You know, Google, the web already had this feature

Google has overstayed the web's welcome.<p>What started out as a quirky, innovative company that bucked all of the suit-and-tie trends (see Microsoft, HP, even Apple in some regards) of Silicon Valley, has now turned into a monstrous calamity with no regard for its users. Up until 2009, it was breezy and beautiful, but right now, at this moment, it's a different story altogether.<p>Don't be evil? Pfeh. The only thing left of Google that they haven't managed to screw up or cause outrage over is search. The only thing they <i>can't</i> afford to change, for fear people will stop using it.<p>This harkens back far before Google, far before any company dared invest in the Internet. This type of corporate mentality is one we see often, but tend to forget quickly. Apple did it in the 1990s. Microsoft is doing it now; look at Windows 8.<p>Any corporation that strays too far from its roots with fail. Not in a fiscal sense, but in an ethical sense, and that's the worst type of failure there is. Do I <i>hope</i> they get their shit together and start being Google again? Of course. They could start by fixing YouTube, exhuming Google Reader, and rethinking the decision to end iGoogle.<p>And please, PLEASE, reinvent that horrid thing called Google+. Even the name sucks.

You guys in this thread whining about google:<p>It isn't google that has changed, it is <i>the whole world</i> which has changed.<p>Look at the things that some of you champion; the iPhone, the iPad...anything running iOS, anything made by apple computer, the company that is pushing <i>the hardest</i> against openness on the internet. Oh, you want some basic browser functionality like uploading files? Spend time learning objective C, writing an app, submitting it to us (can't let anything edgy get through! Don't use any APIs we don't like!) and then selling it in our closed off app store so that people stay in our warm walled in garden of shiny plastic.<p>You talk about "growth hackers" or "hustlers" as if these people are anything but parasites on our creative culture.<p>Yeah, google does some shitty things. Google+ is obnoxious. Some of the stuff happening with youtube is obnoxious, but google remains as one of the coolest companies in the world, still funding the coolest things in the world just because they can.<p>If a little bit of annoying google+ talk is the price that humanity has to pay for things like google driverless cars, google glass, and google fiber FINALLY holding bandwidth providers to task on bringing fiber to the curb, then GOOD.<p>I will continue to take that deal. The people whining about google+ will too.<p>Oh hey! You know we could just give it all back.<p>Back goes chrome! Remember when firefox leaked memory like a sieve but we all STILL ran it because there wasn't a viable alternative (unless you were double super extra hip and ran Opera)<p>Back goes android! Enjoy choosing between Apples complete joke of a mobile operating system and RIM, or palm.<p>Back goes google glass! Maybe Microsoft will sink the money required into developing a viable headmounted display.<p>Back goes google cars! Oh! Maybe Mercedes will license some garbage developed by a defense contractor in the 90s and sell it on their most expensive luxury cars.<p>Reading this thread reads like I'm reading the comments of a bunch of spoiled children.<p>If you seriously hate google+ this much, then good! Use all of these wonderful, world changing tools we have around us and "hustle" and "growth hack" your way into a brand new web browser and suite of free mail, spam filtering, document storage, and search.<p>I look forward to see it!

I feel the author's pain. I don't hold it against Google for looking at the way RSS is (was?) used and re-implementing it in a way that they can more easily make money off it, while simultaneously removing any traction they are offering for the old non monetizable way of doing things. They are a business after all and no amount of money in the bank is enough [1].<p>But I find the whining a bit distracting since the same thing that made RSS in the first place is still out there. There is no "patent" on aggregating RSS feeds or creating a more durable (and by that I mean self sustainable) service which has the same capability.<p>My advice is don't look at this as a loss, look at this as an opportunity. Rarely does the invading army come back to revisit the burned out village they have left behind. It is dead to them, so it is a uniquely safe place to avoid their future gaze.<p>[1] I asked Eric Schmidt at one of the TGIF (friday) meetings why taking the $30M/year they spent on bottled water and putting it into their bank account made sense. His answer was that there were a lot of unknowns facing Google and the only insurance they had for dealing with them was to have a lot of capital. There is always something that <i>could</i> happen, that you might have prevented if you had just a bit more <i>money</i>. And sliding rapidly down that slope as early as 2007 (when I asked my question) it continues to be the goto answer to this day.

Honestly: Google isn't that bad. This article mentions a few things, and specifically mentions Google. But really many other companies and websites are doing similar things.<p>I've been railing against anything other than pure HTML, CSS, and perhaps Javascript for years. I've obviously lost that argument a long time ago. But it's not Google who killed that model of the web. If anything Google is helping by helping to kill Flash.<p>Sites have been blocking based on browser type for years. They've even used sneaky tricks to avoid users changing the agentid string. (<a href="https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/msg/7e6d6a94db0c84bb" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/msg/7e...</a>) - that website (the Argos website) worked perfectly well in Opera.

The author is reaching here. Us nerds need to remember the web isn't just for us, at least not for B2C businesses. Google isn't doing this to squash competing technologies and take over the web... on purpose. What's going on is that only nerds like us give a damn about RSS. Everyone else wants to just point and click around and have stuff work. Google+ and some pointing and clicking around = a lot of happy normal people. Seriously, meta tags? Again, who's gonna do that except me and everyone else in this thread? Techie folks like us tend to really overestimate our importance and how many of us there are. There's a lot but we're nothing compared non-technical folks.<p>Google isn't for us. It's for your parents. But that's alright because there's a whole world wide web out there without Google and Google really can't do much to actually kill any technology. RSS exists guys, there's just no Google Reader anymore. The cool thing is that if you actually care about this stuff then you're probably in a position to know how to build it. Google caters to those who don't know or care to build stuff. Why would you blame a company for catering to its customers?

I have always been somewhat of a Google fanboy except for a few misgivings about their worrisome breadth of infiltration into people's live and things like the iGoogle shutdown but the Reader situation has been a huge slap in the face that made me lose a lot of faith in them.<p>There is a huge war between Facebook and Google for global control of the most popular social graph and as much as I like Zuckerberg as a person, I was rooting for G+ for its streamlined interface and perceived lesser level of evil. Now I'm not so sure.<p>I think there should be a third option in the form of a decentralized social protocol.<p>I think there is market for a "social rss" where you could choose amongst a number for providers, "Google Readers" for social if you will, that could connect to each other. That way people could choose their frontend and the way they consume their friends social feeds. This would open competition and give people choices of different user interfaces, layouts and themes.<p>For public posts the implementation could be fairly straightforward. I assume other providers would periodically fetch friends posts, upvotes, downvotes and other social interactions from other networks.<p>When it comes to private content, the providers would probably have to send things only to other trusted providers that promise to show it only to the correct "circles". However, I don't see it as a big deal since privacy in G+ and Facebook is already somewhat of an illusion because it only takes one amongst hundreds of friends to share your stuff outside the network. Maybe your friends would need to authenticate into your network and do email verification at least once. Maybe they could use a Mozilla Persona authentication?<p>There are companies that could do this without too much effort. Tumblr already publishes rss of their user's feed, they would only need to add the ability to consume rss and push for an upgrade of the rss protocol to support social features.<p>Digg has shown interest in doing an rss reader, why shouldn't they work on upgrading the protocol to include more social features?<p>Other web based rss reader companies could do it.<p>A new team from this community.<p>Or even better, cooperation of all of the above!

Wait, you're not a Google fan anymore because you have to use Google in order to use a Google service? You're complaining that you have to use Chrome in order to use a Chrome add-on? And that you have to use Google+ in order to get Google+ notifications? You can add Google+ pages to your circles without this add-on; you don't like Google anymore because they're offering the ease of doing this in a single click in a particular browser, but you have to send them some data?<p>If the content you're interested in is only available through Google+, that's not Google's fault. Complain instead to the website owner who decided to have content on their Google+ page.

The web had the feature and it failed: everyone flocked to Facebook and Twitter to live within their happy walled gardens.<p>What do you want Google to do - sacrifice their business to pursue some ideological point about how geeks think the web should be? Google is being reactive here. The web already lost this feature, because us (we geeks) failed to make a distributed, federated model appetizing enough for Grandma and Aunt Maud to use. I think there's still opportunity for a federated model to arise and beat the pants off Facebook and Twitter (and G+ for that matter) but it's not going to happen as long as we're all in denial about the flaws of the old model.

Given its a extension for universal access to the G+ notification count, people who go out of there way to install this and keep it have not only bought into the notion of the G+ stream, but like it enough that they want more convenient access to it.<p>With this as a premise, an optional feature inside an already optional extension to scope out more content for the stream just seems to be a logical extension for the enthusiasts who use it.<p>Even supposing the only content on the G+ page was exact reshares of articles, it isn't an exact 1-to-1 match with an RSS subscription since it also augments the users search results, populates contact details into the Android People app/address book as well as any other integrations they add to circles.<p>I don't really get the significance of the article, though maybe it's because I've (mostly) got over my Reader mourning phase.

I used to be a Google fan as well. Not a BIG fan but a fan. In late 2010 I decided it was time to move on from Google. It took a while but I already went back to Firefox (nightly), started moving my emails to fasmail.fm (with my own domain so I'm not tied to anyone), I'm trying to use only DuckDuckGo (it's difficult... I have to admit that Google is unbeatable yet), stopped using google+ and Google Reader (since 2011), avoiding Google Talk, Analytics and Web Master Tools, etc. I think I'll make it to the end of this year. They are evil.

Waiting around for people to embed metadata in their webpages is a terrible business strategy.<p>This is way better for google than something like an embedded RSS feed. This lets google generate the equivalent automatically, without webmasters needing to do anything.<p>Yes, this occurs at the expense of other things (annoying developers). But that's the reason.

lets all stop with all the fear mongering. Do you guys really believe that every time a site loads a facebook or twitter widget they aren't tracking you either. I can name 1000 other trackers that sites actually do install and that do genuinely sell your information. There are a handful of widgets that do the same thing for twitter and facebook so lets just stop the bs.

Nitpick: the extension would not need to send every URL visited to Google. Just the ones where it detects a G+ widget. And by serving you the widget in the first place Google already knows that you've visited that page.<p>(Unless I misunderstand what the extension actually does)

I think this blogger isn't understanding a fundamental reality of corporate structure that has little to do with some pie-eyed plan for what Google thinks the web "needs".<p>This behavior isn't indicative of any design to "improve" the web, which I think could be said that a fair majority of programmers desire on a personal level and indeed what most laymen would admit to wanting as well.<p>This has to do with Google focusing on brand homogenization. This is marketing, not web fundamentals. It's a company trying to extend, homogenize and monetize its brand and the services its brand can offer under those circumstances.<p>I also thinks this differs in nature from the path Microsoft took with its OS strategy, though there are certainly some similarities.<p>Is corporatism infesting Google? Of course it is! That's what happens when a corporation grows to the size Google has over the past decade. Now, this is in no way meant to be in any way a defense of corporate culture or an argument against lobbying tech companies to do what's best for the web. We generally want to see the web evolve in a positive way.<p>However, if you're expecting that from a major corporation that at the end of the day has responsibilities to shareholders... well, to say the least you're going to be disappointed.<p>Positive evolution will generally come from non-profits, because they can take risks. I defy any programmer to point to one of these tech giants and say they "definitively moved the web in a positive direction". Google's the absolute closest you could get using such a narrow criteria and that's largely due to their innovations in search that stem from their less profit-focused days and their more recent Google Fiber efforts. Even then, Google Fiber is an extension of Google's long-term corporate goals.<p>The only point I want to argue is that we need to look at this situation through a realistic lens. When we lose sight of the realities of Corporate America and its relationship with technology, that's the point when we start engaging in counterproductive hyperbole.

It's the 2013 version of Netscape's "What's New" and "What's Cool" buttons.<p>Holy shit, nothing HAS changed. It just has a different skin on it.

So google tells business hey setup a google+ account for your business to show yourself off...accept if a person is on their iPhone and comes to your google+ page they have to have google+ installed. How many are not going to bother installing the app and not come back to your google+ page?<p>There is a difference between highly suggesting consumers use your product which google used to do and requiring they use your product. Sadly google has crossed that line.

I'm not so fond of Google+ either, but really this is a lame post. RSS was just not that good of a technology and has been in zombie status for a couple of years now already. Its about time somebody took steps to put it out of its misery.<p>Google+ is a shitty replacement for RSS and I don't even think its going to catch on, but at least now we have more of an opportunity to try and get open content syndication right.

I find it really depressing that this discussion immediately degrades into Apple vs Google, people feel a need to state that they are or have been a "fan" of Google before giving their statement and similar. If we want to really discuss about what a desirable future for the web is, how to further that cause, and who might be allies and foes we first have to overcome these attitudes.

Google tracking codes are on a majority of sites anyway, and you probably find the sites using Google. They already know which URLs you go to.

There's a false equivalence fallacy the author commits here where he assumes that the effort required to get a useful number of websites that also have Google+ pages to commit to embedding a specific tag is equal to the effort required to create this Chrome plugin that phones home, or that either of those two tasks could be accomplished by the same people.

For a little background about where this rant comes from : the article's author was also the author of a nice feed aggregator - and he is a good guy.<p>Anyone who has been invested in developing stream infrastructure to break through the silos that web sites used to be can only be aghast at the regressive trend pushed by large social walled gardens.

FREEDOM.<p>As long as things stay free, Google and anyone else are free to do what they want. There is also a corollary here: Every form of refuge has it's price.<p>Democracy and republics are not perfect, but name a better system that has worked.

This does suggest that they really did shut down Reader in order to push people to use Google+. This suggests that somebody at Google is a fucking idiot, because Google+ is in no way a substitute for Reader. Google+ (like Facebook or Twitter) gives me a stream of stuff that's happened recently - it's ephemeral, in that if I don't make a conscious effort to bookmark something I see there, I'll forget it. An RSS reader, on the other hand, remembers (and categorizes) everything unless I make a conscious choice to mark it as forgettable.

<i>My personal stream was my RSS feed, you want me to replace it with a Google+ profile.</i> Interesting I wrote about this just about a year ago: Social Networks Killed the Content Providers (<a href="http://www.lanceramoth.com/blog/2012/05/social-networks-killed-the-content-providers" rel="nofollow">http://www.lanceramoth.com/blog/2012/05/social-networks-kill...</a>)<p>I also introduced the idea of Personal Digital Asset (PDA). Would love to know what you think.

It's not Google's problem, or Facebook's or Microsoft's or anyone else's. The problem is architectural. With NAT and firewalls we have created a net that does not permit <i>easy</i> lateral communication. As a result, all communication must go through something in the "cloud" -- some third party. This is inherently favorable to monopolies for several reasons.<p>IPv6 and killing the in-network firewall would change things immensely.

If you don't like, make it better.

I don't know if people know this or not, but all of these "social" features invade our privacy without us having to install an extension. The social javascript embedded into the web page automatically communicates with each service it's from.

All this Apple vs Google talk is tiresome.<p>People: complaining about Google doesn't mean praise for Apple, or vice versa.<p>Defending Google's recent follies by comparing them to Apple is like telling someone to leave America if they don't like the PATRIOT Act.

The fuhrer.. err I mean Larry Page has declared G+ or die! So expect more to go that competes or can't intergrate G+ properly. Google long ago lost the "Do no evil" moniker.

Google is also starting to screw with the search results ... personalized search results for example... Maybe Mozilla should start a search engine

Google+ is the Bob of our times

I wish Google would charge me for Reader. I'd be willing to pay up to $50/year.

Chrome never implemented RSS auto discovery.<p>Everyone else has a "walled garden" why must Google be different? and why should they - arguably the least “walled” of said gardens - suffer the "openness" brunt?<p>The fact that they are not investing in RSS tools doesn't mean they're against them, it's just not in their interest anymore, and so I come to the conclusion that this is yet another Google Reader lament, and I thought we've already had our fill of these on the HN front page.<p>It’s the same discussion all over again, If you've not found a Reader replacement by now, or at least had your eyes on a couple of replacement candidates then you're just being stubborn.<p>Google lets you export your feeds and that is why they are not "evil", not because they refuse to indefinitely maintain a service that isn't of interest to them.<p>Also the crux or that post is an opt in feature that you have to install as a browser extension, if you don't like it then avoid the extension, but then how is it any different than Facebook's 'like' buttons or any of the other social widgets that are cluttering the web?!

So don't install the extension then.<p>Who are these low karma users who keep submitting these Google bashing/feigned indignation posts?!