Generally speaking, I really like Google. I also really like a lot of Google products. On a regular basis, I use Google search, Google Analytics, GMail, GChat, Google Calendar, Google Plus, Google Docs, and Google Reader. That’s quite a few products, huh? The reason I use these products is because Google makes using them easy and convenient, and because these products are generally very good at what they do. They also have good integration (e.g. how GMail suggests adding events to your calendar based on the content of an e-mail). However, in the last week, I’ve experienced two separate issues that, while not completely changing my opinion, have made me more reticent to quickly adopt new Google products and have made me question whether or not some existing products are doing more than I want them to.
I noticed the first issue two weeks ago while attending the Systems Biology: Networks meeting, which I thoroughly enjoyed, at Cold Spring Harbor. I was thinking about the poster I was there to present and then started thinking about the highlight talk I’d submitted to the Great Lakes Bioinformatics conference. I was curious about when I would receive notification if my talk was accepted or not. Checking the website, I noticed that it was a week past the notification deadline, but I had yet to receive an e-mail. I scoured through my inbox looking for anything remotely related to the conference, but found nothing. Unfortunately, my CMU e-mail was, at the time, directly forwarding to my GMail account, so there was nowhere else to look. Before bothering anyone about the notification, I decided to check my “spam” folder and, sure enough, it contained a week-old e-mail notifying me of the acceptance of my highlight talk.
Ok, so an acceptance notification got sent to my spam folder; big deal, right? I mean, these things happen and I eventually found the e-mail. Two things really bothered me about this particular spam classification though. First, I have no idea why the message was marked as spam. What, about this message that had a good deal of relevant information in it, set off the spam filter. Second, I get a good number of what is clearly “academic spam” (e.g. Dear Dr. (or, when they are feeling generous Professor) Patro, We’d like to invite you to speak / submit / present / organize a session at our conference blah blah) every day. These are solicitations to participate in academic conferences or journals with no ties to organizations I’ve ever heard of before, and with no reviewers or editors whom I know. This type of academic spam is fairly common, and sometimes it seems like it should be quite easy to flag as spam. Yet, every day, a number of these messages make it through my spam filter and show up in my inbox. So what irritated me about my misclassified spam was not so much that there was this false positive (which is a more serious problem with spam than false negatives), but that the same filter lets through a lot of really annoying false negatives on a regular basis. Further, I’ve never trained or explicitly set up a spam filter for such messages, so it’s happening automatically in GMail. A similar occurrence happend to my group-mates who submitted posters the conference and had their confirmation e-mails go directly into their spam folders. This particular misclassification was important enough that I decided to disconnect my academic e-mail address from my GMail account and handle all that e-mail separately for the time being.
The second occurrence, which happened the same week, is that Google announced that they are abandoning Google Reader in July. Now, I realize that Google has been discontinuing certain experimental or low-priority projects for a while now — their so-called “spring cleaning”. Honestly, I don’t think such a policy is always a bad idea, and sometimes it’s necessary to get rid of “cruft” and re-focus on the core products that really provide value to your customers. Take for example Google’s discontinuation of Google Wave and subsequent folding of some of Wave’s features into their other projects. Yet, I can’t quite bring myself to be okay with their decision to shut down Reader. In particular, Reader’s not a niche product — a failed experiment with a short lifespan. Reader is a solid, widely used, and generally well-liked Google product. A testament to this is the subsequent response to Google’s announcement, which involved not only a tech-news and Twitter storm, but included a quite popular petition requesting that Google keep Reader going. Luckily, it’s not too difficult to get my information out of reader and to switch to a different (non-Google) product. However, it really highlights the impotence that we, as users of Google’s products have. It’s a web app. We didn’t pay for Google Reader and purchase the rights to an executable that we can continue to use. No, come July, we’ll simply be redirected to some page updating us about the defunct status of a product that many of us have used for years. This experience has made me substantially more reticent to adopt new Google products. For example, Google Keep looks really neat, but I’m not touching it right now. What if I accumulate 2 years worth of notes and then Google decides to pull the plug on that product? At one point I was contemplating migrating my Dropbox account and adopting Google Drive . . . now I think that’s very unlikely to happen. While I still like the Google products I use very much, and I’m intrigued by some of the great products they keep putting out, the decision to adopt their new products is no longer the no-brainer it used to be. A product being easy to use, powerful and slick are all important, but it’s also very important to me that a product that I put a lot of time (and data) into won’t just vanish one day because the developer decides to do some “spring cleaning”!