I actually fully agree with him on this. The open web is increasingly being threatened and locked down. We need to oppose that.

It's always easy to spout how we need to push forward open standards, but what we've seen instead is developers falling over themselves to develop for Apple and Facebook. The very people who are needed to push forward the open web are the very same people who spend their time and energy expanding the every growing empire of closed ecosystems.

I sense hypocrisy.

Salient quote:

You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? … Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

The OP was calling for distributed social interactions using open and standardised peer protocols/applications. All for that. Not clear that this precludes proprietary implementations.

Until then, crusts must be earned. Trivia of the week: blackberry handsets support .ogg files. Wonderful.

Why not call out Google then for not having an open source search engine or adsense or maps? Or maybe that's because Google doesn't open source anything that makes them money?

The open web has nothing to do with OS software or hardware. Unless you're typing this comment on a Stallman-approved machine, you're a sanctimonious hypocrite.

I personally want both and think both are quite tightly linked but it's not hypocrisy to value one and not the other.

On my Arch Linux, I use Chromium with a separate PDF reader and I don't use Flash. I suggest everyone do the same. For all intents and purposes, you will be using Chrome.

> especially how deeply it tries to push Google services.

Can you clarify what you are talking about? You can login with your Google account if you want tab sync etc. If you don't, you don't have to.

But you aren't. You are using Chromium.

> Can you clarify what you are talking about?

Google's AppStore, and their Apps on the new tab page (I forget if they had anything installed by default). Honestly, I don't feel like setting up a fresh install of Chrome to check. But you could answer your own question by doing this.

This isn't really what I've observed. Do you have a source?

We, the developer community should probably focus more time on standards based tools, than Twitter/FB/Google Apis - all we are doing is just help them gain more traction.

There are enough of us to keep a vibrant ecology going, but we'd have to commit to putting our energy there.

Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses.

It's hard for most of us to comprehend, but ready-made revenues of a few million bucks, even if it was $100M (unlikely), is not of interest to Google unless it's growing fast. Which RSS, isn't.

Welcome to Extremistan. Black Swans like Google do things that aren't intuitive.

"The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability"

Yes. This is indeed the direction Google has been moving, and it's a problem for those of us who enjoyed an open web, as users and developers.

Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down.

They tried with other standards too, e.g. PubSubHubbub, WebFinger. Most people have never heard of them.

There's no conspiracy theory needed here. Google tried with Reader too, for 8 years. It just didn't take off. Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier. Not the kind of people who read HN, but the kind of people who are too busy to figure out what seem like trivial technologies to early adopter types.

So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running.

All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. For a giant company focused on growth, that's all the reason you need to turn it off.

You know, I've seen this statement on almost every thread about Google Reader, and it seems to be one of those things that everyone is just giving a pass to.

Google's entire hiring and organisational model is (or at least should be) predicated on hiring great people to get things done. This is how every well run technical company operates. This idea that we all need "senior management attention" or "product manager" love is something that comes out of dysfunctional organisations without a shared vision. Could you imagine this statement being made about some of the tech company darlings here (37Signals, Github, Stripe etc.)?

If you're going to put a product in maintenance mode (or even slow growth) with a team who understands it, you don't need senior management attention from on high.

Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now - that's not going to go away any time soon and you better believe that it was much worse than someone coming along later and saying "Oh no, Google reader is so unchanged from 3 years ago, I hate Google." Anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps.

All these arguments are poor. Or, at best, if they're true, they signal that Google has really lost its way - it's now a behemoth organisation that requires senior management oversight on every single product offering, and any non-spectacular product could at any instant bring the entire organisation down with its combination of toxic legal and toxic risk.

Some might protest that Reader should be the exception, but Google is the only one with the numbers, and I do believe Reader's popularity has been amplified by the nature of its loyal users. It's unlikely a complaint from a disgruntled SketchUp user is going to the top of HN.

"Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now"

Most of my non-technical family and friends haven't even heard of Reader and aren't aware of its shutdown. OTOH If Reader had some security leak that caused people's GMails to be read, they'd certainly hear about it and Google's seniors would be hauled into Congress or the EU to explain themselves.

At risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I don't believe Google has lost its way when you look at their performance over the past couple of years. If stock price is any indication, the all-time high (at a time when its rivals have been flat or in decline) suggests the market doesn't feel that way either.

The fact is, many many Google services don't make money in and of themselves. But they add value to the broader ecosystem as a whole.

Whether Google wanted to shut their service down is their business, but the weird machinations that have been trotted out to justify (senior management time, legal and technical risk, reputational risk) are really bizarre when taken within the broader context of how Google does and should operate.

Risk analysis is one of the things companies do when they make decisions.

No-one is justifying here. This is just a conjecture about why it's in their interest to shut it down, contrary to impassioned arguments about how much money they could make to keep it. It's not a "justification" because no moral dimension has been mentioned here.

I'd like to know how you would explain to shareholders that you are spending thousands upon thousands of pounds running a service which generates no revenue and doesn't encourage use of its other products ("anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps." hence no ad revenue or cross selling). It's nice if companies can do this but they aren't charities, this was a piece of charity google had to let go... and now we have a beautiful ecosystem of RSS clients with innovation and variety, I can't remember the last time I saw a monopoly was crushed of the companies choice and a tonne of little grass roots were seeded.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-throwing-money-down...

Larry and Sergey are the shareholders. They want to spend millions on self-driving cars, no one questions it. No one was questioning whatever tiny amount they were spending on Reader.

As someone who never used Google Reader and therefore doesn't really care either way about it, I can live with that, because the article raises points that strike me as generally true, and are discussed to rarely for my taste.

> Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier

You said this about Google Reader, but I'd like to take it out of context and go on a tangent (because when all you have is an off-road bike, everything looks like a ramp :D)

I don't think anyone denies that literacy is really important, some would call it a human right, or at least something deriving from human rights. But what would constitute "literacy in the information age"? Or maybe even "just" "web literacy"?

Being able to sign up to Facebook? Being able to write HTML and CSS? Being able to code a little, enough to be able to discern cool projects from total charlatans? Being able to code well enough to do anything they could possibly want their computer to do, and to contribute to the pool from which they took in however small ways?

I don't know where to exactly draw the line, but I am positive that signing up for Facebook is not enough (regardless of what Facebook might tell people, duh). It's easy, but it leads nowhere, or not very far. It is akin to having someone read and write for you, instead of ever learning it. Perfectly acceptable in the short run, when there is no other choice, but pathetic, a complete no-no, in the long run.

Our society would be even more of a cold, dark cellar without widespread literacy. Not that everyone reads, but most people at least could if they wanted to, sometimes they do when it's necessary, and that helps. With that in mind, I worry about how naively we treat this brave new computerized world.

There is this quote that predates the web but which the web constantly makes me think of, and which I believe goes hand in hand with another one:

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." -- A. J. Liebling "Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker (14 May 1960)

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." -- George Orwell

Yes, not being able to think is easier. I know, I've been there. But only in the short run, in the long run it makes everything impossibly hard.

The web as we know it, isn't even two decades old, and we already act all wise about it, that "that's just how it is". Yet we didn't give up on literacy for hundreds of years, if not millenia. If anyone today suggested that hey, wouldn't it be kinda okay if most people couldn't read, as long as the others made sure they select the best books to read to them from...? they'd be laughed out of any group of people. Most people on the planet older than 10 would see through that. It took us so long to get here, but damnit, here we are.

I don't see how computers are different, other than currently being mostly pushed and therefore being held hostage by motives of greed, consumerism and distraction, and our own shallow desire for instant gratification. But those motives are like clouds in the wind, in the way they are manifested they're rather a zit that grew in an unclean spot, than a "law of nature"... while computation and communication are hard facts that will not go anywhere ever, until the very end of the universe, or at least the end of life in it.

Whoever obstructed literacy in history is now dust and their motives forgotten, whatever temporary advantage over others it gained them they lost - but literacy remains, and the gratitude to those who teached others with patience and creativity will never waver or diminish. Again, I don't see how computers are different. Not everybody is Shakespeare, and not everybody has to be Carmack, but that doesn't mean to just leave it to the "experts".

Kicking out the ladder under you and being the middleman for what you found in the tree is a game old as dirt, and I think one nice step to help improving the physical world would be to stop repeating its worst mistakes in the "virtual" one.

/end rant.. no, wait:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein

I wish I could dig it up again, but ages ago I listened to an interview with Weizenbaum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum )... he said computers, technology in general, just like everything, can be used to empower people, or to disenfranchise/control them.

In some ways, things like Facebook make people "experiment with publishing" that might not have before, so that's cool... but it shouldn't end there. Just like "organizing the world's information" is not Google's task. If Facebook's and Google's goal was to make themselves obsolete, I'd be all for it.

But it's not, and like with many others, "innovation" is often enough just the excuse to be the middleman. I personally don't need those inventions. Sometimes flowers grow on a dung heap, but most of it is really dung... and flowers can grow perfectly fine on meadows, too.

Maybe when my phone gets enough bandwidth and screen size to make RSS useful I'd care more about that but even so, I can switch to a different alt. at that time if needed.

Google has made it obvious, not just by killing Reader but by many of its recent actions, that it has switched sides from the open network to the walled garden. And the mindset of the walled garden does stop people from blogging (because they're too busy clicking "Like" buttons) or consuming RSS feeds (or any other information channel that doesn't appear in their walled garden).

Personally, I'm with you--I own my own domain name, host my own blog, have my own email that's independent of Google or anyone else, etc. If I want to consume someone's RSS feed, I can just do it; I don't need a walled garden to do it for me. But you and I are outliers.

I'm honestly curious. Because while I'm a hacker and know how to do many things with my computer, I'm literate because I fell in love with the machine as a child.

But I spend at least an hour a day commuting in my deathbox, and all I know is how to change gears, start/stop, and (more hp + lower weight = faster).

On the other hand, to a novice, a computer is about browsing the web, playing games, sending email, and so on. But after you learn more about computers, you can do so many more things. Extra knowledge gives you a lot of extra power.

And while more hp + lower weight = faster, more hp = faster and lower weight = faster, generally. Ceteris paribus, The ratio of hp and weight is the fasterfication factor.

Yes, and it is. You can drive your car anywhere you want.

But it's so hard to hard to pick where to go, it's much simpler to pick from a simple list of places. Our car only drives you to the top 20 most important locations of your town, we find that our customers don't want to go anywhere else. We are sunsetting your ability to drive to unimportant places.

Glass is following the same route. With the delay of the GDK, Glassware is the current development route. It is just a REST protocol on a limited 1,000 requests per day. I imagine the GDK will not surface until they are satisfied with the results from the audience.

Yes, they did try open standards. However, the reason it failed was not (IMO) because open standards were a bad idea.

The Open Standard initiatives failed at Google because they did not really know how to do UX. They have only recently started to figure it out.

(I would argue that Google+ is significantly better than OpenSocial ever was, and Google needs to improve it even further)

If that was the case, couldn't Google have sold the site to someone else, instead of scrapping it?

I'm an engineer and not a business person but I imagine that finding someone to buy Reader and then executing the deal would also be non-trivial.

It is in Google's best interest to have RSS and individual blogs die. Amusingly enough, it is also what Facebook wants, so the two giants are fully alinged on this one.

About 6 months ago I quit Facebook and Google+, deciding to publish my stuff on my pages and my blog alone, instead of throwing them into closed gardens. I do not regret that decision, even though readership dropped significantly.

So why exactly is the death of RSS in Google's best interest unless they're actively trying to send users away to their competition ?

Sure he didn't do an app for Android (until someone did for him) and is a bit snarky about it as a platform, but the web version of Instapaper existed before the app did and powered the whole thing.

Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in).

His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related, but he's originally (and still) a PHP web guy.

He discussed that at some point, I think it might have been on Accidental Tech Podcast. As I remember the idea was that since The Magazine wasn't terribly important (security wise) he could avoid having to give people another username/password. He said it was something of an experiment and he probably wouldn't do it again. I think Casey and Siracusa both said they found it odd and confusing at first.

I always thought of Marco's attitude about iOS as Windows PTSD.

Instapaper has an open API, and The Magazine is available online.

Is their overall strategy to drive adoption working these days? I know their number of users must be quite large now, but AFAICT it is pretty much hugely inflated by being a catch-all for anyone with any kind of Google account.

I actually like Google+ quite a bit and have a lot of people in my circles and I'm in quite a lot of other people's circles, but I never actually go to Google+ anymore (unless I'm following a link to some Linus post or something from somewhere else) because it simply never hit the required critical mass of actual mainstream usage for me to switch. Everyone I know and want to keep up with IRL is still stuck on Facebook, ergo I'm stuck on Facebook even though I don't particularly care for it. Even among the smallish subgroup of people I know IRL who did embrace Google+ at first, they are virtually all like me now, with accounts that scarcely ever get used.

I'm not sure what Google+ has to do to make converts of the masses, but at least among my circles they aren't doing it currently despite whatever collateral damage they are causing in trying to force people there.

It's not supposed to be a social network like Facebook. The thing you see when you visit G+ - people microblogging and sharing pics etc - is just a fraction of the whole point of G+.

G+ is Google's social layer. In data terms, it turns people into "first-class citizens" across Google's estate, instead of every project just shoehorning in their own "user" structure. That's why you see G+ in Play reviews, YouTube comments, integrated into email, and so on.

Because one day, you're going to type into Google's Search engine "what's for dinner?" And it is going to tell you.

How? Because it knows who your wife is, and it knows your wife's phone number, so it texts her saying "what's for dinner."

Example is crude, I know. But I can't think of a better way to explain what I see Google's end game is with G+.

The idea is really more that you'll go to look at Google Now when you wonder what's for dinner, and there'll be a card telling you that, and you won't even need to ask.

Though the search bit might be an intermediate step on the way there.

I'm increasingly feeling like the problem with Google+ is that it didn't start with a minimum idea. They went straight for the concept of 'Facebook' and didn't give users enough incentive to make the switch.

Maybe they could have made a "Facebook Export" importer to populate streams with existing posts, friends, and photos. Maybe they could have made it more social and personal.

Or maybe Facebook's momentum prevented people from actually making the switch. Enough people are satisfied by Facebook that they wouldn't abandon it for a couple of friends.

Google just didn't play the cards right, and I feel like Google+ has gotten too complicated for anyone to just jump in and figure it out.

FB is for IRL friends/family, G+ as long-form Twitter. It's Twitter for people who don't get 140 characters. I'd say the strategy is working, given the amount of G+ links I see. Personally I'm more interested in what my G+ links say than FB (because they're interests of mine, not just IRL'ers talking about their nail polish), although I check both every so often.

The G+ posts are basically blog posts that are in Google's walled garden. Not much unlike Twitter or Facebook. You have the power to say what you want. For now. As long as you use their systems. And don't expect to own your data or your own online presence.

Regardless of how you separate all the food on your own personal plate so that it never touches, the problem is the proprietary lunch trays. Not everyone likes those.

I feel like Richard Stallman at lunchtime.

Many people don't like the 140 character restriction and I've read many who don't get Twitter. For about two accounts I didn't either and only found it "working" on a third, partly due to the people I was interacting with. That doesn't diminish those who don't like or get it, it just means they don't. Life goes on. I personally prefer G+ for depth. For example, neither your nor my replies would fit into Twitter, so we'd be stuck with glib and dismissive.

I don't know what social network would qualify as long-form twitter, to be honest.

If I construct a popular online social network, I could run it on Debian, code it in Emacs, have all the source code on Github, genuflect to a picture of Richard Stallman daily, and still have no open APIs for users to interact with their data. If most major players on the Internet lock your data down, then many common uses of the Internet will in a very real sense become proprietary even if it is running entirely on free software.

I'm sure it's fun to smugly go "well, you use iOS so you should like closed things," but it kinda betrays a significant distance between you and the point.

Marco was blaming Google/Twitter/Facebook locking down devs/users in their own eco-system and your point is you get the interoperability within Apple's own garden? Come on.

BTW, you give a perfect example of what being hypocrite looks like. Sure, you can enjoy your time by hosting a closed service on top of open source infrastructure, that's hypocrite. You can also enjoy your time in a closed eco-system ever since from day 1 with absolutely no interoperate and still manage to find way to fuck those closed web based eco-system. That's also hypocrite.

Interoperate means what? Choice and competition. I see no spirit of either in Apple's eco-system. And somehow Marco always find a way to blame other companies for that.

Funny: that's what most people said of RSS 0.x (poorly crafted), 1.x (over-engineered) and 2.x (ambiguous and full of badly-specified edge-cases). Atom was supposed to fix all that.

The article got that ass backward. With Google Reader, you were locked in Google's ecosystem. Without Google Reader, you are free to use whatever RSS client you can find.

I think the role of Google Reader for RSS is truly overrated but please show me how I'm wrong.

This is (or was) a false dilemma. You could, with Google Reader, use a vast multitude of RSS clients: you didn't have to use Google Reader proper. And, because nearly everyone supported Google Reader as a common sync API, you could switch between clients without losing your place or your data. Want to try X flavor-of-the-month RSS app? No problem: just log in with your Google account. Don't like it? No problem either: switch back to your other RSS client and everything—even what articles you've read and starred—are right where you left off.

Now, there's at least a half dozen competing and incompatible sync APIs and numerous perfectly-adequate RSS clients rendered obsolete because they haven't been updated to support other sync services. Because of the lack of a common and ubiquitous sync API, choosing an RSS client now that Google Reader is gone will be more locked down than before, at least for the foreseeable future.

Which is Marco's point: companies don't want you to be able to freely move your data around. They want you to use their service. Yes, there's more choice, but choosing one service over another winds up making it harder to make a different choice down the line.

You think? Before the Google Reader shutdown was announced, pretty much every mobile RSS client was just a front end to reader, using it to manage the feeds. And pretty much every other web RSS reader died off. Safari killed RSS integration. Net News Wire stagnated.

I mean, honestly, was there a single healthy RSS client at the end of 2012, being actively developed?

- and, unlike twitter they have a lot of space to move in (pay for api access anyone? Voluntarily subscriptions to feeds? )

Creating openness is not good enough. There were business reasons to support every long lasting open technology, and with the dominance of proprietary social media platforms, that business reason (for RSS at least) is dead.

The web opened up e commerce, and modern social media lowered the barrier to entry for online communities.

Its the same problem cryptography has, if its not dead simple and obviously useful don't expect it to stick around (at least at mass appeal)

An absurd statement on the face of it (even with the weasel-word qualifier), given Google+'s large number of active users. In fact, given the traffic there, I suspect his ridiculous Cupertino fanboism is to blame for not considering Google+ a smashing success.

Huh? Does _anyone_ consider Google+ a smashing success? On what basis?

It's very hard not to think of Apple when reading this sentence.

This article is about openness and interoperability, not about spying or government agencies - not sure your analogy stands. Plus, I think it's a pretty well known fact that Marco is indeed a sympathiser of Apple (hence the "conspicuously missing" bit).

(although it is a footnote)

However, Apple doesn't really make claims about openness (apart from a brief marketing push around OSX 10.2), whereas Twitter's success came from liberal access to its API and Google makes a big deal out of its openness.

Remember everyone: "Open web" is very important! But your browser itself doesn't need to be open source. Use Safari instead of Chrome. Your OS doesn't need to be open source either. Use and develop for OSX. Use and develop for iOS. Refuse developing for Android and make iOS-exclusive apps. Buy all Apple products and support Apple. Then open a blog to advocate openness and bash companies that build open source tools.

Google+ Sparks was a kind of RSS/StumbleUpon thing. Flopped.

Reader sharing became sharing into Google+. Many in the Reader crew defiantly cried out against it and said they wouldn't share things if they had to use Google+ to do it.

It wouldn't have been all roses no matter how you cut it.

I think people are in the bargaining phase of dealing with their post-Reader era grief.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't want publishers to use RSS/Atom. They want them to publish using their respective, proprietary APIs.

The blogpost at http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/pubsubhubbub-... also mentions a Feed API.

I'm confused, I guess this means that only the sync + ui for reader is dead.

So, what?

> PubSubHubbub was very much part of a different era.

PubSubHubbub is very much part of now, which is why they just released a new version of the spec.

If you think Marco is a particularly rabid fanboi, congratulations on your sheltered and privileged life. Apple fanbois get much worse than that.

I'm not a fan of Marco, but you're right. If Marco really was a rabid fanboi, more than half of his blog would be pointless claim chowder posts.

Twitter and Facebook are for posting links to things you've found or broadcasting short messages up to a few sentences. Twitter is for doing those things publicly, Facebook is for doing those things within the circle of your friends.

Blogs (and RSS) are for posting longer pieces of text, articles and such things. When you want to post an article, you don't put it on Twitter (for obvious reasons) or Facebook (because it limits your audience), you put it on your blog (self-hosted or on a service like Blogger or Wordpress) and you post links to it to Twitter and/or Facebook. And when you want to invite your friends to a movie, you don't post that to your blog, you post that on Facebook.

So I'm not worried that Twitter and Facebook don't have RSS feeds - I wouldn't even want to see my friends' FB posts when I'm reading longer articles in my RSS reader. And I'm not worried about Facebook killing blogs and RSS - yes, most people post stuff on Facebook and not on their blogs, but that's because most people don't write anything that would resemble an article.

(I do agree though that Twitter should have some open API for getting someone's public tweets in a machine-readable form, but it doesn't have to be RSS, JSON is just fine.)

Anyway, my point is that this isn't a conspiracy. Google+ might have all sorts of potential for moneymaking but its not google's main business at this point. This trend towards more closed systems is largely emergent. These closed environments are we're people like to interact.

Why does Google have to "slow down" Facebook? What does that even mean? Is Google only successful if no other successful web companies exist?

I just have a gut feeling that shutting down Reader may have made life easier for Google when it comes to National Security Letters, subpoenas, warrants or whatever. Turning over a list of what someone has read, does seem a bit evil.

Maybe I am being naive in attributing a positive motivation to them on this issue. But it just feels more plausible in light of the backlash of negative feelings the shutdown has created, who harbors such feelings, and the rather trivial resources required to maintain the service.

If they were turning over logs from Reader - and why wouldn't they have been requested - what options would Google have? Carry on or shutdown or lawyer up, are about it.

Would the backlash when such a practice was disclosed be less than that for shutting down Reader? I doubt it. People who didn't use Reader, like me, don't care about its shutdown. But I'd probably be full of condemnation and brimstone when commenting on a story about Google turning over reading lists to the government.

If the NSA is getting as much data as we expect, then they can get people's reading lists from their ISPs. So Google shutting down Reader wouldn't have kept much of anything out of federal hands.

Further, if Google had a sudden attack of nobility, then it would be Gmail or Google Voice that they'd be shutting down. That's where the real private information is, and that's what most people are angry about. Not what a small fraction of Google's audience gets in their daily papers.

As long as content continues to be centralized in those three companies interop is toast.

Between your post and the author's, I feel like we're talking past each about what the above two phrases mean.

First of all, what do you call a "locked-in API"? I would imagine it'd be an API written in a proprietary language or only works on certain systems or browsers. Personally, I haven't seen that from any of the mentioned companies. Afaik, most of Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's API work on any browser available, any computer that can run those browsers, including mini-computers and smartphones, even some dumb phones. Where's the lock-in? The fact that you put your data in their databases? The fact that there isn't a single format shared between each?

About interoperability being "toast," to what extent? I could probably point you to a large amount of websites and web services that have integration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sometimes all at the same time. Sounds like that they can operate together to me. Perhaps, you want them to provide integration between each other?

If Facebook or Google provides an API that's not an open standard, you're locked-in because the day they decide to remove the API, or to charge high prices, or deprecate a crucial feature, you can't switch easily to another platform.

But—I'm curious to see what everyone thinks—are we too late for this attitude to change anything?

But I'm hearing the same complaint all over the place, so I'm starting to think I might not be alone.

I've just been put off by the idea that maybe I'm an outsider and people don't want that, and it'll be months of work potentially for nothing. Maybe I should start some thing even if I just hand it off. I dunno, would love to see what the thirst is out there.

I also don't know if I'd call it an attitude but more an alignment towards the actual situation. Many have compared the various services mentioned to AOL and the walled garden, but they all still thrive on open, crawlable, & indexed links.

What moved the needle for google 5 years ago is not what will move the needle today. Google will focus more on search, g+, android, apps, cloud, because those things can make an impact relative to Google's current scale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403558

What's good for the net is the opposite, which is the kind of decentralized it-just-routes-around system that the internet was designed to be in the first place.

To my chagrin, most of my clients, friends and family prefer the standardized and sanitized sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, *.google.com, Reddit and Digg.

I miss the anarchy days, when every site was a random gesture thrown up by someone possessed of the spirit of an idea or a plan, and not all websites were standardized web apps that are just too "perfect" to be fun, or to permit evolution.

/off my lawn

Reader was not known to most people, but to many technical folks. Among them are many bloggers. Shutting down Reader certainly removed one big plus of the open blogging world.

Thereby people have less arguments to blog openly. How is that a problem for Google? If people choose to move over to closed platforms, that content becomes inacessible to both Google's crawler, and to Google ads on blogs.

Thus, by turning off Reader, Google actually hurts itself not only directly, but indirectly by treating the openness of the web less favorably.

Will we be using Facebook daily 5 years from now? 10 years? 20?

Or is the next war in augmented reality, which Google has a head start? (but using which social network?)

Anyone have good links to futurist thinkers on these topics?

My guess would be something like a new publishing standard or system that makes it easy to package good writing into an immersive mobile form, possibly via Newsstand. But just spitballin' here.

The prepositional phrase is not in the beginning of the sentence and is less than four words so no comma needed!

The former strategy was pretty good for getting around people's ad blocking, since it was essentially a long form text ad.

Amen.

Openness and interoperability aren't going away, they're merely being refined. That might mean taking away the hacker's toy for a bit while some kinks get worked out (i.e. Google's Jabber issue and the switch to Blink). It might also mean that we live in a monoculture for a while (Webkit). But regardless, the web is steadily improving and no matter how much you all try to spin it, RSS and Google Reader really aren't the martyrs you claim them to be. It sucks that even a successful product can be mercilessly shut down by the evil Google tyrants, but it shouldn't be surprising at all.

Sometimes companies make decisions that hurt a part of their user base for some perceived benefit for other users. Did Google fuck up by closing Reader? Probably. But it's not the end of the world.

There are only so many eyeballs, and right now being very sticky is an obviously viable strategy for dominance. Google didn't get into phone operating systems because they knew or cared much about them. They did it because their revenue base was under long-term threat. (Hell, Google is trying experiments to see if they can get in front of your actual eyeballs, intermediating your entire waking life.) And Facebook tried taking over people's phones for exactly the same reason.

Talk to the Googlers who have left over the last few years, and you'll hear very clearly that things have changed internally.

Uhm, what?

So the company selling my milk want me to drink milk, just milk and nothing but milk?

I thought one of the founding ideas of capitalism is that you can strike deals that benefit everyone. That you don't have to screw anyone over.

Internet is such a big space (unlike milk) that if an Internet-company wants you to use their Internet-stuff and no-one else's Internet-stuff .. well, I don't know what will happen, but it can't be good.

Capitalism screws people over by the day in America

Finally something we can agree on

I am saying that Google's commitment to openness has declined substantially over the years, and that this is due to their interpretation of the commercial context.

These companies' goals are not necessarily aligned with goals of an interoperable Internet. This has been repeated over and over again: Twitter locking down its API, the percentage of ads on Google search, lack of privacy on Facebook, etc...

You probably need open source/Wikipedia style alternatives to prevent abuse. They don't have to replace the commercial ones, just provide counterbalance. I think people have tried to create open versions of Twitter, Facebook, and possibly Google but they haven't succeeded.

Wikipedia is an outlier in that it is a non-commercial service versus primarily being code or protocols. Services have ongoing costs which make it much harder for non-commercial entities to survive.

I think the Firefox(?) mobile os is a good start.

Wikipedia is a bad example, as there is plenty of abuse there [1].

[1] http://www.smoblogger.com/wikipedia-sucks/ http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog/archives/... http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100506025259AA...

Many more, but it's hard to find them since putting "wikipedia" in your search now causes google to look up those words on wikipedia itself first...

Why does HN continue to think that companies on the web who give their services to millions of users away for free (please don't repeat the you are the product being sold meme), are entitled to direct said companies to keep any project you deem useful around for as long as you deem it important (to said $RANDOM_MILLION_USER)?

With a userbase the size of Google there will be millions of people complaining about removing every single product they've ever released. Google isn't the Oracle of the world where Oracle releases a product, charges you out the wazoo, gives you 24/7 support and only enter the market of said product after researching if it is a good business investment or not. Google is the one who experiments, tests, lets you use for free, and either retires or promotes projects which turn out to be good for the company (either tech wise, or to the dismay of HN money wise). That's their MO.

Google and Facebook allow you to export your data for most of their services, and I think we can all agree that Google at least are good at giving users a fair amount of heads up before they sunset a product (or should we call it an experiment?).

It seems the prevailing notion on HN anymore is once you are a big company (bad), any service you offer the internet no matter how long ago, should be kept around indefinitely, because you are a big company (bad) and you now make a lot of money (bad). Therefore you should let everyone free ride on your platform so that fellow (broke) startups can bootstrap themselves off your prior work (good). But once said (good, broke) startups start making lots of cash, they will then become (bad) and fall into the same category of other (bad) internet giants.

This is a discussion of the trend we increasingly see of big companies abandoning interoperability in favor of their own locked down protocols, APIs, etc. That's why the article is titled "Lockdown".

Marco nailed it with his closing statement: "We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership."

If you're arguing against that, honestly, I'm going to straight up now call you wrong.

He just doesn't want to play that game.

His article is a call to action, basically saying, "If we want an open web, we'll have to (continue to) build it."

That should be totally obvious to everyone. The web was nice and open when ads ruled the world, but now companies -- the same ones that pay our salaries either directly or by proxy -- have to make money to pay those salaries in ways that aren't display ads.

Google/FB/Twitter/etc have plenty of ways to get data out of their systems via API. If you don't want to use a proprietary API to get the data out then don't put the data in proprietary systems.

You want an open web? Great. I'll make a response that's common in f/oss: submit a patch. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to do. I don't mean to be too snarky, but stuff like this grinds my gears:

> That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them...

Right, right, they stood on the shoulders of giants and whatever. But guess what, your curated news feeds and carefully cultivated twitter feeds and everything else -- they all cost someone somewhere something to build, money or time or both, and without that world to build on, you wouldn't have them.

I forgot what my point was. Rant /off.

Unless someone is demanding legislation to force Google to keep Reader alive, stop with the entitlement bullshit. We are entitled to dislike business models and approaches, we are entitled to criticize them, and we are entitled to not use projects from companies which follow them.

Edit: If you did, and that's your takeaway, I think you started with a predefined notion about its content. Please read it again and try to forget about reader. Reader is not the point. (I'm not the author btw ;)

One issue in this specific case might be that Google has way more than enough money to keep Reader alive, whereas many people on HN see their own startups fail due to financial troubles, and if they do make it to an exit their products are often killed by acquihires. Wealth is wasted on the wealthy and all that.

It feels like a betrayal because we thought Google shared our values. Really I don't think this is about entitlement at all. Using that word in this context amounts to shaming people about the anger they feel over a breach of trust. Entitlement is more like having your parents fly in to demand the university raise one of your grades so you can get in to medical school.

The frustrating thing for some of us was that this is how it has always been and trying to point it out to people just got you shouted down. Google has always been about making money, what else? Watching otherwise intelligent hackers get so genuinely bamboozled by a simple motto has been surprising, to say the least.

I looked it up and they announced the motto with the IPO in 2004. Sometimes I think I compare their actions now to my expectations of the pre-IPO company; it doesn't really make sense.

Also, I hate, hate, hate this line of argument. It gets trotted out every time an immensely powerful corporation does something that upsets people. It's universal applicability makes it universally pointless.

My friends aren't entitled to anything from me either. But if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch, and I am perfectly fine with that.

> if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch

This never happened. It's more like, "if I decide to stop showing up because it no longer benefits me and give my friends a month's notice, they're going to bitch." Sure, that's true, but it seriously doesn't make you evil or mean the end of all friendships ever like Marco would make it seem. It just doesn't work like that.

Also, If something is universally applicable, it might have a nugget of truth somewhere, by the way.

So we got dependent. And they pulled the rug out. People only got dependent on the assumption it would be persistent. Google's entire business is making things that don't make them money but give them more avenues for ads. And your freaking news feed from Google is the best place I can imagine for targeted advertising and to figure out a users browsing habits. My emails are stuffed with spam, my google searches could be anyone, but you can reliably say I'm browsing my reader feeds and I'm interested in the articles I am opening and those are the ultimate target for advertising.

I'd say something about how social networks factor in, but I don't use any them (or Twitter) so I could care less. But I highly doubt that Google got its desired outcome from killing Reader - they lost a vast swathe of technical users and lost confidence from even more, and they won't see these people move over to consuming content on Google Plus because they don't give a crap how many dog treats the neighbors dog ate yesterday, they care about xkcd strips or gamasutra article feeds. You get a wall of shit on Google+ that you can at least curate in the RSS world. Why I would ever want to use it I have no idea. If I want to talk or interact with people, I'll use XMPP or SMTP. If I want to consume textual or image based media with consistent publication, I'll use RSS. Notice how I keep quoting protocols - because they are open and interoperable. I can expect other people to be ably to reliably target said protocols and distribute their content to anyone that wants it because you have a myriad of tools to access them. That share on G+ button only works with G+, and like the article said, Google wants you stuck on their services.

So I switched the default search engine on my grandparents, mother, cousins, and neighbors to duckduckgo. I'm looking for free web email services that compete with gmail to drop that too, because who knows when Google will rip that rug out from under us as well. "Why are you sending emails? Just send G+ messages! You are all on G+ right? It is expensive to keep a copy of all those email attachments!"

Microsoft did something similar with IE back in the day: it was better than Netscape and it quickly dominated, but then they kept adding proprietary hooks (ActiveX etc) and the open web started to stagnate - until Firefox saved the day with a faster, more secure alternative that slowly gained back hard-won market share.

I don't think this phenomenon of hurting open platforms is necessarily intentional, perhaps it's a side-effect near-monopoly products in a given space.

I'm sorry, but it is true.

It is worth noting that Google did not start charging a monthly fee for Reader. If they had, I suspect the vast majority of users - including API users - would have gladly paid for it. Rather, they pulled the plug completely, and the only reason they did that was because they simply did not give a shit. It was an utterly disrespectful thing to do to users who came to rely on the service.

There's also the fact that Reader crushed most of its competition after it came out[1]. It was like a Walmart that opened smack in the middle of a town - none of the smaller shops could compete with it and they closed. In the case of Reader, this was okay with most people, since it was free at the time. But then Google said, "welp, this isn't making us any money" and shut it down. Too bad the noteworthy competitors were long gone by then. That's the absurdity of this whole thing.

To go back to the Walmart example, it's like a Walmart that comes into town, forces the smaller shops to close, and then leaves town a few years later. Where will the townspeople do their shopping now?

I know it isn't a perfect analogy, but I think it is accurate enough to get the point across: if you come out with a free service and end up displacing everyone else in the market, then you have an ethical responsibility to at least try to continue the service in some shape or form. Start charging for it and explain why you are doing it. Some may complain but most will understand and agree to pay since they have come to appreciate it and rely on it. Or serve ads, somehow. But whatever you do, don't just shut it down citing lack of profits. Because that just makes you look like a tool.

[1]Interestingly enough, while I was searching past HN submissions to find that story, I came across this one from 4 years ago, titled "Is Google Reader next on the chopping block?" The article itself seems gone but the comments are still there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435555. The comments themselves are chilling, but even more so because of their similarities to the ones on the more recent "With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?" submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434021

Even though it's possible for another watercompany to come in and clean up the well, too many people distrust well water, and hell, all the cool kids are now drinking bottled Googlewater.

This separation of concerns makes it clear that more than one trust issue is implicated. I think you're saying that users might distrust a service's permanence (frankly all services should be suspect on this point), but it seems other users might distrust a service's discretion with their reading habits. By separating this aspect of RSS consumption from all others, so that e.g. the really paranoid could just run their own service, everybody would be able to arrange a suitable situation.

This is exactly the kind of entitlement the OP mentions. Also, how would you know your product you wanted to release was going to displace everyone in the market? Does this apply only to large companies or is it small shops as well? What if they lose interest or what if they lost users when they add this magically and universally loved paid solution? There is no such ethical responsibility and they shouldn't be because it is ridiculous. Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.

This is a funny question because I thought I was very clear in my original post. I said with great power comes great responsibility. The kind of great power I am talking about here is the kind Google has as one of the world's largest (read: richest) and most influential tech giants.

>>Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.

This is ironic, because Google Reader was shut down not because it cost Google any noticeable amount of money to operate, but because it didn't fit some Google exec's ideological vision. The precedence I'm trying to establish is at least ethical in the sense that it puts the well-being of users first.

Companies have a responsibility to put the desires of their owners first, and as a public company that generally means profits. This is hardly an ideological vision, but more of a long term business plan, and even if reader was costing them nothing to maintain it still doesn't fit that plan.

Also, your solution is hardly more ethical than theirs, even if it puts the "well-being" of users first. It's just more binding than what already exists. In my opinion, it was perfectly ethical that Google gave its users a good head's up to the situation and that they even provide a way to find other services that might replace Reader. It's not like it randomly stopped existing one day or like they promised it would always be there. No moral code was broken and no ethics or rights were trampled on. It just sucks and you have every right to be upset. To be a proponent of "you either support it forever in some way or you're (ethically? morally?) evil" isn't really helping though.

If you want to close down a product, you can at least open-source it. Which is another thing Google could have done with Reader. It would have given another party the opportunity to pick it up and develop/maintain it.

Sorry, that's a cheap shot. This isn't about entitlement or whether services are free or paid, or even about Google reader specifically, and it's certainly not related to entitled users on HN.

From the article: That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

He's talking about whether we should accept the ongoing corralling of the web into walled gardens where there is one gatekeeper and landowner, and everyone else producing goods for the public is a sharecropper, and the public can only buy what's on offer - take it or leave it. There's a real danger in building or living inside the walls of these corporate communities (twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever Apple's equivalent to eWorld is called these days). The tension between large corporations and their users (free or not) is of course as old as the hills, but that doesn't mean we should give in to their latest attempts to lock users into one ecosystem that they control.

This instinct is why Apple prevents Amazon from selling on its iOS platform, why Amazon wants to be the world marketplace for everything, why Facebook encourages people to put their online lives exclusively behind a FB login, and why Google wants to channel everything through G+ and require an account for any activity on the web. It's a natural instinct for corporations, but not one we should accept or buy into.

There is something to your last statement, in that this behaviour seems to be tied to the size of a corporation - once it grows to a certain size, priorities inevitably change, the staff changes, and the drive to seek rent from customers and partners becomes overwhelming. So in a sense this is a natural cycle that it's difficult or impossible for companies to avoid. That doesn't meant that we as customers and developers should acquiesce to the brave new world, and start building our products or lives around services like reader - as many have found out this week, that's a bad strategy, because large corporations don't really care about the service, or the value to users, all they care about is the lock-in.

That means we can happily use these services, but should always remember they may be withdrawn by fiat, and never build a business on them - for example if you build your company dependent on a twitter, FB or G+ login, don't be surprised in a few years when they start to charge for the privilege of growing on their land. The open web is a better place to build in my opinion, it's hard to get started, but infinitely more rewarding to have your own space, as a reader or as a developer.