Google pays $18 million to shutter Apture, CloudFlare clones it in 12 hours

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/19/google-pays-18-million-to-shutter-apture-cloudflare-clones-it-in-12-hours/

by jgrahamc • 15 years ago

118 75 15 years ago

aresant• 15 years ago

Apture had great distribution thanks to a very simple pitch to publishers:

"When somebody is reading an article and wants more info on a word / topic you lose them to Google - with Apture keep them on your site!"

As a result they received huge support from major destination sites like NYT, Time Magazine, etc.

Funny that Google wound up buying them and negating the major value they delivered to publishers.

I wonder if they do a rev-share on the advertising it generates when it becomes a Chrome feature, probably not.

jacquesm• 15 years ago

Likely google thought they would make up the expense in increased adsense revenues from the publishers that use Apture post shut-down, but 12 hours is a terribly short window for a shut-down to be effective.

I wonder how often they'll be able to buy the 'next Apture' until they figure out that they're going to have to live with it, after all if it only takes 12 hours to clone then this seems like a winning business model with a guaranteed exit.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

I think they didn't so much shut it down because they wanted it to die--they probably shut it down because they didn't want to support it and moved the team over to working on the Chrome feature alluded to in the article.

pbhjpbhj2• 15 years ago

Perhaps there is an IPR issue here too? C&D just around the corner?

jerrya5• 15 years ago

Apture provided a horrible mechanism that breaks browsers and violates common "web ui standards" and created gross privacy leaks. At one point, as implemented on the NYTimes site, I showed that every single time a user selected a portion of the text at an NYTimes, apture enabled post, the contents of the selection were sent to apture servers.

I was more than happy to see them go.

It's a shame that CloudFlare promises to bring them back, I am hopeful they will do this in a manner that is not so outrageous or harsh on the user.

cdata13• 15 years ago

Hi, I'm one of the engineers working on the Apture replacement (Highlight). Care to be more specific about the biggest gripes you had with Apture's original implementation? As far as the general UI and UX is concerned, I'm not sure what we would really change, but generally I'd be happy to do what I can to ensure that bad practices aren't carried over (especially those related to user privacy).

chunkyslink• 15 years ago

Personally I hate the whole implementation. I've never found anything in those annoying boxes of any use at all. I just don't want a box popping up when I mouse over links. Its just a bad idea. Could you implement a 'permanently disable this feature' option ?

jdc• 15 years ago

Making the box appear in a static location might make it less irritating.

jerrya5• 15 years ago

Obviously I didn't like the the poor implementation that sent any and all of my selections off to their servers.

I really dislike what it does to mouse input.

If I select something, it's mostly because I want to copy and paste it. I am very good about crediting where I collect my copy and paste segments from, I didn't need apture to put in references to the original article in every single one of my cut and paste buffers.

Sometimes I select so I can search. I want to conduct the search with my favored search engine. I don't want Apture conducting the search (poorly) with the intent of keeping me at the original site.

And sometimes I click or even select in a window just to leave a visual indicator of where I am so that when I scroll or drag a window around, I can find my place easier. I don't want apture windows popping up whenever I click or select anything. To quote the Simpson's the Internets do not work that way.

And there was no way to opt out of it short of using noscript or adblock or other technologies to strip it away.

So: don't invade my privacy, don't insert text into my cut and paste buffers, don't steal my search abilities, don't steal my mouse clicks, don't pop up windows, don't break my browser.

Apart from that, it was a real winner service for the websites, and not for their visitors

esrauch• 15 years ago

I highlight text while I'm reading it on a regular basis, almost never to copy paste it or do anything else, it just helps me keep track of where I am in the article. I pretty much never want highlighting to have any action except highlighting. Even if it didn't, it's breaking consistent behavior because highlighting on page X suddenly has completely different behavior than on page Y.

There should at least be a cookie that can optionally disable the service that can be set when it opens up. Would be pretty easy to implement and it would at least allow an out for people who think the experience is awful.

SquareWheel• 15 years ago

If I may also contribute, I find this type of activity to be a major inconvenience, and often times infuriating. Here are three examples:

Clipboard hijacking: Remember Tynt? They hijacked your clipboard to say "Read more at <link>" or some nonsense. That is not what I copied, and you are breaking my expectations by modifying it. Gruber has a much better post on this (http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks), but essentially: knock it off. Don't try and manipulate your reader.

Information panels: If I doubleclick a word, it's because I'm marking my place in an article, or I intend to copy and paste that word. To offer any sort of popup or panel gets in my way, and causes me annoyance. This is not the expected behavior, and I'm far less likely to continue reading the article or website if this happens.

Tracking: I don't know how bad yours is, but with Apture it was just one more company tracking me. There's already Google +1, Facebook like buttons, and Analytics on every page - and this is just one more thing to slow down my page and turn my data usage into statistics. I don't like it. I can enable Noscript, but I shouldn't have to.

You may say that these are features that your users (Cloudflare customers) want, but I'm sorry - they're morons. I deal with clients who would eat these kinds of features up, "they'll set us apart from other websites!". No. It only hurts the end users, and does not provide useful features.

And it really concerns me that Google bought Apture, I often use Chrome and do not want to see this integrated at any level. I can see marketers and managers eating this stuff up, but it surprises me that the engineers at Google are interested.

shasta• 15 years ago

90% in 20 hours - amazing! Maybe someone good at math can eatimate how many months it will take them to do the other 10%...

whatusername• 15 years ago

They'll probably get 90% of the remaining done pretty quickly.

lifeformed• 15 years ago

and Zeno can handle the rest.

w-ll• 15 years ago

I would but the proof is rather long for a HN comment, simplistically the limit goes to infinity.

pluies_public• 15 years ago

According to the ninety-ninety rule, about 20 more hours. :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

yanw2• 15 years ago

It is worth mentioning that Apture was an annoying product and I for one am glad that they "shuttered" it. As for the acquisition it was probably for talent or IP or both.

guelo2• 15 years ago

> it was probably for talent or IP or both.

Or for anti-competitive reasons.

yanw2• 15 years ago

How so? seeing as whatever Apture did can be replicated in < 24hr.

powertower• 15 years ago

I love CloudFlare and their story.

IMO they are one of two (or three) recent startups that I consider to be genuine, and have a real product/service that adds actual value. The rest not so much ... just fluff and social.

cdata13• 15 years ago

CloudFlare engineer here. Just wanted to say thanks for the positive assessment :) having so many awesome users keeps us feeling really positive about the stuff we do.

drivingmenuts• 15 years ago

Are you a user (site-owner) or a browser (a user of the site)?

j_baker• 15 years ago

I'm a former Apture developer/current Google employee (but I don't necessarily speak for either one). It's worth noting that Apture won't actually be shuttered until likely sometime in January (probably around the 10th). We had originally planned on Dec 20th, but we weren't confident that we had gotten the word out to everyone who uses our product (most notably people who use our plugin).

libraryatnight• 15 years ago

Not relevant to the story completely: What does it mean that Google is rolling this into Chrome? Does it mean that now Chrome will by default pop up with tons of annoying bubbles whenever I highlight text?

jrockway2• 15 years ago

I'm guessing it will be integrated in a similar way as Search and Translate are.

stickfigure2• 15 years ago

As someone considering CloudFlare's SSL and CDN services, this worries me.

The bottom line is that this misfeature is an annoyance for 99.9% of internet users. Of those, maybe 1% understand how to get rid of it - probably by installing browser plugins that block the origin servers to some degree. I have no intention to use this (obnoxious) feature... so if there's any risk that part of my customer base will receive a degraded experience on my website, this is a compelling reason to use a competitor.

xxdesmus2• 15 years ago

It'll be opt-in. I have no idea how this would degrade your customer's experience in any way.

stickfigure2• 15 years ago

The internet has a way of "fixing" what it interprets as damage. For example, if I'm in a pool of shared IP addresses that gets used by spammers, I might find my legitimate outgoing emails blocked as spam.

Likewise, if end-users find that cloudflare provides irritating features on websites, they may very well develop browser plugins that block cloudflare services - even the 'good' services (deliberately or not). Maybe this is far fetched, but the bottom line is that anytime you associate yourself with unsavory activities, you risk getting hit by the blowback - even if you don't "opt-in" yourself.

Taking the long-term view, this cannot possibly be good for CDN customers who don't want to annoy their users.

nchuhoai2• 15 years ago

I don't know what people feel like, but I really miss Apture being gone. For some of you, it might have been an annoyance, but for me, it is simply an amazing service. Apture's capabilities (which go beyond mere search) have helped me explorer so many topics right from within the site. For the college student who doesn't understand all the keywords of the text, Apture was a blessing.

I really hope, the guys will integrate it in Google at least half as good

nchuhoai2• 15 years ago

really, people downvote me because I find a web service helpful?

goodweeds• 15 years ago

Apture was incredibly obnoxious. Moreso then when you copy from sfgate or the new york times and they add extra text and adds into your copied text.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

This article was so jam-packed full of meaningless drivel that I think I'm going to be sick. Why does every argument have to be framed as noble startup versus evil corporation, when all you did was write twenty lines of Javascript? If I issued a press release every time I wrote a simple computer program, I'd have my own Library of Congress by now.

(I clicked through to another article on that site raving about CloudFlare saving the Internet. Apparently by providing managed Apache hosting, they are un-breaking the broken Internet. Wow, amazing! Next week on The Tech Wankosphere and Hacker News: "jrock.us CEO runs apt-get upgrade; picks up a few bugfixes". That's right folks, I'm saving the Internet!)

Terretta• 15 years ago

You are saving the Internet, one patched bug at a time.

No, really.

Google pays $18 million to shutter Apture, CloudFlare clones it in 12 hours

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