Open Letter to Google - RE: Google+, Reader, and the Black Bar.
I remember when I set up my Gmail account years ago. It’s a reliable service, which I say outperforms every competitor out there. Without Gmail, we’re stuck with Hotmail, Yahoo, and Juno. More apps have come and Google has pushed itself into every part of our lives. From the Google homepage, we can go everywhere and do everything. If it’s relevant, it’s on that little black line.
My favorite service is probably Google Reader, the app that alerts you when your favorite sites update (RSS, “aggregator”, whatever you want to name it). In the recent past, it’s gone from a separate service, to being top of a handy black bar, to being hidden under a “More” tab, to the bottom of that hidden tab. I’m not alone in my shock that such a valuable resource is being treated like a forgettable Happy Days family member. Just search for “Reader google missing/moved/gone” and you’ll find a thread like this one:
It’s clear from Google’s archive of user feedback that what everyone wants is the option to customize their ribbon. People love the black ribbon, they want it to be their go-to place for all of their useful applications: Gmail, Reader, Calendar and Documents. Your useage may be different, but I see the Google site-a-verse as a sort of digital day planner or launching point for anywhere you want to go on the internet. I use mine in order to keep track of my life and the web’s daily changes. This shouldn’t imply “News”, which I do not feel takes a priority enough to warrant a top place on the black bar. My viewpoint on what is news is my own, it does not involve what Google is paid as a company to list as news. YouTube and Maps are great services, but they are their own applications that are not something you stumble into without wanting it on your own. If you want to go to one of those, you type in the URL. People associate email with their RSS feed more than they associate a viral video with planning a trip to Descanso. To give another pithy metaphor, it is akin to sitting with your morning paper, reading a postcard from your folks while a man in a suit asks if you would bychance like to see a map of Luxembourg.
I understand why these changes were made, and know that you are in a great push to compete with Facebook, Google. Shoehorning all of your services to work through Google+ is a bad move however, as applications like Reader are great as is and should be synonymous to the Gmail service. “Keep in touch with family, keep abreast of the internet. All in the same service.” As of now it’s listed as third to last on your services and will probably phase it out entirely come next “patch”. Please reconsider.
If you replace Reader with Google+, you do not push people into using your “Facebook-Killer”, you’ll alienate them out of using your service - the number one RSS feed on the internet. And however big Facebook is, Google is still bigger. We need you to do what you do, nothing more. Don’t set up supermarkets, don’t start a Pharmaceutical company, don’t offer cable services, don’t create an MMORPG, (starting a brewery might be an okay idea), and above all, don’t destroy your company in order to fight a losing battle with Facebook.
Give it a few years, Facebook will die on its own and you can take its place. No one will care then. But in the meantime, we’d rather not be alienated. We’d rather be listened to and trusted with the option to drag and drop our preferences in the order we will use them.
Thank you,
Sal Makar
4:33 am • 16 February 2012
