the thing is with tools nobody knows about is, that google regularly kills them. i.e.: http://trends.google.com/websites?q= google trends for websites
this was the unbelievable useful tool to get competitive data (traffic, queries) about other websites. it was not perfect, the data was sometimes months late. but it was good enough to compare websites with each other.
now it's gone. probably it didn't fit into google strategy. probably someone at google decided that "we are not in the business of providing competitive intelligence data of websites" (i guess that, as the google adplanner was stripped of lots of website data in the same timeframe )
the same thing with the product mentioned above. it will be killed. maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but sure as hell sometime.
Why do you say Google killed Reader? It may have moved down in the menu hierarchy, but it works fine still. They did, however, kill the project that allowed you to subscribe to html instead of RSS and google would compare versions of a page and generate RSS of differences, possibly that's what you were thinking of.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said "killed". The commenting on articles in the context of reader was great. We had bunches of gmail friends who would get some good conversations going . Buzz extended that and for a while it was high-quality at least for us.
Do you remember the protests outside of Google offices when they removed that ? One couple even met through reader and got married.
The shared items RSS out was another sad loss. I had set up one client so that he could select news items using that and they would show on his site as industry news. I used it to post stuff to my own site.
Oh, and recommended items basically sucks now and related feeds rarely returns anything. It was like they removed the google magic and left it as just a feed reader.
There's always cost to keeping old code around. With any given Google product, regardless of how unpopular it is, there will always be people unhappy that it's been pulled. But it's healthy to have a focused set of products and to cull non-useful ones.
Also: they didn't kill google reader. And Google+ is not comparable to Buzz. Google is clearly not going to kill that off.
Very true. I am one of those people who checked Trends for Websites once or twice every week. It used to give a nice overview of traffic of various websites. I am amazed there is not a lot of outrage over this.
well, i think we got used to the fact that google just kills all the good stuff that does not make them (enough) money or are not directly relevant for their main advertising business. i.e.: i don't think they will ever kill GA, as it's necessary for their customers (advertisers) to see how much they get out of it, they will never kill google webmaster tools, as a good crawl-able web makes their job easier, so it makes sense to give webmasters the necessary data,....
but for anything that is not directly relevant for search and advertising, all bets are off.
this was the unbelievable useful tool to get competitive data (traffic, queries) about other websites. it was not perfect, the data was sometimes months late. but it was good enough to compare websites with each other.
now it's gone. probably it didn't fit into google strategy. probably someone at google decided that "we are not in the business of providing competitive intelligence data of websites" (i guess that, as the google adplanner was stripped of lots of website data in the same timeframe )
the same thing with the product mentioned above. it will be killed. maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but sure as hell sometime.