Comment by The5thElephant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by The5thElephant | Hacker News Reader

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It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products.

I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well?

This is why I'm building https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place.

All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.

> It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products

The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy".

There are two forces at play here. One side wants privacy. When they give data to Google Calendar, they don't want Google Maps or Ads know about it. The other side (your opinion above) wants more integration between services.

In this political climate, the privacy side has an edge. This means if Google Photos want to access data on Google Calendar to provide the integration you asked above, they will have to jump through multiple quarters of privacy reviews, with a very high odd of being shutdown.

> All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market

After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.

IMO you’re spot on. The catch being that between showing an ad and matching photo locations, the former has a near straight impact on the bottomline while the latter is murkier. When both are going through reviews, that’s a lot of weight difference in the arguments and we’ll see more of one that the other.

After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.

All of these concerns could be trivially addressed by leaving them up to the user. Add the necessary controls to the user account page, pick default settings biased in favor of privacy, and allow users to change them if they prefer.

It's amazing to me that people have already forgotten that Google had in fact already successfully done that with Google Inbox. It's not that they weren't able to do it.

It's that in their infinite wisdom they shut it down. Just like they shut down hangouts in their infinite wisdom.

what even was project inbox? at most five people used it.

hangout is now integrated in meet, which is integrated in gmail.

it's google doing a microsoft/apple and trying to be the leader in video calls/remote work/remote classes by forcing people to have it ready just by having the gmail app.

just like apple with facetime (but they have no idea how to expand on it) or Microsoft adding teams to windows status bar, you like it or not.

Both AOL and Google had, around the same time, secondary mail interfaces that provided extra features. Google's was Inbox; I've forgotten the name of AOL's. They were quite similar to each other, with each slightly better than the other in some ways. Both sites were slower* to load than AOL's and Google's standard email interfaces. Neither reached the market penetration or current-account conversion management wanted., and those of us who used them were sad to see them go.

* Google eventually added so many features to Gmail that they had to add a progress bar during page load.

> privacy

Do Not Give google credit for privacy.

first, showing maps for a location it is already showing on the screen... the data is already all there. it is pure and simple calendar team didn't want to bother using maps team's api. nothing else. nobody had a meeting and decided against it because of user privacy.

second, no matter the product, the only integration all of them MUST have is to both advertising and profile. those two internal apis respectively serve ads against your profile (ssp) and add events to your profile to later target ads.

so no, absolutely nothing on google deserve the privacy argument.

The privacy argument doesn’t make sense to me. The addresses are already in Google Calendar. They don’t need to be saved into a different service to be viewed anonymously in Google Maps. You can already do it in Google Calendar for one event/address at a time.

Yes there are business/internal-politics reasons why some obvious features or experimentation doesn’t happen, but those aren’t necessarily good reasons beyond short term benefit to specific individuals at a company.

But I do think some of it can generally be blamed on large companies losing their ability to be nimble due to the inherent friction of the politics and logistics that build up as an organization grows.

FWIW, I worked on the integration with calendar and maps - the GP comment is exactly right, it was due to privacy concerns. The terms of service for Workspace say that user data can never be used for anything not related to Workspace, so moving any user data from Workspace to another service has to be done very carefully.

In the example of this integration, allowing it to open in the sidebar was okay because it was a user action, and there is some data anonymization that happens (I don't recall the details, this was a few years ago).

But we couldn't share a list of your appointments with maps ahead of time to allow them to generate the view you describe, because there wasn't a way that guaranteed that the data wouldn't be associated back with the original user.

I don't think privacy has anything to do with it. Google Maps doesn't need to capture any user data to implement OP's suggestion. Google Calendar just needs to render a map with a set of locations marked on it using Google Maps. It doesn't need to tell Google Maps what or who the locations are for. This is something Google Calendar should already be able to accomplish using a public API. All other aspects of the feature could be implemented as part of the Google Calendar service without any further integration with Google Maps.

Further, I don't think users are generally against services using the information - which the user has presumably already provided intentionally - to better serve them. The problem is when that information is shared with third parties or used for purposes which are not obviously in the users' best interests. IMO, any user data stored externally should be subject to an opt-in permissions system which strictly defines how the data can be used. That doesn't stop companies like Google from being able to offer me useful services that I might actually be interested in. The notion that privacy discourages innovation is just silly.

    The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy"

I don't understand this.

Once Google has my data, how does it affect my "privacy" if Google Service A shares it with Google Service B?

I'm somewhat privacy conscious, but I don't understand the concern there. I assume that once I give them my data, they're already doing whatever with it internally.

An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river

If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.

oh wow, it's actually worse for me: there's no marker at all, just a map of western europe: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.87...

This is not the case for me. I just now searched in mobile Chrome for "Lakeview Chicago" and the mini-map static image has a purple outline around the neighborhood. Clicking on that took me to Google maps with the neighborhood outlined in a red dotted line (which is harder to see, but obscures less of the other features/labels on the map). This was on Android, in the maps app, just now, but I've seen the same thing in a desktop browser.

Ah, you're right. It looks like the issue I'm complaining about only happens for "line" features - e.g. a river, or a road (https://www.google.com/search?q=route+66).

FWIW, OpenStreetMap can do it. I went to https://osm.org, entered "Rhine" into the search and clicked on the first result. Deeplink: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/123924

Innovation, oh my, sometimes it feels like the fat ones (and, by proxy, everyone else) are living in some alternate fantasy world where the mantra "you're not gonna need it" is taken to the extreme, so they're not even trying.

The pendulum should swing back to complex and more complicated interfaces sometime — but right now these are the dark times where, for example, Netflix, this huge, popular movie and show library, doesn't even have a way to find out exactly what movies with some actor or director it has available. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that.

Your project does look useful and on point though!

The rumor/theory I have heard about Netflix is that increasing discoverability too much would allow people to see two negative traits of Netflix: How often things come and go from the platform (which other apps like Criterion Collection embrace), and just how limited their library actually is at a given time.

Scroll through recommendations. It looks like they have hundreds of great movies for you to watch! And yes, technically they do. But look how many times they try suggesting the same movies in different categories, inflating the view in a way to make the library seem bigger. One movie might show up "Because you liked comedy..." then "Because you watched <comedy movie>" then "Light-hearted movies".

TLDR money and masking their poor library quality.

I wonder if AppleTV's atrocious single-line onscreen keyboard fits into this picture of making things less discoverable, or if it's just an extreme of form over function.

Definitely not, because Apple gives users the ability to type search in on an iPhone or iPad instead of using the apple TV remote. They also let you do voice-to-text, which is nice.

It is entirely possible to both provide a useable onscreen interface and the iPhone connection option.

Whatever the reason (and I can think of many) it just shows how Apple is past the point of caring for their users.

I’m about to enable the new Facetime Live Transcription feature in iOS 16 so my wife can have conversations with her father, who is rapidly losing his hearing. For this reason (and I can think of many) I strongly disagree.

Fair enough, but that’s also a cool new feature that drives sales.

I meant it more like, why wouldn’t they fix this objectively bad input mechanism? It would take tiny effort but it wouldn’t improve their sales or they might even calculate that it drives usage of iPhones and therefore good for them even though it’s bad for the users.

For the record I own both an Apple TV and an iPhone, inasmuch one can pretend to own these devices.

I had to look up this linear keyboard they created, pretty unique.

Seems like it can be changed.

Settings > General > Keyboard, then switch from “Automatic” to “Grid”.

Wow! Thanks!

For some reason I wasn’t getting automatic updates but after a manual update I can now see and set this option.

I retract my earlier statements, thank you Apple devs!

Your app looks beautiful. This is something that I've wanted to build some time. Would love to help out if possible.

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