and less to meta-tag my photos.

It is on the phone. Just not on desktop.

How long before Google+ bites the dust? Sounds ludicrous, right? Until it happens.

Lesson is: either pay for it, or support open source.

I'm not sure why the "If I pay for it, it will continue" meme persists. Your payment does not guarantee continuing availability. Many paid products and services vanish as well.

Require open source.

True. No guarantees.

However, my own anecdotal evidence tells me that everything I've ever paid for and cared about is still in existence (even the crappy little utility-apps).

That's a far higher success rate than the company in question. And sure, there's a reason for that by the very nature of Google's business model and strategy. Doesn't mean I have to accept or like it.

Your comment about the blog prompted me to go check the Google Voice blog...nothing since May 2013. Crap. I've been using, loving, and recommending GV since I started using it in 2010 when I got my first smartphone...one day they're just gonna up and shut down GV and not only will I lose a service I'm extremely fond of but I also won't get, you know, phone calls, because that's the number I've handed out for the last five years.

OMG, my GV number is so precious to me, all my friends remember it because it's so easy to remember, in case if they lost their mobile phone and need to call someone.

I ported my number out of Google Voice a couple of years ago. Some things to keep in mind with GV:

* Your only form of "support", even when paying to port out a number, is a forum staffed entirely with volunteers. If you're actually using GV it's useful to read through here to see the trainwreck: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/voice

* As the parent mentioned, the GV Blog is barren.

* You're better off porting out your number now given this support situation.

Well, I mean, I certainly don't wish I did it years ago like you did- I love GV. I can't see myself leaving it until they make me, either through closing it down or making it too obnoxious to use or etc..

Which consumer Google product has a kind of support different than a volunteer forum?

Try to get help for Google Music, or Google+, or an Android software.

They should at least sponsor and monitor some tags in the stack exchange forums like Microsoft does.

> Which consumer Google product has a kind of support different than a volunteer forum?

The one I've dealt with recently is Google Express.

The best support (the only real support) I’ve ever gotten for Google products were

(a) partnersupport-de@youtube.com (support for youtube partners, monetized, back in the days, German),

(b) This very website. Start an angry thread, get it to the front page – or post a comment on a frontpage thread about a dev topic – and suddenly some Google dev ends up fixing it, and in the same moment, your comment on here disappears.

Support methods I have also tried:

(c) Buying Google Apps for Business (the 30 day free month), then calling their support, after the support call was successful, cancelling it again (doesn’t work, Google doesn’t answer Google Apps for Business calls, someone takes your call, you say hi, in the same second they hang up on you)

Support methods I have not tried yet, but plan to, in case the previous ones don’t work anymore:

(d) Just arriving in person at their nearest Google office, getting entrance somehow, and then directly providing my complaints to the next manager (at risk of getting sued for entering their office illegally)

I received some excellent support from the GCS (Google Cloud Storage) team while I was working on my last project. There was only an email address listed in the API docs. I didn't have high hopes when I first contacted them with an issue, but I got a response in less than 24 hours, and a similarly quick response to my following response. That first problem was due to my own misunderstanding of the API, which the person in question patiently helped me better understand.

The last time I was in contact with them was a few months ago. I got another reasonably-timed response, and this was an issue on their end (something to do with an occasionally missed automated notification when files were uploaded). It took a couple weeks or so to fix the problem, but they contacted me after each upgrade (rather than waiting for me to contact them) to follow-up and see if my issue had been resolved. After a couple rounds, it was fixed.

I'm not sure I've ever received personal support from Google prior to that, but in my experience, the GCS support team was/is absolutely top notch.

I spoke to someone at Google on the phone about a problem I had with Google Music. There is a "request callback" link in the help/support section. I've also asked questions on the phone regarding purchasing videos from their digital store- specifically, what quality playback would be supported on my Chromebook model. It didn't take long from question asked -> question answered in either case.

Where did you port your number to? Any suggestions for an alternative to GV?

For services that have feature parity with GV, I'd recommend ring.to. Note that ring.to is run by bandwidth.com, the same CLEC that Google Voice uses for most (all?) of its numbers, so porting is easy:

https://ring.to/#newservice

For a more hands-on alternative, Anveo is a good choice (and they have SIP and SMS short code support):

https://www.anveo.com/

ring.to sign-up seems to assume porting an existing number. Is there a way to sign up for a new number?

>RingTo launched over two years ago with a simple mission: help more people keep the phone numbers they love. In the spirit of moving forward, several changes are coming down the pipeline we want to share with you.

>In early 2016, RingTo will transition to a paid service and will no longer offer free accounts to new or existing users. But don’t worry, we’re making it worth your while to stay with us!

I'd say they haven't quite finished the new signup yet.

I guess this is a good thing? If it's paid it might stick around for a while longer.

Edit: not sure I'd touch them - http://us6.campaign-archive1.com/?u=9094a6314c49a804bd522a79...

I use voip.ms. It has a good service. Some limited SIP knowledge help if you wish to make it work ok.

I ported my google voice number to... Google Fi! Most of the same features, plus now I don't deal directly with Verizon/T-Mobile/etc.

I suspect that is where the resources that had been on Google Voice have gone to.

so you moved away from a dying product from yesterday from a company that gives zero support even if you're paying ... to the dying product of tomorrow.

I am not from the USA. I have a GV number and I have been using it for a couple of years and it's super helpful. I am not sure how I can keep it once they shut GV down.

Legally, you own your number, and have the right to transfer it. This should still apply if it shuts down.

IANAL, but see https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/keeping-your-telephone-...

You don't legally "own" your number. You have the right to port it, but that is not the same thing.

Say we get the announcement that GV is going away tomorrow... anyone know of a decent alternative?

Huge opportunity here for a startup to be building a beautiful, well-maintained alternative to Google Voice, basically Grandcentral all over again :)

I'm still upset about Google Reader...

There's at least two of us then. Reader is what made me swear never to rely on a Google service for anything ever again.

I still don't know how to use the Internet without Google Reader :/

https://theoldreader.com/ works for me

Ouch, automatic locale detection, and badly in need of a (proper) translator (for at least Dutch). And no way to switch language that I can find (wouldn't be the first time that was translated with "").

I'm currently using https://blogtrottr.com to get e-mail updates for RSS/Atom feeds.

Huh ? You can change the language (I'm in France and I have my theoldreader in English). You just need to click on your login at the top right and go to "Settings" (probably Instellingen in Dutch).

I don't have an account there.

But I just figured out that using: https://theoldreader.com/?locale=en will also get me English text.

That enables me to properly evaluate it before signing up should I want to.

https://www.inoreader.com/ is a good replacement

This is as close to Google Reader as I've gotten with any of them.

https://www.inoreader.com

Inoreader is fantastic! Works great on the web or in an app.

The app is nowhere close in polish to the google reader app, but I make do :'(

Considering all the rest of the Reader clones that have popped up, I think this one comes as close to Google Reader as they get.

newsblur is one of those open source yet hosted options that is a really good replacement

What about The Old Reader? https://theoldreader.com/ It's very similar to Google Reader, with the same UI.

Feedly works fine

There was a moment of beautiful karma a couple years ago when I was at a museum conference where the Google Cultural Institute (https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/) team was trying to sign up partners but people kept asking how they could trust that it wouldn't turn into the next Reader and how they could get their data out or have permanent redirects when (not if) Google decided to shut the service down.

I don't get it though. Yea, it was a dick move they did not just open source the backend reader server code so people could just selfhost a replacement, but they did let you export your feeds and now we have a half dozen reasonable or good reader replacements that do the same job, and most of them copied Google's UI to attract old reader users.

It was one of the most seamless transitions besides the lack of good Android apps for a while (and Feedly's is still super slow).

I don't think that "just" is the right prefix for "open source the backend reader server code". Moving it off of Google's internal infrastructure would have been a major project.

Eh, I was until Feedly came along. It is really is just as good.

Feedly's use of whitespace bugs the crap out of me. I also don't like the behavior on the desktop as much. I much prefer Inoreader.

https://www.inoreader.com

the big white bars in desktop? I'm okay with it. when reading, it is easier when the content is compacted. if the text was full length of a browser, supposedly it is harder to read or people lose interest. Now, youtube is video, so I'm not sure whats up with their white bars but I digress.

Even Google Reader had a maximum width of its content with any white space being on the right side of the content. I MUCH prefer this UI.

Digg Reader is almost identical in every important way... just in case you haven't tried it

My experience with Digg reader is that it is still subpar, though better than Feedly. Specifically, I've seen it miss updates on some feeds (sometimes for days at a time), and it frequently "forgets" that I've looked at items and shows them as new again (seems to be a UI glitch). It also frequently shows feeds as having unread items but no items are actually unread (seems to be a server-side glitch, resolved by marking read in bulk).

Digg Reader is still the best I've found, but still feels like a notable step down from the reliability and consistency of Google Reader.

I've been really happy with Newsblur. I've been happily paying him since the reader shutdown.

Amen...

I was Hulk Smash level angry when they pulled the plug on Reader. So much so I just went into every Google system and closed out my use. The only things I haven't been able to abandon are Gmail and Picasa. This helps me trim out one more service.

Reader was the "fool me twice" moment with Google.

The shitshow that was (and is) Google Groups and the destruction of the dejanews archive was equally awful.

I rarely put much stock in Google products. Their approach seems to be to get a decent idea off the ground, then turn it over to the masses to use and figure out and suggest how they can make it better.

This usually means no support whatsoever. While I can appreciate the whole, "Post something in our forum!" approach to customer service, I can't tell you how many times I've posted a question about a product or a bug and get fucking crickets for MONTHS. I gave up a long time ago thinking it was going to get better.

When I see a new product they release, I'll kick the tires and test drive it, but no way am I even remotely putting enough confidence in it to use it on any of my projects. It's just too risky.

One of my coworkers pursued a bug where Chrome would not update version numbers in WMI like 5 years ago... Fixed like a month ago.

"Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear"

The worst part is when they do this with acquisitions (which Picasa was, though admittedly it was acquired quite a long time ago).

Also, even when they don't outright kill apps/services, it is painful when they basically let them wither on the vine (see: Google Voice, another acquisition of a promising product that Google snapped up and then basically put into hibernation soon after).

None of the shutdowns have really impacted me, but they definitely impacted how I approach Google's offerings. It's not that long ago that I would (at the very least) try out pretty much anything Google put out (e.g. Wave/Reader/Desktop/Drive). Now there's always a nagging feeling of "When (not if) will this be trashed?"

My expectation of Google Voice going away has kept me from doing more with it or many other Google products; what's funny is that by showing even token effort they could easily turn me into a $5-10/month paying customer instead of one who actively avoids depending on anything Google.

As it is I'll keep paying my money to my lightly used long term online fax service and perhaps at some point I'll switch over to a paid SIP provider.

As for GOOG-411 isn't it pretty widely accepted that it was free to build up a large pool of voice data without the privacy concerns of using Google Voice customer voicemail? Its end was guaranteed once they had enough training data for minimum viable voice recognition - on the same kind of phone microphones even.

I don't see a reason to not use Google Voice, after all it's easy to port the number somewhere else in case they shut down.

> I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected.

Although I never really used Picasa, Dropbox's decision to shutdown Mailbox and, to a lesser extent, Carousel, was particularly upsetting for me. Although in the case of Mailbox it was more due to a decline in acquiring new users after the buyout [1].

I'm not too bummed about it now as I've found better alternatives.

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailbo...

They also decided to shut down Skitch which I use on a daily basis. Lately I've been looking for an alternative (on Windows) and I think I will go for Greenshot http://getgreenshot.org/

Look into Snip from Microsoft (https://mix.office.com/Snip) and ShareX (https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX) for a couple other alternatives.

Thanks, both Snip and ShareX are very nice, I'm now testing them.

Why they didnt evolve google talk into a skype clone is beyond me.

I have 20 ideas at least of cool features, but as we only have skype this type of product will stagnate.

Hangouts is kind of a Skype clone.

Yip, Google Talk is merging with Hangouts ... I wouldn't bet on those 20 cool features any time soon though

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