Hacker News Reader

Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

They shut down Google Reader then put up a pointless map hack. Recognize that putting this together took a bunch of people's time and energy, not to mention processing power, server load, etc. All reasons for shutting down Reader.

What is the message Google is communicating to everyone? "We're still fun, just less useful?" Sorry if I don't have room to appreciate their "corporate whimsy" anymore.

View on HN

Reader was based on a very old Google platform that was no longer viable. Porting Reader to the new infrastructure essencially meant rebuilding the entire thing as a new project. The amount of work does not even compare to an April Fools hack by the Maps team.

Can we please stop using everything that Google does as an excuse to complain about Reader?

Where are you getting that information?

This riff is getting really old. People used Google Reader. Google took it away for its own reasons. It was Google's to take away. If anything, this creates a slight inconvenience to its users but a huge opportunity for someone else to come along and innovate.

Especially in a company the size of Google, there is no mutual exclusivity between working on Product X and implementing minuscule feature Y.

Not saying either is right or wrong, but there's a difference between a major product and what was likely a side project of a few employees.

Project decisions aren't binary. I'd assume that people that worked on Reader didn't work on this.

You could have been out helping people instead of writing this comment.

> What is the message Google is communicating to everyone?

"April Fools'"

I'm annoyed about Google Reader too but give it a rest already. This is a whole different scale of project.

The comparison is moot (different scales/time and effort). Also, don't trivialize the importance of having fun and being able to do so in a fairly large company.

I guess they made us all last-day-of-March fools.

As in fools that forget that their couch is not the center of the earth? Wake up, it's April 1st in some parts of the world now. As an exercise in self-education, go find out which.

First, it's my bed. Second, I didn't know the world was round, I've always thought it was flat.

Google's official blog post: "Find treasure with Google Maps Sunday, March 31, 2013 at 10:37 AM"

The YouTube video accompanying that post, published on March 31, 2013.

And Hacker News is a US-based and US-focused website. So excuse me for letting my US bias creep into my throwaway comment.

But I apologize to all those in Iran who are celebrating April Fools Day right now.

Yes, published USA time, but most of the world's population is living in April 1st now (India, China, Japan - all Asia essentially, Australia and so on). So it's not only Iran.

Why downvote this comment instead of engage? I thought Hacker News was supposed to be about discussion not Reddit upvote battles.

20% time?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com