Comment by bxparks

Comment by bxparks 2 days ago

68 replies

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A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4.

Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos.

Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now.

Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google.

Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.

Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.

Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.

Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..

brandonb927 2 days ago

Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.

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  • nine_k 2 days ago

    Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.

    Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.

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    • perardi 2 days ago

      Just think of the data mining they could have had there.

      They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…

      They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.

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      • nine_k 2 days ago

        This would require the decision-maker to think and act at the scale and in interests of the entire company. Not at the scale of a promo packet for next perf: "saved several millions in operation costs by shutting down a low-impact, unprofitable service."

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    • eloisant 2 days ago

      Yes, Google killing Reader was probably the first time they killed a popular product and what started the idea that any Google product could be killed at any time.

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    • benjaminwootton 2 days ago

      There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these buckets and I don’t think I could ever recommend their enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer products pulled.

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  • Spooky23 2 days ago

    Yes! I loved this product… it was our little social network for my friends and coworkers.

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  • ta12653421 a day ago

    I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D) There would have been a clear change to fill this vacuum?

    The thing is: I guess they didnt see a good way to monetize it (according to their "metrics"), while the product itself had somehow relative high OpEx and being somehow a niche thingy.

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    • noirscape 18 hours ago

      Killing Reader didn't just kill Reader. It killed the expectation of RSS to be a valid default consumption format of the internet. These days, if you use RSS, it's either relying on some legacy hidden feed feature that hasn't been shuttered yet (lots of Rails and WordPress sites that are like this) or you're explicitly adding RSS to your site as a statement.

      Picking up the pieces after Reader was impossible because the entire RSS ecosystem imploded with it. Almost every single news site decided that with killing Reader, they wouldn't bother maintaining their RSS feeds, leaving them basically all "legacy" until they irrevocably break one day and then get shut down for not wanting to get maintained.

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    • starkparker a day ago

      > I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D)

      like theoldreader and Inoreader, which explicitly copied the columnar interfaces, non-RSS bookmarklet content saving, item favoriting, friend-of-a-friend commenting and quasi-blog social sharing features, and mobile app sync options via APIs? Or NewsBlur, which did all of that _and also_ added user-configurable algorithmic filtering? Or Feedly, which copied Reader's UX but without the social features? or Tiny Tiny RSS and FreshRSS, which copied Reader's UX as self-hosted software?

      theoldreader remains the most straightforward hosted ripoff of Google Reader, right down to look and feel, and hasn't changed much in more than a decade. Tiny Tiny is very similar, and similarly unchanging. FreshRSS implemented some non-RSS following features. So did NewsBlur, but as it always has, it still struggles with feed parsing and UI performance.

      Inoreader and Feedly both pivoted toward business users and productivity to stay afloat, with the former's ditching of social features leading to another exodus of people who'd switched to it after Google Reader folded.

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    • janwl a day ago

      There were a few copycats, but they 1) weren't as good (mostly because they wanted to do more than google reader!) and 2) they weren't free.

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huhkerrf 2 days ago

> Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my music moved without a new upload.

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  • david_allison 2 days ago

    YouTube Music isn't available in all countries which Google Play Music was available in.

    My music was deleted.

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  • shakna 2 days ago

    You made the transition, under differing licensing terms. Not always an option.

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mikewarot 2 days ago

Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before almost everything else, in a nice offline package.

Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8(

Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job done.

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nja 2 days ago

Chromecast Audio still works! They just don't sell them anymore. I use mine every day, and have been keeping an eye out for anyone selling theirs...

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  • bxparks 2 days ago

    Hmm, good to know. But given Google's history, I assumed that it would stop working.

    I also need to sell my Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K. Brand new, still in its shrink wrap. Bought it last year, to replace a flaky Roku. It was a flaky HDMI cable instead. I trust Roku more than Google for hardware support.

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tdeck 2 days ago

I'm still amused that they killed Google Notebook and then a few years later created Google Keep, an application with basically the same exact feature set.

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  • TheCapeGreek 2 days ago

    You can say that for a fair few of the services mentioned by GP.

    Google killed a lot of things to consolidate them into more "integrated" (from their perspective) product offerings. Picasa -> Photos, Hangounts -> Meet, Music -> YT Premium.

    No idea what NFC Wallet was, other than the Wallet app on my phone that still exists and works?

    The only one I'm not sure about is Chromecast - a while back my ones had an "update" to start using their newer AI Assistant system for managing it. Still works.

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    • jychang 2 days ago

      They stopped making the Chromecast hardware

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electroglyph 2 days ago

Google G Suite offered a free option after initially saying it was ending. just logged into my Workspace account: https://ibb.co/99jBLJnD

still have many domains on there, all with gmail

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  • zimmund 14 hours ago

    They've been crippling the free tier for a long time. And a few years ago they were about to restrict it completely (they've backed out last moment), to a point where many of us migrated to other platforms and never looked back.

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daxfohl 2 days ago

Google Search: Not officially dead yet, but....

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  • bdangubic 2 days ago

    yup, losing 0.000087% year-over-year so in 865 billion years it’ll be dead :)

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    • bxparks 2 days ago

      That was probably me, when I stopped using Google Search some years ago. :-) Got tired of the ads, the blog spam, and AI-generated content crap floating to the top of their results page.

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      • marttt 2 days ago

        The https://udm14.com/ flavor of Google is quite usable, though, esp with notable operators like inurl:this-or-that. But, all in all, yeah, gimme back vanilla Google search from 2008-2010 or so. Back then it was definitely a tool (I worked in investigative journalism at the time), whereas currently "searching" stands for sitting fingers crossed and hoping for the better. But, oh well. </rant>

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      • vunuxodo 2 days ago

        Kagi has been a great replacement for me. Less blogspam I've found, plus it doesn't give me AI results unless I explicitly tell it I want AI results by adding a "?" to the end of my query.

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      • daxfohl 2 days ago

        That's more what I meant. Sure, lots of people still type stuff into the URL bar that takes them to www.google.com/search. But whatever you want to call that results page now, it's no longer Google Search in anything but name.

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        • bdangubic 2 days ago

          same can be said if you compare www.google.com search from 2012 and 2022, times are changing… I am not defending google search here, I haven’t used it except by accident in long time now but to say google search is “dying” like you often hear (especially here on HN) is a serious detachment from reality

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    • kirubakaran 2 days ago

      How did you go bankrupt?

      Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

      - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

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      • bdangubic 2 days ago

        I guess I’ve heard it all now… Google going bankrupt would not have made Top-1 Million list of likely things to read on Sunday morning…

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    • easyThrowaway 20 hours ago

      I wouldn't be surprised if they're going to kill it with their own hands by implementing some half-assed AI feature that breaks the core functionality of the product.

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dwayne_dibley 2 days ago

I still use PICASA it works fine. However, when google severed the gdrive-photo linking it meant my photos didn’t automatically download from google to my PC. This is what killed google for me.

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tomComb 2 days ago

I’m still using - free g suite - play music - finance - nfc wallet is just google wallet isn’t it? - chromecast, video and audio-only I guess play music is now YouTube music, and doesn't have uploads, so that can be considered dead, but the others seem alive to me.

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eloisant 2 days ago

> Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..

They have something called Google TV Streamer now, so for me it's more of a rebrand than really killing a product.

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  • Hobadee 2 days ago

    Except Google TV isn't the same. You can cast to it, but it's more akin to a Roku - it comes with a remote and has "channels" you install.

    Oh, and a metric crapton of ads it shows you.

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stavros 2 days ago

Immich is a great replacement for Google Photos, if maybe not Picasa.

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bigthymer 2 days ago

I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location. It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and where I had gone.

Is there another app where I can store this locally?

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  • socalgal2 2 days ago

    Google Maps still tracks my location.

    The difference is they no longer store the data on their servers, it's stored on your phone (iPhone/Android)

    https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979

    That way, they can't respond to requests for that data by governments as they don't have it.

    I can look on my phone and see all the places I've been today/yesterday, etc

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  • bapak 2 days ago

    Arc and its free Arc Mini companion. iOS. Been using it since Facebook eclipsed Moves app. A decade later, it's still not as good as Moves.

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  • forever_frey 2 days ago

    Check out Dawarich, it has an official iOS app and you can use a number of 3rd party mobile apps to track your data and then upload it to server: either ran on your own hardware (FOSS self-hosted) or to the Dawarich Cloud one: https://dawarich.app

    Using it on daily basis

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  • sameline 2 days ago

    Apple Maps added a Visited Places (beta) feature recently.

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  • bxparks 2 days ago

    Strava? :-) Half-joking, half-serious, I haven't used Strava in years, I don't remember all its capabilities.

    Edit: Missed the "locally" part. Sorry no suggestions. Maybe Garmin has something?

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    • iamacyborg 2 days ago

      Nope, Garmin only tracks your location when you record an activity that uses gps, which is good, frankly.

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socalgal2 2 days ago

I used Picasa and loved it, until I realized I want all my photos available from all my devices at all times and so gave in to Google Photos (for access, not backup)

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  • bxparks 2 days ago

    I use SyncThing for that purpose. It syncs across my phone, my laptops, and my Synologies. But I don't sync all my photos.

    I don't like the thought of providing Google thousands of personal photos for their AI training. Which will eventually leak to gov't agencies, fraudsters, and criminals.

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chrismorgan 2 days ago

> Google Hangouts:

Which particular thing called Hangouts? There were at least two, frankly I’d say more like four.

Google and Microsoft are both terrible about reusing names for different things in confusing ways.

> Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps.

And Hangouts was part of that problem. Remember Google Talk/Chat? That was where things began, and in my family we never wanted Hangouts, Talk/Chat was better.

Allo, Chat, Duo, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Talk, Voice… I’ve probably forgotten at least two more names, knowing Google. Most of these products have substantial overlap with most of the rest.

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hshdhdhj4444 2 days ago

I think Chromecast has been replaced by Google TV which is a souped up Chromecast.

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nine_k 2 days ago

Picasa definitely went against the grain of Google, which is all about tying you to online services.

Hangouts had trouble scaling to many participants. Google Meet is fine, and better than e.g. MS Teams.

Legacy suite, free forever? Did they also promise a pony?..

Play Music: music is a legal minefield. Don't trust anybody commercial who suggests you upload music you did not write yourself.

Finance: IDK, I still get notifications about the stocks I'm interested in.

NFC Wallet: alive and kicking, I use it literally every day to pay for subway.

Can't say anything about Chromecast. I have a handful of ancient Chromecasts that work. I don't want any updates for them.

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hshdhdhj4444 2 days ago

Google Desktop Search (and also the Search Appliance if you were an SMB).

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rgblambda 2 days ago

Add Google Podcasts to the list. I switched to AntennaPod. Youtube Music has too noisy an interface.

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andsoitis 2 days ago

Why did you keep on using so many Google products if those products get cancelled?

Why didn’t you quit Google after, say, the third product you used got canned?

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  • dlcarrier 2 days ago

    I used Google Talk than Hangouts, but once they switched to Meet, I gave up on them. By then my family was all using Hangouts, and we never settled on a new service, because one of my siblings didn't want to support any chat services that don't freely give user information to the government, and the rest of us didn't want to use a chat platform that does freely give user information to the government.

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dheera 2 days ago

Isn't it "Google TV Streamer" now?

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  • bxparks 2 days ago

    From what I can tell (since I am just finding out about this today), they stopped manufacturing the old Chromecast hardware, and at some point, will stop supporting the old devices. The old devices may stop working in the future, for example, because they sunset the servers. Like their thermostats. Who knows?

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    • dheera 2 days ago

      I wish there was some law that requires open-sourcing firmware and flashing tools if a company decides to EOL a product ...

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kulahan a day ago

I am just learning via this comment they’re killing chromecast. My disappointment is immeasurable. I have 3, and use them daily. This might be the push to get me to install network wide Adblock.

I should’ve realized when that recent update broke them for like a week, then the brought the all back online, but suddenly much buggier.

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serial_dev 2 days ago

Am I the only one salty about Google Podcasts? For me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back… I dropped Android, switched to iOS, and slowly phasing out the Google products in my life.

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