rasterizer

Before someone veers into a misguded USSR analogy (too late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5753890) note that Github also disabled downloads months ago: https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads

Seems like it's a pain point for code hosting services.

Oh, so this is about a "Gilt" employee being peeved about the presentation featuring the "Google+ Sign In" integration with "Fancy"(a competitor?)?

Well no, it's not anti competitive because when a user logs into a service she implicitly expresses interest in it, making it more relevant to her in a search scenario, and since it's personalised that "prominence" is unique to said user.

I see, then no convincing case was made to support that unless if you count the lament about experimentation and their numerous products, and no reasonable connection was made between that and 'evilness'.

I'm not quite sure what the author is going on about in that post: 'google is good but they make money so they're not good', 'google makes lots of products, then kills some of them so they're evil', 'google design is not perfect so I don't like them'.

It seems like he started from the assumption that Google is evil then he went rambling around that without making a coherent argument.

And I think by "rodeo" he meant IO? it's gibberish.

That comment reads more like reflex than anything with much thought put behind it: "Google is closing a service; Google is the new Microsoft" that old tired cliche.

First of all it's far form an unexpected announcement seeing as they have been developing another payment service in parallel, and second "monopoly" is a specific legal term, it shouldn't thrown around lightly, it's not just another synonym for "big".

As for your points:

1) Experimentation is net positive, and by definition most of said experiments will fail. You can't really be any sort of a self respecting tech company if you shun experimentation.

2) This is anecdotal, they have a selection of core products and when a peripheral one gets deprecated it's done through a reasonable process as spelled out in that post.

3) That's subjective.

Non-"off the record" chats were always archived, difference is that controlling the archiving behaviour is no longer done by client rather via a new web interface at: https://mail.google.com/mail/#chats

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-interface-for-g...