As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.
Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything.
It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.
This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.
Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer.
(On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
Damnatio memoriae?
> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.
(The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)
I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere.
I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%...
"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.
(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)
One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize[0], meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas.
In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant.
I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. I suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. (To avoid various risks in bankruptcy courts, sometimes financing is arranged by selling some asset below market value with an agreement to buy it back at a fixed date at a fixed higher price. There might also be a rental agreement involved. The cash flows look like a secured loan, but in case the loan can't be repaid, a court order isn't necessary to seize assets... the collateral assets have already legally changed hands.)
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(Happy supporter, otherwise unaffiliated.)
Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.
But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.
And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.
Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.
What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.
That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated.
They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.
Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?
But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...
The search engine I can't disagree with.
The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.
It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).
I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.
Yep. That was the point for me wehere Google went from startup I would like to work for sometime in the future to the ranks of IBM and Oracle