I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about 90s Microsoft.

Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything.

It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.

> I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now"

This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.

And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product. The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.

Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known.

Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer.

(On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)

> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)

Damnatio memoriae?

> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

Otherwise known as throwing it down the memory hole.

Neat. How did you know that?

(The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)

I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful.

I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere.

I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%...

"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.

(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)

> (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping,

One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize[0], meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas.

In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant.

I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. I suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. (To avoid various risks in bankruptcy courts, sometimes financing is arranged by selling some asset below market value with an agreement to buy it back at a fixed date at a fixed higher price. There might also be a rental agreement involved. The cash flows look like a secured loan, but in case the loan can't be repaid, a court order isn't necessary to seize assets... the collateral assets have already legally changed hands.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capesize

Does "Ascorer, Amit's Scorer" have anything to do with Amit Singhal, he who led Google Search for many years?

Yes, my understanding is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal wrote the first version of Ascorer and named it after himself.

It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.

Some people are trying to build a community here: https://neocities.org/

I can't believe that website is still around. I just got teleported to the 90's.

Neocities isn't that old. Perhaps you're thinking of Geocities, the '90s vintage website that inspired it?

I realized later that it's Geocities v2; essentially. Still a fun thought that sort of service is still a thing. I think Medium.com is probably the best offspring that I can think of.

Sign up is free and easy.

Those who want and for whom $5 is pocket change is encouraged to make a paid account to support it.

(Happy supporter, otherwise unaffiliated.)

And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.

Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.

But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.

And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.

Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing.

Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.

You can get it on linux: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/github-desktop-bin/ (mentioned in the official docs) or https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop.

What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.

Why would I need an "official desktop app" for anything, if I got a perfectly good git, and with git being perfectly integrated in modern IDEs (should I need a more GUI approach?)

I found active bookmarks in Firefox to meet my needs before they removed that feature. I don't remember Google Reader all that well and I'm wondering how it was different than other RSS readers. For example, Akregator is commonly available today. (I remember that Google Reader could aggregate more than just RSS feeds, but I don't remember exactly what.)

... so everything consolidated in G+?

I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a cool idea at the time, I thought.

That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated.

They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.

Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.

We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.

For some reason I never saw it working.

Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?

It was crappy but it's intention was good.

It wasn't the fastest, but I think that now browser (and CPU) tech has moved on since then, it'd probably be a lot smoother. I remember using it once to coordinate specs on a small contract job and it worked pretty well for that.

I liked wave a lot as well.

Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.

But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar.

But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.

This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click.

I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...

Did people have to have G+ accounts to receive invites? I know Facebook requires it, but if they just used standard calendaring events (maybe with an info link to g+?) that would seem a winner

Maybe they added it later? When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.

First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing

I swear material design was the result of one too many post-it note sessions.

G+ had events, I used to use them all the time. And then they removed them from communities, which was a large portion of how people (in my circles at least) used them. So that made it a lot less useful.

Yeah, I noticed this too: I think Google Reader was heavily used by the right sort of people (devs, bloggers and media types) that, when Google killed it, it created a lot of bad will with the people who shape opinions.

Who then went and told everyone else that RSS was dead because Reader was gone.

Spotify wants you to believe it, but it's not true.

Interesting perspective. I had long tended towards the viewpoint of, "Jeez guys, it's just an RSS reader, there's 50 better ones now, why do we have to whine about Reader getting cancelled every 5 minutes?". This is the first good explanation I've found for why it could be considered a bigger deal.

Yes, for me that's when I started to develop a negative opinion if Google. I still use Android but aside from that my life has drastically been de-googled since then.

Though very disappointed, it is not surprising in retrospect. Google doesn't want to make a niche application for a handful (relatively) of nerds. They want to make unduplicatable AI/big-data services for billion+ users. Anyone can make a feed reader. No one else has been able to create a search engine, translation service, or email service (spam filtering, auto-complete) nearly as good.

Your information is a few years out of date, there is a new translation engine on the market that seems to be objectively better (deepl.com) as well as more GDPR-friendly ;)

The search engine I can't disagree with.

The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.

The problem with “email is email” is that people can’t easily change email addresses, so once in gmail they can’t leave, no matter how egregiously google abuses the data.

We might be better off with an email address portability law similar to what exists for mobile phone numbers, but even without that GMail offers POP and IMAP access as well as forwarding to external addresses.

I mean they could've easily sprinkled in some AI to decide which specific unread items to prioritise, and turned the homepage into a social media feed with sharing and commenting, while presenting RSS feeds similarly to Facebook's pages.

It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).

That would've been a good way to go. It's a shame they haven't gotten social to catch in any of their many attempts (Buzz, Plus, YouTube, Reader, etc.) because I'd prefer anything from Google over Facebook.

I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.

Sites will not let you crawl unless you are Google or maybe Microsoft. They might have, if it looked like you were likely going to become much better than Google and would be competitive. But you will never look like that because they will not let you crawl. Is this true? I don't know, but it is one story. And gets to why there's a more fundamental economic mechanism to Google's monopoly, over Amazon's or Microsoft's.

But Google got a whole bunch of way more niche products today. Just check the play store.

fastmail is better than gmail.

Is it really? Gmail is pretty good at spam blocking and searching through your email. I haven't found a better alternative, although I'm open to other options

> In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived

Yep. That was the point for me wehere Google went from startup I would like to work for sometime in the future to the ranks of IBM and Oracle

Is there evidence that Google+ caused the demise of Google Reader? Couldn't a simpler explanation be that the VP in charge of this product wanted to put headcount toward something more profitable? One problem with talking about a large company is that decisions, even major ones, are often made without other functions having much of a say, and yet every decision is attributed to the company as a whole. And just because Google+ was happening at the same time as the Reader shutdown doesn't mean you can create a causal link between the two.