Chief Architect of Google+ requests clarification on Google Reader
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
Google Reader itself was the useful piece. It aggregates RSS feeds. I don't really know how else you can explain that "yes, it aggregated RSS feeds, and I like to read all of my RSS feeds in one place".
Even when they aren't.
Currently worried that they are beefing up their AI pursuits because of the recent AI hires which could mean I don't even have a chance. Lets se what happens.
Hence it's counter-productive to mention the shutdown in negative terms, as that associates the two efforts in a way that underscores the latter interpretation.
No, but if you were trying to convince people you weren't forcing them into Google+, but Google+ was presenting alternatives out of their sincere love for the people, you wouldn't use the person who made the decision now would you?
And who better to stand up and ask "how can we help" than one of the people who will later take to the Google Blog to say "look what we added to Google+ because you asked for it?"
This is like asking me what I like about burgers so you can make a better salad.
1. Information density. Magazine style / tiles / graphics etc aren't the same as single line expandable headline with maybe 40 headlines visible per screen height.
2. Just the content. Reader didn't try to guess what you wanted to read or notify you what your friends were up to.
That is the philosophy of G+, though-- to cannibalize Google into a Facebook clone. G+ is like the evil vizier whispering in the senile monarch's ear.
I 'circled' a bunch of people from the numerous Hacker News communities on G+, and I see far too many pictures and videos in the feed. And mostly personal life stuff, like their pets, or lunch, or some trees or whatever. (This is also my current complaint with App.net, but that's a different story).
I really wish there were a way to filter by post type (text and links only) in Google+, to bring it even one small step closer to replacing Reader.
Facebook by comparison is a network of people you know irl, so you kinda care what random stuff they're up to.
G+ on the other hand is more like long-form Twitter where you subscribe to people, whether you know them irl or not. Its network based more on shared interest than real life connection.
But when people you've subscribed to because you're interested in what they have to say about programming start sharing their vacation pictures and other personal stuff, it can quickly fill up your news feed with noise.
It would be really nice if G+ could implement tagging and filtering by tag, or some ML that learns what to suppress in your feed from whom, or something along those lines. Anything to enable people to continue posting whatever they want, but to allow their followers to selectively receive only the portion they're interested in.
Don't be fooled, though, the fact that he is asking about Google Reader does not mean they intent to implement a feeds reader within G+. They most likely believe RSS is an old technology that should be phased out, so I don't think this is happening.
RSS on the other hand is a protocol which facilitates the dropping of the content into a reader. So an email client by its very nature a RSS reader (several email clients provide this feature, or at least they used to).
The question is not whether G+ could be an alternate. The question is whether we are looking at the world where the RSS would become the backbone of services like Lexus Nexus which is used by media specialist and/or people with resource ($$) ... or would RSS remain a pipe which is available for average Joe to easily "get" the information however and whenever they wish.
2. And yet there were non-trivial complaints Google Reader lost its original sharing/social functionality. So clearly not everyone prefers the social-less implementation. And fewer still would seem completely off-put by a social panel they can tune out and ignore (as they already were ignoring it on Google Reader's rise).
This doesn't sound so weird to me. No one was working on Google Reader. The traffic to the web app was negligible. It generated little to no revenue. And even the API traffic probably didn't amount to much. It just wasn't on the radar.
The fact that got missed wasn't that Reader was a popular app, it simply wasn't, period. What they missed is the demographics: the specific people who relied on Reader, though few in number, are disproportionately loud and influential tech leaders and journalists. So they were shocked at the outrage.
This is completely and demonstrably false. It drives more traffic at this point than G+ itself.
(I personally have no idea…)
That's what was useful. I really don't get what he's aiming for here... obscure features that may have existed that only some people thought were useful?
Especially TOR looks like a great replacement but it's still pretty overloaded.
> There are 25746 users in the import queue ahead of you.
And it has no "Export" as of right now.
edit: Formatting
It never hurts to ask, you can always be surprised.
Does Newsblur or any other RSS reader have this?
And I'm not terribly optimistic about them releasing all the historical information they have in one huge download, which would be the appropriate way to preserve it.
Even if he incorporated a large subset of Reader features into G+, I think at best that would likely only capture the wants of a small fraction of the Reader user base given that both products have inherently different goals. G+ is, depending on how you look at it, either a full-fledged social network or a central identity service connecting various components of the Google ecosystem. Reader is a dedicated, decentralized (in the sense that the feeds themselves come from outside Google) RSS consumer. Both products seemingly have different philosophical approaches to the web (walled-garden vs. generally open) and I'm not sure that can be reconciled so easily.
These musings are off the top of my head though, so I'd love to hear thoughts from any avid Reader users and/or G+ engineers/users who agree/disagree.
What is funny is how many lemmings are falling into his trap.
Which seems pretty reasonable.
It's important to remember that to Google products like Reader are blips on the radar. Every second they spent scheming about Reader cost them millions in Ad Sense revenue; hence, there was no scheming.
It seems an inevitable sort of feature.
So the idea that they were surprised by this and are going to start from zero to build a new bit of G+ seems... a stretch.
I assert it's rather more plausible that such plans were under-way and closing Reader was a step to clear the way for a Google+ solution. Because nothing near a unimind would have been required to coordinate it and because the entire migration is more inevitable than not.
Is it possible the Google+ team is sincere in wanting to help people and capture feedback? Sure.
But that's rather orthogonal to the question of whether this statement and the timing of all this is primarily motivated by PR strategy.
He could at least meet with someone who had worked on the project.
More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling."
Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.
I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.
Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product.
There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.
Or is this one of those cases where "lol u suk" is the preferred response?
Uh... Gmail pretty much started the "launch your web app as a beta" craze.
Then it hit me: That's exactly it. Google+ is Google's way of controlling an entire ecosystem of replies to topics. That's exactly the problem with Google+.
Google Reader was great because it gave you a window into the internet. A window that you could shape however you wanted.
I do not want to share my reading activity with everyone. I just want to sit here on the corner and read. So why make it "social"?
Ironically, I can't really come up with 'better product' in this specific use case.
"Reader killed RSS" feels just wrong. If anything Reader made RSS thrive, because the data source that get sinked into Reader data is RSS.
Reader is a killer product that shifted the landscape because it fills one single role (RSS aggregator with read+fav status syncing), and does it extremely well, in a fantastically unobtrusive way. I sure as hell don't want another Google product as a remplacement, nor another existing or future product integrate RSS aggregation (and certainly not Plus) as part of it. I don't want a kitchensink or mishmash social/news/aggregator app.
Anyone current or past Google employee who put some work on Reader, here's my personal message to you: thank you, your work is awesome.
I also think Google is smart to try to get out in front of the negative press. I think this attempt is solid approach to redirect people's passion in a positive direction.
The only mistake I see, is that nobody spoke up and said, "Reader doesn't have many users, but the users are bloggers and journalists, so we better shut this thing down with an extreme amount of empathy."
In the interest of being constructive, I think they should have:
1) Done a phased shutdown by disabling adding new feeds.
2) Published the API
3) Offer to work with alternative providers to make migration easy.
Pretend for one yoctosecond that you work at Google, disagree with the decision to shut down Reader, and are in a position to try to make the product you're working on help fill the void.
That people like you assume it's malice, or some conspiracy or evil plot, just saddens me.
Full disclosure: I have empathy, and own GOOG stock.
So, Google would allow another team to create a clone of what they shut down after all these years? Their excuse was that they need to focus on fewer products
For one, Reader could be built on a very different set of APIs that makes it inherently difficult to maintain.
That's speculation, but it's certainly the kind of thing that has happened at every large company I've ever worked at.
It could also be that he wanted to redirect some of the passion for google reader in a positive direction. Make Google a bit more empathetic and friendly.
It could be some combination of the two.
I don't see malice here. I think Mr. Zunger made a smart move.
Now if he actually thought he was going to learn something he didn't already know from those comments, that would sadden me.
He is smart enough to realize that comments like those have a huge power-user sample bias and are mostly useless.
My lemmings comment was way out of bounds.
If you worked there, wouldn't you do something similar?
Then again, if I were so smart, I wouldn't have made the lemmings comment. I meant it as a mild joke, though you and other people interpreted it as an serious insult to 500 people and Mr Zunger's character.
Feels something like:
"We're sorry that we took away your child support benefits, but can you give us some feedback on how we can improve our social services to the community? (any feedback about the withdrawal of child support will be ignored). Child Support Services. We listen."
On other words, they shut down an open product to promote the closest of all social web platforms.
" I'd like to integrate those ideas into future versions of many Google products, and try to capture that value."
... ugh. No! I don't want all that crap pieced out across many different apps. Just give me a damn reader. Charge me for it or use my reading habits to inform ad targeting, I don't care, just find a business justification to keep it around. Don't try and put some half-assed version in G+ or Youtube or gmail or wherever.
I've tried to explain how powerful it is, how it centrally gathers so many diverse publications, how it gives a new perspective on global events or political sensitive topics.
But it's a blank screen, the welcome wizard is helpful (I started with Apple and Google collections and quickly added Planet Gnome and Mozilla), but it's not the same.
Google+ is a product that tries to do everything, but makes the simplest things difficult. After Buzz, Google made discovery impossible, so G+ users accumulate very slowly. I'd like to "subscribe" to a circle, say Linux kernel or Node.js developers, but instead I have to get linked to someones G+ from somewhere like here and then follow just that user. I should be able to subscribe to that entire circle with one click, and have it appear as a subgroup on the left sidebar, and the, Presto, we have 50% of Google Reader.
I would suggest Reader be replaced (if it must) with G+ Curator, a reader for feeds including RSS and Atom, but also G+ Circles, third party feeds like Twitter or Tumbler (if possible), mayabe Google Groups or even a gmail filter.
I would use the Reader API for this, it's basically an atom feed aggregator, and could convert all those other inputs into Atom feeds the same as it does Atom and RSS today. I would translate the current feed IDs into G+ ids.
The problem with Google dropping RSS is it basically kills the prospect of sites bothering with RSS, they look to Tumblr and the like and think there's something there, but they find they can't easily browse other feeds, and it becomes like Facebook (now), a mess of pithy sayings and 'viral' photographs that people probably don't bother to read. Then, at some point Tumblr (or some other site) shuts down and the community goes with it, the orgranization is lost and the users find something else to waste their time on.
But really, unless Google looks at fixing problems with G+ and makes it something that people want to use, we'll be not talking about it's shutdown a year or two from now
Or read the most upvoted complaints on open forums like HN or Reddit? Especially since he's architecting an ahem social product, shouldn't he already be comfortable doing that? And shouldn't he value the diversity of those responses more than those from Google+ buddies? I guess "dogfooding" has become more valuable than understanding.
Finally, my favorite "Zune" moment: "NB: The comments have filled up!"
I am sure there are technical reasons why more than 500 comments is not allowed, but none of them are user-centric.
The Reader interface was pragmatic and efficient so it appealed to those, like me, who are information consumers.
At the heart of it all are two main points:
Time-Shifted Consumption and Deliverability
It's never been about having real-time access to information. It's about time-shifting the consumption and knowing that I will see that content at some point in time if I desire.
Feeds are to Reader as Season Passes are to TiVo. (As an aside, the latter is the model that should have been marketed to users.)
Using other methods such as G+ or Twitter or Facebook or any other mechanism that tries to find, shape and filter the information based on interest etc. are usually not comprehensive and rarely allow me the comfort of knowing I can rely on reviewing whether or not I value that content.
In short, I might not see it fly by in my stream and curation services might remove content that I may enjoy.
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In the same thread, Rob Ferguson writes:
Not specific to Reader, but regarding RSS (even Twitter to some extent), the multi-feed publish/subscribe model allows people to create separate feeds that each represent a facet of their personality, something they want to say. While the single-output model of G+ or Facebook has some advantages, e.g. seeing the 'whole person', the trade off is that you can't really specialise or segment content.
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Nelson Minar writes:
So I'd say the main value of Google Reader in the last year has been the very fast centralized feed crawler, along with its API that made it easy to put more modern UIs on top of Google's RSS reader infrastructure
I don't need "features," I just need to consume my feed without thought.
When did Google lose its sense for the needs of users on the internet?
and
What is the problem google as an enterprise is having with the service staying alive... as at the same time g+ currently simply can not replace g-reader for its users.
Strange.
That's why Ad Blocker isn't in Google Play anymore.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, I was getting close to using G+ once in a while for things...now I will never, and I'll think twice before using any Google product on a regular basis. Dependability matters.
Trying to parse this sentence, you are implying that you thought their actions could be explained by arrogance and now you think it is something else. Correct?
Let's take all this enthusiasm about Google Reader and not just save it, but make it into a community project that we can host online.
If you are developer who is proficient with PHP and Node.js, reach out to me if you might be interested in joining the project -- you can find my email at http://qbix.com/about
I just love this offensive/defensive writing style: Nicholas Nassim Taleb does the same, all the time, throughout his books (and I'm a big Taleb fan).
I've noticed that people with strong ego typically hate that kind of writing that said.