Irreal

Well, not sin really. More like the consequences of ill considered decisions. As we all know by now, Google has decided to terminate their Google Reader service. On the face of it, the decision doesn’t appear particularly controversial. The service, while used by many, is by no means wildly popular and with the decline of RSS has become less so. Google has never found a way to monetize it so why keep spending resources on it?

The answer to that is found in the nature of the Google Reader constituency. By and large it is used (and loved) by nerds. That might seem like an even better reason to ax it except that on the Internet, it’s the nerds who are the influencers. They are the ones that the technically naive come to for advice on what hardware they should buy and what services they should sign up for. If you’re trying to make money on the Internet, you ignore them at your peril.

You’d think that Google, more than most, would understand this yet here they are not only ignoring the nerds but doing something they find deeply offensive. So what? Well, Google is launching a new service, Google Keep, that is obviously meant to compete with the popular Evernote. Suppose the nerds were to turn against the new service and advice people to avoid it. What arguments would they use? The answer writes itself doesn’t it? Depend on this service and sooner or later Google will retire it and all your notes will be lost. Would the technical community do that? Why yes. Yes, they would.

Maybe in the end it won’t matter but Google was first embraced by the nerds who served as evangelists to the laity. If the technical community does play a roll in causing the failure of Keep and future Google initiatives Google will have no one but themselves to blame and the nerds will enjoy a moment of schadenfreude.

For my part, I’ve upgraded my Evernote account to premium even though I don’t come close to exceeding the free account limits. I think of it as a way to help preserve my notes and to ensure that Google doesn’t crush Evernote.

From Vivek Haldar, an absolutely wonderful characterization of meetings.

Over at the New Yorker, Tim Wu writes about Fixing the Worst Law in Technology. That law is, of course, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. CFAA was the vehicle that federal prosecutors used to threaten Aaron Swartz with decades in prison and millions of dollars in fines for what, at the end of the day, was violating JSTOR’s terms of service. Those threats are widely believed to have precipitated Swartz’s suicide but far from being chastened, prosecutors are busy charging others with similar trivial violations carrying equally severe penalties.

None of this is news to the informed geek and certainly the Irreal readership is aware of the issues. What’s significant about the New Yorker article is that it’s in the New Yorker. The magazine is hardly a hotbed of technology news and not a place where one would expect to find a large contingent of geeks hanging out. It is, in short, as mainstream as a magazine can be. Thus, it’s significant that they are covering this issue and bringing it to the attention of people who might never have heard of it otherwise.

The article is sympathetic to the movement to get the CFAA changed and unlike many publications—mainstream and technical—gets the facts of the Swartz case correct. Still, Wu is pessimistic about Congress making any meaningful changes, Zoe Lofgren’s bill notwithstanding. He believes that the best hope for change is that President Obama will reform it administratively. Not that encouraging but at least the word is getting out beyond the technical community.

The article is well written and worth a read if only because it won’t tell you that Swartz “hacked” into some site and stole a bunch of papers. Go on over and take a look.