Google Spaces will be shut down on April 17th
support.google.com
support.google.com
There is just no way I'm investing time in any new Google product. They are untrustworthy.
For instance, why on earth would I want to use Allo when still Hangouts exists? We know one or both will get cancelled within a year or two. I'm not going to sick my neck out and try to get my friends and family to use one of those platforms only for them to go away.
But what else has Gooogle ever done for us?
"Let's use Hangouts" "Sorry what's that?" "Google's screen sharing" "Just use Skype" "Ok"
Don't forget after investing the entire company into Plus and failing to gain traction, they pulled the rug out from underneath the whole thing. I'm told similar internal focus is now applied to GCP, doesn't mean I wouldn't expect the compny to just one day say "bah, fuck it, we couldn't dominate that, turns out people require something from us beyond engineering, so I'm not playing because I haven't a clue how to do that" again
You are the product, not a customer.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.infoworld.com/article/2925839...
Ads are treated like any other machine learning problem. The belief is that ads should be (essentially) predicted search results.
If your inside of the Google network go/bye-inbox has all the information.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and joined Team Sabotage a year ago to cause as much damage to the company as possible.
Non-technical low-cost people probably aren't going to find Fi, and "power users" are going to go for unlimited, especially as data use climbs.
And... I doubt Google will keep Fi around to support a bunch of low-cost, "minimal" users. Where's the money ("new Google") and what's to learn ("old Google")?
Sigh. And just as the T-Mobile network (and Fi comes also with Sprint) was starting to look broad enough to warrant moving away from Verizon.
Well, as others have said, who believed it was going to last? For my own Google use -- which for me doesn't currently include advertising/marketing -- I've basically drawn the line at the "traditional" Google office apps. As far as I know, they still dogfood those, internally. Anything newer? Not worth any long-term investment / lock-in.
If I return to doing some web sites (a few people want me to, currently), I'll look into whatever are the current best practices for indexing high and being appropriately exposed on Maps and the like.
Oh, and, by the way, Site Search, just the other day? Really? You're already indexing it, Google? What does killing off this mildly customized search entry point save you?
It's pretty demoralizing. We are the biggest evangelists for the products because we are proud of our co-workers and Google. But it gets harder and harder to evangelize to our friends and family when things are so quickly withdrawn.
Hopefully the Spaces team got their promotions out of the launch.
My advice to people making these kinds of decisions at any company of any size: when sunsetting a project (not just putting it into maintenance mode) consider the real cost to internal morale and to brand equity.
They can announce they are closing and look for people to take over product, the best team vs not some 'for sale' situation. While it would add some additional work it would keep peoples faith in trying google products and we' likely see some cool success stories of the back of their startup efforts.
Maybe once a year, I check Google Takeout services to see what I've used, then go on a deleting spree. I hope at some point outlook.com matures to a point where I can abandon Gmail.
EDIT: They (say they) aren't shutting this down to low traction, but it will only reinforce the existing perception.
I'm looking forward to the Google car.
Including their audience in the process would bring back the feeling of early google making one's life easier.
The idea was cool, I think small group collaboration and being able to share stuff in a "stream" for just us was a really interesting way to approach the problem, however the UI and user flow just didn't "click" in a way that's hard to describe.
So, sure, makes sense to shut it down, no one uses it. But there are some good reasons for that.
I wonder, how much can a service like this cost Google? Are the savings worth the negative publicity that comes out of so lightly launch and then shut down services? I feel like they're starting to really damage their brand among those in the know, which are the ones who give advice to everybody else...
It tends to chip away at your confidence if you're looking at investing in their services.
The issue is that it's an established pattern, so it may limit adoption on other new services they launch.
If that happens often enough, I may just start off with the competitor.
That being said, I cannot help but wonder how what Google is doing is different than any startup working on a product. The differences might be that Google never tries to substantially change, improve or even market a product once it has been released. They throw it at the wall and that's it. If it sticks they keep it and it might get some love, but if it doesn't the entire thing gets axed. Another difference is that sometimes products seem to get cancelled for larger strategic reasons that the consumer doesn't care about. G+ seems to have lead to some of those.
All this can cause the user to feel like they might care more about a service than Google does. I think that's really the crux of the matter here. People don't want to commit in Google services anymore because Googled themselves doesn't seem all that committed. Startups are usually super committed to their product.
Edit: what makes this worse is that many services they've shut down could have easily supported a small to medium sized startup, especially a self funded one. It might not make sense at Google scale to run something like that, but it seriously damages consumer trust.
From a marketing point of view, the big difference is that a startup isn't labeling their product with a very well known brand. The downside for the startup is that they need to build their brand recognition and image from scratch. The downside for the big brand is that they have a lot to lose if they tarnish their own reputation.
I can't say I'd be confident in their newest project-of-the-week going forward though (if not in those realms), if I needed it to go beyond the next 5 years.
They should just put this stuff in labs/beta and let customers have the right expectations. Their current method is just bone headed.
Do they really not get it or do they just not care? Or am I wrong, is this not hurting them at all?
Of course, sometimes the people in tech introduce products to non-tech people. That could be a problem...
Every now and then there is a Google product I know about which would be perfect for some use case we have in our community (I am involved in a lot of political organizing here). I bring it up, and no one has heard of it; and the last time I did this, I went to go show people, and it had been discontinued anyway... I mean, what's the point?
Definitely. I expect there are dozens of snarky posts on Memegen by now. Whether that has any effect on management decisions is another matter.
Or am I wrong, is this not hurting them at all?
From the last earnings report, apparently not.
Alphabet Shutting Down Google
Unless search and ads somehow die off as a cash cow catastrophically, that's always going to be the tail that wags the dog.
Edit: One interesting query is "cancer cure". On my reasonably large monitor, nothing organic showing unless I scroll down. Anything travel related is similar, like "vegas hotels".
Edit2: If you disagree that the importance of the plain organic results is fading, please explain why they keep moving down. Google does understand what "below the fold" means in terms of what's important and what's not. In fact, the algorithm penalizes sites that place the important content below the fold, beneath things that are self-serving.
I am guesssing this does not belong in a separate app by itself for google. It does not have the kind of high volume addictive app idea that google cares about. This is only used when you plan something and after that you don't ever touch it until the next time. So I see why they are killing it, but why did they launch it at all?
Are there specific features of Spaces you're looking for?
so basically project infanticide...
Because Google is a business, and hosting a "read only" version of a service that no longer serves their interests would be a waste of money.
>They could leave it up for ad targeting if not just as a good will gesture to their community.
There's no point to that if the Spaces community isn't large enough for the gesture to be relevant or the ads to be worth anything.
I'm reading the tea leaves here, but according to the OP, they intend to "use what we’ve learned to improve other Google products and services." Likely, Spaces was never meant to be anything but a platform for testing experimental UX concepts without interfering with their more popular properties.
Google probably still wants to combine their services into a unified social media presence, except maybe for Youtube (which they maybe want to rebuild as a direct, primarily subscription based competitor to commercial streaming services like Netflix.) They don't want another PR fiasco like the Google+ integration so I guess this is plan B?
I'm probably wrong, though.
You mean it's a keeper? Sorry, it had to be said.
No matter what you use though, you should have backups of anything important.
I just make spreadsheets at sheets.google.com, make it editable offline, edit on phone with Sheets app
tune in next time when I bore you with my org mode setup!
Yes - I'm very confident Keep will stay.
[1]:http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/19/12555052/google-shutting-d...