Google Saves | Hacker News Reader

Google Saves

google.com

58 pointsfouadmatin79 comments

The problem I have with Google tech, especially after the new Nest stuff has to come to light, is that there's no guarantee they'll support it for very long. It's entirely possible that I'll incorporate this into my workflow, just for Google to kill it off a year later.

Agreed....this is actually something I'd probably love to use, but I'd bet money it will be gone in 2 years or so like so many other google apps.

I'd argue that Photos will be an exception. But I'm also arguably a fan boy.

In some ways Photos is already proving itself because it emerged from Google+.

Yeah, this might be worthy of using, however in its very hour of inception it has already shown of being untrustworthy, by lacking an export option.

Yeah this is way too niche, ill-defined, and overlapping with existing products to ever survive.

Why don't they just make a convenient set of clients or extensions to map into a product that's not going to disappear next quarter, like Drive/Docs/whateverthehellitisnow.

If you use Google Chrome, there is a official Save to Google Drive extension which appears to do the same thing as Google Saves, and more, minus the Material layout.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-google-dri...

> minus the Material layout

Seriously, I wish there were a MaterialBlock extension for my browser. And for Android. And for...

I hesitate to start using it for the same reasons. If it does catch on I would think Evernote has the most to lose here.

Despite reports of them struggling I don't see any clear competitors, but a central repository for all of my "saves" with tags and powerful search could give Evernote a run for their money.

Indeed, this the Experiment phase, after which comes Excitement and later Estinguish.

I stopped getting into these tests and rely on established, often non free, services.

Plus I don't see what this one in particular has to offer compared to Evernote and One note.

Before even clicking on the comments, I knew this was going to be top comment. And it just goes to show how bad it's gotten lately.

But then I think of all the other stuff Google does for free. A company that has so many products and offerings is just bound to have a few that they shut down.

Some of them are inexcusable though.

For popular products (especially ones that have been purchased, re: Revolv), they should at least have an advanced warning and a lengthy "transitionary" period.

Was Revolv ever popular though?

I thought the whole point was it wasn't popular - they were a home automation also-ran, who basically nearly went bankrupt in 2014 - got bought out in an acqui-hire, immediately ceased selling the product, then kept the servers on life-support for 2 more years.

E.g. -

http://www.cepro.com/article/theories_on_home_automation_hub... http://recode.net/2014/10/24/nest-acquires-home-automation-h...

If they were actually popular, I suspect they would have been where Samsung SmartHub, or Nest is now.

It's like when people talk about Google Reader, or Wave.

I loved both of those products - but I don't try and kid myself that they ever got traction with the mainstream masses.

Yes, nerds get angry when you shut down things they love, but we're also probably a minority - and it costs money/engineering effort to ensure these things continue to run well.

If Revolv had actually gone bankrupt I'm not sure people would be nearly as mad as they are.

The fact is that Google is worth tons of money, and has access to a ton of hosting infrastructure. Is Google (or Alphabet, really) arguing that they can't spin up a single cloud-computer-engine-thing and run Revolv?

You can say the same for every early-stage startups since most of them die anyway.

At least here you have a guarantee that it'll disappear.

So all Google services are guaranteed to disappear?

Should Google only work on things that it could guarantee to run for at least a few years no matter how it is performing?

No. They're free to pull the plug on whatever. I will just make all future decisions knowing that this will probably happen. i.e. I won't rely on anything Google releases unless I know it makes them money.

Google can do what they like -- but at this point, without such a guarantee, their history shows that it would be unwise to take the time to integrate their side projects into one's life or workflow.

What do you say is the percentage of their products that disappeared versus those that still exists?

It seems like there are a lot of Google products out there that are 5+ years old.

Length of time isn't necessarily a good indicator. Google Reader ran for 7 years when they decided to shut it down.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader#Discontinuation

> Should Google only work on things that it could guarantee to run for at least a few years no matter how it is performing?

Of course not, but it's gradually becoming self-fulfilling.

Early adopters in the 'tech community' are becoming wary of investing time in new Google experiments, which in turn affects promotion of the service to the mainstream community.

What might help is if they moved this sort of product back into the domain of Google Labs and gave it a minimum lifetime indication. I think people would be happier to give things a try if they knew it was experimental and might only last for 12 months.

Out of curiosity, but what's your gold standard for companies that sustain services over time? Or is your suspicion scoped to free services, of which Google has dropped a number of well-liked but non-revenue-generating services?

For their most popular products...I've found them to be pretty stable...little apps I've created using their Javascript mapping still function even though I knew so little about JS back then. I keep forgetting that I have a Google Voice number, and it still works fine even though it's been years since I've last used it on a regular basis.

Of course I think of Amazon being the most stable of platforms, but those are dev focused, with APIs that they've dogfooded too much to just drop. OTOH, they've cut a few public-facing conveniences, such as Send-to-Kindle integration from third parties (or, that's what I'm assuming, given the roundabout way that is now needed to import O'Reilly ebooks).

Step one: Make it self-hostable with zero requirement to connect back to the company.

My rule of thumb for buying technology nowadays is: Can I use it on my "air gapped to the Internet" network at home?

It's too early to tell if this will be a feature...but the mainstream Google products have the "Takeout" option [1]...which produces an archive of machine-readable data...Kind of fun to look at Google searches over time (as JSON), among other things, such as Contacts, GMail, Keep, and Maps...including products that I've never even heard of (Fit, Stream, Playbook)

[1] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

The good news is depending on your air-gap setup, you can still participate in the global PII market.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-tha...

That's amazing. If anyone had predicted that a year or two ago, people would have called him a paranoid conspiracy theorist. But leave it to marketeers to push the envelope--as surreptitiously as possible of course.

Reason #47 to use ad-blocking tools on everything. If anything kills advertiser-supported content on the Internet, it will be the advertisers themselves.

That's the dilemma I have: I'm finding that I'm hesitant to get behind "cloud" services, especially free ones, because I can't know how long they're going to be around.

Which really annoys me, because they're convenient as hell, especially for non-technical users. Sure, I could run a server in my apartment and get a self-hosted thing and whatnot, but I can't expect my parents to.

TL;DR, I don't know the right answer to when we should use cloud services.

That's true for most free services without ads. These comments always have this sentiment that Google does something wrong, which is simply nonsense IMO.

It's not even a question of "wrong"--it's a question of whether it's worth my time. If past performance is an indicator, the answer is, "probably not worth my time."

Google Notebook did this--better--years ago. Hierarchical notebooks, tags, web clipper extensions and bookmarklets, sharing, blah blah blah.

Google killed it. Dumped all the data into monolithic Docs documents. If I wanted to use giant Word docs, I would have.

Now, this. Why? What about Keep? Save != Keep?

Google used to call everything "beta." It's too bad they stopped doing that. Now they should call everything "alpha." It would be more honest.

And that brings us back to the question of "wrong." Is it wrong to throw up a free, open service and invite people to rely on it, then yank the rug out from under them? "But it's not making them any money." But they're making billions upon billions of dollars. "But someone has to maintain it." But they have thousands of engineers.

Anyway, you can decide the ethics however you want. The bottom line is, it would be foolish to spend any time on any new Google service. I've already spent too much writing about it here.

On top of this, I enjoy Pocket. I used to love when Google released the next new thing and now anytime I see a clone of an existing great product I think "bully".

How does this work? Why isn't Bookmarks integrated?! Half-baked product that is!

Edit: Here's the Chrome Extension [0]!

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-google/meo...

Thank you for that. I clicked on the submitted link, I got a flash of a splash page that just disappeared because I happened to inadverdently click after the page load. And then a completely empty page that tells me that I have no saves. And literally nothing else to tell me what Google product I've tripped on...a link to the extension that said, "Hey, looks like you need some saves. Install our Chrome extension!"

I'm guessing this is must be a soft launch.

I have a feeling this project will end up in the dust bin. I'd rather use something like Pocket, or just my browser favorites/bookmarks. Then at least I know they'll be there next year, and it's more convenient.

This seems like some project manager's 20% project.

My thoughts precisely.

Feels like they missed a prime opportunity for Keep integration here.

Feels like something that should be inside of keep altogether ..

Yeah...when I read the little intro displayed before it pops you into the actual app I assumed this was just an update to Keep.

I feel like this will either be integrated into Keep in a year's time, or Keep will be integrated into Saves in a year's time.

Yes, there's a chance that Google may can this after 2-3 years like they have countless other products. However, I can see where Google may obtain great value from this service for the foreseeable future for two reasons:

1) The tagging feature of the images you save. They are prominently displaying an "Add Tags" button when you save an image. I see tons of free nourishment being generated for their deep learning systems to digest.

2) It's just another way they will be able to gain more capital from you, Mr/Ms Google user. Do you like saving pictures of that hot band all the kids are talking about? Here's an advertisement for tickets to their upcoming concert. Are you tagging photos of homes because a move may be in your future? Here's an advertisement for mortgages. Etc.

Yeah, this definitely isn't going anywhere. I do look forward to idlewords's writing about it, though.

As in http://idlewords.com/? Why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords

He runs this: http://pinboard.in

I tried typing "what is this" in the search box. Maybe someone will get my message and reply back, for the next time I visit the page.

Anyone can get screenshot of this page? Got 404 for me. Seems like it is prohibited in my region (Asia).

Same here (Russia).

Everything I learned from past years frustration with google products is that their product survival time is getting shorter and shorter. From Greader's 8 year life span to Glass'SIDS, if we plot the product survival curve maybe we can get a not so nice prediction here.

Oh, look, it's like Google Notebook, except worse. Give it 18 months and they'll kill it and dump all my content into monolithic Docs documents with no tags or other metadata, just like they did with Notebook.

And what's the point of this? Isn't this what Google Keep does? Keep, Save, what's the difference? It's inevitable that they'll realize this and kill one or the other soon. And Keep has more features than this already!

If Google wants me to use any new stuff, they'd better give me a guarantee that they won't kill it for at least 3 years, with at least 1 year's advance notice. Otherwise, why bother? I've been burned too many times. Bad, Google, bad!

It seems that you can search for the full text of the webpages you saved, which is the best part Google can do.

I am using pinboard at present and decide to give Google Save another try even though there is no urge need for this.

del.icio.us 2.0?

I've already lost all my saves once.

pinboard

Hey delicious is still around, not great, but around. In fact if you poke around in their UI (I think it was going to export) you can get redirected to one of the old UIs from before it got sold and web2.0y.

they are going back to the old version. there seem to be some pains in the reversion since some times i will go there and get the old look and then the next time i go there it will give me the "new" look. (It might be caching or something but it is inconsistent)

kippt.com?

Let the record show - this is how people will "bookmark". It's bringing in marked up data from the page, effectively treating websites as little interesting nuggets of data. We won't don't save links to aggregators, we save links to articles, nuggets. The UI is clunky, but it'll get better. Hierarchy is toast, and doesn't scale, welcome to your bag-of-visited-memories-websites-past.

Would be really cool if the amount of times a web page is saved was factored into search results. Also would be interesting if you could make 'saves' Public or Private. This could have been the 'social' backbone to Google rather than G+.

I'm sticking with Pocket. Google Saves is the equivalent of Google Keep. (I also use Evernote)

What if Google acquires Pocket?

What if Google acquired Groupon and Evernote?

how about google save google wallet?

Hah. Wouldn't it be nice if you could put any arbitrary Google service in there. Final twist would be the service that saves the services would be deprecated. All of them would disappear at once! Although I think Google trashing Google saves would be more negative publicity than usual.

Haha, I can see it now. "Do you miss some of Google's sunsetted services? Now you can relive them with Google Google. Google Google allows you to use previously offered Google services, just like they used to be!" (Fast-forward 18 months.) "All good things... Google is sunsetting Google Google, effective 3 months from today. All your data will be available in our new service, Google Google Google. Thanks for using Google Google!"

404?

Oh, you mean Google Stop-Downloading-Our-Precious-Image-Search-Results?

so basically v2 of google notebook... I loved Google notebook..too bad they discontinued that and now is back in a different form.. hope this lives on for a little longer.

Why is it 404'ing?

Leads to 404 for me.

Might be US-only; I was on a VPN, got 404, turned it off, got the site.

I'm in the US and am 404'd.

I'm in AU and it doesn't 404.

Is this google's attempt to take on pinterest?

Nope, that's Google Collections: https://plus.google.com/collections/welcome

I just don't need ANOTHER place to save stuff.

Any instructions on how to use this?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-google/meo...

this looks useful, but I'll be hesitant to invest any time in making it part of my life.

Thank You.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com