I was a heavy Delicious user when Yahoo leaked that they were going to shut it down. Instead, they sold it off. While it still exists, it is a hollow shell of it’s former self. At the time I was pretty devastated. But I recovered by basically migrating most of what I use to Google.
I have actually been quite a Google cheerleader, but recent events have ruined that for me.
I understand why Google is shutting down a lot of edge products, Google Reader being the most visible. But it’s the underlying things that are cause for concern.
Google was very critical while Facebook killed off their RSS feeds, but Google now has Google+ without them. Google Reader had incredible sharing features, but those were killed off and now the whole product is being shutdown. In the long run, I agree with Dave Winer and Marco Arment that this is a good thing.
The problem is that what Google has killed off is my trust. I trusted that, as long as it was possible to be open and make money, that was the route they were going to take. But something has changed at Google and it hasn’t been a decline in their earnings.
Google+, which I have been a fan of, has not become more open with time, but less. Killing off calDAV and directing people to use the Google API’s instead, not an open move.
Google is becoming a typical American company — consumed with corporate greed.
I started out in the computing industry in Unix. I remember a time before Linux. I am going to push back toward those roots and write the software or use open source software and host it myself.
Of course these means more of my time and effort will need to be spent on this effort instead of other things that have risen to consume my time, but I see no trajectory for the future that ends well for free or ad supported software.