Google Is Killing Off the Pixel 2, Inbox, goo.gl URL Shortener, and Google+ This Week (pcworld.com) 90
In addition to shutting down Google+, Google URL Shortener, and Inbox by Gmail this week, the company has stopped selling its Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones through its online store, which means whatever remaining stock at other retailers will likely be extremely limited. It also means that the $799 Pixel 3 is now the cheapest phone Google sells. PCWorld summarizes the other three products coming to an end this week: Inbox by Gmail: When the Inbox by Gmail app launched in 2015, it was a revelation. A completely new way to view and organize your messages, Inbox boiled your emails down to a smart task manager, with bundles, pins, scheduling, and shortcuts that made managing your inbox a breeze. But over the years, Google's interest in Inbox faded, and it never really got the attention it deserved. Most of its unique features are now part of the Gmail app (though we're still waiting for bundles), and several third-party apps have adopted Inbox's style. Apparently that's good enough for Google, because as of this week you won't be able to use it anymore.
Google URL Shortener (goo.gl): Back in 2009, link shortening was still a novel idea, and Google was one of the first to bring the concept to the masses with the Google URL Shortener. It was a simple way to turn a lengthy web address into a short one that consisted of goo.gl and a short string of letter and numbers. With the rise of bit.ly and similar services, Google's own URL shortener became less important to people's work flow and now, nearly 10 years later, it's gone for good.
Google+: Google+ was once supposed to be the one-stop shop for social and support among Google users, but it never really caught on. And then it was revealed that some 50 million users may have had their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed to third-party developers, which accelerated its demise. Now it's going away for good, but we can't imagine that anyone will actually notice.
Google URL Shortener (goo.gl): Back in 2009, link shortening was still a novel idea, and Google was one of the first to bring the concept to the masses with the Google URL Shortener. It was a simple way to turn a lengthy web address into a short one that consisted of goo.gl and a short string of letter and numbers. With the rise of bit.ly and similar services, Google's own URL shortener became less important to people's work flow and now, nearly 10 years later, it's gone for good.
Google+: Google+ was once supposed to be the one-stop shop for social and support among Google users, but it never really caught on. And then it was revealed that some 50 million users may have had their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed to third-party developers, which accelerated its demise. Now it's going away for good, but we can't imagine that anyone will actually notice.
Google breaks the web, yet again (Score:3, Insightful)
Broken links break the web.
Google should have been forced to use the link shortener exclusively for all it's own internal web sites. Then it would have been safer.
the new threat is the google AMP and other accelated pages. This is already breaking compaibility with browsers other than Chrome.
Google is the new nicorsoft of embrace and extend.... and kill
Re: (Score:2)
Google was also late to the game, not early. The Google fanboyism around here gets ridiculous sometimes.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, not only is Google often late to the game, it often fails, M$ and Google has so much in common, one in the same, just with different marketing, much like the Corporate Democrats and the Corporate Republicans, doing exactly the same thing, selling out their users or voters as is the case, whilst pretending to serve them. You could imagine Google and M$ both coming out with the book, 'How To Serve Humans', only we find out when it is too late, it is a cook book, well a book on how to invade and analyse p
Re: (Score:2)
Can't always get what you want. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google+ was once supposed to be the one-stop shop for social and support among Google users, but it never really caught on.
Well... Google wanted to be the one-stop shop anyway.
Re: Can't always get what you want. (Score:5, Insightful)
One stop shops main features are convenience and simplicity. I can't imagine why Google didn't succeed.
Never used Google+ but perhaps it wasn't convenient or simple.
All I know is that they changed (i.e.: screwed up) the use of "+" the search field.
Re: (Score:2)
I used Google+ a little bit when it launched. It had some good ideas like putting all of the people you wanted to share items with into "circles." You could have a Friends circle, a Family, circle, a Co-Workers circle, etc. People could be in multiple circles. Then, you could share with just a particular circle. Want to share that dirty joke? De-select the Co-Workers circle. Posting a highly technical article? Take off the family circle and select the Co-Workers circle. And so on.
Unfortunately, it just neve
URL shorteners SUCK (Score:4, Insightful)
URL shorteners SUCK, they're a miserably bad idea and always have been.
Case in point: goo.gl.....what happens to the millions upon millions of links now obfuscated by non-functioning goo.gl? They get lost and millions of 404 errors will rule the day.
Link shorteners have ALWAYS been a shitty, stupid idea. They're a great way to trick people into visiting some shitty malware site, but more importantly they break a fundamental part of the web- the fucking URL itself.
Re:URL shorteners SUCK (Score:5, Informative)
Google claims [googleblog.com]:
Re:URL shorteners SUCK (Score:5, Insightful)
While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination
Remember this iin a couple of years when they sunset those links too. Seriously, do you trust google to keep anything up and running after they start decommissioning other parts of it? Do any parts of Hangouts still work?
Maybe Google Graveyard will help make my disbelief clear: https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
I wouldn't rely on those links staying viable for any extended period of time. Maybe they will, but I wouldn't bet a dollar on it.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course that is possible. But, I expect they won't do that for a long time as the cost of maintaining the static forwarding service will drop every year both as hardware gets more efficient and cheaper and as usage of the links decreases as the pages using them go away and as the targets go away. As well, static data has much less stringent backup, recovery, and real time replication requirements. Dropping the analytics associated with usage should save quite a lot of resources. Eventually the forwarding
Re: (Score:2)
Companies are in business to make money, so it's not a question of how much it costs, but how profitable it is to maintain. I can think of tons of technologies that are ultra-cheap to maintain, but are still dropped like hot potatoes when they no longer can be used for good PR.
Re: (Score:3)
True, but breaking links would also have a cost in reputation and make some people very angry. My guess is that they will decide the minimal cost of leaving the links on autopilot for many, many years is less than the reputational cost of cutting them off. But, I thought Trump wasn't going to win the U.S. Presidential election so my magic ball seems to be flawed sometimes.
Re: (Score:1)
Based on things like Facebook stomping on our privacy, UX people removing features like crazy to enhance our experiences, support cycles where 6-months is considered "long-term support", and... Trump, I get the impression that reputation doesn't mean much, anymore. It used to be that every company had to release some flaky, PC-laden apology for any minor PR issue, but now you can pretty much say "Fuck you" to the public and go on with business as usual.
Re: (Score:2)
Years ago I grabbed a google account when they were first time promoted to the public. Later I started using that account with "Google Talk" service configured as a Jabber chat with XMMP federation(?). Google Talk was reportedly killed ~6 years ago and (if I understand that correctly) replaced by Google Hangouts which is not based on XMMP. Yet, the 3rd-party IM programs (Pidgin, MirandaNG, kopete, ...) keep working with that account and I can use that to chat with people that use GMail in a browser. My IM p
Re: (Score:2)
How many of the things in the grave yard broke other parts of the internet. Did you guess zero? The answer is zero. Google have a perfect track record here.
Re: URL shorteners SUCK (Score:2)
For now...
How long until Big Brother Google kills that functionality too?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They're a great way to trick people into visiting some shitty malware site, but more importantly they break a fundamental part of the web- the fucking URL itself.
Yes, that's their primary use, malware. It's not so you can tell a human a URL they can remember. :rolleyes:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that's their primary use, malware. It's not so you can tell a human a URL they can remember. :rolleyes:
This has got to be a troll, right? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Yeah... shortened URLs people can remember, like http://shortlink.com/fi8z92gf3
So short. Much memorable.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not easy to remember, but a damn sight easier to read out to someone over the phone.
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen mail servers delay mail by 20 minutes or more, particularly mail when confirming a registration on a website.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not so you can tell a human a URL they can remember. :rolleyes:
Roll your eyes all you want, the fact is that you never tell someone to go to "http://goo.gl/x/dj4980fhd", do you?
Or maybe "Yah, just go to http://goo.gl/x/m2c_(Qw-sfcn3 [goo.gl]"
Sure you do. Give me a fucking break- even short URLs aren't memorable.
Yes I do (Score:4)
the fact is that you never tell someone to go to "http://goo.gl/x/dj4980fhd", do you?
Yes, I do in fact do that.
Or rather, I use the URL shorteners that let me define a shortened URL like tinyurl.com/LinkToShare which expands into something I could not easily tell someone and would take ages to copy. It's great for presentation materials to be put online where I can take some longish Dropbox URL and shorten it into something easily read, remembered, or captured on a cameraphone.
The permanence of such a link is not really much of a concern either...
Re: (Score:2)
You always seemed pretty reasonable to me, Bill, but that statement really makes me shake my head. Seriously, WTF?
Re: (Score:2)
I think their primary purpose was to make links more Twitter friendly. When you had 140 characters to work with, a long URL could take up your entire tweet. For example, the URL to this page is 133 characters long. That leaves me a mere 7 characters were I tweeting this under the old Twitter length restriction. If, however, I used a URL shortener, I could get this down to about 25 - freeing up over a hundred characters. Of course, since then Twitter has expanded the length of tweets which makes this less of
Re:URL shorteners SUCK (Score:5, Informative)
Link shorteners have ALWAYS been a shitty, stupid idea. They're a great way to trick people into visiting some shitty malware site, but more importantly they break a fundamental part of the web- the fucking URL itself.
That depends on what your intent is -- if you're using them to spread malware, then it's you who suck, not the code.
What you call "link shorteners" actually have three distinct uses:
1) Bona-fide link shortening -- If you have a 200 character link that's awkward to paste around (especially in small text display areas), this seriously does help
2) Analytics and tracking -- If you need to track outbound links or for some reason need to analytic who's getting to your destination, this helps.
3) A permanent URL for content that may move in the future.
But the OP is wrong. At least as far as #3 is concerned, the tech behind a link shortener is at least as old as pURLs [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
The only way I've ever used goo.gl is
4) To SMS somebody an insanely long (keyword-stuffed) article URL you're looking at on your PC without having to type out the whole damn thing on a horrible little touchscreen.
Re: (Score:2)
And apparently I can't read because that was #1.
Re: (Score:2)
I also hate very LONG URLs. :(
Re: (Score:1)
The search engine. Google Maps stunned the world. Gmail. Docs and Calendar. And then... ...what?
They went public, brought on Eric Schmitt, CFR member, to run the thing, and turned it into a surveillance powerhouse.
Project Dragonfly is still being worked on and neomarxist cliques make sure that conservative and libertarian employees don't work on new projects [youtube.com].
Sure, some engineers who weren't told about PRISM were pissed, but Google was apparently complicit above their paygrade, probably OTR like Dragonfly.
Re: (Score:1)
Google Wave was life changing, but they killed it before it was even open to the public.
Google didn't stop releasing life changing software, they just decided it was more fun to change your life by flushing it down the toilet every couple of years.
URL Shortener (Score:2)
Google's URL shortener was built directly into Google Docs, Sheets, and Drive for several years. Now all of those links shared about the web and linked in blogs and other useful locations... will just be dead. Thanks! I'm really glad that with all of those billions of dollars, you couldn't hire 1... just 1 person... to keep that simple service up and running.
Re:URL Shortener (Score:5, Insightful)
Google claims existing links are going to keep working; you just won't be able to make any new ones.
Of course, what people forget is that these short URLs usually rely on the TLD of a foreign country, in this case Greenland.
This potentially places all goo.gl links under the control of Greenland. Now, I don't expect them to do anything bad, but how many other link shorteners exist based on other countries' TLDs? How many of these countries will always be friendly? There's really no way to know.
Avoid using link shorteners.
Re: URL Shortener (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
the links will continue to work, what we need now is a subculture of link re-appropriations. redirect the redirecting links...
There's a website (Score:3, Interesting)
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Unique features are unique (Score:2)
Most of its unique features are now part of the Gmail app
None of its unique features are part of the Gmail app, that is what makes them unique. There are rumours that some of the unique features like pinning, reminders and bundling are coming to Gmail real soon now, maybe in May when Google has a PR event planned. But if they acknowledge that those are good features to have in Gmail, then why are they shutting down inbox before they have implemented them there? Maybe they are relying on the short attention span of the average modern internets user so they can
Killing off? (Score:2)
By "killing off the Pixel 2" they mean continuing to support it, just not sell it any more, as they've been selling the Pixel 3 for a while now.
Announcing 404 day on April 13 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
$800 wtf? I will stick to my $200 iPhone SE.
Privacy matters.
Do either of those phones come with a contract?
Usually, phones with contracts are much cheaper because the cost of the phone is moved to the contract itself.
When will they kill of GoLang? (Score:2)
Like they killed of GWT etc.
Sure they use it internally. A bit.
Is it wise to develop in GoLang? Would it really survive without Google?
I guess I am not "anyone" (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I am not "anyone" then. I was using a G+ group to support AI research, which I now have migrated to MeWe.
And so, this "nobody" will continue. There were many of us using G+, but just because our numbers never made it to the insane levels of FaceBook -- who basically treats all their members like 5-year-olds -- does not mean we were nobodies. I was a member of many high-quality groups, like Blender and many others, that are all going to go "poof". And the 200GB archive I downloaded from G+ is another sign of just how active I've been there for many, many years.
So PCWorld can shove it where the sun never shines. Besides, they are one of the worst computer magazines ever. Never ever liked them.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, from what I could tell, google+ was finally gaining marketshare as many thousands of users fled facebook.
Only to have the bridges behind and ahead burned so all the data they had shared would sink into the swamp and be buried.
So... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
The trouble with Google... (Score:2)
The trouble with Google is people do not realize that these services they provide are not the product. YOU THE USER are the product. Google is a marketing company and always has been. It is how it funds itself. By selling advertisements and collecting massive amounts of data and metadata about it's product which is YOU!