I still miss google reader and Picasa. I don’t think I will ever get over those two losses.
The truth is that you miss the world in which google reader could exist. Free, unfettered, unabridged access to full length articles in a highly consumable format is not a thing that most publishers are behind now. They want your eyes on their ux and their ads.
It's a bit like saying you miss street fighter 2 cabinets. Ok but, there are no arcades left.
Excellent. But what Google took away was the culture of blog-RSSing.
It gave an enormous advantage to Facebook and Instagram. Which are competitors to Google. What a bad move from Google.
When they moved on, nobody else wanted to take on support in their free time, and no department wanted to pay someone full-time to work on it, so it was killed.
RSS still exists, you know!
I don’t think GReader led to a closing of feeds. It was simply a thing already happening. And even today the vast majority of sites still offer RSS feeds, I can’t even remember the last time I wanted to follow something, and it didn’t have a feed available.
But what you're not getting is that Google Reader helped make that world. Deleting the largest RSS reader app and replacing it with proprietary news feeds damaged the open web.
Huh? I use a self-hosted CommaFeed instance and it still works great.
We thought "Google is a big tech company, this should stick around." Got about 10 years out of it, which strikes me as pretty average for a tech product, but not great for a photo archive. Hell of a lot shorter than "4x6s in a shoebox."
At least that was a desktop app and they still have their data. Hopefully they were able to find a new way to organize them.
But I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only good way to store data is in an organized tree of folders, with any management software being a veiwer UI into that structure. App inevitably goes away? Replace it with the next one. Some things just need to have longer lifespans than software projects.
Point it at a folder, that’s your photo library. Dev could stop development tomorrow and your photos would be right where you left them.
I mean, if people really miss Picasa (and I personally know several) -- it's worthwhile to reimplement it and make money.
no it's not, because if you do (and look to be getting significant growth) Google will just start it up again and drive you out of business, run it for a year or two afterwards for free and then kill it.