Google and Feeds

For some reason, a day before Google Reader was closed, Google Developers blog published an article about PubSubHubbbub, feeds and the Google Feeds API. PubSubHubbub (PuSH) is a protocol for sending notifications when a feed is updated. "Using the PuSH protocol, servers can subscribe to an almost arbitrarily large number of feeds and receive updates as they occur." Google encourages publishers to submit their feeds to a public PuSH hub like Google's hub and Superfeedr's Open PubSubHubbub Hub.

The most interesting part of the post is this one: "Google directly hosts many feed producers (e.g. Blogger is one of the largest feed sources on the web) and is a feed consumer too (e.g. many webmasters use feeds to tell our Search system about changes on their sites). Our PuSH hub offers easy access to hundreds of millions of Google-hosted feeds, as well as hundreds of millions of other feeds available via the PuSH ecosystem and through active polling." And something else: "We are planning some improvements to the Feed API, as part of our ongoing infrastructure work."

This means that Google's feed processing backend will continue to exist, but will focus on the Google Feeds API and Google Search index updates. Google Feeds API will also continue to exist and third-party feed readers could use it. All of this was an important part of the Google Reader backend, but Google Reader also had to manage subscriptions, labels, the read/unread state, create a search index for each user.

Hopefully, this also means that Google's services will continue to offer feeds. Maybe, at some point, even Google+ could add support for feeds.

Update: Google Feedfetcher is still running and shows almost the same number of subscribers. Here's a screenshot from FeedBurner:

"Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage or Google Reader. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google's other search services (feeds appear in our search results only if they've been crawled by Googlebot)." - from Google's help center.

Tomek Wasiak noticed Google Feedfetcher in his site's logs today. He subscribed to the site's feed in Google Reader and he's the only subscriber.

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Help Google Translate Support Māori

Google's homepage links to a page that asks Māori speakers to help Google add this language to Google Translate.

"Google Translate is a free automatic language translation service by Google. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Google Translate currently supports translation between 71 languages. Our team is working on expanding this list and Māori could be one of the next supported languages with your help. If you speak Māori and English, we will greatly appreciate your help with identifying good Māori translations."

Google links to some pages that allow you to rate translation quality. Please don't use this feature if you don't speak Māori.

From Wikipedia: "Māori (...) is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand. (...) According to a 2001 survey on the health of the Māori language, the number of very fluent adult speakers was about 9% of the Māori population, or 29,000 adults. (...) 157,000 New Zealand residents claim they can converse in Māori about everyday things."

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Blogger Requires to Write the Title First

I don't know about you, but I like to write the title of the post at the end. It makes sense to pick a title only after writing an article because the title usually summarizes the text. Sometimes I have no idea what's the right title, but it reveals itself after writing the last paragraph.

This post is not about finding the right title for a blog post, it's about a new Blogger feature (or a bug?) that shows this message as soon as you start writing a post: "Required field must not be blank". The warning is placed below the title field, but it's not obvious that it refers to the title. Click "ignore warning" and the warning is displayed again in a few seconds.

You can't save, preview or publish post if you haven't picked a title. This is really dangerous: what happens if you write a long post and the browser crashes? Until now, Blogger automatically saved the post as a draft and you could find it later. Now it's no longer saved until you write a title.

You could write a temporary title and change it later, but why use a workaround? The title should not be a required field. Blogger could show a warning before publishing the post and that should be enough. It's important to mention that Blogger has never required post titles before. You could even publish posts without a title.

To sum up: here's a feature that's annoying, not useful, dangerous and hard to understand. It's really difficult to come up with something like this, but someone did.

What if Gmail had a similar feature?

Update (July 8th): The feature has been removed (or the bug has been fixed).

{ Thanks, Beben. }

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A Google Trends Annoyance

It's sometimes helpful to read some instructions, especially when you use advanced features. What happens when you can't dismiss these instructions and you have to see them every time you use a service?

Google Trends shows an annoying box every time you click the search box: "Explore Trends. Separate terms by commas to compare. Some examples: [GMC, BMW, Honda], [Swine Flu], [Madonna, Adele]."

Google Trends used to display this information on the homepage, but now the homepage shows a list of hot searches.

Here's the old Google Trends homepage:

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Google's Homepage Promotes the Mobile Search App

Google's mobile homepage now promotes the Google Search app for iOS. There's a big banner at the top of the page in both Safari and Chrome for iPhone and iPad.

There's a standard iOS feature for promoting mobile apps, but Google doesn't use it.

"Smart App Banners vastly improve users' browsing experience compared to other promotional methods. As banners are implemented in iOS 6, they will provide a consistent look and feel across the web that users will come to recognize. Users will trust that tapping the banner will take them to the App Store and not a third-party advertisement. They will appreciate that banners are presented unobtrusively at the top of a webpage, instead of as a full-screen ad interrupting the web content. And with a large and prominent close button, a banner is easy for users to dismiss," explains Apple.

Google implements a similar feature, but it doesn't work so well. Dismissing the banner doesn't work: when I open google.com in a new tab or refresh the page, the banner shows up again. That's annoying.

How do I know that Google doesn't use Apple's smart app banners? Here's Yelp's site: the banner includes ratings and screenshots from the App Store.

Another clue: Google's banner is also displayed in Chrome and smart app banners are limited to Safari. Google should use the smart app banner for Safari and the custom banner for other browsers. Oh, and you should be able the dismiss the custom banner.

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Moto X - Designed by You, Assembled in the USA

Moto X is no longer a rumor, Motorola's CEO announced it in May. "Moto X will be built in a 500,000-square-foot facility outside of Fort Worth, Texas, that was previously used to build Nokia phones. Seventy percent of manufacturing will take place there, making this the first smartphone built within the United States, Woodside said. However, the processors are from Taiwan and the OLED screens are from Korea." It's surprising to see a CEO that reveals so many details about a new phone before it's launched.

AdAge reports that Motorola will run a full-page ad "in the July 3 editions of The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post". The ad announces the "first smartphone designed, engineered and assembled in the USA" and "the first smartphone that you can design yourself".

Motorola has a new logo, is now "a Google company" and has bold ambitions. "We're not just any company," says the ad. Once a mobile phone pioneer, Motorola lost market share and was saved from bankruptcy by Android and Google. Now Motorola tries to bring back innovation and go back to the roots.

"Smartphones are very different than other tech products a consumer owns," says Brian Wallace, Motorola VP. "They're closer to shoes or a watch. You carry it with you everywhere you go. Everyone sees what phone you're carrying and they judge you on it. Yet it's the one thing you carry that's the least customizable." Well, you can always buy a case.

The trouble with assembling phones in the US is that it's expensive and most components are made in Asia. The new Motorola tries to change that. "Marry big science with a good application and you have something. When you take on a really bold vision you yield good results more often," says Regina Dugan, a former DARPA director who now works at Motorola.

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

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An Old Google Ad

Here's an old Google/Airtel commercial from 2007 that was restored and enhanced for the Computer History Museum. It's from India and it was the result of a partnership between Google and Airtel, a mobile network operator. The commercial announced the launch of Google search on Airtel Live.

Director: Ram Madhvani
Writers: KS Chax, Ajay Gahlaut, Pradyumna Chauhan
Agency: Rediffusion DY&R, Delhi

{ Thanks, Kristian Serrano and Roney Thomas. }

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Google Alerts Drops RSS Feeds

If you read the post about the well-connected Google Reader, you probably anticipated this chain reaction. All the services that integrated with Google Reader will remove their features, now that Reader is gone.

Google Alerts no longer supports RSS delivery and recommends users to switch to email delivery. "Google Reader is no longer available. To continue receiving Google Alerts, go to http://www.google.com/alerts/manage and change your alerts to email delivery," says Google.

You're probably wondering: what's the connection between Google Alerts feeds and Google Reader? Google Alerts feeds, which were added back in 2008, had public URLs and you could use any feed reader to subscribe to them. The trouble is that the feeds were generated by Google Reader and were actually a Google Reader feature, just like the web page monitoring feature.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer feeds for search results and the Web Search API has been deprecated and it was too limited to create a service like Google Alerts. The only obvious alternative is to screenscrape Google results.

Talkwalker Alerts looks almost like Google Alerts and offers both email alerts and feeds. The service is free for up to 100 alerts.

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Google Reader's Final Message

If you open Google Reader, you'll see this message:

Thank you for stopping by.

Google Reader has been discontinued. We want to thank all our loyal fans. We understand you may not agree with this decision, but we hope you'll come to love these alternatives as much as you loved Reader.

Sincerely,

The Google Reader team

Frequently-asked questions

What will happen to my Google Reader data?

All Google Reader subscription data (eg. lists of people that you follow, items you have starred, notes you have created, etc.) will be systematically deleted from Google servers. You can download a copy of your Google Reader data via Google Takeout until 12PM PST July 15, 2013.

Will there be any way to retrieve my subscription data from Google in the future?

No -- all subscription data will be permanently, and irrevocably deleted. Google will not be able to recover any Google Reader subscription data for any user after July 15, 2013.

Why was Google Reader discontinued?

Please refer to our blog post for more information.

I don't understand why Google removes Reader data so soon and why the message uses words like "systematically deleted", "permanently, and irrevocably deleted". It's like they try to get rid of everything that's related to Reader. I can still download Google Buzz data from Google Takeout. A similar message was posted for Google Health, but users had one year to download their data.

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Google News OneBox With Bigger Photos

Google tests an updated version of the Google News OneBox, with bigger thumbnails. The images are really big and I find them distracting. Another change is that the first link no longer sends you to a Google News search results page, it points to a news article and borrows its title.

Here's the existing interface:

{ Thanks, Michel. }

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The End of This Internet

"Congratulations, you've reached the end of this internet. Look for another?" That's the message you see when you use the Google Reader bookmarklet and you read all the posts from your subscriptions. It's a joke that's quite bitter, now that the end of Google Reader is really close.

Google Reader was more than just a feed reader, it was probably the most well-connected Google service. It was integrated with so many Google services and now all of them will be a little less useful. The missing features, which relied on Google Reader, will show how important this service really was.

iGoogle's canvas view for feeds was powered by Google Reader and now it's no longer available, just like the Reader gadget.

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