Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Replies in-line, below. Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.govmailto:rcpa...@sandia.gov SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.govmailto:rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.govmailto:dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) On Mar 14, 2013, at 11:43 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netmailto:d...@parrot-farm.net wrote: Oh come on guys, Google never makes a mistake. Ever. --Doug OK, how's this for specific. Try these on: Do you think Android will last? I don't mean will it completely go away but will google, for example, drop out of the Android consortium and let the handset makers carry the load? If Google drops Android, then it will not last - the handset makers will fragment it in order to have distinguishing features/selling points. If Google sets up the Open Handset Alliance with funding, it might be able to keep the handset fragmentation at bay. Will G+ be dropped? After all, it mainly gives a Facebook-like world for most folks. G+ is better from our standpoint, but I use twitter 100x more than either FB or G+ and FB has the masses and will never loose them. So G+ is just catch up and niche. Probably not - Google seems to be pushing single sign on through G+ in order to better track people for targeted advertisement. How about Chrome? I think that is the more likely to remain stable forever simply because they depend on a browser as the root of all that they do. Ditto the Dev Tools which are superb. Hopefully solid. I agree - Chrome is probably a long-term investment. Especially since it is their vehicle to get users to single-signon through G+. How about Chrome OS? The twitter world is betting on Mozilla over Google in the browser-as-OS world. Possibly because Brenden Eich became CTO recently. Also their phone promises a way to have responsive design webapps become universal, getting rid of the need for customized android/iphone/windows apps. That's a pretty big win for perplexed companies moving into mobile. Unless Mozilla can get out of their cruft rut, their browser-as-OS will be really slow and unresponsive. As much as I like Firefox and its security plug-ins, I've had to give up on it on my Android phone - it's a memory and processing hog. Firefox has grown bigger and slower with every version. Also, Mozilla doesn't have desktop applications ready. How about Dart? Consider ASM.js vs Dart. Which would you bet on? I'm still betting on Mozilla's ASM.js because its simply more fundamental and understandable and even is part of a C++ to JS translation effort Apples vs Oranges - asm.js is a subset of javascript for which Dart is a ground-up replacement. The real comparison is how much penetration has Dart made into implementations (apparently, negligible). FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Please sign this thing! Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time
Its not artificial when my alarm goes off in the morning! On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Parks, Raymond rcpa...@sandia.gov wrote: Time. Time is an artificial construct. An idea based on the theory that events occur in a linear direction, at all times. Always forward, never back. Is the concept of time correct? Is time relevant? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Please sign this thing! Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time
Only to human beings. On Mar 14, 2013, at 2:10 PM, Parks, Raymond rcpa...@sandia.gov wrote: Time. Time is an artificial construct. An idea based on the theory that events occur in a linear direction, at all times. Always forward, never back. Is the concept of time correct? Is time relevant? Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) On Mar 13, 2013, at 9:45 PM, Carl Tollander wrote: But I like it! Should happen an odd number of times a year! Clocks are arbitrary anyhow; just wake up with the Sun. On 3/11/13 3:25 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: The title sez it all: Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government Basically a petition to either keep DST or standard time, and not flip/flop for no apparent reason. Arizona for example has survived without time change so maybe the rest of us can too? https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/eliminate-bi-annual-time-change-caused-daylight-savings-time/ShChxpKh I am SO sick of this weird, unnecessary attack on my poor ailing metabolism. Takes me a week to adjust. Taint needed. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding _not_ being able to figure Google out. I wonder if different people (people ensconced in other domains, other fora) feel this same desire/frustration around, say, Unilever or General Electric? I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock. But without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present different, perhaps even incommensurate results. I know this was the case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin. I could no more imagine figuring Lockheed Martin out than I could imagine figuring out C. Elegans. Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers, _still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships. GMail is a great example. I hate GMail simply because I can't download the software and run my _own_ GMail server on my own hardware ... similar to SparkleShare, Tor, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. If they allowed that, then I'd love GMail. And, if they did that, you wouldn't have to worry about Google abandoning it, as long as it had a sufficiently pure free agent following (like the role Debian plays for Linux). Why? Oh why? Do we insist on these soft paternalist producer-consumer relationships? What's the underlying cause for people to prefer the Raspberry Pie over Arduino? GMail over postfix? [sigh] Owen Densmore wrote at 03/14/2013 09:34 AM: Good by Google Reader (which I use a lot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 .. and a host of others in this year's Spring Cleaning http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html I will give them this: they have an export stunt, and I apparently can move to others. I don't use the google front page they killed off, Yahoo instead. But seriously, does anyone have a crystal ball? I just can't figure Google out! - Are they consolidating? .. i.e. converting everything to G+? - What's next to go? .. Google Docs? It gets use by digerati, but few others. - Is GMail safe? .. It gets a lot of use, but its easy to scrape off the ads, so can't be a profit center. I'd certainly pay for many of google services .. although I doubt this would stop them from randomly killing off ones I care about. Is there some obvious trend, like I mentioned above, for example .. moving everything to G+? Damn! -- == glen e. p. ropella The dog is dead and the sacrifice is done FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Like many others I use Google Reader daily, it is hard to understand how they can kill such a good and useful product. Apparently it has to do with G+, see http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/14/former-google-reader-product-manager-confirms-our-suspicions-its-demise-is-all-about-google/ -J. Sent from AndroidOwen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote:Good by Google Reader (which I use a lot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 .. and a host of others in this year's Spring Cleaning http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html I will give them this: they have an export stunt, and I apparently can move to others. I don't use the google front page they killed off, Yahoo instead. But seriously, does anyone have a crystal ball? I just can't figure Google out! - Are they consolidating? .. i.e. converting everything to G+? - What's next to go? .. Google Docs? It gets use by digerati, but few others. - Is GMail safe? .. It gets a lot of use, but its easy to scrape off the ads, so can't be a profit center. I'd certainly pay for many of google services .. although I doubt this would stop them from randomly killing off ones I care about. Is there some obvious trend, like I mentioned above, for example .. moving everything to G+? Damn! -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Yeah. Do no Evil, except, of course if you feel like it. N From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 4:00 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services Like many others I use Google Reader daily, it is hard to understand how they can kill such a good and useful product. Apparently it has to do with G+, see http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/14/former-google-reader-product-manager-confirms-our-suspicions-its-demise-is-all-about-google/ -J. Sent from Android Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Good by Google Reader (which I use a lot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 .. and a host of others in this year's Spring Cleaning http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html I will give them this: they have an export stunt, and I apparently can move to others. I don't use the google front page they killed off, Yahoo instead. But seriously, does anyone have a crystal ball? I just can't figure Google out! - Are they consolidating? .. i.e. converting everything to G+? - What's next to go? .. Google Docs? It gets use by digerati, but few others. - Is GMail safe? .. It gets a lot of use, but its easy to scrape off the ads, so can't be a profit center. I'd certainly pay for many of google services .. although I doubt this would stop them from randomly killing off ones I care about. Is there some obvious trend, like I mentioned above, for example .. moving everything to G+? Damn! -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Glen - I appreciate your analysis here at several levels (assuming I actually sorted it correctly), it is nicely dense and layered, appropriate for my particular palate at least. I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding _not_ being able to figure Google out. It *is* entertaining. I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock. Obviously (to me?) Owen's (and the others discussing such things) stake is not whether to buy GOOG but rather whether to invest one's personal/professional energy and attention in learning/using/integrating their tools into one's workflow (or Digital Ecology as Owen is wont to say). But without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present different, perhaps even incommensurate results. Absolutely... and secondarily to considering Google and how/when/if/why you might integrate their products/systems into your workflow/ecology, there is the more speculative questions of what would I develop if I were GOOG or since I am not GOOG but the ARE the 800lb gorilla, where do the tools I might develop fit into whatever oddly shaped phase-space is left after GOOG takes theirs? I know this was the case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin. I could no more imagine figuring Lockheed Martin out than I could imagine figuring out C. Elegans. This is a moderately apt analogy. My daughter (PhD microbiology living in your neck of the woods... Portland/OHSU) were just using C. Elegans as an example in another discussion over the weekend. In this case, C. Elegans relative simplicity and ancient roots are roughly opposite Google's complexity and very recent roots. Despite the gray hair contributed by Andy Bechtolsheim, their *intellectual* roots are pretty shallow compared to say... Lockheed or Martin (both established 1912?). On the other hand, GOOG *is* highly studied by many, though arguably maybe less than AAPL or the ancient IBM. Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. I'm not quite clear on this point. It sounds as if you are identifying corporations such as LockMart and Google as being more like evolved organisms than machines? And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers, _still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships. This fits my biases as well... but apparently in a different way. There are many services I am happy (smug) to provide for myself (heat and water) and/or at least lust after being able to provide for myself (electricity). There are others I suppose I am happy to defer to the cloud. While I *likely* am able to rebuild my starter motor or alternator, I probably wouldn't be able to fabricate a good enough bearing or brushes to do the rebuild and therefore depend on the cloud including AC/Delco and many other industrials of that ilk to supply me with such things. I definitely am happy that we have a Michelin and Yokohama in the cloud, I can't imagine making tyres that would be useful to me. Having a public/common Internet or even a private/common telecomm or private electrical grid (cloud) are almost required... I'm still holding out for a fully distributed mesh network to grow together from it's many tiny patches (see the recent posting on Mesh networks here) or a fully distributed electrical grid (home/neighborhood solar/wind/???) but there are good (non political, non-social) reasons that we didn't get broadly scalable infrastructure until it came from one or a small handful of entities (public or private), behaving in a paternalistic way for the most part. GMail is a great example. I hate GMail simply because I can't download the software and run my _own_ GMail server on my own hardware ... similar to SparkleShare, Tor, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Ma Bell used to provide handsets with phone service but eventually gave over and allowed customers to procure their own, but I don't think they ever offered customers the option of setting up their own switch downtown (although I suppose the did allow/require big customers to set up their own switchboards, etc). So maybe your
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 2:57 PM, glen g...@ropella.name wrote: I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding _not_ being able to figure Google out. I wonder if different people (people ensconced in other domains, other fora) feel this same desire/frustration around, say, Unilever or General Electric? Please, Glen. I do not wish to be mystical only practical. I use Google Stuff. So I want to know when it is likely to actually do what it appears it is going to do. When it goes away, I'm naive enough to be surprised. So would like at least a hint of WTF is going on. Normal. Human. Me. I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock. But without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present different, perhaps even incommensurate results. I know this was the case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin. I could no more imagine figuring Lockheed Martin out than I could imagine figuring out C. Elegans. Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers, _still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships. GMail is a great example. I hate GMail simply because I can't download the software and run my _own_ GMail server on my own hardware ... similar to SparkleShare, Tor, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Er.. IMAP? You have complete control over gmail. I uploaded 20+ years of mail to it over a day or so and have it all cached on my IMAP clients (thunderbird and mail.app) .. yes one needs 1 and I'm positive you have multiple clients. Protocols. Formats. That they get and I can use to my advantage. If they allowed that, then I'd love GMail. And, if they did that, you wouldn't have to worry about Google abandoning it, as long as it had a sufficiently pure free agent following (like the role Debian plays for Linux). Why? Oh why? Do we insist on these soft paternalist producer-consumer relationships? What's the underlying cause for people to prefer the Raspberry Pie over Arduino? GMail over postfix? Generally our use of them. I actually used Goog Reader so now will look for a replacement. Now I do have to admit its generally fun! We get enough time to look at great replacements. Flipboard is really quite good as a media consumer and reader is basically that. But FB is tablet only. Might want something for laptop/desktop. I may however spend a bit of time trying to figure out why G+ is so popular. I do think Google is a fail in social, don't you? But if they can make G+ a replacement for skype, facebook, reader and others, so much the better. They haven't a chance with twitter however, but they can use twitter's open formats and protocols to integrate twitter into G+. I suspect they already have .. or someone has. There is one other bitch I have over killing reader: Minimalist is a nifty chrome extension that lets you modify sites to your liking. Started with gmail but then generalized into others including reader. I sorta hate seeing innovative engineers get screwed by Google. But like the demise of delicious, I ended up with Pinboard which is so vastly superior, I'm extremely thankful delicious failed. What a weird world we live in. And yes, I still want to get google. Sorry! -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Funny. Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early ones he lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing exponentially, that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now, and that keeping current is a very awkward problem both personally and institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up the argument at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was giving the lectures, and it's still truer now. I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant all the time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go back to work and do something really smart. So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this problem: if you can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can find it for you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you wanted. And Google the company is a place founded on the same principle: its projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can ever know what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of it off to make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into. So, why is progress supposed to make sense? -- rec -- On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Glen - I appreciate your analysis here at several levels (assuming I actually sorted it correctly), it is nicely dense and layered, appropriate for my particular palate at least. I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding _not_ being able to figure Google out. It *is* entertaining. I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock. Obviously (to me?) Owen's (and the others discussing such things) stake is not whether to buy GOOG but rather whether to invest one's personal/professional energy and attention in learning/using/integrating their tools into one's workflow (or Digital Ecology as Owen is wont to say). But without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present different, perhaps even incommensurate results. Absolutely... and secondarily to considering Google and how/when/if/why you might integrate their products/systems into your workflow/ecology, there is the more speculative questions of what would I develop if I were GOOG or since I am not GOOG but the ARE the 800lb gorilla, where do the tools I might develop fit into whatever oddly shaped phase-space is left after GOOG takes theirs? I know this was the case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin. I could no more imagine figuring Lockheed Martin out than I could imagine figuring out C. Elegans. This is a moderately apt analogy. My daughter (PhD microbiology living in your neck of the woods... Portland/OHSU) were just using C. Elegans as an example in another discussion over the weekend. In this case, C. Elegans relative simplicity and ancient roots are roughly opposite Google's complexity and very recent roots. Despite the gray hair contributed by Andy Bechtolsheim, their *intellectual* roots are pretty shallow compared to say... Lockheed or Martin (both established 1912?). On the other hand, GOOG *is* highly studied by many, though arguably maybe less than AAPL or the ancient IBM. Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. I'm not quite clear on this point. It sounds as if you are identifying corporations such as LockMart and Google as being more like evolved organisms than machines? And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers, _still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships. This fits my biases as well... but apparently in a different way. There are many services I am happy (smug) to provide for myself (heat and water) and/or at least lust after being able to provide for myself (electricity). There are others I suppose I am happy to defer to the cloud. While I *likely* am able to rebuild my starter motor or alternator, I probably wouldn't be able to fabricate a good enough bearing or brushes to do the rebuild and therefore depend on the cloud including AC/Delco and many other industrials of that ilk to supply
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
[email composed 5 messages back] There is a lot I don't know about Google, and considering it's complexity I agree that some aspects may be unknowable. But it is not going to drop Gmail soon. Although it may not be as much of a money maker as it was when ads were more prominent, it is the main way for drawing people into the Google pantheon, aside from maybe the search service itself. In fact, many people conflate Gmail and Google because of this. I think many (though maybe not most) of Google's decisions are generated at least in part because of public appearance - for instance, many of it's services were cut a few years back when Page Brin took a more executive role again, because (according to them) the company was getting 'cluttered'. At the time I was a little disappointed, as some of my favorite projects were Google's quirkiest (GOOG-411, for instance) and therefore at the top of the list to be cut. But I could see what the reasoning behind it was. And Reader had already been cut before now, when they removed social sharing so that it would not compete with Google Plus (Google seems touchy about social things; both Buzz and Wave were cut, for reasons that were predictable if not acceptable at the time). Now, there are many things Google does that could be considered evil (or at least heading that way; all that foofaraw with Verizon?), but not providing service previously provided for free is not one of them. It is merely annoying, or at worst (if all your workflow is locked into the service) frustrating/infuriating. As for opening Gmail, didn't they try that with Gears when that was still a thing? I don't recall. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
