Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
We're not the only ones interested: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/culture/preparing-for-google-groups-shutdown.html Nelson is an old-time complexity guy as well as a Google graduate. -- 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
I think the Yahoo purchase of Summly and hire of it's 17 year old owner came across as a distinctly google-reader aspected acquisition. -- rec -- On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: We're not the only ones interested: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/culture/preparing-for-google-groups-shutdown.html Nelson is an old-time complexity guy as well as a Google graduate. -- 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
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Yes - this is a concern, which would impact deeply on my research if it came to pass. Let's hope that if it comes to pass, it will be a more orderly exit than the Geocities shutdown. BTW - I know Nelson from early ALife days! On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 03:07:18PM -0600, Owen Densmore wrote: We're not the only ones interested: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/culture/preparing-for-google-groups-shutdown.html Nelson is an old-time complexity guy as well as a Google graduate. -- 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 -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au 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
Turns out there is a bit of sense in google's move: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/google-kills-rss/ .. they apparently are opting out of RSS usage in general: Oh Google. Thought we wouldn’t notice that you’re trying to kill off not just Google Reader, but also your support and endorsement for the RSS format itself? People have just started noticing that Google’s own RSS Subscription Chrome browser extension has disappeared from the Google Chrome Web Store. Though it’s unclear at this time exactly when the extension was removed, the change appears to be recent. I'm not much of a G+ user, so do any of us use it enough to see if it really is The Next Big Thing? In particular, RSS is likely not part of G+, right? I.e. you can't have G+ create a list of recent favorite blog posts? It certainly keeps track of G+ stuff itself, but if RSS goes, it likely will stay in its own silo. -- 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
Oops, forgot the HN reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385089 I love the first entries .. they think G+ is behind this too. (Don't understang G+ but...) I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over. *replyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=5385248whence=%69%74%65%6d%3f%69%64%3d%35%33%38%35%30%38%39 * https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=5385413dir=upby=backspacesauth=f9354d8128341e674ff818de4786e80911f65350whence=%69%74%65%6d%3f%69%64%3d%35%33%38%35%30%38%39 Andrenid https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Andrenid 1 hour ago | linkhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385413 This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done. Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of closed socialness and realname ridiculousness... but overall I always thought they were still on the right side of Don't Be Evil. I'm totally convinced this quiet attack on RSS is a not-so-subtle attempt to push people into G+, and even though I casually use G+ (about the same as I casually use FB or Twitter), G+ is NOT a replacement for RSS, and it's not how I want to keep track of all the sites I read. I don't want to like them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit. Simple. RSS doesn't care if you're logged in. RSS doesn't care if you use your real name. RSS doesn't care if you're accessing it from work, home, or anonymously via an internet cafe. And that's exactly how it should be. Throw in the Picasaweb crap they're doing now too, FORCING you to use G+ Photos (which is a horrible horrible experience), and I'm done. I've just installed Firefox on all my home computers and my phone, for the first time since Chrome came out, and will be looking for a new RSS aggregator. 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've used Google+ a couple of times recently for the AV version of a hangout with reasonable results. For example, screen sharing was an important factor at the time, and that worked well, and the audio is fine, too. At the moment, I'm having trouble getting the latest version of Skype to install properly, so the G+ Hangout was a welcome alternative. And the price is right. Next big thing? ¿Quien sabe? -tj On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Turns out there is a bit of sense in google's move: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/google-kills-rss/ .. they apparently are opting out of RSS usage in general: Oh Google. Thought we wouldn’t notice that you’re trying to kill off not just Google Reader, but also your support and endorsement for the RSS format itself? People have just started noticing that Google’s own RSS Subscription Chrome browser extension has disappeared from the Google Chrome Web Store. Though it’s unclear at this time exactly when the extension was removed, the change appears to be recent. I'm not much of a G+ user, so do any of us use it enough to see if it really is The Next Big Thing? In particular, RSS is likely not part of G+, right? I.e. you can't have G+ create a list of recent favorite blog posts? It certainly keeps track of G+ stuff itself, but if RSS goes, it likely will stay in its own silo. -- 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 -- == J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USAhttp://www.analyticjournalism.com/ 505.577.6482(c)505.473.9646(h) Twitter: jtjohnson http://www.jtjohnson.com t...@jtjohnson.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
REC - Most excellent... thanks! I think progress itself is highly over-rated or at least mis-apprehended. It isn't necessarily what we think it is! - SAS 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 mailto: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
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Steve Smith wrote at 03/14/2013 08:50 PM: 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). Yeah, I get that. And I suppose there's a lot of inter-individual variability as to how much variability (or uncertainty) each individual sees (expects) in their tools ecology. I think it was RA Wilson who claimed that all it took was 20 years to turn a liberal into a conservative. Perhaps it's natural that, as we grow older, we want a more stable tools ecology? But, in general, I reject that. I think it's mostly a matter of focus. When I'm tightly focused on a single objective, interference like a broken tool really frustrates me. But being mostly a simulant, my focus goes tight-loose-tight-loose all day long every day. So, perhaps it's my domain that prevents me from becoming frustrated at the ability to predict the stability of my tools ecology. 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? This is also a good point. I'm privileged that my produce tends to be stand-alone. I'm not usually coerced into negotiating a large, highly connected tools ecology, and finding a reliable place to plug in my products. But that's partly because I force those around me to think in terms of stand-alone produce (hence my fascination with closure). It makes me a less desirable contractor to some because they've committed to an ecology that I readily criticize. In this case, C. Elegans relative simplicity and ancient roots are roughly opposite Google's complexity and very recent roots. I'm not convinced that the worm is relatively simple compared to Google. The closure between layers for Google seems pretty clear: machines vs. humans vs. corporate structures. While it's true that there is some fuzziness between the layers, it's nothing like the fuzziness between, say, the neuronal network and the vasculature in the worm. But, to some extent, the higher level of modularity in a system like Google does make it more logically deep. It's difficult to poke your leads into the Googlebots to find out why they behave the way they do. So, I could say that while the complexity of the worm and Google are probably ontologically similar, the apparent complexity of the two will be quite stark depending on how they're measured. gepr said: 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? Sorry. I'm asserting that organisms like Owen are pattern recognizing machines evolved to find patterns (even when there are none). I speak reflectively, here. I'm arguably the most biased pattern recognizer I know, despite my Devil's Advocacy of arbitrary decision making within Google. I find patterns everywhere, which is why I'm a fan of conspiracy theories. 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. Yeah, you took that in a different direction, which is why I have to quote it whole. My focus is on the
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Glen - I think it was RA Wilson who claimed that all it took was 20 years to turn a liberal into a conservative. Oddly, I spent about 15 years turning from a raging Conservative into a Progressive (if not precisely Liberal). The next 15 seem to be sending me off toward the Anarchist (Anachronist?) horizon. Perhaps it's natural that, as we grow older, we want a more stable tools ecology? There does seem to be a positive correlation there in general. But, in general, I reject that. I think it's mostly a matter of focus. When I'm tightly focused on a single objective, interference like a broken tool really frustrates me. Yes and no. When I'm tightly focused, the most frustrating thing is anything *unexpected* such at I'd rather wield a familiar but sub-optimal (possibly broken) tool than a new shiny one that I'm not familiar with. I feel that my peers (many right here on this list) would *always* rather have a shiny new tool straight from the store (or the magical commons where all free things come from?) even if they have to spend hours/days/weeks figuring out how to operate it properly. But being mostly a simulant, my focus goes tight-loose-tight-loose all day long every day. So, perhaps it's my domain that prevents me from becoming frustrated at the ability to predict the stability of my tools ecology. You use Simulant in the same way Blade Runner has Replicants... is Simulant actually the preferred Subject in such a sentence? It sounds more like the Object? As if you are a simulated construct or the subject of a modeling-simulation project! Perhaps we all are? In this case, C. Elegans relative simplicity and ancient roots are roughly opposite Google's complexity and very recent roots. I'm not convinced that the worm is relatively simple compared to Google. I may have mis-stated my comparison. C. Elegans compared to the rest of biology and Google compared to the rest of the high-tech and corporate ecology. The closure between layers for Google seems pretty clear: machines vs. humans vs. corporate structures. While it's true that there is some fuzziness between the layers, it's nothing like the fuzziness between, say, the neuronal network and the vasculature in the worm. yes. So, I could say that while the complexity of the worm and Google are probably ontologically similar, the apparent complexity of the two will be quite stark depending on how they're measured. Agreed. I think my quibble (which went sideways anyway) had more to do with Ontogeny than Ontology. gepr said: 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? Sorry. I'm asserting that organisms like Owen are pattern recognizing machines evolved to find patterns (even when there are none). I speak reflectively, here. I'm arguably the most biased pattern recognizer I know, despite my Devil's Advocacy of arbitrary decision making within Google. I find patterns everywhere, which is why I'm a fan of conspiracy theories. Got it. And as a sidenote, I transcended Conspiracy Theories early on, filling the same niche with conspiracy theories *about* Conspiracy Theories. There is an Occam/anti-Occam arguement that suggests that all first-order conspiracy theories are way too pat and *have to be* some sort of conspiracy of their own. It is a slippery slope into the mouth of a vortex I fear... stay far back from the edge lest you be lost forever. To me, there's only one reason for frustration and that is when I hit a blockage I don't want (or didn't expect) to hit. I wouldn't care if my home-made tires didn't work as well as tight tolerance, robot made tires. I still might make and use them. But I _would_ care if I couldn't find out how those robot made tires are made, even if just to satisfy my curiosity as to whether or not I should buy/steal my own robot ... or perhaps to be able to parse the gobbledygook coming out of the mouth of a professed tire robot maker. Got it. I share that. It's the lack of access that frustrates me, not the lack of any particular extant structure. Hence, i don't care if Google Reader exists. But I do care if I can't (pretend to) figure out how it works. Your days must just be filled! I share the sentiment but guess I gave over a few years (decades now?) back on this... following RECs recent reference to Hamming and complexity and ignorance, it *feels* like the (science/techno) universe has been growing more complex superlinearly (I'm not ready to say geometric nor exponential) but I'm pretty sure that much of that experience is my (recognized) ignorance growing superlinearly. When we first learned to control fire, we noticed
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
What blows my mind is the apparent lack of movement in the # of people who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had that conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about postmodernism and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people who admit they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic postmodernists, anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are people who think there is, should be, or have a plan. I look around me every day and see all these people who think there's a plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which you can grok the world. If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a) there is no plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it. And the more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be liquid or gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia sets upon me like a heat bath. Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM: 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? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -- Bertrand Russell 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
Slam Dunk! Maybe dementia is just part of the annealing schedule? Assuming of course there were actually a Plan(tm). What blows my mind is the apparent lack of movement in the # of people who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had that conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about postmodernism and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people who admit they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic postmodernists, anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are people who think there is, should be, or have a plan. I look around me every day and see all these people who think there's a plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which you can grok the world. If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a) there is no plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it. And the more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be liquid or gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia sets upon me like a heat bath. Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM: 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? 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
In case gmail also heads south, Dropbox has a new partner, Mailbox: http://goo.gl/y3IL2 .. with the obligatory hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572 .. and /. stories http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/03/15/1822258/dropbox-acquires-mailbox Also just search: mailbox dropbox web interface MB is an iOS app but if DB integrates with it, my assumption is that it would end up having a web front end, just as DB has. Kinda clever, and I like the idea of all these nifty new critters being based on Amazon Web Services. -- 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
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
