> I feel like I've been burned by my trust in Google too many times
I'm genuinely curious about this. In what way do you feel burned?
I think I get what you're saying. I use gmail and Google uses an algorithm on gmail to decide what ads to show me when I do a search. The ads make money for Google and I don't get any of that money. All I get is free search results. I think what you're saying is that because Google is using your information to show you ads and make money that somehow you feel cheated?
But I don't feel particularly burned by this arrangement. If Google gave an option to start charging me money to avoid ads if I'm honest with myself I'm pretty sure I'll choose to continue seeing ads instead. I guess I'm curious about exactly how you feel burned.
I dislike Google's data slurping practices, and moved away from Gmail and other of their services years ago due to mistrust, but I think that was just an honest documentation bug. The button was to disable only the Location History feature, but the description made it sound like it was a global setting for the whole device. As a developer, I could very well see myself making that mistake; being embedded in the context, it's easy to miss how it will be read by someone else.
Isn't that the _potential_ to be burned, as opposed to being burned?
To be fair, there are many threats in the world we can all be worried about, but largely ignore in our daily lives, to no meaningful detriment in most cases.
It was a close call. For a number of months there it looked like RSS was going to be well and truly dead.
The fact that my comment is being downvoted tells me that people here have a shockingly poor memory for this sort of thing.
And heck, it's not even the death of Google Reader that was bad for RSS. The life of Google Reader was bad for RSS too. It was a "good enough" product released for free, as in good enough that it wasn't worth trying to compete with a free product so nobody did, but it wasn't actively maintained and just served to cause the entire RSS ecosystem to stagnate for years.
Not at all. They could have actually put effort into it. The problem was that they didn't maintain it. They let it languish, staying exactly the same for years, good enough that nobody wanted to compete with a free product but not actually doing anything to improve the RSS ecosystem, so pretty much nothing happened with RSS for years besides it just existing. And then they decided to just shut down Google Reader with a relatively short time frame, because they never figured out how to monetize it.
They had 3 perfectly good options:
1. Don't build Google Reader in the first place if they weren't interested in actually maintaining the damn thing.
2. Put some effort into it, keep improving Google Reader, make the whole RSS ecosystem better rather than causing it to stagnate.
3. Sunset Google Reader over a much longer period of time, like a year instead of the 3.5 months they gave. Those 3.5 months were just barely enough time for people to build replacement services.
>The problem was that they didn't maintain it. They let it languish, staying exactly the same for years ...
That's what maintenance is though. Keeping something functional, but not developing it further.
>... because they never figured out how to monetize it.
That's not true. They shut down Reader because the codebase was dated, and there were few engineers left on that team. It was a reallocation of resources.
>Sunset Google Reader over a much longer period of time, like a year instead of the 3.5 months they gave.
RSS is essentially on life support. every website that supports it hides the functionality a couple of clicks deep(where newbs won't think to go) whereas pre-google reader it was front and center
RSS feeds are linked in meta tags. You simply point it at the frontpage (or blog) of the site and it'll find it. There doesn't need to be a visible RSS button on the page.
I'm genuinely curious about this. In what way do you feel burned?
I think I get what you're saying. I use gmail and Google uses an algorithm on gmail to decide what ads to show me when I do a search. The ads make money for Google and I don't get any of that money. All I get is free search results. I think what you're saying is that because Google is using your information to show you ads and make money that somehow you feel cheated?
But I don't feel particularly burned by this arrangement. If Google gave an option to start charging me money to avoid ads if I'm honest with myself I'm pretty sure I'll choose to continue seeing ads instead. I guess I'm curious about exactly how you feel burned.