25 March 2013

Wired UK: “Five Google products that should fear Larry Page’s axe”

But the company retains an almost comically broad set of initiatives, ranging from self-driving cars to high-tech glasses to (multiple) social networks to mobile handsets and (multiple) operating systems -- and everything in between. If Google sees a beloved, impactful, but less-than-blockbuster product like Reader as something to prune then there's plenty more brush to clear. […]

Blogger: When it was created by Evan Williams in 1999, seven years before Williams co-founded Twitter, Blogger was bar none the easiest way to create and maintain a blog. But the world has moved on. Rival network Tumblr has social features that vastly outmatch Blogger's, while WordPress is much easier to customise and has a robust development and design community supporting it. As with Google Groups, the only reason Google may want to keep Blogger around is to preserve the old content and avoid a PR backlash. But Google could easily put a freeze on new blogs and posts.

Ryan Tate

The main blog hasn’t been updated in three months, same for the account – last tweet two months ago; Blogger in Draft has been retired about a year ago, the developer group has been mostly ignored by the support engineers and a general lack of feedback and support on the usual channels; a very poor mobile presence with a barely usable app; no meaningful features for as long as I can remember – aside from the increasing integration with Google+; long-standing bugs with threaded comments that have yet to be solved; a recent flood of spam comments. Need I continue? All the signs of neglect are there and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see going the way of in a year or two. The public backlash should be even fiercer than with Reader, but at this point I think is well past caring about what the public thinks.

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