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Comment by URSpider94 | Hacker News Reader

For those who see this as Google turning off an unused service: no, just no. This is Google cutting off a massive interop ecosystem to try to parlay the success of Nest into higher adoption of Google Home. That’s vastly different than shutting down G+, Wave, Orkut, Reader, etc.

It would be as if they announced tomorrow that the only way to read GMail is in Chrome browser or on an Android phone.

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> For those who see this as Google turning off an unused service: no, just no. This is Google cutting off a massive interop ecosystem to try to parlay the success of Nest into higher adoption of Google Home. That’s vastly different than shutting down G+, Wave, Orkut, Reader, etc.

It's exactly the same as previous shutdowns, it's just that you didn't personally care about previous shutdowns and couldn't be arsed to emphasise or learn the lesson that google can not be trusted to keep services alive.

The sharp folks are those like ocdtrekkie upthread who shed their nest immediately upon learning of the acquisition.

Since you claim its exactly the same as previous shutdowns listed; when Google shut down Wave, which paid for Google product were they aiming to increase adoption of?

G-Suite (Docs).

my memory of wave is that it barely even launched. wasn't it around less than a year? did anyone actually use it?

My group of friends tried to. It could have been quite successful, since it basically offered what Discord is now.

How? I guess you could use it like a chat room just putting new messages at the bottom of the document but seems like a crazy kludge to use Wave as a chat.

I thought that was its intended primary purpose. We could chat and inline media, pictures, etc. It was a big upgrade from IRC. There were issues with sharing files larger than just images and whatnot, but it easily could have been polished a bit into something better. If Discord added the ability to have 'threads', it would basically be what we used Wave for. For a few weeks anyway until Google decided it wasn't catching on enough or whatever justification they gave for giving up on it.

I don't think I ever heard of it being pitched that way just as a collaborative editing room for editing an actual document not just for using the comments etc as a chat.

It's a typical Asshole Executive move: leverage successful feature to increase adoption of random other product, and then convert adoption increase into bonus and career opportunities, and hope that the loss in goodwill isn't noticed.

It was the same when G+ was created. Asshole Executives started jamming + buttons everywhere, including search results (!). They killed + in search queries as meaning "required". Every semi-successful feature had to get G+ integration to maximize the adoption of G+.

> Every semi-successful feature had to get G+ integration to maximize the adoption of G+.

Also, forced Youtube integration and G+ accounts being required even to rate Android apps.

Funny that G+ was still ignored despite this effort.

s/Funny/Fair and just/

We shouldn’t reward scummy behaviour like this.

Some times people say "What if $COMPANY goes evil?". But if Google couldn't make G+ successful, then them going evil shouldn't be too concerning. They're clearly not as powerful as one could think

I'd be inclined to believe it was ignored because of this effort.

I think it’s very similar to shutting down Reader, which I’ve long believed was killed in a vain attempt to force adoption of G+.

They kind of did do that with Offline Gmail, though.

Gmail is still imap readable.

For now

With the caveat of having to jump through a series of hoops every few months because Google kindly decided to switch off "unsafe access"

That's never, ever happened to me.

It happens to me all the time. I used to use Gmail API to send mail (personal hobby app, to my own account). Every now and then Gmail would randomly refuse to authenticate through the API because of unsafe or suspicious access or some other BS. Then I would need to jump through some hoops (log in manually though browser, toggle on/off the "allow less secure app" setting, the disable unlock captcha setting, and it would work again for a while before acting up again.

I don't think depreciating the use of "Give your Google account password to $app" or "Give $app a fixed never expiring key that's as good as your password" unless you explicitly enable it is particularly user hostile.

If you used the Gmail API https://developers.google.com/gmail/api and client that supports OAuth instead of SMTP with username/password you wouldn't really run into this problem.

Yeah it kind of sucks for hobbyists because it's not as simple as sending an SMTP email but that's more to do with the lack of good tooling than something fundamental.

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