I just got the Google Reader “update” that DougJ posted about last night, and it’s another canary in the coal mine for anyone relying on Google services: the free ride is ending. Reader is one of many Google products that doesn’t push ads and doesn’t have a direct link to any of Google’s current obsessions (which are mainly social networking and mobile), so Google doesn’t really give a shit about what happens to it. In addition to the ugly new theme DougJ mentioned, Reader also lost all of its sharing functions, because Google saw that as a way to force more people to use Google+. If you want to learn more about that, ED Kain complains loud and long about it at his place.
In a less noticeable but arguably more important change, Google has also clamped down on use of its Maps API. Whenever you visit a web page with an embedded map (like this one), chances are overwhelming that the person who created the map used Google to do it. In the past, non-commercial use of the Maps API was essentially unlimited. Now, Google has decided that anyone hosting a map that gets more than 25,000 hits in a day has to pay a fairly steep fee. To put that in perspective, if I embedded a map in a front page post at midnight, we’d probably hit the limit sometime around mid-morning.
Google’s done something similar with its Google Apps product, which allows businesses and organizations to host email and other Google services under their own domain. In other words, Apps lets you have a [email protected] email address while using gmail. That product launched with a 500 user limit, which was reduced to 50, and is now 10.
In all of these cases, Google has engaged in classic predatory behavior. They drop a free product in a market where a number of small, entrepreneurial solutions are operating. This free product is either better (Reader), or better and cheaper (Maps and Apps). Google keeps the low or free price long enough to drive the competition out of business. Then, they either monetize (Maps and Apps) or bastardize (Reader) the Google product.
Unless the Google product you’re using shows you ads, runs on a mobile phone, or is somehow competing with Facebook, prepare to either pay or be disappointed. That’s just how they roll now that they’ve become the new boss.
cleek
and people laugh at me when i say i don’t want to use “cloud” or web-based apps.
efroh
But hey, “don’t be evil”, so it’s ok, man.
JGabriel
mistermix:
Google has determined that it’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” is too long, and that they can save money by making it shorter.
So let us unveil the Official New Motto for Google:
.
dr. bloor
What is it that the kids say these days? “Hoocoodanode?”
Steve
Good luck with that predatory behavior because the barriers to entering these markets are very low.
JGabriel
I can’t believe that I’m actually contemplating making Bing my default search engine. It’s becoming a toss-up between MS and Google on the evil scale.
ETA: Of course, neither comes close to Verizon.
.
MattF
Hmm. Serious Question: Is there some way to back up my gmail archives?
THE
So far I’m not that unhappy with the new Reader. I miss the color on the title link mainly. But I’m nearly used to the lack of it now.
Other aspects, like sharing, I never used anyway. You didn’t really expect them to promote FB when they have G+ now, did you?
It’s awfully white is my main reaction.
Comrade Javamanphil
If you aren’t paying for it, you aren’t the customer. You are the product. You can bitch all you want as the product, but Google only cares what its customers (ad buyers) want.
TheMightyTrowel
@MattF: DL to your computer via a mail system like thunderbird or (ick) outlook.
mistermix
@Steve: That’s true, but Google brings a ton of resources to the table. Take Bloglines — the main competition to Google Reader — as an example. They basically languished after Reader took all their business, and they still don’t have smartphone readers. Other smartphone RSS applications rely on Google Reader in the background to sync between desktop and mobile. I really don’t know of any RSS app that does good synchronization with the cloud, and it would cost a fair amount of scratch to start such a service.
gnomedad
@Comrade Javamanphil:
Nicely put. Gonna remember that.
MattF
@TheMightyTrowel: Now that I’ve had a cup of coffee and had a moment to think about it, I remembered that I’ve always downloaded gmail to my desktop (Apple) Mail program, so I’m safe after all. I guess I’ve never really trusted them dang dad-burn cloud services, anyhow.
Zach
I wouldn’t give a shit about the Google Reader changes if one of the changes wasn’t something or other that made it run really slowly even on a new Mac Air… I’m doubting this is in an attempt to push me into a Gears-supported browser, but who knows.
I don’t see much of a difference between the old Reader sharing functions and the new one. I haven’t used Plus much, but it seems that I could make a circle or whatever for people who want to read what I share and have the same thing? The amount of white space at the top of the screen is mind-boggling though.
Raging Thunderbolt
@Comrade Javamanphil: Are you John Gruber?
Raging Thunderbolt
Also, it’s unclear to me why you think the new theme is ugly. The colors are simplified and stronger. There is a greater use of white space in visual rhythming. Obviously, with anything new, it’ll take some getting used to. But even the most diehard anti-Google people tend to think the new theme unifies Google services and is, in this case, way better than the outdated old theme.
The complaint about taking away sharing, especially on such a short notice, is legitimate. The complaint about the redesign is not.
Jim Pharo
Free ride ending? Whocoldanoed?
Decided Fence Sitter
Zach, for me the problem is noise. Reader was a nice self-contained unit. I could follow G+ or Facebook for Bob can the stories of life; and not have to sort through the possible noise of his 15 shares of food, art, and cute kitty photos.
Gin & Tonic
@gnomedad: I first saw that said about TV.
Gin & Tonic
TANSTAAFL. As true as it’s ever been.
Walker
@cleek:
We joke at academic conferences that “in the cloud” is the new “in bed”.
There is way, way too much cloud snake oil out there. I was at a conference recently where the CEO of Gaikai was selling his brand. He stated that he saw this future of ultra-low power devices because all the computing was being done in the cloud, and we did not need to power all that computation on the device. Which conveniently ignores the fact that WiFi is a much bigger power drain than any CPU cycles.
harlana
you guys just need to stop fiddling around with those new-fangled interwebs thingies, you’d probably be a lot more relaxed and less frustrated.
Gin & Tonic
Anyway, I pay for my e-mail. IMAP over SSL to servers located in an EU country with much better data privacy laws. It’s not free, of course, nut it works from anywhere I tend to be.
john b
i’ll put it simply for you: the old version had sharing. the new doesn’t.
Davis X. Machina
I believe they are a business… with shareholders, etc.
For a corporation ‘Don’t be evil’ is a meaningless utterance, because one of its terms is meaningless. It’s like having a company whose motto is ‘Don’t be crangoknab.’
The ‘commanding heights’ of the modern economy aren’t coal, steel, railroads, and shipping any more. And ‘public utilities’ doesn’t have to just mean water, lights and sewerage….
Goodbye, Clause IV, hello Clause 4.0, anyone? If you want to nationalize them, go for it — I’m there with ya.
WereBear
I’ve never understood the impulse to complain about a free service.
Nothing is free. We decided to trade “eyeballs” for “what they look at” decades ago when TV got started.
RSA
I’m hoping that for some of the work going on in my lab, we’ll be able to switch to OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps. I don’t know how much we’ll be losing, though.
Can't Be Bothered
Shorter mistermix: waaah, amazing products are now only completely free for personal rather than enterprise use. Should we be expecting an ad free bj anytime soon? The ridiculous entitlement of tech geeks about monetizing anything on the internet always makes me think of the “this is bullshit” kid from this louis ck bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
J.K Galbraith explains how this works in American Capitalism
Samara Morgan
/yawn
what is your problem retardo?
this is the Glorious Freed Market Kain is always wetting his pants over.
get a fucking clue.
castellan
@Can’t Be Bothered: This has to be one of the stupidest things I’ve read all day. mistermix wasn’t complaining about the “free for enterprise use” part of the change. He was complaining about how anti-competitive Google’s changes have been. It’s becoming a serious problem.
Davis X. Machina
I’m more upset about the jump in the apparent default price of a Kindle book. Shortage of ones and zeroes someplace in the supply chain?
Jack
@MattF: If you want to back up your GMail, you need to set up a local email client with IMAP or POP3 or whatever it is, and let it spend the 12 hours downloading your email.
For many other Google services, you can use Google Takeout to download an ever-growing amount of your Google data: https://www.google.com/takeout/ . Google Reader will be added to Google Takeout, press releases say.
Despite the “You’re not the customer” line everyone is so enamored with, it’s more nuanced than that. Google has a very Jekyll-and-Hyde attitude. Sometimes Google wants to make money, and is coldly calculating, adding up how much a map view costs them. Sometimes Google wants to do something purely because it’s the right thing to do, a la Google Takeout. Sometimes Google wants to do something just because it’s freaking awesome, see car-comma-robot.
With Google Reader, I don’t think it’s corporate greed that’s driving them; I think it’s much more patronizing. They think they’ve made a better way to share content, Google+. Why would you keep using the old way now that it has been superseded by the new way? Don’t you know the new way is better? Why should they keep wasting time with the old way that they could be spending on the new way? (For anyone who thinks you could just leave the old way alone, that’s not how it works: software rots without constant maintenance.) They think they know better than you do what you want.
Maybe they do, but telling people that you know better than they do seldom wins many friends.
J.W. Hamner
These seem like really odd complaints. Isn’t basically all “freeware” no longer free if you are making money off of it? That seems to be all Google is doing, and it seems to be fairly standard.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Are morning insults to the post author the new normal here? Hell’s bells that’s a shitty way to live.
Comrade Javamanphil
@gnomedad: Shamelessly stolen from someone (perhaps Gruber as Raging Thunderbolt surmises (And please, don’t ever confuse me for a Yankee and Cowboy fan from Philly.) But yes, it sums the dynamic up nicely.
beergoggles
@Comrade Javamanphil:
You’re the product even if you are paying for it.. like tv/cable network programming. Scammed twice.
beergoggles
Just fired up the new google reader – design wise it is far more aesthetically pleasing than the previous incarnation. Never used it for sharing before so can’t say I care about that function. I see the G+ integration but since I don’t share, it doesn’t really bother me.
Eh, it’s not like there’s such a high entry bar for designing rss readers – there’s a crapton of them out there and if it really goads ur goat, load up tiny tiny rss (demo at http://tt-rss.org/demo/tt-rss.php) and run your own rss reader server.
Shinobi
I just +1ed this post in google reader. I actually don’t mind, I found setting up sharing and reading feeds in google reader kindof annoying, this will encourage more of my friends to get off facebook and make it easier to share stuff.
Is it Ideal? Not Really, but it’s still better than it could be.
Zach
@john b: “i’ll put it simply for you: the old version had sharing. the new doesn’t.”
My point is that Google could duplicate the old Reader sharing behavior in the new Reader/Plus easily:
1. On each post, put a “share with people who follow what I read” button which will post a link to GooglePlus in your “people who follow what I read” circle
2. Allow you to add an RSS feed based on a GooglePlus circle to Reader — stuff posted in my “people who share stories with me” circle
3. Generate a link that automatically adds someone to the “people who shares stories with me” circle
Can't Be Bothered
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): YouMustBeNewHere.jpg
Martin
I have it on pretty good authority that this wasn’t their intent at all. This is an honest-to-god change in business model. I understand that people don’t like the change, but Google had two choices:
1) Start selling a product
2) Sell you 20x more than they were previously, which was a lot.
Personally, I think their old business model was just horrible for users, because users were the product. I don’t want them harvesting every tidbit about me, what I read, what email I get, who calls me, and then selling it. That was the price for a free RSS. Not worth it.
Nutella
@Gin & Tonic:
Can you tell me what that service is? Or can anyone else recommend a good mail service to host my own domain? The one I have now is not as reliable as it used to be.
PhoenixRising
Now that Google is structuring some of its formerly free! products to charge for their use, I may be able to try some of them. Up until now, I’ve been following the Weasley Paradigm: Never trust anything that thinks for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
AOL was up front in 1993: Pay us every month, we’ll make email your mom can use work. From there, since weaning myself off the VAX, I’ve always followed the simple yet elegant rule that if the company is doing me a favor, I don’t want it. Because that’s not how capitalism works.
Google isn’t being predatory by getting as many beta users for their free products as they can, then figuring out how to charge someone money. It’s being innovative. In the event that they master the robot car, they will give away rides first, then charge the automakers to license their techniques.
joe in oklahoma
if the Goog was serious about social networking, they would have built G+ around reader instead of the other way around. the old reader was a creative social network in its own way…
Nutella
@Martin:
You think they won’t do this once they get all your info combined into one master Google+ account? Even if they change Google+ to a paid service? Not likely. Google’s entire business model has always been based on selling user info directly to their real customers or indirectly through ads. The work they’re doing now to combine accounts is to make the selling of your data more efficient, that is, more like FaceBook’s business model.
Andrew Beck
@joe in oklahoma
Reader had a creative social network built in, that almost no one used. I’ve used reader almost from the day it was launched and no one I knew could be convinced to use the sharing properly. I either had to tweet, share on facebook, or send emails to get people to read them.
And no one should be complaining about them charging for access to their API’s or for their Apps for enterprise. If you’re loading 25,000 maps per day; you’re probably running a for profit website and should be paying. If you are truly a non profit, Google will allow you to slide.
This stuff isn’t free for them to develop. And the bandwidth costs alone are staggering.
MTiffany
Google: soon to be just a search engine again.
Gin & Tonic
@Nutella: Runbox.
Joel
On the other hand, Google Scholar is awesome; a free, fast, easy to use replacement for ISI’s clunky Web of Science.
MTiffany
@PhoenixRising:
Nice to see that Google is pursuing the same marketing strategy employed by drug dealers.
PhoenixRising
Well, yeah. And purveyors of free pony rides, also too. Capitalism sucks, except compared to all the other economic systems that have been tried!
piratedan
alas…. fare thee well Netscape Navigator… we hardly knew ye… what do you mean I’m late to the party?
Judas Escargot
@WereBear:
This.
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, even WordPress etc: “Eyeball Farmers”, all. The only growth industry left.
Imagine a human race, numbly clicking on ads until the sun goes red and boils off the oceans. That’s the thrilling vision of the future we’re being offered by the ‘Digerati’ these days.
Jason B
This is like the classic Microsoft tactic: Embrace and Extend. Whenever something new comes out (e.g., a browser), don’t fight it, embrace it, integrate it with the OS, and make it more work for anyone to use the competition.
RareSanity
This is Google being “evil”, seriously?
I am not going to say that Google doesn’t have its faults, but it needs to be repeated…the service is FREE!
For years Google has offered free, high quality services. All they have asked in return, is to be able to display ads (that you are not even require to click on), and to be able to develop metrics, based on your browsing habits.
Hell, there are thousands of other websites, that do the exact same thing as Google, and don’t give you shit in return.
I was a part of the original GMail beta launch, back in the summer of 2005. It was basic, web-based email, to say the least. I have seen enumerable features added, performance improved, and my data allocation grow by almost 4 times its original amount…all for free!
So the bitchin’ and moaning that Google has the audacity to attempt, to tie together all of the disparate “products” it offers…for free, strikes me as the height of an attitude of entitlement.
Look at the way that Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, CompuServ, and hundreds of others, have bumbled along in the “information age”. Google has insulated its users from all of that. It was defining how the basic functions on the internet should be, and it brought you and I along for the ride, for free, and without any pain or stress.
Now after all of that, they say, “Look, we have enjoyed this ride. We have enjoyed you being with us on this ride. However, because of this journey, we have made it easier for other companies to compete with what we do. We need to reorganize, so that we can continue to offer as many free, high quality services, while also generating enough revenue to stay in business.”
What is the response from the internet?
Fuck you Google! You should be giving me everything I want, how I want it, in unlimited amounts, for free! If you don’t you’re fucking EVIL!
Stay classy, internets…
stormhit
@RareSanity:
I don’t understand your point. Despite whatever alleged previous “bumbling” from others may have occured, we’re now at the point where other online services are comparable or even superior to Google’s. I’m missing why this means that anyone should feel loyal to them instead of switching to whatever works best. That’s what people did when Google first came along, isn’t it?
Samara Morgan
AMG you guys are thick.
frictionless sharing is the new Big Brother.
i have to admit its delicious to see mixie and his
rentboihomeboi EDK whining about natural “freed” market innovation.How long before facebook and twitter are selling your personal demographics to the bankstahs and the PO-lice?
cudlips.
you just keep lapping up that “freed” market drench.
uptown
Build your own cloud. Hard drives are cheap and linux has what you need to run on older or slower chipsets.
Opera Unite is a new technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends, without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders, or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser.
Mike
I see that google is now following the oh so successful Netflix model of management. Morons.
pete
I just spent an hour and a half using Google Reader, as I generally do twice a week, to check a large selection of RSS feeds, some based on specified Google News searches. The new version sucks. Sometimes the items did not show up, sometimes the (useful) indication of what I had read before did not take, and always it was slow. Also, I see fewer headlines per screen, which is annoying since I am human-scanning the results of their computer-scan.
I’d pay for the service, but only if it were good.
RareSanity
@stormhit:
That’s not really my point. It’s not about loyalty or “the better product”. It’s about the outrage expressed because a high quality service, that Google offered for free, was being changed. Toward the end of my comment, you’ll see that the changes going on at Google, are expressly because other companies are competing better with them. So my point is, outside of just general bellyaching about something changing, let’s keep the change in perspective. This is not, Google becoming “more evil”, they are trying to position themselves to better compete with tougher rivals.
It wasn’t all that hard to for GMail to beat Hotmail. However, Google+ competing with Facebook and Twitter, is quite a daunting task.
This change really isn’t Google being anymore “evil” than it was last week, whatever your perception was of them then.
To your other point, obviously there is not a better product than Reader (or what it used to be) out there, or I don’t think people would be so upset. They would just move to the better product.
todd.
I don’t really buy the whole “anti-competitive practices” bit. It seems odd to complain that Google made things that were better. I get that smaller companies can’t offer things for free, but I also think there’s a reasonable argument that Google’s business model simply didn’t operate in terms of pay-per-license software. If you’re making money elsewhere, and giving away great things, “predatory” seems a bit much.
But the new look Reader is a sad day.
You can get rid of some of the extraneous whitespace with some CSS modifications, outlined here. This restores a lot of the usability of pre-redesign Reader. A ton of extensions exist for every browser to make this kind of CSS tinkering pretty easy. So far, I like Stylish.
HyperIon
@cleek wrote:
or online banking!
or twitter!
let’s face it, i’m more of a luddite than you are. ;=)