
Google pays $18 million to shutter Apture, CloudFlare clones it in 12 hours - jgrahamc
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/19/google-pays-18-million-to-shutter-apture-cloudflare-clones-it-in-12-hours/
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jerrya
Apture provided a horrible mechanism that breaks browsers and violates common
"web ui standards" and created gross privacy leaks. At one point, as
implemented on the NYTimes site, I showed that every single time a user
selected a portion of the text at an NYTimes, apture enabled post, the
contents of the selection were sent to apture servers.

I was more than happy to see them go.

It's a shame that CloudFlare promises to bring them back, I am hopeful they
will do this in a manner that is not so outrageous or harsh on the user.

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cdata
Hi, I'm one of the engineers working on the Apture replacement (Highlight).
Care to be more specific about the biggest gripes you had with Apture's
original implementation? As far as the general UI and UX is concerned, I'm not
sure what we would really change, but generally I'd be happy to do what I can
to ensure that bad practices aren't carried over (especially those related to
user privacy).

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chunkyslink
Personally I hate the whole implementation. I've never found anything in those
annoying boxes of any use at all. I just don't want a box popping up when I
mouse over links. Its just a bad idea. Could you implement a 'permanently
disable this feature' option ?

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cdata
That's a good idea. It's difficult to communicate the purpose of a
"permanently opt out of this feature" button from the little widget that pops
up, but it's definitely something we could integrate into the main window that
expands. Would that be a satisfactory experience for you?

Feel welcome to suggest alternative UI ideas for adding a feature like that,
if you have any.

~~~
jerrya
I do like redthroway's suggestion of putting it on it's own subdomain. That
makes it easy for noscript or adblock to get rid of that and only that and
leave actually useful scripts and content served.

~~~
cdata
It seems like an easy way to disable it outright and permanently is a feature
people would like to have. While noscript (and similar tools) would certainly
solve this on a per-visitor basis, if we (CloudFlare) could provide a novel
way to present an opt-out in the UI we could then report to our users how many
of their visitors ultimately disabled the feature completely. This is just me
musing about the possibilities, but overall that seems like it would be more
constructive than our users thinking "Oh awesome, another one of those Apture
things!" while their users silently grumble and block scripts..

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Arelius
Certainly providing a global opt-out would help your stance in that you care
about the end-users, and not just the advertisers using the service. There are
probably also ways to figure out how many people opt-out using no-script also.

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aresant
Apture had great distribution thanks to a very simple pitch to publishers:

"When somebody is reading an article and wants more info on a word / topic you
lose them to Google - with Apture keep them on your site!"

As a result they received huge support from major destination sites like NYT,
Time Magazine, etc.

Funny that Google wound up buying them and negating the major value they
delivered to publishers.

I wonder if they do a rev-share on the advertising it generates when it
becomes a Chrome feature, probably not.

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jrockway
This article was so jam-packed full of meaningless drivel that I think I'm
going to be sick. Why does every argument have to be framed as noble startup
versus evil corporation, when all you did was write twenty lines of
Javascript? If I issued a press release every time I wrote a simple computer
program, I'd have my own Library of Congress by now.

(I clicked through to another article on that site raving about CloudFlare
saving the Internet. Apparently by providing managed Apache hosting, they are
un-breaking the broken Internet. Wow, amazing! Next week on The Tech
Wankosphere and Hacker News: "jrock.us CEO runs apt-get upgrade; picks up a
few bugfixes". That's right folks, I'm _saving the Internet_!)

~~~
Terretta
You _are_ saving the Internet, one patched bug at a time.

No, really.

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j_baker
I'm a former Apture developer/current Google employee (but I don't necessarily
speak for either one). It's worth noting that Apture won't actually be
shuttered until likely sometime in January (probably around the 10th). We had
originally planned on Dec 20th, but we weren't confident that we had gotten
the word out to everyone who uses our product (most notably people who use our
plugin).

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stickfigure
As someone considering CloudFlare's SSL and CDN services, this worries me.

The bottom line is that this misfeature is an annoyance for 99.9% of internet
users. Of those, maybe 1% understand how to get rid of it - probably by
installing browser plugins that block the origin servers to some degree. I
have no intention to use this (obnoxious) feature... so if there's any risk
that part of my customer base will receive a degraded experience on my
website, this is a compelling reason to use a competitor.

~~~
xxdesmus
It'll be opt-in. I have no idea how this would degrade your customer's
experience in any way.

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stickfigure
The internet has a way of "fixing" what it interprets as damage. For example,
if I'm in a pool of shared IP addresses that gets used by spammers, I might
find my legitimate outgoing emails blocked as spam.

Likewise, if end-users find that cloudflare provides irritating features on
websites, they may very well develop browser plugins that block cloudflare
services - even the 'good' services (deliberately or not). Maybe this is far
fetched, but the bottom line is that anytime you associate yourself with
unsavory activities, you risk getting hit by the blowback - even if you don't
"opt-in" yourself.

Taking the long-term view, this cannot possibly be good for CDN customers who
_don't_ want to annoy their users.

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shasta
90% in 20 hours - amazing! Maybe someone good at math can eatimate how many
months it will take them to do the other 10%...

~~~
whatusername
They'll probably get 90% of the remaining done pretty quickly.

~~~
lifeformed
and Zeno can handle the rest.

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jacquesm
Likely google thought they would make up the expense in increased adsense
revenues from the publishers that use Apture post shut-down, but 12 hours is a
terribly short window for a shut-down to be effective.

I wonder how often they'll be able to buy the 'next Apture' until they figure
out that they're going to have to live with it, after all if it only takes 12
hours to clone then this seems like a winning business model with a guaranteed
exit.

~~~
tikhonj
I think they didn't so much shut it down because they wanted it to die--they
probably shut it down because they didn't want to support it and moved the
team over to working on the Chrome feature alluded to in the article.

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powertower
I love CloudFlare and their story.

IMO they are one of two (or three) recent startups that I consider to be
genuine, and have a real product/service that adds _actual_ value. The rest
not so much ... just fluff and social.

~~~
cdata
CloudFlare engineer here. Just wanted to say thanks for the positive
assessment :) having so many awesome users keeps us feeling really positive
about the stuff we do.

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libraryatnight
Not relevant to the story completely: What does it mean that Google is rolling
this into Chrome? Does it mean that now Chrome will by default pop up with
tons of annoying bubbles whenever I highlight text?

~~~
jrockway
I'm guessing it will be integrated in a similar way as Search and Translate
are.

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goodweeds
Apture was incredibly obnoxious. Moreso then when you copy from sfgate or the
new york times and they add extra text and adds into your copied text.

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nchuhoai
I don't know what people feel like, but I really miss Apture being gone. For
some of you, it might have been an annoyance, but for me, it is simply an
amazing service. Apture's capabilities (which go beyond mere search) have
helped me explorer so many topics right from within the site. For the college
student who doesn't understand all the keywords of the text, Apture was a
blessing.

I really hope, the guys will integrate it in Google at least half as good

~~~
nchuhoai
really, people downvote me because I find a web service helpful?

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yanw
It is worth mentioning that Apture was an annoying product and I for one am
glad that they "shuttered" it. As for the acquisition it was probably for
talent or IP or both.

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guelo
> it was probably for talent or IP or both.

Or for anti-competitive reasons.

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yanw
How so? seeing as whatever Apture did can be replicated in < 24hr.

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guelo
Apture was interfering with people searching for the terms on Google.

