How long before Google discontinues the service? I'll stick with EverNote.

+1 For $50/year I feel like Evernote is focused on me as a customer.

I just blogged about this: Google has cancelled 5 services that I used for work projects. I have just switched to using my own domain email as primary, moving my blog from Blogger to one of my own servers (Wordpress is actually pretty cool), and I am using Dropbox as my primary photo and music repository (now using Google's and Apple's services as just backups).

I really like being a paying customer for services that are important to me. I like Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's free offerings, but I use them without depending on them.

I wonder different Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's businesses would be if they had a modest fee (like $25/year) for users, and made users customers instead of products?

Reader wasn't killed because it couldn't generate revenue. Reader was killed because someone at Google thought they could make everyone use plus instead.

How do you read RSS feeds in Google+?

You don't. You don't use RSS in FB or Twitter either. All of the social networks see themselves as competitors to RSS.

Or to put it their way, RSS limits their profitability.

Plus competes with RSS feeds, not with RSS readers.

Nothing in this world is forever. Get over it, you'll be happier. Take advantage of what's new and innovative, stop living in the past. It takes less than a minute to transfer your Google reader content over to the two dozen or so, very capable, replacements that are more than eager to take you on. If Google note decides to shut down in a decade, be assured that your content will be with you no matter where you decide to go next. There will certainly be many more, perhaps even more innovative and capable replacements at the time.

While it's nice to not have to migrate your content every decade or so (Google Reader was introduced 8 years ago), it's certainly not that painful. As apps and services evolve at blistering pace, I love the fact that we can get some fresh air, and a wave of new innovations. I hope more companies do what Google does, discontinue products, for whatever reason, and give others a chance to grow.

The difficulty is not in migrating to a new service when the old one dies; it's in transferring all your old data across to the new one and updating all your other tools that reference it.

With Reader, (apart from historical read/unread/starred/etc) this is as simple as downloading an OPML file and uploading it somewhere else.

With Gmail, it's more tricky. Migrating emails is fairly trivial, migrating the address itself though (unless you own the domain) involves updating all your contacts and changing your settings for every site you use on the internet (auto mail forwarding of course makes this easier).

With Notes, I'm not sure there's a standardised format for exporting/importing from one service to another. Certainly, with different features between each product a lot of information would be lost when doing so.

If you're fine with that and/or don't keep really important notes in the service then it's not really an issue. If you want to ensure they stick around as long as possible, then you need to pick a service that is committed, or one that you control yourself.

Evernote managed to offer an import tool when Google Notebook shut down. I don't know how well it worked since I only had a few simple things in my Notebook account.

This is not true. History does not come with your Reader export. Old archived stories will be lost forever.

Nothing is stopping you from backing them up yourself manually. At least you got a 3 month warning ... I certainly didn't when Yahoo decided to just close my @rocketmail email account.

Reader lasted longer than almost all of the (major) RSS readers combined. What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Honestly, I don't understand the stance of using an inferior product (this assumes you believe Keep will be superior to EverNote, if not, then why even comment?) because you fear the superior one will be shut off. I rather use a product from a company that has a history of providing mechanisms to take out my data if/when they shut the product down instead of a startup/small company that will probably lose all my data when they go bankrupt or get acqui-hired.

There's no reasonable way to estimate how likely Evernote is to fail or be acqui-hired, but we can reasonably estimate how long an unpopular, non-core, free Google offering will last. All other things being equal, avoiding the Google offering is at least avoiding the devil we know. The success of the Reader replacements also suggests that there are business opportunities in simply being the alternative that exists when Google pulls the plug, so I would not expect Evernote to react to this news all that fearfully.

Of course we should still choose products based on their positive qualities and the freedom to use our data as we wish is an important one.

> What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Because 99.99999% of EverNote's revenue does not come from some other part of business?

One thing is for sure: most users that did use Reader will skip this one :)

The issue for many people is that these ancillary services from Google may be found to not add value to Google's overall G+ strategy, and killed in the interest of staying "focused". Google is simply not "all-in" with some of these services. This just isn't the case for company's like Evernote.

Presumably a product conceived post-G+ will be explicitly designed to add value to the overall G+ strategy, so has less chance of getting to the point of being shut down. Google Reader on the other hand was conceived in 2005 when Google was all over the place and even then the management didn't like it.

G+ is a tricky dependency. There's little confidence in it outside Google and some factions in the tech press.

It's the old pig and chicken metaphor - Evernote is committed to note taking, Google, it's not so clear.

Obviously both might end up dropping it for one reason or another, it just feels like Evernote are likely to fight harder to stay in this market and to keep me happy.

Yeah... if they can't make money off of Reader, how will they ever make money with a product like this? Thanks, but I'm good too.

Yeah, I have a sudden mistrust of anything Google creates after they fked us with Reader.

It will be interesting to see if uptake is diminished by their recent shutdown of Reader. It's hard to feel unwary of new Google services that don't smell like something 90% of folks will use.

There's no 'if' about it. Everyone still is, and will be pissed at Google for quite a while.

you dont see a mass exodus from gmail ...

Gmail is a significant enough profit center that it's unlikely to ever be under threat. Reader didn't directly contribute to the bottom line (and arguably led to fewer ad views).

Google knew it could kill Reader because a low friction transition was possible. Killing Gmail would register in the stock price.

It is a lot easier for people to protest by not doing anything than actually putting effort into it. Switching from Gmail to some other provider involves a lot of friction. Not using a newly released product (assuming this will be one) is fairly easy.

Such things are hard to judge. I have a feeling that a lot of people (a lot more than usual anyway) have recently transferred their email from an @gmail.com address to a Google hosted custom domain.

On the other hand, with Google Apps you can actually be a paying customer. Maybe the fear factor just isn't there.

These things take time.

They had "Google Keep." It was called Google Notebook, and they killed it without warning. I would be interested in hearing the motivations of anyone who gives this application a serious try.

And I mean that. Maybe they've got some useful insight that allows for the possibility that this will be different.

Agreed, I look forward to the "Top 5 replacements for Google Keep" stories on Lifehacker, etc. in a few months/years.

Google Reader is one of those tools that is hard to replace. I'm trying out alternatives but they all feel odd to me. I really liked hitting space to jump from one story to the next too. Keyboard navigation was really good in GReader.

I agree, but I'm finding j/k navigation works in all of the GR alternatives.

Phil Libin's long term plan for Evernote[1] is precisely what this sort of application requires, and is at total odds with Google's product release/discontinue approach.

Google Notebook was "discontinued" only a few years ago - and the kinds of consumers who would be interested Keep almost certainly share a significant overlap with those who two years ago were interested/used Notebook, and therefore have literally been bitten by Google in this exact space in the last few years.

[1] http://vator.tv/news/2013-01-17-phil-libin-on-an-evernote-ip...

While I think this is an interesting point, at the same time, it looks like it may have been more difficult technically and brand-wise for google to migrate notebook to drive (which I think is the goal). It probably made more sense for them to discontinue notebook, which had a relatively small userbase, and relaunch it as a new product/brand under the drive suite.

I'm not sure if I want to touch any non-core (Search, YouTube, Gmail) Google's services after the discontinuation of Reader.

The thing is, a few weeks back Reader could be considered core Google offerings.

Which is exactly why Google lost everyone's trust.

Anyone who would say that hasn't been paying attention. Not only had innovation on Reader slowed to a halt, but Google was also working on and prioritizing products that competed with it (G+). There is a reason why Feedly was able to move so quickly on replacing the Google Reader API, they were anticipating the shutdown of Reader for a while.

Is this a joke? A product with less than 1-2 million active users can't honestly be considered a "core Google offering".

How many more million users are needed?

How so? RSS is definitely niche (especially when compared to those three), and I don't see how they would be making money off it, except via ads - turning off AdBlock, I don't see any.

Not as core as Search or YouTube though...

No way I'll give it a try. Bit by Google Notebook a few years ago.

To be clear (for those of us who don't always click through and actually read the articles), this isn't any sort of announcement from Google --- it's just the results of some sleuthing that hint at a future note-taking service.

It's more than a hint. The service was active on Google for some time a few hours ago and then was pulled down again. It definitely exists, not a matter of 'if' but a matter of 'when'.

Sorry google but you can fuck off this week.

Irony explained using an analogy:

A new experimental product by Google with a dubious monetization strategy at best has the name "Keep".

This is a hard one. I'm a geek that loves to try new gadgets/websites and when I find one I like I use it a lot, like Google Reader for example. The problem with Google is I may get attached to one of their products and then a year or two down the road they pull the plug on it. It's happened enough times now that I don't even care to try Google products until it becomes as big as gmail and I'm sure it wont just vanish. Anyways plenty of other good services for taking notes that I can pay for and I'm sure they will be around for a long time.

All the "how long will it last" sentiment aside, this looks like a great move for Android - lists, notes and other basically structured data, synced across your mobile devices which Google can provide on Android devices out of the box if they want.

If they did do that it would also makes it less likely they'll pull it at some point in the future. Bundle it with Android and you're going to hit hundreds of millions of users very quickly. Even Google don't pull back from that sort of thing without thinking.

Screenshots from Androidpolice they took while Keep was up for a short time: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/03/17/google-keep-is-live-...

The most interesting about this is not that Google is building a new service, but how everyone responds to it. All trust seems to be entirely gone among most hackers around here.

This was live for a little bit last night. Here are some screenshots: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/03/17/google-keep-is-live-...

To stay actually on topic for once, if these screenshots are anything to go by, Google Keep looks pretty bare bones and not really suitable as a replacement for anything bar the most simple use case (of course, a couple of screenshots does not a product make).

This is some awesome commentary here.

Nobody even read the goddamn article. Bunch of parrots.