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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Short version: Google couldn't keep Reader going because it would take money to get it working on the new Google+ infrastructure that failed spectacularly.

Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.

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It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.

That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created.

I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.

Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back.

They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.

Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them.

Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.

More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.

Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products.

Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.

> They changed it to quotation marks […]

They just got rid of one of the two available operators; quotes were there 10+ years ago.

WOW! Just wow! That would explain why + stopped working for me.

Thanks buddy.

I also really wish that they would revert this change. But maybe Google+ was created just because they wanted to get rid of the + operator in Google search?

Heh, Google killed Reader so I could consider any alternative to Google before using their products. So it's been DuckDuckGo, Firefox, box.com, other OpenId providers etc. I still use gmail, because i only use email for boring stuff like amazon or whatever, not communication with friends, and it's not like I see any of their ads anyway because I use adblockers (part of the reason i use firefox - you can't block ads using chrome on android). I use Android. That's good. They're not screwed that up yet, although i'm sure given enough time they will.

Putting a single word inside double quotes makes it mandatory .

At least that's what I heard somewhere back then when they broke the + operator.

> broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail

This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.

When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.

The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.

Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.

This is my single biggest problem with the whole g+ thing. Very frustrating, never mess with contacts.

Oh. Eye-opener. Is this why in the past year or two random contacts are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and I can't merge them, and sometimes one app (like Hangouts/messaging) won't know a phone number is attached to a contact while another (the phone app) will, etc?

The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.

Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.

Randomly, I also notice sometimes I have to edit a contact's phone number then save again for it to register as a number that hangouts recognizes.

Edit: I have Google Fi

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