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Less Than a Month To Go Before Google Breaks Hundreds of Thousands of Links All Over the Internet (greenspun.com) 88

Posted by msmash from the PSA dept.
Philip Greenspun:Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums. They wasted a huge amount of humanity's time and effort by shutting down Picasa.

Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.
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Less Than a Month To Go Before Google Breaks Hundreds of Thousands of Links All Over the Internet More

Less Than a Month To Go Before Google Breaks Hundreds of Thousands of Links All Over the Internet

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  • If no one visited them (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    then they were never broken

    if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  • Works as designed.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google does not want you to link to anything, they want you to google for it...

  • Greenspun (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vinn ( 4370 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @03:44PM (#58255614) Homepage Journal
    So, I just want to chime in here on the poster - Phillip Greenspun. Most of you won't remember it, but for those of building out web pages back in 1993, there wasn't exactly a lot of content. Phillip had a ton of pictures online and an online gallery before that was even a thing. Jerry Yang was still updating his content list of Internet by hand. I feel like back then the web was small enough that you really could see nearly everything of interest. Anyway, that was just a name I hadn't seen in a long time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mssymrvn ( 15684 )

      He was the original creator of photo.net. These days it's somewhat fallen by the wayside for "Sony Cameras are teh Best!!!1111" (dpreview.com) and other photo sites. But it was a fantastic trove of information about a good many things, not just which camera has the greatest number of megapixels. I miss the olden days.

      Now you damn kids get off of my lawn! I have a cloud to yell at!

    • I learned a lot from his methodology. I just wish ACS didn't use Tcl, AOLServer, or Oracle. A LAMP stack would have probably held back the likes of Facebook for community organizing.

  • Yes, Picasa was great. Yes, Google screwed it up. But Google drove Picasa into irrelevance long ago... at this point, I have my doubts very many people are going to notice these newly-broken links.

    • It was shite.

      It had a brilliant thing where if you were in a directory and scrolled past the last file it silently went into the next directory. Which of course is exactly what you'd expect because that's what all file browsers do!

  • Dependance on vendor service bites users in ass (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schklerg ( 1130369 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @03:48PM (#58255670)
    Shocked I tell you! Because Google has never shut down a service with little regard to users. And in fact, no other company ever has either!!! And no trendy online startup has ever gone out of business either, with the end users being the only ones who get screwed. If you depend on some proprietary or online (or both) service, you're going to end up screwed eventually. Plan accordingly.
    • You're exactly correct. And in a world where everything "technology" is moving to an "online only" model, we're fuct.

    • Many sites you go to on your iphone no longer work in iphone safari. Even some Redit pages don't work. instead you get a box to install chrome. The issue is google's accelerated server pages. Google sucks

    • I hear they're offering refunds.

    • If you depend on some proprietary or online (or both) service, you're going to end up screwed eventually. Plan accordingly.

      People keep moving most of their goodies enthusiastically to the cloud. Go figure.

    • Re:Dependance on vendor service bites users in ass (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @04:27PM (#58256028)
      The crazy stupid thing is that Picasa was by far the best app I've seen for indexing photos locally. You'd install it and it would search your entire hard drive for all photos, then organize them all so you could flip through them in the app. No having to dig through hundreds or thousands of folders. Other apps required you to conform to the way they worked. Picasa conformed to the way you wanted to work (or not work - you could just dump the latest photos from the camera's memory card to some random folder, and Picasa would dutifully find and index them). And it was so simple to use. I'd just install it on a friend's computer, let it index enough photos so I could show them the basics of it, tell them to give it a few hours to finish indexing, then leave. I never got a "how do you..." call from them about it - they all figured out how to use it on their own. The ability to synchronize Picasa on your desktop with the cloud via picasa.google.com was just gravy.

      But Google wants to force everyone onto the cloud, so they killed it. Picasa's stellar local desktop capabilities became a drawback to Google. Google Photos is fairly simple, but nowhere near as flexible nor quick. And Google's own storage policies force you to downgrade photos to 2048x2048 resolution unless you want to pay for more than 15 GB of storage (I have over 6 TB of family and travel photos).

      I just hope the Picasa installer still works after they kill off support for it. And that it doesn't do something stupid like check for picasa.google.com and suicide if it can't find it.

      • (I have over 6 TB of family and travel photos).

        I have a few terabytes of stuff too. That's why I stay far away from "the cloud" and bought a couple of big-ass hard drives.

        Storing anything of value on Someone Else's Computer is just stupid.

        Sure, my house could get hit by a meteor, but I'll take my chances.

        • > Sure, my house could get hit by a meteor, but I'll take my chances.

          Perhaps you should consult with someone who has real knowledge of what the risks are. Even without that knowledge, I'd guess that a fire, burglary or perhaps flooding would be far greater risks. Or do you have some kind of fire-proof safe?

  • they could be deleting photos like Flickr is doing.

    I guess that's always the risk of using other peoples computers (I mean cloud services)

    The other thing you should think about is the EXIF information in your photos, like GPS location of where the picture was taken. You may also be concerned about cloud service manipulating your EXIF information for their own purposes...

    • Google could have been charging for Picasa & THEN shut it down.

      • Google could have been charging for Picasa & THEN shut it down.

        Oh come on, you're probably thinking of Microsoft...

    • They could be committing commercial suicide, like Photobucket did. Or is still doing. Is Photobucket still a thing at all?

      • They could be committing commercial suicide, like Photobucket did. Or is still doing. Is Photobucket still a thing at all?

        Mystifyingly, yes, it is.

      • Photobucket committed suicide when they let furries and the adolescent girls who hang out on virtual pet sites host their little bitmaps for free.

    • I guess that's always the risk of using other peoples computers (I mean cloud services)

      That's the risk of using ANY data storage besides paper or microfiche: You have to migrate periodically.

      No matter if you store your (whatever sort of) data in the cloud or locally in your desk drawer: You have to copy your 3.5'' floppy discs to CDs before you throw out your floppy drive, you have to copy your files from flickr to google photos and from Google+ to instagram (or whatever) when those services close and you have to copy your DVDs to some other medium before you get rid of your optical drive.

      Arc

  • This should be a warning about all "cloud" services. Make sure you have copies of your own data under your own control.

    • Aehmm.. Why?

      According to the link the photos will still stay online and only deprecated links will break and second, it is not like it happend without ample warning and time to migrate your data.

      While agree with you that you should always have a local data backup (AND a remote one, e.g. in a cloud service!) this story is an example of how closing of a cloud service should work to give everyone enough time to migrate to another service, so that you don't need a local copy.

  • It's simple, stop trusting google to keep anything. Just stop using their services, because at any point everything you've worked so hard for could go away. They have done this repeatedly over the years, and have shown that they really don't care about anything that they or you create.

  • Lessons learned? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @03:58PM (#58255756)

    I would hope people learn a few lessons from this and are not keeping any documents that need to survive long-term in Google Docs...

    I have to say, there's no wasted time on my part since I saw the service probably wouldn't get much traction even from launch, and never used it.

    There is one thing I find amusing about his post though - he states :

    "Example: my review of an Antarctica cruise on the Ocean Diamond. It was so easy to publish the photos via Picasa"

    Well that's the classic computer problem right there, you should have known it was wrong when it was "so easy". Anything easy is almost always not permanent, anyone who has been using computers as long as he (or I) have should know better about how long "Easy" lasts.

    • I would hope people learn a few lessons from this and are not keeping any documents that need to survive long-term in Google Docs...

      Yup! Everything I have on Google Docs is also on my local machines. Never used Picassa.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      So this is why operating systems are getting harder and harder to use, with more and more obscure commands to remember and not a single way of getting a quick overview of the stuff you usually use and need?

      • So this is why operating systems are getting harder and harder to use, with more and more obscure commands to remember and not a single way of getting a quick overview of the stuff you usually use and need?

        No, I think that's typical creature feep, with a side-helping of design-by-form (over function). Or visa-versa. It's endemic in the software industry.

      • "obscure commands"

        You obviously never used UNIX.

    • QFT: "Well that's the classic computer problem right there, you should have known it was wrong when it was "so easy". Anything easy is almost always not permanent, anyone who has been using computers as long as he (or I) have should know better about how long "Easy" lasts."
      Also called "The Unix Way" :)
      Finally, it's apparently a new meme to insult you, so go _____ a(n) _______. Filling in the blanks will be left as an exercise for the troller(s).

    • oh, no, does that mean cat and grep are being depricated?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • what's their plan for Picasa? (Score:3)

    by 4wdloop ( 1031398 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @04:09PM (#58255850)

    They pulled Microsoft's E^3 strategy on Picasa: they embraced it, they extended it and then they pulled 'google' on it by extinguishing it. Can they at least open it up if they do not care about it? Probably afraid of it becoming a competitor to their on-line fiefdome?

  • Nomadic Identity and Content Addressing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dm42 ( 946565 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @04:11PM (#58255862) Homepage

    "I told you so" -- or, actually, Mike Macgirvin told us all so. But we were all too busy playing with our toys - or other things - to think about what was happening all around us. This day should have been forseen, fortold, and warned about since the beginning of "big centralized services" ---

    OH WAIT -- it was.

    Mike's been working on this since his days working on Friendica (before that actually) and he has continued to push forward to provide a truly decentralized, nomadic network that keeps you and your data free from vendor lock in. While everybody has been chasing "market share" and seeking to make the next "Facebook killer," Mike has been building a solution that is far more SOLID than even Berners-Lee's current vaporware.

    Hubzilla (and more recently ZAP) with running the ZOT6 protocol (with work on Zot8 already underway!) have been working to deal with this problem for the better part of a decade.

    "Nomadic identity" (the ability to host your social media presence, files, data, and just about anything else with multiple different providers on multiple different servers - and log into any of them and continue working if one of them goes down for any reason) has been part of Hubzilla for a LOOONG time.

    Now, with Hubzilla version 4.0 just released over the weekend, Hubzilla adds Nomadic Content addressing that separates content addressing from DNS within the ZOT network. Now, if you use Zot, you can move your content to a different server and there are no links to update - your traffic will just follow you to the new location.

    The Zot network (called "the GRID") is a completely decentralized network that allows VERY granular access control and privacy options - in a solution that is MIT licensed and runs on a standard LAMP/LEMP stack. And the Hubzilla platform is as easy (I think easier) to extend with addons and custom modules as Wordpress is write plugins for.

    The OP SHOULD be a "non-story" as all these challenges have been known for a long time.

    The fact that we are lamenting this reality on SlashDot just shows how far we have fallen.

  • As a company, they seem to have the attention span of a two-year-old. One can't help but wondering what kind of a management layer they have? I mean, managers tend to be, by and large, useless; but those at Google seem to be worse than that.

    • no, par for the course when people get a free service they use for years, that they whine when it's taken away as if someone owes them something.

      pay money and get some rights, or shut the fuck up

  • Once again, the cloud screws everyone. I love my simple, cheap NAS and its simple, easy-to-use features. It's really too bad that the marketing departments of Synology, Qnap, etc. didn't have the budget to sell everyone on a personal NAS instead of this cloud sh*t.
  • Voluntarily breaking picasa links is annoying, but then again, Google insists on caching Pintrest pages -- which pretty much result in a whole page of broken image links 100% of the time that you click on one in the results, no matter if the page is from six days ago or six years ago.

    I understand the transitory nature of what Pintrest provides--but it's silly for Google to bother to include Pintrest pages at all, for the same reason.
  • I actually liked Google+ because there were actually more intelligent posts and conversations on their than Spacebook. Now they are shutting the service down and leaving everyone out in the cold, not to mention the broken photo album links. Thanks for nothing Google!
  • "Links break on the internet ... some dude shocked!"
  • These massive internet companies create things that hundreds of millions of people come to depend on but they have the right to pull the plug any time they want to based on business needs. When do they actually become obligated to continue a service they provide? When are they a utility? Congress should look to the subject.

  • I've often thought it would be better all around if content-oriented websites started by figuring out how they could structure everything as a static archive, and then worked backwards from there to layer in the dynamic parts.

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