Google Services I Hope They Don’t Kill
Google’s been culling products left and right lately. Hey, I think more companies should do this, if things aren’t working sometimes it’s best to call it a day and try something else. But Google please don’t kill these services, even if they don’t make Adwords type money:
- Google Analytics: an indispensible tool, although I have some issues with it, namely the lack of an api or plugin support, data portability and minor bugginess. As much as I love this tool, I personally block the tracking script in Adblock, sorry for messing up your tracking data.
- Feedburner: they haven’t done a good job post aquisition, I’m guessing it’s taking a long time to migrate to Google architecture. I still appreciate having 1 feed, as I’ve switched blog engines about 4 or 5 times but kept my readers from having to change their subscription. Their stats are also useful.
- YouTube: unlike a lot of video sites, including Google video, their videos aren’t location restricted, meaning I can watch them in Beijing. They are also fast, Google’s content distribution network is second to none. That said, I think they could do a lot better with the service, unless they just want to be the photobucket of video hosts, which they very well might want to be.
- Google Talk: it’s boring but hey it works. With Microsoft’s recent troubles for 3rd party clients, I’m glad I switched to Gmail. I’m also recently getting a lot of spam on my Yahoo IM, I might just turn it off.
- FireFox: yeah this counts because Google bankrolls them and even feeds their employees (their office buildings are side-by-side).
- GMail: I don’t think they will kill this, but it’s certainly not very profitable, and the buckets of free space do impact the bottom line.
- Google Maps: I think this might be profitable, but I’m not sure. It’s still “double true” good and the new features like streetview have been great too.
Kill these instead please:
- Google Blog Search. More like Google Spam Search, amirite? I guess Google decided Technorati was a paper tiger, which it did turn out to be. Also Twitter is the new blog anyways. (until spammers ruin that).
- Picassa: Their web experience is not to my taste. I don’t like having to have a Google account just to look at my friends’ pictures.
- iGoogle and Google Gears: lots of people love them, but I don’t like the model very much, it seems too walled-garden to me.
- Chrome: I appreciate the effort, but I would appreciate it more if they just made Firefox faster and better.
- Blogger: cede defeat to wordpress and tumblr and posterous and the other guys.
- Knol: totally useless. I would like to see a good wiki type product though if someone could make one.
- Orkut: going with .NET destroyed this service, by the time they rewrote it to Java it was too late to compete I guess. Still brazilians of people use this service so they probably won’t kill it.
