0xDECAFBAD - Tag: google

The Readerpocalypse, or Occupy Google Reader

2011-11-01T10:31:54+00:00

TL;DR: Google gave Reader a face-lift and removed built-in following & sharing. In exchange, they added +1 buttons and ways to share to Google+. But, the changes seem to have removed most of the value from the service for me, so I'm moving on as I was invited to do.

What happened?

Almost a year ago, I wrote about how my habits had gotten less del.icio.us. One of the main culprits that stole my sharing flow was Google Reader: I went from using a quick bookmarklet to an even quicker icon-click in my feed reader. That meant I left most things untagged, but I shared even more than before. Eventually, Google Reader released a bookmarklet for use off-site, which meant I started sharing everything everywhere to Reader.

I also found a replacement for my old del.icio.us network in Google Reader's social features. I could follow people, and the stream of things they shared and annotated turned into a great source of news curated and pre-filtered by likeminded people.

Well, as it turns out, Google's recent changes to Reader just removed all of the above. In exchange, they added a couple of buttons to +1 and share items to Google+, which streamlines things for them and encourages more use of the new service.

As I wrote on Google+, the net result is nothing to stomp and shout about, but there's nothing there that makes me happier. As I played more, though, I came to realize that most of the value I derived from the service had evaporated.

Item-centric vs People-centric, Efficiency vs Engagement

There's a big difference between the way sharing happened on Google Reader, and the way it happens now on Google+. The best way I can think to explain is that the old way was item-centric and the new way is people-centric. In other words, people seem to be the dominant social objects in Google+, whereas Google Reader used to treat items that way.

Before, we all gathered around the news. The headline and summary were primary, and our comments were collected after the item. The result was a de-duped stream of great news filtered through smart brains. Even if the people I followed never said a word, the fact that they'd clicked "share" was value enough. In fact, it was better that way most of the time, because we all got out of the way of each other and the news.

This, by the way, is what I loved about del.icio.us and now pinboard.in: It's anti-social networking. We can provide low-effort, intelligent inputs to build something useful for each other, but we're not there to assert a presence or distract each other from the things we each came to see.

But now, that filtered news stream is gone. In its place, on a different site entirely, removed from the flow of feeding on news, is a highly-engaging flood of people babbling away, which occasionally includes repeated shares of things that have bubbled up during the day.

What's wrong with that, for me?

I don't want to wade through a heavily-padded, user-friendly flood of duplicated, echoed items.
I don't want to engage with the people—at least, not when I'm in a mood to feed on news. I want to catch up on what's been put out into the infosphere already, and then start talking about it.

The design of Google+—which has spilled over into the Google Reader face-lift—is about engagement and not fast & efficient processing of the day's news. Engagement in general puts a drag on the task—which for me is like a GTD, Inbox Zero, headline skimming, pattern recognition zen thing that might not be everyone's cup of tea.

But, for all I know, avowed weirdo and info freako that I am, these changes may drive Google Reader growth through the roof for mainstream users. But, it's no longer a product for me. The changes in sharing have removed most of the value for me, because I no longer have the warp speed cruise through news that other people used to power for me.

Circles point the wrong way

One of the things Louis Gray touted about the new sharing features reads like so:

In Reader’s previous sharing model, as a follower of your items, I would see every single item you shared, no matter what it was about. Obviously, as I have different interests than you do, not everything you shared was something I cared about, which often led to reduced sharing of off-topic content. Now, you are more in control, so you can share sports items to your sports circles, great recipes with your foodies circle, or local news to family and friends. You can keep sharing, like you always have, but now, you can better select who sees what.

But, for this purpose, Circles point the wrong way.

Circles on Google+ are lists of people controlled by me. They're not topics—again, people-centric and not item-centric. Circles are a targeting mechanism for sharing to people, and a filtering mechanism for items from people. That is, I can use a circle to set who sees something and I can decide who's stuff I see and when.

But, things that Circles don't do include:

Letting me follow Circles without the Circle-owner needing to manage membership - eg. Don't make me send a message saying "I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter". RSS doesn't work that way and it's better for it.
Letting me and others filter for what gets sent to specific Circles - eg. I'm in both your "scifi" and "politics" circles, but just show me what you sent to your "scifi" circle.

Google Reader didn't have this to begin with, but what I'm looking for is an equivalent to tagging on pinboard.in. For example, if you like my taste in scifi but could care less about my views in politics, you can subscribe to just the tag feeds you want.

I'm happy to tag my shares with topics; that's beneficial to me for search later, and helps interested people besides. But, the last thing I want to do is manage subscriber lists. That doesn't scale. There's no way for you to even know I have "scifi" or "politics" Circles, and you have no way to join either of them without asking for an add.

Too much coordination, not enough benefit. I just can't see the value in people-centric Circles here.

Other things broke, too.

And beyond the fundamental shift in sharing and reading, these things have broken for me now too:

The bookmarklet is dead, so there goes my off-site sharing.
No sharing at all from the mobile web version, so there goes at least half of my sharing on-site.
Android apps like my favorite gReader Pro still think sharing works, but they're just deluded and use an unsupported API anyway
No more feed to Facebook, so there goes most of my Facebook output. (Though, that might be a boon some friends over there.)

Now what?

The remaining value of Google Reader is as just a plain old hosted feed reader—one of the last of them out there, in fact. The problem here is that I'm a weirdo who wrote a book on feeds and feed readers, and so I'm perfectly capable of providing the remaining value for myself.

I'm sure most people won't want to do that, which is probably why "you're not going anywhere". But, there are alternatives even for people who don't want to D.I.Y. entirely:

Dave Winer's River2 (also open source, in UserTalk on the OPML Editor) runs on my laptop and lets me circle back to the code that ran my second-ever news reader, Radio UserLand. (My first was a thing called News Clipper in Perl from many, many moons ago.) And, of course, River2 is one of a suite of apps Dave's working on to build a decentrallized network of feeds and outlines.
NewsBlur looks mighty fine, and the guy running it only asks US$12-36 (your choice) for a year's worth of premium access. Remember: if you're not the customer, you're the product. And, if you want to try installing it, it's an open source Django site. While not yet very social, NewsBlur's creator has plans to head in that direction.
Tiny Tiny RSS installed on my Wordpress-capable web server in about 10 minutes, gobbled up my list of 800 feeds with no problem, and appears to have 90% of what I wanted from Google Reader. Also, it's an open source PHP site. For sharing, Tiny Tiny RSS lets you "publish" shared items in an RSS feed—kind of like the old reBlog web app—and has some experimental cross-instance sharing features.

At the end, the funny thing is that I've circled back to my old del.icio.us habits and have started tagging items on pinboard.in like never before. I'm sure there aren't nearly as many people watching me as before on either del.icio.us or Google Reader, but it's a place to go at least.

It'll probably be recognized as an illness someday, but my sharing feels compulsive at this point and I get itchy without a good outlet.

Firefox Sync server on Google App Engine

2010-07-05T23:00:56+00:00

TL;DR: I built an implementation of the Firefox Sync server API for Google App Engine.

To celebrate Independence Day, I figured I might take a shot at liberating Firefox Sync from the tyranny of Mozilla's servers.

Thus, over the past few days, I've built a sync server using the 1.0 Sync API, hosted on Google App Engine.

I lied about the tyranny thing, though—I just wanted to say something clever about the holiday. In reality, with respect to Firefox Sync, Mozilla has done all of the following:

Published the Sync API spec;
Released the source code for the server used in-house;
Explicitly included the option to use a custom server when setting up sync in the browser.

This means that, although Mozilla offers servers to go along with Firefox Sync, you're totally free to take your data elsewhere. Since your sync data is encrypted and practically opaque to the server, there's no direct profit for Mozilla in offering free sync hosting—not even through any clandestine data mining for devious purposes. It's just that sync makes Firefox a better browser, and somebody has to run some servers to make it work.

So, there's every incentive to make it easy for you to switch sync providers and stop freeloading on Mozilla's servers. Building a server on Google App Engine means I can freeload on Google's servers!

I kid, of course. No one's really complaining about freeloaders, and App Engine has quotas in place to head off any serious mooching—which is why I'm not telling you where to find my sync server deployed on Google App Engine, by the way.

No, I did this because:

Firefox Sync and Google App Engine are interesting and important technologies;
I've already done a bit of work on the PHP-based Firefox Sync server at Mozilla;
I really wanted to take a break from PHP and spend some time with my old friend Python.

There are, of course, a number of bugs in this server. But, it seems to be working between a number of machines and browser profiles I have at home. Things are really in need of optimization, it suffers from my inexperience with App Engine, and I keep running into those aforementioned App Engine resource limits—especially when updating or deleting large numbers of items (ie. 1000's to 10000's of items).

Pull requests and issue reports on GitHub are welcome!

A next step I'd like to take with this thing is to revisit another old friend, the desktop web app server. (Also known as the desktop website.) It seems to me that it would be interesting to scale this server down to a household appliance—say, just for use by my wife and I.

I'd be especially happy if the work I'm doing for a Google-hosted app could be self-hosted at home. Seeing as the development environment for App Engine runs on my laptop, I'm willing to bet I can hack the whole shebang into a simple, special-purpose app to download and double-click on a home desktop PC for use as your sync hub.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Archived Comments

James Socol
2010-07-06T01:28:02

Assuming you already had a network and a Mac Mini or something at home, it would be pretty interesting to run your own small Sync server just to keep your home computers together. Maybe even use localtunnel for when you're away.
Mike
2010-07-06T01:36:37

You are a real-life hero!
l.m.orchard
2010-07-06T01:52:00

@James: Yup, exactly that. Maybe even roll in some SSL and UPnP port forwarding for easier setup behind a home router. And, if there were a Windows version, it could run on that cruddy desktop back in the spare room.

@Mike: Naw... this guy is the real hero, even John Lilly agrees!
Crash
2010-07-06T09:20:54

Is there already a App Id for this tool?
l.m.orchard
2010-07-06T10:18:57

@Crash: Sure, there's an app ID for my instance of this sync server. But, as I said in the blog post, I'm not sharing it. At least, not until or unless I get the quota usage down to a point that I wouldn't exhaust the free hosting limits.

It's pretty easy to deploy your own sync server on AppEngine with the source, though.
Peter Petrov
2010-07-06T13:18:11

@Leslie: The app ID of your instance is visible in app.yaml, so you've shared it anyway :)
l.m.orchard
2010-07-06T17:18:47

@Peter hah! Right you are! But, at least you had to look at the source of the app first to figure that out :) That is mostly the point of this blog entry after all. Anyone who does that and then uses my installation anyway will probably be sad when I regularly blow away data and eventually make it invite only
Tobias
2010-07-07T00:24:41

Neat! TyphoonAE http://typhoonae.googlecode.com might help you to build your household appliance.
Kumar McMillan
2010-07-07T20:59:25

Hey Les, this is super cool! Google App Engine's Datastore API is still very shaky though. In fact, it's been so bad lately that I've been considering porting one of my heavily used apps over to something else. Thankfully, this post suggests that fixing the Datastore is their top priority: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/datastore-performance-growing-pains.html
Robert Kaiser
2010-07-07T21:21:51

Well, I actually feel more comfortable with my data being on Mozilla servers than on Google servers - even with the decreased trust I have in the Mozilla organization, I'd trust it more than Google any day! ;-)
Chris Arndt
2010-09-28T11:06:55

Instead of porting GAE to your desktop, why don't you just port your app to plain Django? Django should run off your desktop with no problems.

correlation is not causation

2006-12-21T02:01:38+00:00

By the by: Correlating the new del.icio.us JSON URL feed with Google's recent deprecation of the SOAP Search API is about as effective as noticing how often the clock reads 12:34 when you just happen to be looking at it.

Archived Comments

Joe Grossberg
2006-12-21T13:10:16

Because ... you say so? :)

Also, I think you misuse the word "correlation".

And I think there is a correlation -- both are indicative of a trend in "web services" today.

JSON and YAML are getting more popular in that arena and XML (especially SOAP) is something that a lot of programmers dislike workign with.

Google Reader is good

2005-10-08T17:47:15+00:00

For what it's worth, I still feel like I've been unfair to the guys at Google over Reader.

I know how much work must've gone into that thing, because I know how something like that could've been built. I really think it's just because it's not the right kind of app for me, and I'd like to see someone make that app. And, I'm also a bit burnt out on the whole AJAX Madness buzz.

Thing is, Reader is so good at being what it is. I'm just critical because it's good at being what I don't want.

Archived Comments

jperkins
2005-10-08T18:15:57

The issue that I have with Google's reader stem from a rushed to market feel that I think that it has. As a developer, I'm sure that you've been in the position where suits see a business opportunity and decide to launch an app that's not ready. That's what the Google reader feels like to me. More so when the acquisition of Ranchero (owner of NetNewsWire) earlier this week is taken to account. For example, the lack of rudimentary autodiscovery in supplied urls. That's a no brainer to add and yet it's missing. I suppose that the developers could've neglected that feature, but that seems like something that would've been added in a later internal development release prior to a public beta launch.

Eh, it's all supposition on my part, but if it is the case that perceived business opportunity outweighed holding off a bit and shipping a solid app then that's not a good sign for Google at all.
Sencer
2005-10-08T22:38:56

where suits see a business opportunity and decide to launch an app that’s not ready. That’s what the Google reader feels like to me.

That's exactly what I though. After an initial warm-up phase where I liked it, I decided it's not for me, and the app feels very, very beta to me. Not that it has errors, but it's doing very little to be actually helpful. Especially after an import I feel pretty much lost. Everything is new, no way to mark stuff as read. Upon revisiting everything is unmarked again. No way to scan snippets. That which is there maybe nice, but it's not useful enough to get me to switch.
Nick
2005-10-09T03:13:04

Yeah, it's not quite perfect, but it's also a Google LABS project. So, it's not really meant for 'release' as much as it's a proof of concept sort of thing..

BTW Les, I fixed the comment thingy.. It's called loading Wordpress..

Too hard on Google Reader?

2005-10-08T03:36:12+00:00

You know after I posted that semi-rant on Google Reader, it occurred to me that I was maybe being a bit too hard on it. I mean, obviously, there's evidence of hard work put into this thing. And although I haven't bothered to view source yet, I imagine there's some cool AJAX-style magic going on under there. And, for some (most?) users, this way of viewing feeds is nice and pleasant to use.

But, man... all that hard work, and I just can't shake my impression of how slow this thing is. And I don't mean how slow it is to load from the server, but the whole UI experience once it's loaded: That is, how slow all the scrolling and the clicking and the navigating is. Wasn't this AJAX thing supposed to be all about quick, slick, and snappy web apps?

I guess I feel a bit let down—with all the time it took Google to make a move in the feed aggregator space, and with those PhD's they have laying around, I expected they'd finally have something revolutionary. Not this, not a cute toy I could've cobbled together myself in short order with Flash or AJAX. (But I haven't, because it'd be useless to me.)

For example, take the Google Maps API. I just happened to be working with it for a project this week, and I have to say that that's some nice stuff there. That's a platform that feels like some magic. I don't think I could've built that from scratch, though it sure is fun building things atop it.

Toolbars and Java, Happy Meals and Lego

2005-10-05T23:44:56+00:00

Google took a big step toward challenging Microsoft's dominance in computer word-processing and spreadsheets with the announcement Tuesday that it would distribute Java technology from Sun Microsystems.

Source: Wired News: A Challenge to MS Office

Errr... How does that follow? Just because a Happy Meal comes bundled with LEGO Bricks doesn't mean McDonalds is challenging the housing construction industry.

And, since when was OpenOffice based on Java? Last I heard, WordPerfect for Java was doomed back in 1997. I thought NeoOfficeJ was based in Java, but not OpenOffice.

(Update: It's Lego, not Legos. Also: LEGO Gets Pissy About Brand Name)

Archived Comments

Eby
2005-10-06T05:08:16

Actually there was quite a hooplah about the parts of OpenOffice that are now written in Java (and require JRE). The licensing has caused some concern with some distros. I'm not sure what all came out of it but the article I read is below. I wouldn't say it's "based on java" but parts are heading there.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/22/204244
Simon Brunning
2005-10-06T10:04:42

Arrrghh! It';s Lego, not legos!
l.m.orchard
2005-10-06T10:50:23

Heh, I think I'd just read a "Letter to the Editor" piece in an Xbox magazine from someone at the Lego company with a laundry list of points where they'd abused the Lego brand like I did—i.e. Lego is plural; Lego must be followed by a trademark symbol; LEGO must be in caps... I forget all the stipulations.