At the time, Iran had for a couple of years implemented an internet censorship platform, blocking access to much of the internet. Nearly all international news agencies (CNN, BBC, NPR, etc.) were inaccessible; so were most of "web 2.0".
Despite the widespread censorship, there was a large active community of independent blogs, non-sanctioned news sites, and small e-publications. The reason this structure could thrive was that even though these websites and weblogs were blocked, they were accessible through Google Reader.
Because of the way Google services were implemented, the government could not block Reader without also blocking GMail and Google Search, which was not an option. As long as authors had a way (like a not-yet-blocked VPN or a friend outside the country they could email to) to post articles, people could read them, like them, comment on them, etc. Iran's censorship was to significant degree neutralized by this setup. The community was large, strong, and thriving. They even had their own jargon: the community was referred to as blogestan [1]; Google Reader was called Gooder, etc.
And then, Google, for some (now obviously incorrect, but ultimately irrelevant to my point) financial calculation, decided to kill Reader. Just like that, overnight, the breadth of the web accessible to an average Iranian decreased by orders of magnitude. The entire community of freethinking authors and their followers disappeared. The only news websites remaining accessible were those sanctioned by the government, pushing the official narrative.
Google put a large nail in the coffin of internet freedom in Iran. For that, I will never forgive them.
[1] with the -stan suffix, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan
I remember one SaaS product we wanted to use at our company had one major js file that had the word "proxy" in the title. The product had nothing to do with circumvention or anything but the national internet filters picked up that word and blocked it completely. Thus, we couldn't use that service at all.
Although I hate that I can't block YouTube on our metered connections with a URL whitelist as Google logins require calls to accounts.youtube.com.
It's interesting that they didn't block gmail and Google search. The Chinese government did that a couple of years ago, which surprisingly didn't cause widespread criticism except among the highly educated group.
If their policies were a bit more cohesive, maybe the people who killed Reader would have remembered these declarations, and maybe decided differently.
So instead of asking how this is good for Google as a company, you have to look at whether it's good for a single project within Google. PWAs and AMP seem like the most likely candidates.
Makes two jaded HN readers so far :)
They are developing free, probably open source, plugins and themes for WordPress. Also they stated that they will help develop the supported AMP plugin.
That's great. Google will make it much better. It needs help right now.
I just don't understand why people are snubbing and thumbing their noses at Google for contributing their world-class resources to making free, open source software better.
Sure, their interests align with getting a foothold in this ecosystem, but I don't think their play is to poison WordPress.
Not that your wrong for being suspicious of their motives in general. They have broken some pretty cool stuff.
I've never done any WP development, but my understanding is that WP core/internals are essentially OK, but plugins have gaping security holes. I think internals are messy because WP shares the PHP philosophy of avoiding major breaking changes but their front end tooling is probably less mature (because Jesus webpack, 4 major versions in as many years, wtf)
Anyway, I hope we have reason to be optimistic here, but it looks like the beginning of something awful
So, the good thing is that Google will not push WP to run on an alternate language, because the entire value of the project is its API compatibility. That's also the bad thing.
The thing is that there would be no point in doing so (which, admittedly, hasn't stopped Google before).
Right now Google needs WordPress. Without WordPress, where is Google going to place ad spots? Facebook? And WordPress has PHP as a massive underestimated advantage - every Tom, Dick and Harry can spend 5 minutes to install WordPress on a $5 a month shared-hosting plan, something no Ruby/Rust/Go/Java/C++/Node/Erlang/Fashionable-Language-Of-The-Week can do.
I think it's important to note here that WordPress is a project, not a business or a company. I don't think Google is trying to break a community supported product that powers 24% of the web. Sure, build better doors and windows to their products. I don't see that as a bad thing. I happen to like Google, as do a large number of Internet publishers. Many of us will appreciate these efforts.
Google now has WordPress as the next internet thing to embrace and than kill off.
Miced feeling here. I hate WordPress but don't like Google doing it...
People launch online stores on it for the price of their domain name, hosting and some sweat. That is freaking cool; more projects should aspire to have that kind of impact
WP is very popular, but it is terrible from an engineering standpoint. My company decided to move to WP and every time we engage a WP developer or consulting company, and I give them my engineer requirements, most of them pass. I'm talking about things like command-line deployment, publish to test servers with git, things like that. So far, only one firm has not balked at this, and they seem to be very expensive. I don't think Google will put up with this type of thing.
And, don't forget, WP is OSS. Blogger wasn't, so that's why the comparison to it are not apples to apples.
If you're wanting to do that, why not just use Drupal, which has drush and drupal console. Also, drupal.org uses git for all those third party modules and themes.
How common is this with programmers in general though? If you frequent hackernews, you get the impression everyone does these things but this isn't going to be an accurate representation.
You do not need command-line deployment and test servers with wordpress, that's the whole point.
Does Google or any Megacorp act monolithically over the span of a decade?
I have a conspiracy theory:
These are myths writers from Wired and PC World want us to believe in so that they attract eyeballs.
And now you sir, have recirculated these myths!
It's just a shame that unintended consequences things like Google Reader over the years have done much to harm blogging. It could have been so much better...
In general, Google doesn’t want to encourage stuff that lives off their cloud. RSS is the best protocol for Facebook/G+ type stuff where you want feeds and updates, but it’s harder for central control.
Google has done this with other products over the past decades. I remember when Blogger used to generate flat html that would publish to self-hosted web sites. And Google desktop that would index your local machine. Lots of stuff that fit into “organize the world’s information” mission and empowered users was discarded or deemphasized in favor of things that put Google between users and their data.
And back in 2007ish I remember bloggers crying out to Google for help with some tools /APIs to help combat comment spam and Google basically ignoring it, leading to the eventual death of blog comments and blog based discussion.
Looking at all that, it's great to finally see Google trying to support bloggers - the people that have delivered some of the most interesting content in their index.
Or am I too jaded?