The hard lesson of Google Reader

Google Reader logo

By Aaron Sherman

Google is learning some new lessons of late. Specifically, that the user base of a product doesn't map 1:1 to the impact that removing that product will have. In the case of Google Reader, the company's recent announcement that they'll be discontinuing the service in July first met with the usual round of "noooo! I use that!" from what few users the service still had after it was gutted to remove its social features and replace them with Google+.

That was probably no more or less than Google expected. But since then, there have been some interesting secondary effects:

• "Reader" has been one of the top-trending topics on Google+ since the announcement.
• New product announcements from Google are now being met with suspicion.
• Digg, a social news site, has announced that they'll build their own replacement.
• An existing competing service, Feedly, has seen over 500,000 new users in two days.

Music on Amazon

Amazon now has a kind of cool feature where you can turn your purchasing history into a sharable bookshelf. The above collection is a random selection from the music that I've purchased over the years. Pretty slick, really.

The Growth of Google+ and Where It Can Go Next

Google+ has been growing rapidly, it seemed to me... but I had no hard data. Then this came along:

Time to Reach 100 Million Users: A graph

that shows G+ hitting 100mil users

Faster than any other social service

This is slightly misleading in a way. There's a sort of tipping point, now, where any social media, primarily-text-oriented posting system will immediately absorb a very large number of users once it becomes "significant enough" to warrant mirroring corporate, celebrity and brand posts from other services. This is why you see The White House, Hugh Jackman, NASA, and the like on Google+. It's not that they're not on Facebook and Twitter, and in fact, most of their postings are mirrored to all of these services.

Still, Google+ is certainly growing rapidly. I find that posts I used to be able to comment on have now ballooned into massive post-fests in which any comment I might have will be drowned out, and as with any other social venue, I find myself searching for more and more restrictive subcultures in order to find a group of peers with whom I can converse in a meaningful way. The ability to share circles with specific people is a real win. That definitely makes the process easier.

I feel that the G+ niche is going to be the corporate outreach and community/ecosystem building space. Google is already using it this way, if you look at some of their recent posts:

• Google Development Office Hours
• Upcoming Google TV development events
• and, of course, Summer of Code

They use the service to find and build communities around their technologies. This is exactly what every technology company wants to see happen to their products, but it's hard to take those first few steps, especially because, to marketing people, this tends to smell like losing control of the message, and that's a cardinal sin in their books.

It will be interesting to see if other organizations can build this kind of ecosystem using Google's tools...

"What's hot" considered harmful

If you log into Google Plus and click on the "hot" link on the left hand side, you'll see a stream of articles that have received a large number of +1s from users. But is this useful? I contend it's actually harmful, here's why:

Back in the day, we used to expect news to come in large batches, once per day, either in the evening news or a newspaper. As information distribution became easier, we've increased that to a nearly constant stream of data in the form of 24-hour news channels and various Web-based feeds. The problem is that there's no more going on in the world, and so we have to turn up the gain on what "hot" means. For example, right now in my Google Plus "what's hot" feed, I see:

• How to make a cable organizer out of toilet paper rolls
• A zombie survival boot-camp
• A discussion about how silly someone thinks Jimmy Wales's head looks on Wikipedia
• and a new Google Plus feature that lets you chat with your circles across Google products.

Now, none of these are useless articles (well, perhaps some) but there's no real sense of what "hot" means, here. In the long run, the harm comes from the overload that we all get trying to keep up with what's actually interesting in the world. Why do these fluff pieces float to the top? Because there's no sense of what "+1" means. I might "+1" an article about a cat jumping really high and a gas explosion in my home town, but those two don't have equal meaning.

Google is a company that knows how to manage information, so you would think that between Reader and Plus, they would find a way to analyze and digest for you, not just articles that others or you would find interesting, but articles that actually have a deeper connection to the real world and events taking place. For example, news of the evictions in New York of the Occupy Wall Street folks or the death of a world leader are not just "hot" but "important."

Perhaps there should be a "what's hot" like feed that doesn't try to stay full all the time, but rather attenuates the flow of noise down to just those few updates. Tailoring it to interests is fine. It's entirely possible that there are folks out there who find the release of a new iPhone far more compelling a current event than the fall of a fascist dictator, and that should be reflected, but it's the desire to "keep the pipe full" that's causing problems, not the weighting of topics.

Google+ problems with apps

If you are having a problem signing up for Google+ and you use Google Apps along with a regular Google/Gmail account, try copying the invite link, and then signing out of your Google Apps account, and then visiting the invite link. This worked for me.

Test Wave Post

I'm testing out Google Wave integration. Please, let me know what you think in the Wave, below.

Twitter / Buzz: the new news?

Today's XKCD discusses the math behind a tweet out-distancing an earthquake (oddly, I read the comic before I heard about the quake). Later in the day, I found myself using Google's Buzz to post pictures of a fire in Boston. It's now getting to the point that I look to the Buzz map on my Droid before I consult Boston.com for local news. It's not that it's more rational or more considered. It's just a matter wanting to know what's going on now rather than a half hour ago. Sure, I can visit a regular news site and find more detail later on, but there's just nothing like having a few thousand potential "reporters" on the scene.

I suppose the future written by some science fiction authors is coming: we'll all be the on-the-scene "reporters" with actual journalists being the people who surf Twitter, Buzz, YouTube and so forth, the way they used to listen to police-band radio for a story. Once a journalist can tap into your head-mounted cam for a live feed hire you on the spot as a freelance photographer, there will be no story too fast to be fed into the hungry maw of the Internet.

What Google Buzz is good for (and not!)

I've been playing with Buzz since it launched and I have a few interesting observations from my experiments. The first is its (and Facebook's) largest failure: Buzz is not for celebrities. Twitter is still the single best venue for celebrities. Why? Because replies gain little visibility from their association with a celebrity post. On Buzz and Facebook a reply associated with a celebrity posting is immediately visible to everyone who follows that celebrity and that creates enormous incentive to post mindless drivel and spam in response to any celebrity posting. This might be improved if Buzz had two kinds of "following": one for friends and one for celebrities and other people you don't know directly. The primary difference I'd be looking for would be hiding replies and not bumping an item in my list when it's replied to if it's not a friend.

Next up: local Buzz search is really nice. Be it on Google's map software or stand-alone, the ability to see what people nearby have been saying is huge. Of course, it will require more adoption to see its potential realized, but it's a great start. Some use cases include searching for a nearby restaurant that people like, finding the best spots at a public event and asking "the neighborhood" simple questions like where people like to do their laundry. If I move to another town someday, I'll certainly be doing lots of buzzing right off the bat.

Integration with other services: mixed bag. Until Google solves the problem of messages from other services (Reader, Yelp, etc) being duplicated when people reply to them on the remote service, Buzz will be a poor place to comment on shared comments and articles from other services. Still, the integration with these services is promising. I was able to do much of what I'm now doing with Buzz in Reader by following RSS feeds from other services (e.g. following my friends' YouTube feeds). But Buzz makes it easier and much more social.

I think Buzz is probably here to stay, and while I'm sure Facebook will continue to do well, it's clearly the primary target of Buzz and it will almost certainly feel the heat.

Google Apps Last Straw: Buzz

For business use, Google Apps is amazing. If I start a company someday, its very first action will be the outsourcing of all communications through Google Apps. Why run a chat server, mail server, document sharing system and calendar server when you can just sign up for Google Apps?

On the other hand, I've now given up on using Google Apps as my primary interface for personal communications. Why? Because Google's social services such as Blogger, Reader and now Buzz don't support it. This means that you have to log into those services and share with your friends an identity that you don't actually use, and in order to manage that identity and its relationships, you need to log into a mail account you don't care about.

So, while my official email address will always be ajs@ajs.com, I've now moved back to using public gmail as my primary window on the social world and all mail to ajs@ajs.com will simply be forwarded there. Some useful tips, though, for those of you who want to do this sort of thing:

• You can configure gmail to send outgoing mail "from" another account. Configure this in your settings (though you'll have to prove that you own the other account by responding to some mail they'll send you).
• Contacts can be exported from gmail and imported into Google Apps or visa versa.

Google Reader vs. Twitter

I've been using both Google Reader and Twitter for a long time now. I use them both very differently, but these days, I'd have to say that I prefer Reader for most things. I'll go into more detail below, but here's the short of it: Reader is free-form, but just as social as Twitter. In fact, because of the tie-in to Google Talk and Gmail, I'd argue that Reader is fundamentally a better social networking platform than Twitter. The problem is that it doesn't have the user-base, so I still use Twitter when I want to contact the largest number of people or to follow what my non-Reader friends are up to. (more...)

The "Follow Me" Push

Google provides a gadget for social networking on blogs. You'll see it to the right in the sidebar, labeled "Followers." As of now, this blog has 5 followers. I'd like to keep that growing so that we represent the community of folks interested in this blog. So whether you're interested in the photography or the geeky topics or the politics or whatever, please follow this blog, post a comment or subscribe via RSS and we'll try to grow our little corner of the world into something more.

Meanwhile, here's what I have planned for the future:

• Obviously, I want to get out into the woods and take more mushroom pictures
• Next, I have some articles on Perl 6 coming
• I'm also working on a set of tools for combining Google applications in new ways... a sort of API mashup. I'll have more in the next month or so
• I've also been thinking about blogging more about the state of World of Warcraft. I don't play as much as I used to, but the mod-writing scene for that game continues to fascinate me, and I'd like to have time to say more about that

I look forward to sharing with all of you. See you in the funny pages!