Expunging Google

https://github.com/duncan-bayne/duncan-bayne.github.com/wiki/Expunging-Google

by duncan_bayne • 13 years ago

289 166 13 years ago

github.com

zalew• 13 years ago

> Bing Maps looks like a potential alternative

why not openstreetmaps?

joahua2• 13 years ago

It's pretty incomplete for parts of the world, and certain applications require accuracy (or at least completeness). The answer, of course, is to contribute, but when your core business isn't mapping that's hard to propose as a viable fix.

Parts of the world in my case ~= Sydney, which has a decent number of geeks per capita to contribute. OSM is wonderful, but has a way to go before it's a viable solution for everyone.

incanus77• 13 years ago

Check out MapBox and http://ideditor.com.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

Second that. Google maps are surprisingly bad in a number of first-world countries like France or Israel; OpenStreetMap are very very detailed. I don't think Bing maps would be better than either of those.

stonith• 13 years ago

Adding the missing features (email + maps) to owncloud would appear to be the neatest way to go. Then target something like the openstack API and you can move between providers pretty easily. The bit that bugs me is how to deal with rolling your own maps provider, but if you're willing to compromise on having access to all maps all the time it wouldn't be so hard.

kylec• 13 years ago

One alternative to Google Groups is 37signals' Breeze:

http://basecamp.com/breeze

$20 one-time payment to create a group email list.

g3rald• 13 years ago

For companies like Google we are mere merchandise, as we do not generate sufficient profits they discard us, well done ...

cromwellian4• 13 years ago

"It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web" That's a pretty bold claim and an epic overreaction, especially given that Google currently derives 97% of its revenue from the Web, and if it goes away, it would be very problematic for Google.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

The Web is a small subset of the Internet. There are many other protocols to enable the sharing of data between individuals and platforms, and it looks like Google wishes to deprecate at least some of those in favour of its own end-to-end solution. I think that killing off Reader in favour of G+ is the start of acceleration in that direction. I hope I'm wrong.

cromwellian4• 13 years ago

First of all, the quote, from you, specifically says "open Web" not "open Internet"

Secondly, Reader was not killed because of G+. If FriendFeed is finally killed off, will you say it was because Facebook needed the resources and engineers on a competing product? Consumers have moved on to desire the kinds of features that are inherent in services like Facebook, and RSS simply isn't suited to solving the problem of federated social networking. There is no open standard for this, remember, Google tried it with PubHubSubHub/WebFinger/OpenID/OAuth/ActivityStreams but it didn't work.

I favor federated feeds as well (see my essay http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...), but honestly, for me personally, RSS was a HUGE step back from what I had on USENET in the 80s with RN/TRN. Someone must create a new, open federated social networking platform, but honestly, you can't put the cart before the horse. Google tried that several times and failed.

First, you've got to built a super successful platform consumers love, then you can standardize it. The history of doing it the other way is littered with failure. Remember OpenSocial?

I don't think Google has lost sight of the Open Web, I think it just realized that you must focus on the end user design issues first if you want to be successful. Ignore this at your peril, look at the way consumers flock to native apps on mobile. They care about experiences, not implementation. If the "open web" specs don't do the job, then you need to create a product first that consumers show they want, and then work backwards to figure out how to fix the specs.

dools• 13 years ago

Great list! I had already been eyeballing fastmail but hadn't seen ownCloud. Will check it out, thanks!

I agree with you on the Android front, too. Although I'm still struggling to get a new qwerty after my pro+ died :(

tonylemesmer2• 13 years ago

Also check out http://aerofs.com/ (I prefer this to Owncloud)

ok_craig2• 13 years ago

I still think this is all ridiculous. Stopping support for a product that uses a certain standard doesn't mean you're against that standard, unless you're a conspiracy theorist.

You can argue that they're against certain open standards if you want, but the canceling of Reader isn't actually evidence of that. Simultaneously putting effort into G+ is also not evidence of that. It's not even symbolic of that. It is only evidence of shifting product priorities, not outright opposition to open standards.

The singular data point that I can think of as being anti-standard is the pending drop of CalDAV for Calendar, which I personally think sucks. But nobody ever cites that. Everybody's pissed that Google canceled a product that they liked, and that's what's driving this never-ending criticism.

lobster_johnson14• 13 years ago

The main problem with Google at the moment is the centralization of many popular services into one corporate entity. Video, search, email etc. are all now in the hands of, mostly, Google. With so few viable competitors, you get a de-factory monopoly as well as insane growth. The centralization itself is the problem.

Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass and autonomous cars, Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated, and Google does not seem to care much about Internet standards or about being ethical.

ok_craig2• 13 years ago

I can get behind your first paragraph, which is basically just saying that as a consumer you like to support variety and a dynamic market by using services from multiple providers. If that's you're goal, that's a reasonable enough justification for me. However, that's not a reaction that would come as a direct result of one product cancellation (because it is a proactive, not reactive perspective), and my comment is in response to the post, which explicitly claims the reason for expunging Google is due to Google's supposed new opposition to open standards.

I really don't understand your angle with the second paragraph though. It's just the kind of stuff that's going to make this all devolve into a battle of words about who the best/worst/most evil/most creative/most underdog/most overvalued/undervalued/deserving/undeserving companies are. Frankly a generalization like that without any specifics or context is a fanboy thing to say. If you're trying to tell me that Google is a stagnating company doing more net harm than good, all I think it's worth to say is that I think you're terribly wrong, and I disagree.

dalks6• 13 years ago

> de-factory monopoly

Not really:

  - Video: Till Oct '12, youtube's market share peaked at ~52%. [1]

  - Email: Gmail surpassed Outlook in market share only in Oct '12. [2]

  - Search: Google Search 67.5% as of March 15, 2013. [3]

> many of these services have stagnated

And when they attempt to get out of markets so that other new companies can perform better, we get Reader like response.

> Google does not seem to care much about Internet standards

And how are you sure that FastMail and Vimeo (Alternatives suggested in the OP) are any better?

[1] http://videonuze.com/article/youtube-s-market-share-nudges-u...

[2] http://gigaom.com/2012/10/31/gmail-finally-beats-hotmail-acc...

[3] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2255183/Google-Grabs-Mo...

RestlessMind• 13 years ago

> Aside from ..., Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated

Can you please give a few examples of innovative companies these days? (And I am totally serious, no snark/sarcasm intended)

rattray• 13 years ago

I'd have to disagree on the innovation point. Google continues to make dramatic improvements (imo) to many of their apps and services. As a developer building on Docs/Drive, I've seen that service continuously grow and expand, though much of the work remains below the waterline. Similarly, Maps, Now, Voice Search, Chrome, App Engine continue to be improved at a rate that outstrips what I'm used to at most other companies Google's size.

It's true that the visible feature changes have slowed significantly, but I'd attribute that more to the size and completeness of the existing products than anything else. It's also true that they aren't entering many new product lines, though for one thing I'm not sure that's something you'd lament and for another, I hear they've declared they won't be entering any new business that they expect to be below $1bn.

dannyr4• 13 years ago

So are you saying that if we don't count the innovation that Google has been doing, Google is not innovative at all.

Btw, here are some Google products that it continues to iterate:

Google Maps YouTube Android Wallet Google+ Go AngularJS Shopping

However, if you don't want to count these ones, I guess you're right that most of Google's services have stagnated.

#sarcasm

lobster_johnson14• 13 years ago

> de-factory

One of the more amusing typos I have written while sleep-deprived. Sorry.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

I don't think that Google is acting in opposition to open standards _in general_, because for the most part they benefit by them.

What's clear is that:

- Google is seeking to increase the monetary value of its users

- the way to do that is with social media (see Facebook, who are winning this battle hands down)

- they will push open standards under the bus where necessary, in order to drive users to Google+

As the former PM for Reader puts it (https://www.quora.com/Google-Reader-Shut-Down-March-2013/Why...):

"Let's be clear that this has nothing to do with revenue vs operating costs. Reader never made money directly (though you could maybe attribute some of Feedburner and AdSense for Feeds usage to it), and it wasn't the goal of the product.

Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I'm pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social:

    2008 - let's pull the team off to build OpenSocial
    2009 - let's pull the team off to build Buzz
    2010 - let's pull the team off to build Google+"

teeja• 13 years ago

In my experience Google buys something, lures people into using it for years, lets it languish without improvements for years so long as it serves their purposes, then kills it off.

Whether they're "working against the potential of the open Internet" is another question altogether. They like head counts, but like certain fickle people in all of our lives, the idea of actually having a real enduring relationship never crosses their Aspergian heads. It's just business. We've already got enough of that ruining the world. Some of us actually yearn for a better future ... not just enduring life on the way to Alpha Centauri or whatever.

onemorepassword• 13 years ago

You must have not been paying attention. A long list of evidence has been posted here on HN on several occassionas, including dropping CalDAV, of Google turning against the open web.

It's nothing new either, it has been going on for years. They've even dropped their support for net neutrality years ago.

In the mean time Google has been heavily pushing the Google+ walled garden, their anti-privacy and anti-anonymity agendas, and has been pro-active in filtering their services on behalf of the copyright-exploitation industry.

This is not a conspiracy theory, it's just a matter of connecting the fairly obvious dots that barely need connecting because there are so many of them by now all that's missing is an official "fuck the open web" press statement.

dalks6• 13 years ago

> HN on several occassionas

3 if I count correctly: Reader closedown (which, in my opinion, not a hit to open web at all), XMPP Federation issue (It's fixed now) and CalDAV whitelist (Not closedown, whitelist).

bdowney• 13 years ago

Google has made several mistakes re social products but it's definitely not against the open web. There's a lot of internal criticism every time one of these decisions is made but, at the end of the day, upper management gets to do whatever they want.

I've never met anybody at Google how was happy with the way G+ is being handled or liked Vic Gundotra. A lot of us rather he'd go back to Microsoft.

mehrdada• 13 years ago

When I think about it, I can completely agree with your last paragraph. Not a single Googler that I have met disagrees with that.

Executor• 13 years ago

Way to use the words "consparicy theorist" - an overloaded term.

richardjordan• 13 years ago

Most important thing is to not get so entrenched in one technology vendor or another. They are not part of you. You're not an Apple person or a Google person - that's just how companies want you to think. Don't let technology choices become part of who you think you are. Use tech that helps you until it doesn't. Always have an exit plan. Don't get emotionally attached to one company or emotionally put off another. They're corporations. The don't care about you. Thy offer a service. If that service comes as part of a trade you're comfortable with use it, else don't.

mrich• 13 years ago

This is the comment that should be at the top of this thread.

parennoob• 13 years ago

I don't think Google is 'actively working against an open web', but the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+ makes me reconsider every time they open up a new service (didn't even glance at Keep, for example. Remember what happened to Google Notebook?)

It's nice to have open source alternatives, and possibly to help them grow. If a lot more people start using, say, ownCloud, it will probably help develop it into a more robust and usable platform. Also, as a hacker, having a stack of my own software side-by-side with my current Google/Apple stack will probably help me learn more as I use it more, and will give me something to fall back on in case Google shutters it.

cromwellian4• 13 years ago

"the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+"

There's a lot of erroneous assumptions in there. Reader was never really a product with much support, it was more a labor of love of a small dedicated team. Reader was not shutdown to "make way for G+" anymore than any of the other spring cleaned services were shut down because of competing services. Even the original (ex-Googler now) Reader engineers have pretty much outlined many of the reasons, including the decline of RSS, which was killed off in large part by people moving to services like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

It's really regretable, but it's time to realize that the rest of the world moved on, and if we want federated, open services, it's going to have to built from the ground up, and in a way that users, not hackers, will want to use it.

logn2• 13 years ago

I don't know about replacing Google with DDG. I'd prefer an engine that actually does its own indexing. Yandex is the only alternative that fits the bill in my mind: http://www.yandex.com

Also, so happy to learn about ownCloud. As a developer, I'm a little disappointed to see AGPL licensing, but it's probably a smart choice and I use that license in some projects.

dublinben• 13 years ago

DDG actually pulls its results from Yandex and several other sources. Why limit yourself to a single, old-fashioned crawler, when you can use one of the most innovative meta-search engines?

http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399

logn2• 13 years ago

Meta-search is a pretty old idea too. And you're at the mercy of your sources and have less insight into the data you're searching and less ability to rank pages.

lessnonymous• 13 years ago

FYI: Fastmail, while still developed in Australia, is now owned by Opera Software.

3825• 13 years ago

I'd like to give credit to Google where it is due. With takeout, it is very easy to get quite a bit of your information. You already could get your emails by IMAP or POP but still Google set a standard with Takeout :)

This makes it possible for someone to just pack his bags and leave. This is also the reason why I am staying.

yanw• 13 years ago

I try to avoid these sorts of submissions, mainly because of their non-content and the subsequent familiar discussion, but somehow they keep reaching the front page.

It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”.

Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:

http://www.webrtc.org

http://www.chromium.org

And their various web speed efforts:

https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed

And of course:

https://fiber.google.com

I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader.

Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

Thanks - I've corrected that error.

See my other comments on this item for rebuttal of your other points :)

kyrias• 13 years ago

Huh, Firefox hasn't dropped RSS support? The button is just not in the Awesomebar anymore.

josteink• 13 years ago

    Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google
    initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:
    
    http://www.chromium.org

That's funny. I see Chromium as their OSS alibi for doing whatever non-standard they want with open-web HTML, which doesn't exist in any other browser. But now it's not "proprietary", because it's in a OS code-repo somewhere.

So now it's "standards" even though it hasn't been submitted, ratified or approved yet. And everyone else, if they dont want Google's stuff to work poorly in their browser, has to be a dog and follow Google's leash.

I consider Chromium some of the worst damage Google has done to the open web.

Spakman• 13 years ago

Interesting opinion. I hadn't considered it like that at all, but I will give it some thought. How much of the non-standard stuff is getting any use/traction (honest question)?

For me, currently, Chromium seems like nothing like a good thing. For example, their Linux sandboxing appears to be at least a step ahead of anything else so far.

nfoz• 13 years ago

Stop whining and build something better. Reader was never a very good RSS reader anyway. You can do better.

adamors• 13 years ago

Reader was a great RSS archiver and syncer though.

ternaryoperator• 13 years ago

owncloud was an interesting item on his replacement list. Has anyone else used owncloud and can vouch for it? If so, are you self-hosting it or using a commercial host? If the latter, which one?

xradionut• 13 years ago

I was mildly interested in it until I saw the letters PHP, then lost interest.

rentzsch• 13 years ago

I've barely used it, but http://librelist.com seems like a potential Google Groups replacement.

niggler• 13 years ago

I've asked multiple times about adding subdomains to distinguish repos from blogs, but it appears that this is a workaround that no subdomain reporting would detect

xwei• 13 years ago

I use all the products you listed. And I will not attack a company just because of a product. If you just want to be popular? you did it. Kid.

zobzu• 13 years ago

For maps you may want to try here.com It's not bad - faster than gmaps too

olalonde• 13 years ago

Hmmm Laval shows up before Montreal... I think I'll keep using Google Maps for now.

ernesth• 13 years ago

Google Maps has its share of little cities showing before big ones. I currently see a Digoin on the map of France whereas Saint-Étienne, Clermont-Ferrand, Bourges (or Laval) do not appear...

lettergram• 13 years ago

I have seen many of these posts recently and I honestly do not understand. I use Google products and it definitely beats out most of the competition and doesn't interfere with anything worse than any other product out there. Sure the internet is changing, and you can either go with it (or not). Switching to many different products to complete the same tasks (many of them worse than Google products) seems kind of silly to me.

felipelalli• 13 years ago

exagerado.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

Nah, farsighted :) Seriously, you just wait.

If you're a user on a commercial system you didn't pay for (Google, Facebook, etc.) then you're not a customer, you're cattle. Your value is directly proportional to how much the company running the system knows about you.

I don't like where Facebook is going, and I think Google is following in their footsteps, albeit helped along by an excellent reputation for quality and fair play, especially amongst geeks.

Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons.

jmesserly• 13 years ago

> Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons.

I see this meme a lot, but I don't get it how the analogy is supposed to work.

There is actual evidence that Microsoft in the 90's was trying to sabotage standard protocols and open source software, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents.

The key part of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy was extending the standard in proprietary ways, thus making it incompatible and no longer implementable via open source software, thus killing it.

I don't get how any of this applies to any web company, where nearly the entire business is based on the web and the standards that back it. It's no wonder that many of these companies contribute back to the web standards and open source software. Sure, these contributions are in the company's interests--but that's the whole point. We reached a time when it's in interests of many big (and small) corporations to contribute to open source and standards (including Microsoft!).

Some people see efforts to improve standards or contribute new ones as somehow bad, "embrace and extend". When actually it's the opposite: investing in the commons to promote its welfare.

Obligatory disclaimer: speaking for myself here, not any employer past or present.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

99% of websites make money from ads. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Imagine if everyone even asked for $1 per month to sustain themselves. That would be unfeasible. Ads are here to stay.

ebbv3• 13 years ago

This is not conscious consumerism. This is a childish temper tantrum.

Chrome has better developer tools. If your job is being a web dev and you purposely make your job harder because you're mad at Google for shutting down Reader, you're not being rational.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

I'll still happily use Chromium for web development, as and where necessary. Just not signed in to Google for sync, etc. etc.

I do wonder though ... would you have described the formation of the FSF as a childish temper tantrum? I remember the days when to use Linux as a development OS was painful ... it worked out well in the end though :)

magicalist4• 13 years ago

I don't entirely agree with the GP's phrasing, but it's worth pointing out that the FSF doesn't paint all a company's software with the same brush. They're happy to rail against non-free software while accepting contributions to GNU projects from the same developers.

jxi• 13 years ago

FSF is an ideal. The ideal that all software is open source so that it's more secure and has all the other benefits of open source. What you're doing is being childish. "Boo hoo, big bad Google killed a product I liked, so I'm going to make some bullshit arguments to stop using ALL their products."

I don't use all of Google's products, but I use a subset because they get the job done well. If you think killing off reader was a bad idea, why not build your own and see how the cost/benefit ratio pays off. What problem are you even solving by doing this? You're just throwing a childish fit.

ebbv3• 13 years ago

Your analogy doesn't work at all. The FSF is about a goal. It is a noble goal, and it has clearly shaped the software world for the better.

I ran Linux and did lots of development under it in the 90s. I quite enjoyed it and preferred it to Windows development at the time. I use Linux every day for work.

That doesn't mean I don't boot up Windows to play BioShock Infinite, even though I disagree with a lot of things Microsoft does.

sbuk• 13 years ago

Why not just say "You should just do as you are told and not ask questions!"?

robotmay• 13 years ago

I've never found Firebug to be lacking; what do the Chrome developer tools have that make it impossible to stop using Chrome?

In my experience Chrome is a PITA for web development due to its weirdly aggressive caching. I thought people were just making it up a few months back, but I experienced it recently and it's infuriating.

ebbv3• 13 years ago

Shift+Reload takes care of all caching issues.

It's hard to nail down the difference between Chrome Dev Tools and Firebug with just one thing. For me it's not one killer feature it's a quality of life issue. It's all the little things that, IMHO, Chrome Dev Tools does right.

I have no problem using Firebug or even the Firefox Inspector when needed to actually find a Firefox specific problem but for working day in and day out, I prefer the experience of the Chrome Dev Tools.

ahoge• 13 years ago

RSS just isn't very popular. Firefox also removed that RSS icon from the address bar a few months ago. Do you think Mozilla did that because they "oppose the open web"?

No, of course they don't. They got rid of it because virtually no one used it.

alexeston• 13 years ago

Just like everybody else said, Google is not moving against the open web. Rather the opposite. The only thing I agree with is the part where Google tries to get everybody to use Google only, which makes sense considering Google can be compared to a small empire. I mean, has anyone seen the office buildings that Google has?

As for Chrome, I think Webkit (or now Blink) is where web happens fastest. All new web experiments are done with -webkit, not -moz-, and you gotta go where the majority goes. In this case anyway. I haven't used gmail for a long time tho', because I didn't like that the content of my emails get used for ads - so I set up my own email server for personal usage. Other then that, maps, search .. it does what I need it to do so whether it tracks me or whatever is just the cost of the service.

bzbarsky• 13 years ago

> All new web experiments are done with -webkit, not -moz-

Uh... That happens to not be true. But WebKit does have much better (and better-funded) marketing.

cageface2• 13 years ago

I understand why people are reluctant to trust a single corporation with so much control over their personal information, particularly when, as they say, the user is as much the product as the customer. I'm generally a big defender of Google but even I am disquieted by their maneuvering around Google+.

However, I also doubt it's possible to build services as sophisticated as GMail on direct payments from users. I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to pay what it would cost to build and run a service like GMail without ads.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

> I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to > pay what it would cost to build and run a service like > GMail without ads.

What do you think the problem would be? I'm using Fastmail now, and not missing anything from Gmail. All for $50 / month.

cageface2• 13 years ago

I tried Fastmail last year and maybe my impressions are out of date but it can't compete on features at all. The web interface is stone age compared to gmail, search is far slower and less sophisticated, spam filtering was not as good etc. No native apps are available for mobile.

Fastmail isn't bad but I don't consider them to be in the same league.

exterm• 13 years ago

Personal account costs 4.95$ / year. What kind of premium account do you have to pay 50$ / month for?

czk• 13 years ago

Streeme is a good alternative to Google Music

https://code.google.com/p/streeme/

tikhonj• 13 years ago

Even assuming Google is not being malicious--and I think that's a broadly safe assumption--I'm still concerned. I'm am significantly over-reliant on Google's serviced: my email, my calendar, my OpenID, my web search, my videos, my phone, my maps, my web browser... (Well, I do use Firefox now.) It's a single point of failure. A rather scary one at that.

Some of these things do not have good alternatives. My phone? I could use an iPhone or Windows phone, but Apple and Microsoft are malicious. Also, they both hate Linux. But the other things? I probably could--and probably should--move some of them to a different service, if only in the interest of diversification.

Of course, I've been meaning to do this for a while. But I haven't. In many different, usually small ways, I'm hooked into Google. That by itself worries me; in some cases, even if I did want to move to a different service, it would not be easy. Very importantly, this is not Google's fault at all--in fact, they're very good about making my data portable. It's entirely poor planning on my part. Yet it's still an issue.

Perhaps the worst part--or the best part--is that I don't have any immediate problems with this situation. Everything works. Quite well. I just have a general sense of disquiet about it all.

Just something to think about.

duncan_bayne15• 13 years ago

Disquet. That's _exactly_ it, and I wish I'd thought to use that word in the first place.

You're right that Google is still better than Apple and Microsoft. I'm still hoping that Ubuntu for phones gets some traction, I'd love for a truly general-purpose pocket computer.

zjmichen• 13 years ago

If Canonical doesn't turn evil too. Some of their actions give me pause. Oh but man I want Ubuntu phone to be good.

jrockway2• 13 years ago

Diversification is a good idea, but the cost seems higher than the benefit in this case.

Let's say Google becomes evil and makes Android and Chrome evil: the solution is simple, fork Android and Chromium and continue on without the evil additions. Or, don't upgrade. If you "diversify" now, though, you miss out on cool Chrome features, or you spend your weekend maintaining a web browser fork when you could be at the beach.

As for services like videos, calendars, email, and so on -- you can download your data regularly [1] and move to a new service when you feel like it. This lets you defer the cost of switching until you actually need to switch. If that happens to be never, you win. If that happens to be tomorrow, you still win. (But if you switch now, you pay the feature difference cost every day. If Google never becomes evil, then you've wasted your time.)

[1] https://www.google.com/takeout/?pli=1

Think of it another way. Whenever I go to the grocery store, I typically buy "store brand" products. That means everything in my pantry is "over-reliant" on that one store. But in reality, that's not the case: if Whole Foods goes out of business, I can just shop at Trader Joe's instead, since flour and sugar is pretty much the same everywhere. My accumulated recipes will continue to work either way. (And while both stores exist, nothing is stopping me from shopping at them both other than the added time that visiting each store takes. But that cost is non-zero, which entices me to consolidate my shopping needs. For now.)

fafner• 13 years ago

> If you "diversify" now, though, you miss out on cool Chrome features, or you spend your weekend maintaining a web browser fork when you could be at the beach.

Sorry but what you are saying doesn't make sense. It is your proposal (fork when Chrome turns evil) which could end up with him maintaining a web browser fork on the weekend. "[M]iss out on cool Chrome features" ... well you miss out on cool Firefox features if you don't switch now ... I think switching the browser is really the least complicated thing to do of all those things.

> This lets you defer the cost of switching until you actually need to switch. If that happens to be never, you win. If that happens to be tomorrow, you still win.

No. Because now you have the time to slowly migrate and adjust. When you are with your back a against the wall the "costs" can be much much higher.

peterclary2• 13 years ago

Could you explain how Apple is malicious? That's quite an assertion and not one I've previously heard.

zero_intp2• 13 years ago

Going 'thermonuclear' over product competition capricious, callus, and combative app store submission process anti-competitive & likely-illegal publication conspiracy hoarding profits overseas and refusing to pay taxes for the environment that spawned their successes. censorship of users media

pseut2• 13 years ago

Yeah, this was my thought process too (although I do use an iPhone unfortunately). The only point I'd add is that it seems unlikely that Google will move to be more open and more privacy conscious; any change seems likely to go the other direction (for obvious and understandable business purposes, not, as you said, maliciousness).

h2s• 13 years ago

I'm planning to do exactly this, myself. Not so much because of any perceived danger to the open web posed by Google, but because I've come to realise that I simply have too many eggs in their basket. Tellingly, my list of products that I will be replacing is almost completely different to this person's. Google has become the Walmart of computing and it's time to resist.

jay_kyburz• 13 years ago

I would find this a lot harder.

I have 6 applications running on Google App Engine. I use Analytics to track stats in them. I use Ad Sense and Ad words to help monetise them. I have 2 apps for business accounts each with separate gmail, calendar and docs. One for personal life one for business.

Crome is significantly better than both Safari and Firefox on my Mac laptop event though I use both and have all three browsers open, each has a different google account loged into it.

Kiro• 13 years ago

I'm doing the opposite.

tbirdz• 13 years ago

I might recommend uzing Zoho mail instead of fastmail. I've used it for a while now and it's very nice.

jrockway2• 13 years ago

By these standards, it would seem that every company on Earth is "opposed to an open web" because they don't make available a free web-based RSS reader.

pavs• 13 years ago

Also: Self-Host Everything http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Android Market. Used to be OK for getting apps, but now it is going to shove music and video search results in my face every chance it gets with annoying screens between me and the app search results and annoying continue shopping screens after each app.

If I wanted those things, I'd be in the other apps for them, like Google Books or whatever. Of course I'm never in that particular one because Amazon Kindle is so much better. I'm sure if I liked music or video then Google wouldn't be my choice either. I tried to get 300 once for someone and it had a search result for it, but wouldn't show me the page. Then I bought batman instead and it just gave me a license error whenever I tried to watch it.

Really would have been better to migrate Android Market/Google Play as soon as someone else made an app store on Android, and there are many, rather than trusting Google not to sell out their users. With Google you invest time in a product, then basically it gets shut down or co-opted into something you don't want. A startup you like getting bought by Google is pretty much the worst thing possible since generally they'll just kill the product.

Guess I should go through this list and get off their other services proactively. It just isn't worth trusting Google where you don't have to.

RWeaver• 13 years ago

People want their news curated, either through hacker news, reddit, Google plus or something else. For a minority RSS was their preference, but for everyone else Google correctly shifted their resources to the future.

RIP RSS, you had your day in the sun and lead the way for better products.

gurkendoktor• 13 years ago

That's a false dichotomy - I can consume curated news through RSS just fine. Trivium is one of my favourite feeds, for example.

The only difference between using RSS and following the author on FB/G+/Twitter is that I can use any client I want, and neither of us has to use yet another web service.

dannyr4• 13 years ago

I'm a bit speechless with this post.

I have seen overreaction from people when Google shut down Reader.

I told myself that the craziest of those overreactions would be for somebody to quit all of Google's services.

Then I saw this article and I thought he was trolling.

Sadly he is not.

emilis_info• 13 years ago

Switching to Firefox will not save you.

I recently found out that Firefox sends a request to safebrowsing.clients.google.com for every page I visit. I found out how to disable it, but it wasn't straightforward and there were still requests sent to Google for other things.

Safe browsing is in Firefox Preferences "Security" tab under "Block reported attack sites" + "Block reported web forgeries".

Search for "goog" in about:config to find more interesting things.

LiveHTTPHeaders extension is also an eye-opener, because Firebug usually doesn't show these requests.

magicalist4• 13 years ago

sniff the connection rather than jumping to conclusions (and especially before telling people to disable a safety feature of their browser).

Safe browsing does not send the addresses you visit over the wire. The protocol was very carefully designed to be both fast updating and not expose any information about the sites you visit.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/

https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocol...

edit: just to save time for others parsing the protocol page, and it's been a while since I've read it, so someone please correct me if I have this wrong, but Firefox (and Chrome, and maybe others, not sure) stores a local set of the first 32 bits of the 256-bit hashes of all the sites currently marked as hosting malware or whatever. Your browser pings fairly often to get an updated version of this set of sites.

When you visit a page, the canonicalized name of the page you're on is hashed and the first 32 bits are compared against the database of prefixes. If there is a collision (I believe there are usually a few hundred thousand entries of the 2^32 available hash prefixes), only the first 32 bits of the hash of the page you're on is sent to google, as a request for the set of full hashes of malicious pages that begin with that prefix, which allows for the final, very much local, check.

This saves a bunch of time and bandwidth, and lets you get a last minute double check that the page is still bad with no one able to work out what page you're actually on.

chmike2• 13 years ago

When I registered on Quora by using my GoogleId, I was very surprised to see Quora asking me to send an email invite to all my Android phone contacts. Google handed over all the emails of my Android phone contacts to Quora ! Is this what I get from using Android and synchronization ? I didn't see an opt out of that.

I'm now waiting for Ubuntu phone, while hoping that they don't try to monetize it using similar abuse of monopole. The Ubuntu desktop spam still hurts.

Also, when connecting to my Youtube account, google ask me regularly to use my real name and there is no button to reply just no and don't ever ask me anymore!

Google is lowering the barrier for competitors ! Same thing for Twitter and Facebook.

fpgeek2• 13 years ago

No, that's what you get when you don't read the permissions you are granting. Here is the permission request I saw:

  Quora is requesting permission to:

    View basic information about your account
    View your email address
    Manage your contacts

Given that, you shouldn't be at all surprised that Quora was able to figure out your phone contacts.

chmike2• 13 years ago

I agree but this means that I can't register in quora with my googleId without giving Quora all my emails. Since I don't use facebook and twitter what options are left ? I do want to use googleId authentication to access Quora but why would that imply I have to give all my emails to Quora ? Why can't I decide about that ? Why is Google imposing that to me ? Is this a commercial deal between Google and Quora ?

aray• 13 years ago

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, this is (to me) why being able to export your data is a first class requirement of a service. For these listed, there's takeout: https://www.google.com/takeout/

Backing up your online data from services should be just as common (and practiced) as backing up harddrives or important information. You decide which services you want to use, but give yourself the flexibility to move if and when circumstances change.

maxwell2022• 13 years ago

Good for you...

jpkeisala• 13 years ago

This is exactly like in nineties and also later some were trying to do anti-microsoft movement.

rmrfrmrf2• 13 years ago

Cool. Now show me how you're going to expunge server-side Google Analytics from your life.

oelmekki• 13 years ago

If you mean replacing analytics for your website, piwik is the answer : http://piwik.org/

If you mean not being tracked by analytics, well, it's quite simple :

# cat /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com googleadservices.com

edit: formatting

rmrfrmrf2• 13 years ago

I was talking about actual server-side analytics includes. Pretty sure the only way around it is to spoof your user agent data or use a proxy.

jimbosis• 13 years ago

For replacing Google Groups, you should check out Groupsapces, a UK company. http://groupspaces.com/

A free plan gets you two lists of 50 members, and there are many paid options. I've been using it for a group in my local community for over a year now and am very pleased with the product.

laumars• 13 years ago

Google Talk uses an open protocol, XMPP. So basically any client that support XMPP should (hopefully) work with Google Talk. This means you wouldn't have to migrate your friends / family over to a new client but you can still expunge Google's IM client specifically.

prg318• 13 years ago

Google just recently reinstated federated XMPP for their Google Talk service [1] so you can talk to peers on other XMPP servers. I use an XMPP server that has been provided to me by my e-mail provider (lavabit.com) to chat with my friends/family that use Google Talk without any issues.

[1] http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-April/001672...

overshard• 13 years ago

I love these articles and seeing alternatives to mainstream solutions but focusing on alternatives for a single company is not the end goal for me. You can go with Apple, Google or Microsoft and get a nice packaged solution for email, calendar, contacts, music, storage, etc and the end goal for me would not be switching to separate packages. The end goal would be to have a self-hosted easy to install and solution, OwnCloud is almost there for 90% of what I want but it doesn't maintain my email. There is no solution for me unless it's easy and all works seamlessly together, like Google and the rest have.

pseut2• 13 years ago

Note that you can often get jabber/xmpp from your email provider: e.g. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/features_chat.html

b2spirit• 13 years ago

Google's primary objective is not money, but information gathering and control. The move to Google+ is a centralisation of the information repository. Google Glass is an attempt at getting more detailed personal information. The autonomous vehicle development is for them to control your vehicle.

felipebueno• 13 years ago

I totally agree with your thoughts and concerns. It sounds like my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535181

DanBC• 13 years ago

I don't care about reader or RSS.

I do care about Google's decision to avoid paying tax. This may be legal, but it's shady. Thus, I'm starting to not use Google provided services.

It's a shame because Google Search (web, at least) really is very good, despite occasional weirdness.

Here's some screenshots (http://imgur.com/a/u1zj6) of my results. (Note that suicidegirls is NSFW)

[suicidegirls dutch doctors want to kill little babies] gives this URL (https://www.google.co.uk/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&#...)

But [suicidegirls dutch doctors] gives this url (https://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+...)

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

What about the products advertisers/publishers use? Adsense and Adwords.

ganarajpr• 13 years ago

This reminds me of a kid, lying flat in the middle of a super market, revolting with his parents because they didn't buy a toy he liked..

tonylemesmer2• 13 years ago

The main Google services I use are Gmail, Android and Search. I would be mainly interested in replacing Gmail and tried (I have a personal domain with mail forwarded to Gmail). I use Gmail mainly because of its excellent spam blocking but also the Android experience is very good.

I tried getting rid of Gmail last year but failed due to not finding a decent email client on Android that wasn't Gmail. Any suggestions? Please don't suggest K-9.

For search I am now trying DuckDuckGo. I'm a mechanical engineer so will give this a few weeks to see if it affects my day to day fact finding.

Bjorkbat• 13 years ago

You know, I've come to think of Google as less of a corporation and more of a country lately. Most of their products act more like a sort of public service for their citizens, subsidized through ad revenue rather than taxes.

So far, it's had a pretty good track record for a country, no doubt due to the fact that it's still technically a corporation, but still, not too bad.

Still, it has its issues. There are many countries that can only dream of obtaining the data Google has on its citizens. Many of them have tried, and thankfully, for the time being, Google has been more or less protective of this data. Then there's their whole policy of axing infrastructure and services (products) whenever they deem fit, and by fit I mean unprofitable. Depending on your political views, this can be seen as either irresponsible or efficient. Regardless, its inconvenient for those who were using the service, and most efforts to put a service on the chopping block have something to do with trying to get more people to migrate to Google+, possibly to collect more data and serve up more ads, a very bizarre synthesis of increasing taxes and surveillance.

So maybe Google doesn't want to be a country of the internet. Tough. That's what they grew into, and the only way to avoid it is to shrink and pivot and lay off a lot of people who are essentially the Google equivalent of government employees.

Until then, we're right to be critical and cautious towards Google's actions, a responsibility even, otherwise they're liable to really screw up.

Expunging Google

Related Stories