Google Keep is likely to be with us until March 2017 - on average
The closure of Google Reader made fans of new products and developers worry, raising the question of whether Google will close its services and APIs that users are so used to. After analyzing 39 closed products, it is possible to draw conclusions about how long they will last.
Will Google Keep join the ranks of services and APIs closed by “good corporation”? If yes, then when? Photographer: Alamy.
Recently, Google introduced Keep - a service designed to store notes and other information “in the cloud”. To many it will seem familiar. And all because Evernote already offers a very similar service (since June 2008). And also because Google previously had a product called Google Notebook, included in May 2006, which did the same. So why google keep? Because the Notebook was killed - fell into disgrace, was undoubtedly underestimated - in November 2011. (Love ended long before that in 2009, when development stopped )
You may decide that with the discovery of Keep, geeks and lovers of new products will rush to get acquainted with it - even those who do not remember the death of Notebook. Instead, the new service was met with sidelong glances.
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This is due to the fact that the previously announced closure of Google Reader, the famous RSS aggregator, made people who relied on this service nervous, and now they doubt whether to trust their Google data.
Doubts this time do not concern privacy protection. Users fear that one day they will wake up and read a blog entry with the following hopeless words: “unfortunately this service has never been attractive to users ...”, followed by a date when electricity is cut off. As a result, either your data will be buried along with the service, or you will have to collect them and then mess around with the old sofa, which should be raised to the 20th floor of the new service.
How to estimate the most likely closing time? According to the data I collected about 39 services and APIs from Google - from the most short-lived Google Lively (animated 3D chat presented on July 9, 2008 and euthanized 175 days later on December 31), to the surprisingly long-lasting Google iGoogle Add RSS feeds, weather forecast and other widgets, was introduced in May 2005 and will be cut down in November, after 3,106 days of work) - the average lifetime of products that did not pass natural selection is 1,459 days. This is four years without two days. For those who understand mathematical statistics, the standard deviation is 689 days; with the exception of one sample item (iGoogle), all participants are within two standard deviations from the mean.
Iron (hardware) solutions (such as the Google Mini, a standalone search engine, or a strange Nexus Q in 2012 that did not even reach the shelves), as well as initiatives such as RE <C, aimed at achieving value renewable energy comparable to coal. I also included services that went from free to paid (such as the Google Translate API ) and those that are closed to new users (for example, Exchange Active Sync for Gmail ). I also excluded services that have become part of others (for example, some parts of Google Voice). When calculating dates I used exact dates, if it was possible, otherwise the first day of the month was taken for the date of commencement / expiration of the service life. Such rounding on average will give an error of 15 days and should be balanced in the total sample size.
How long do Google services and APIs live? Slightly less than four years, as shown by the analysis of 39 closed services, conducted by Guardian journalists.
If you want to know when Google Keep, which is open for business on March 21, 2013, is most likely to be closed - again, assuming that Google says “you don’t need a violinist” - then the average analysis gives us a date: March 18, 2017. This is a sufficient period for so that you fill it with a large amount of information, and become dependent on the new service. Also during this period, Google will have enough time to discover that people are not using the service as intensively as the developers had hoped. Something similar happened with Knol (lifetime: 1,337 days, May 2009 - April 30, 2012) and, of course, with Reader (2 824 days, October 7, 2005 - July 1, 2013).
If you want to play around with the numbers, then suppose that the lifetime is a random variable with a normal distribution. And if Google decides to close the service Keep, then with a probability of 68% it will happen between April 2015 and February 2019. Even if the closure is at the end of the specified interval, the service life will still be less than today worked Evernote (and the latter continues to grow ). Is Google interested in Keep long life?
Obviously, one can argue that the reasoning is contrary to a simple remark: many services and APIs from Google are working and developing. This of course includes a search. There are also Android, Google Docs, Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View, Google Voice, etc.
... But there is no way to find out if the service or API you use will get Larry Page's favor or he will be cut off with a scythe called “more wood for fewer arrows”. This uncertainty makes people worry.
The more I look at this situation, the more difficult it is to understand why a particular service falls into the “core” of Google. For example, iGoogle (3,106 days) seems to be an ideal way to attract people to the main page of a search engine, and also stimulates people to be logged in. iGoogle allows you to create your own versions of Google's homepage with RSS feeds, blackjack and other information. Is it not part of the basic business model - to attract people to log in to Google and be logged in? But this service is covered.
What about Google Search Timeline, which gave a visual representation on the timeline of search results for a particular phrase or topic? This is an exclusive tool that is not available from other search sites. This service is an obvious candidate for UTP (unique selling proposition) because it allows you to focus on a specific period of time. An ideal tool for researchers; able to attract influential people engaged in deep search.
But no - this product was one of the short-living. It was launched in April 2009 and killed in January 2011. Existed 640 days.
This inability to decide whether a service is important is permissible for a small startup that desperately generates ideas, in the hope that one of them will magically fire and everyone will rush into their wonderful service (and even carry money there).
But for a giant corporation with a worldwide reputation, this is extremely dangerous. As soon as the geeks no longer trust you, they will no longer recommend you. I noticed this week that some developers were talking about their reluctance to use Keep precisely because of the concern that their data would be stored there only temporarily. They also look with distrust at Appspot, virtual machines in the cloud from Google, because they doubt their reliability and their cloudless future.
Therefore, Om Malik (Om Malik), a fan of all sorts of new products, Google declares its concern in the article "Sorry, Google, you can keep it to yourself" , which rages about the fact that Google Reader was thrown under the train. Mike Loukides of O'Reilly Radar joins the aforementioned , noting that “In the total volume of services, Keep is just a small bipod”. This is exactly what people fear.
As Loukides writes,
Of course, we understand.
By the way, the Prediction API was launched on May 19, 2010. This means that in the area on May 16, 2014, you need to closely monitor blog posts. Sorry, Mike [Loukidis].
George Moore (George Moore) asks Twitter whether there is a tendency to reduce the lifetime of services. It turns out that the services are being killed faster (you can sort the table by the “Started” column).
Below is a list of services with dates.
I liked the article because the author uses statistical analysis, although the lifetime of Google services can hardly be considered a random variable. And unlike other sofa analysts, the author very carefully approached his research: determined the date of the beginning and end of the existence of each service, described the method of calculation, built a confidence interval.
My impression of the Guardian article was positive, so I decided to translate it into Russian. True, translating Guardian articles is always difficult, their British English is more difficult than American journalists. I hope you get information from the article for consideration.
Will Google Keep join the ranks of services and APIs closed by “good corporation”? If yes, then when? Photographer: Alamy.
Recently, Google introduced Keep - a service designed to store notes and other information “in the cloud”. To many it will seem familiar. And all because Evernote already offers a very similar service (since June 2008). And also because Google previously had a product called Google Notebook, included in May 2006, which did the same. So why google keep? Because the Notebook was killed - fell into disgrace, was undoubtedly underestimated - in November 2011. (Love ended long before that in 2009, when development stopped )
You may decide that with the discovery of Keep, geeks and lovers of new products will rush to get acquainted with it - even those who do not remember the death of Notebook. Instead, the new service was met with sidelong glances.
')
This is due to the fact that the previously announced closure of Google Reader, the famous RSS aggregator, made people who relied on this service nervous, and now they doubt whether to trust their Google data.
Doubts this time do not concern privacy protection. Users fear that one day they will wake up and read a blog entry with the following hopeless words: “unfortunately this service has never been attractive to users ...”, followed by a date when electricity is cut off. As a result, either your data will be buried along with the service, or you will have to collect them and then mess around with the old sofa, which should be raised to the 20th floor of the new service.
Closing time
How to estimate the most likely closing time? According to the data I collected about 39 services and APIs from Google - from the most short-lived Google Lively (animated 3D chat presented on July 9, 2008 and euthanized 175 days later on December 31), to the surprisingly long-lasting Google iGoogle Add RSS feeds, weather forecast and other widgets, was introduced in May 2005 and will be cut down in November, after 3,106 days of work) - the average lifetime of products that did not pass natural selection is 1,459 days. This is four years without two days. For those who understand mathematical statistics, the standard deviation is 689 days; with the exception of one sample item (iGoogle), all participants are within two standard deviations from the mean.
Iron (hardware) solutions (such as the Google Mini, a standalone search engine, or a strange Nexus Q in 2012 that did not even reach the shelves), as well as initiatives such as RE <C, aimed at achieving value renewable energy comparable to coal. I also included services that went from free to paid (such as the Google Translate API ) and those that are closed to new users (for example, Exchange Active Sync for Gmail ). I also excluded services that have become part of others (for example, some parts of Google Voice). When calculating dates I used exact dates, if it was possible, otherwise the first day of the month was taken for the date of commencement / expiration of the service life. Such rounding on average will give an error of 15 days and should be balanced in the total sample size.
How long do Google services and APIs live? Slightly less than four years, as shown by the analysis of 39 closed services, conducted by Guardian journalists.
If you want to know when Google Keep, which is open for business on March 21, 2013, is most likely to be closed - again, assuming that Google says “you don’t need a violinist” - then the average analysis gives us a date: March 18, 2017. This is a sufficient period for so that you fill it with a large amount of information, and become dependent on the new service. Also during this period, Google will have enough time to discover that people are not using the service as intensively as the developers had hoped. Something similar happened with Knol (lifetime: 1,337 days, May 2009 - April 30, 2012) and, of course, with Reader (2 824 days, October 7, 2005 - July 1, 2013).
If you want to play around with the numbers, then suppose that the lifetime is a random variable with a normal distribution. And if Google decides to close the service Keep, then with a probability of 68% it will happen between April 2015 and February 2019. Even if the closure is at the end of the specified interval, the service life will still be less than today worked Evernote (and the latter continues to grow ). Is Google interested in Keep long life?
Basic services continue to live. But what is included in this core?
Obviously, one can argue that the reasoning is contrary to a simple remark: many services and APIs from Google are working and developing. This of course includes a search. There are also Android, Google Docs, Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View, Google Voice, etc.
... But there is no way to find out if the service or API you use will get Larry Page's favor or he will be cut off with a scythe called “more wood for fewer arrows”. This uncertainty makes people worry.
The more I look at this situation, the more difficult it is to understand why a particular service falls into the “core” of Google. For example, iGoogle (3,106 days) seems to be an ideal way to attract people to the main page of a search engine, and also stimulates people to be logged in. iGoogle allows you to create your own versions of Google's homepage with RSS feeds, blackjack and other information. Is it not part of the basic business model - to attract people to log in to Google and be logged in? But this service is covered.
What about Google Search Timeline, which gave a visual representation on the timeline of search results for a particular phrase or topic? This is an exclusive tool that is not available from other search sites. This service is an obvious candidate for UTP (unique selling proposition) because it allows you to focus on a specific period of time. An ideal tool for researchers; able to attract influential people engaged in deep search.
But no - this product was one of the short-living. It was launched in April 2009 and killed in January 2011. Existed 640 days.
This inability to decide whether a service is important is permissible for a small startup that desperately generates ideas, in the hope that one of them will magically fire and everyone will rush into their wonderful service (and even carry money there).
But for a giant corporation with a worldwide reputation, this is extremely dangerous. As soon as the geeks no longer trust you, they will no longer recommend you. I noticed this week that some developers were talking about their reluctance to use Keep precisely because of the concern that their data would be stored there only temporarily. They also look with distrust at Appspot, virtual machines in the cloud from Google, because they doubt their reliability and their cloudless future.
Therefore, Om Malik (Om Malik), a fan of all sorts of new products, Google declares its concern in the article "Sorry, Google, you can keep it to yourself" , which rages about the fact that Google Reader was thrown under the train. Mike Loukides of O'Reilly Radar joins the aforementioned , noting that “In the total volume of services, Keep is just a small bipod”. This is exactly what people fear.
As Loukides writes,
“What if they kill the Prediction API while you rely on it?” For Reader, at least there are alternatives, you can find a replacement for Google Docs (although most of the ones I know have safely bent), but I don’t know anything at least similar to the Prediction API. I can play the “what if” game for ages (Authentication API? Web Optimizer?), But I think you understand the meaning. ”
Of course, we understand.
By the way, the Prediction API was launched on May 19, 2010. This means that in the area on May 16, 2014, you need to closely monitor blog posts. Sorry, Mike [Loukidis].
George Moore (George Moore) asks Twitter whether there is a tendency to reduce the lifetime of services. It turns out that the services are being killed faster (you can sort the table by the “Started” column).
Below is a list of services with dates.
| Service / API | Started | Ended | days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google answers | 04/01/2002 | 11/28/2006 | 1702 |
| Google Desktop | 10/01/2004 | 09/14/2011 | 2539 |
| Google video | 01.01.2005 | 08/01/2012 | 2769 |
| iGoogle | 01.05.2005 | 11/01/2013 | 3106 |
| Google Bookmarks Lists | 01.10.2005 | 12/01/2011 | 2252 |
| Reader | 07.10.2005 | 07/01/2013 | 2824 |
| Picasa for Linux | 05/01/2006 | 04/01/2012 | 2162 |
| Subscribed Links | 05/01/2006 | 09/15/2011 | 1963 |
| Google notebook | 05/15/2006 | 11.11.2011 | 2006 |
| Google pack | 06/01/2006 | 01.02.2011 | 1706 |
| Image labeller | 09/01/2006 | 09/02/2011 | 1827 |
| Google Sync for BlackBerry | 01.05.2007 | 01.06.2012 | 1858 |
| Jaiku | 09/01/2007 | 01.01.2012 | 1583 |
| Google translate API | 10.22.2007 | 12/01/2011 | 1501 |
| Google Video for Business | 01.01.2008 | 03/01/2012 | 1521 |
| Google chat talkback | 02.26.2008 | 03.07.2012 | 1589 |
| Google Spreadsheet Gadgets | 03/01/2008 | 01.09.2012 | 1645 |
| Google Code Search API | 04/01/2008 | 01.01.2012 | 1370 |
| Google Friend Connect | 05/01/2008 | 03/01/2012 | 1400 |
| Google health | 05/01/2008 | 01.01.2012 | 1340 |
| Google Maps API for Flash | May 14, 2008 | 09/02/2011 | 1206 |
| Google Apps for Teams | 06/01/2008 | 01.06.2012 | 1461 |
| Google lively | 09.07.2008 | 12/31/2008 | 175 |
| Knol | 07.23.2008 | 04/30/2012 | 1377 |
| CalDAV support for Gmail | 07.28.2008 | 09.16.2013 | 1876 |
| Google Adsense for Feeds | 08/01/2008 | 01.09.2012 | 1492 |
| Places Directory app (Android) | 01.02.2009 | 01.09.2012 | 1308 |
| EAS sync for Gmail | 02/09/2009 | 07/01/2013 | 1603 |
| Google search timeline | 04/01/2009 | 01/01/2011 | 640 |
| Wave | 05/01/2009 | 04/30/2012 | 1095 |
| Google Listen | 08/01/2009 | 01.01.2012 | 883 |
| Fast flip | 09/01/2009 | 09/01/2011 | 730 |
| Google Sidewiki | 09/23/2009 | 12/05/2011 | 803 |
| Buzz | 02/09/2010 | 10/16/2012 | 980 |
| Classic Plus | 06/01/2010 | 11/01/2012 | 884 |
| Google aardvark | 01.02.2011 | 01.02.2012 | 365 |
| Google one pass | 01.02.2011 | 04/01/2012 | 425 |
| +1 Reporting for webmaster tools | 06/01/2011 | 01.09.2012 | 458 |
| Google News Badges | 07/01/2011 | 10/01/2012 | 458 |
From translator
I liked the article because the author uses statistical analysis, although the lifetime of Google services can hardly be considered a random variable. And unlike other sofa analysts, the author very carefully approached his research: determined the date of the beginning and end of the existence of each service, described the method of calculation, built a confidence interval.
My impression of the Guardian article was positive, so I decided to translate it into Russian. True, translating Guardian articles is always difficult, their British English is more difficult than American journalists. I hope you get information from the article for consideration.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/178697/
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