
Google Groups Data To Be Destroyed - barrkel
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=308700
======
jellicle
It's October, right? And Google is notifying anyone who creates a Page or File
that the feature is going to go away in February? (And it looks like they
started doing so in September?)

Seems like plenty of notice to me. One would assume that as the deadline gets
closer, more prominent notices will be given. How many months do you need to
move your data?

Google should be held to high standards, both because they are an important
part of internet infrastructure and because they've stated they aspire to high
standards. Five months' notice meets those high standards as far as I'm
concerned.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I disagree. I have a friend whose mom died when she was in College. In the
year following, she kept all her journals and poems in emails in her Yahoo
mail account. That's a safe place for them, right?

The years went on and she got a Gmail account, but she would log in to Yahoo
every year or so to read through her old journals to help process what was
going on in her life.

Only one year she tried to log in and her account was gone. Yahoo, she
learned, simply deletes your email if you don't log in for a year. And she had
gone 14 months.

Personally, I think deleting data like this--especially when the storage
requirements are so tiny--is unforgivable. I can think of many, many reasons
why someone would put something important on Google Groups and then not log in
for six months. There are people away for Peace Corps right now. There are
people deployed in Afghanistan. There are people hiking the Appalachian Trail
(well maybe it's a little late for that).

Many thousands of people will feel completely violated if Google does this.
Google can count on that. For those people, Google will have simply destroyed
their most precious data without warning.

I used to think that one of the selling points of Google Apps was that I could
leave my data there and trust them to protect it. No more worrying about
crashed hard drives. But it's become clear that's not the case.

~~~
njharman
> That's a safe place for them, right?

Fuck no! Double fuck no!

Do people actually think that? That's beyond ignorant/naive. Data in the hands
of a for profit corporation, safe? Did you read the terms of service /
limitation of warranty? The short version is "fuck you and your data". It's
not safe from loss at the whims of market/share holder needs/etc. It's also
not safe from being compromised either by internal employees or external
hackers. It's also not protected by most of the Bill of Rights (those mostly
apply to government vs people not business vs people). It's easily supeoned,
if the business doesn't just turn over the data on request.

Safe is encrypted on multiple devices geographically (and preferably
jurisdictionally) separated.

The lowest acceptable level that can still be considered safe (a very loose
definition of safe) is; a copy in plain/open formats on a device I physically
control/hold(my desktop harddrive), and a copy somewhere else. Mom's house,
Dropbox, yahoo mail, etc.

~~~
DennisP
I'm looking forward to the day when we have a widely used p2p archiving
network like OceanStore or Free Haven. Then we can stop worrying about this
stuff.

~~~
Yrlec
My Master's Thesis covered exactly that. I'm currently working on
commercialising the idea, so you can expect a "HN - Review my startup" within
a year :)

~~~
DennisP
If you don't mind linking to your thesis I'd love to read it!

~~~
Yrlec
Sure, but it's in Swedish. If you still want it I can e-mail it you.

------
Tomek_
Author tried a cheap trick of attracting audience by using a title of a big
"shock-value". But the truth is not as bad as that title suggest: the most
important thing about Google Groups, discussions that is, are not going
anywhere, it's only "Files" and "Pages" features that are going to be trashed.

~~~
kvs
Can we turn down this 'author-is-using-a-cheap-trick-to-attract-audience'
volume around here. I don't think Bruce Eckel needs to attract audience so
badly that he will do it purposefully. Granted, title is not reflective of the
content but give the authors some benefit of the doubt. Let's do a quick
Google search on authors before we write stuff like this.

~~~
scott_s
You mean evaluate people based on who they are versus what they say? No
thanks.

I interpreted the title to mean Google Groups was going away. I was not aware
that there was a separate "data" concept.

~~~
krschultz
That sounds like your lack of familarity with the software and not the
author's showmanship.

If the title read: "Google Groups Shutting Down!" and they meant shutting down
the pages and files part, then sure I'd see your argument. But literally all
data in Google Groups will be destroyed. I actually thought the tittle meant
his data was destroyed on his Google Group, much less all of them were being
wiped. I think it is pretty big news.

------
mattmcknight
I am wondering why they don't just integrate groups features into Google Apps
(where you could use Sites and Docs to do this same thing). It leads me to
believe (knowing nothing about the reality) that Groups was built on some
different underlying technology stack that makes it more difficult to
integrate... I had a JotSpot account that eventually became a Google Sites
site, and the main thing that didn't migrate over neatly was the discussion
forums.

Also noticed this message on there: "Google Groups will no longer be
supporting the Welcome Message feature. Starting January 13, you won't be able
to edit your welcome messages, but you will still be able to view and download
the existing content." Would it kill them to tell us why?

~~~
duskwuff
I'm guessing that the removal of Files, Pages, and Welcome Messages are all
for a single reason: spam. Spammers love Google Groups, because it'll host
their landing pages (complete with graphics!) on a trusted domain. I'd be
willing to bet that someone at Google got fed up playing whack-a-mole with
Viagra ads.

------
jacquesm
I remember when google groups was still called 'dejanews' and I used it just
about every day.

Whatever I wanted to know, dejanews seemed to have the answer buried in its
pages somewhere.

The google took over and promised all kinds of great things would happen to
the content. Only it never did. Google groups was the ugly stepchild in the
google family, first dropped from the google homepage links, then completely
neglected and left to rot.

In a way it is surprising that it took this long for Google to make a decision
on this, but it is a total waste of all the content in there.

Are there any attempts to archive this stuff ? Is there a way to get the data
in bulk ?

I've seen first hand how important old data can be to people and I suspect
this to be no different, the reocities.com project has been running for a bit
under a year now and not a day goes by that I don't get notes from people that
are insanely happy that their content was not lost.

------
hughw
A bigger point Bruce makes is the issue of confidence in Google. Groups is
consumer oriented, but as developers we've seen Google turn on a dime, change
its mind, and leave developers who've bought in to their technology, out in
the cold. Bruce mentions Wave... no follow through from Google. Anyone who
pitched a Wave based service in their own companies or business plan is fired,
but the Goog keeps rolling on unperturbed. Microsoft, whatever else you might
say, never hung developers out to dry like that.

Who's ready to build a full HTML 5 site now, and ask IE users to install
Google Chrome Frame? Ready to bet your company on it? Six months from now,
Google could get bored with it. Yawn. Not working out, fellas. But hey, it's
open source, so you guys keep working on it, ok?

------
deadlyduplicate
Is this the start of the cloud computing dystopia that Stallman warned us
about?

~~~
erikpukinskis
This is a perfect example of one of the Freedoms we don't have with web
applications. Even with Microsoft Office you have the freedom to keep using
the software today in the way you did yesterday.

Even open source web applications don't have this freedom... If wordpress.org
were to do this, those users would be in the same boat.

I've been working on an open source infrastructure project to fix these issue
for a while, but it's still pretty nascent. My "manifesto" on that is here:
<http://bit.ly/forkolator>

~~~
manveru
And for anyone who actually cares about proper linking:
[https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcmB_WI1jRkCZG41c2d4cl80O...](https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcmB_WI1jRkCZG41c2d4cl80OTJmOGpjNmNocw&hl=en)

~~~
sedachv
Hahaha, I'm dying from the irony! bit.ly etc. are pure evil, and are going to
have a much more negative impact when they're gone than Google groups files.

~~~
estel
Personally it's more of a "I want to see what website I'm about to open in my
browser" ideology than pithy moral meanings. But sure!

~~~
user24
it's not really about morality. When bitly decide the ad revenue and premium
plans don't cover the hosting any more, massive chunks of web infrastructure
will fail. When was the last time you followed a link to a running website and
it failed? A few network issues here and there yes, but refresh and you're
fine. When bitly bite the dust, that link is gone forever and you'll never
know where it went. In thirty years I can look at a direct link and know where
it goes, and if the endpoint is still live I can go there. Not so with bitly
links (and don't even start on the smaller shorteners. They'll probably fold
within the next 2 years)

~~~
sedachv
I think the consequences are going to be more severe for dead links. Today I
deal with permanently dead links pretty much every day. With the canonical
URI, there is some hope there's a mirror in archive.org or the Google cache.
If not, I can search for [parts of] the URI and hope someone mirrored the
page, or has quotations from it. bit.ly URIs are a black hole.

------
charleso
Does this mean the end of the DejaNews Usenet archive as well? The
transformation of that unbelievably helpful resource into "Google Groups" was
a crime.

Geez, but I miss Usenet. Having _one_ forum on which everything related to a
topic was posted was unbelievably helpful.

~~~
adambyrtek
They intend to remove only files and pages, which is something like a
primitive wiki for your group. This feature was never widely used anyway and
there are much better tools for the job (like Google Sites).

BTW the Usenet still exists, even if it's not that active anymore.

~~~
Mithrandir
> BTW the Usenet still exists, even if it's not that active anymore.

GGroups has been the cause of most spam on Usenet for years. It's also sad
because some of the people who aren't regular spammers think that when they
post to a newsgroup via GGroups, they're only posting to that _one_ server,
and not on hundreds (if not thousands) of servers. Others think that GGroups
and Usenet are the same, but not as many as the "un-spammers".

It's too bad that this is going to happen, but... I guess that's Google for
you. I wish that Google would instead try to prevent some of the spam on the
Usenet, and not mess about with GGroups. :(

------
sp4rki
Hum I see Google not making a big fuzz about it now, but saying that Google is
obfuscating the announcement and the it destroys trust and all that is a false
assumption until it actually happens.

I'd expect email notifications and notifications inside the app to let me know
the feature is being removed and how to move my data some time before the
actual feature removal happens. I can't say Google has burned me until they do
actually not inform me and 'destroy' my data. I think it's too early to say
"Geez Google you're evil now!", and for the most part, this could be a small
"Hey FYI, we're removing those features... we might not even be sure about it
so we're not doing a big deal out of it yet."

If this article was written 2 weeks before data was removed I'd understand,
but as it is it comes out somewhat sensationalistic.

------
timtadh
I had moved several student org's at my university to private Google Groups
because of the pages and files feature. Now that this is feature is being
killed they will be screwed since they were using it as the repository for
their meeting minutes and other important documents.

~~~
chc
They can just download the data and stick it somewhere else. It's
inconvenient, but nobody is "screwed."

~~~
alec
The author of the article was disappointed that the service was being
discontinued, but his main reason for writing seemed to be calling attention
to how quietly Google announced that it was destroying data. People won't
download the data if they don't know it's going away.

~~~
chc
That is clearly not the case for the commenter whom I was addressing. He
knows, so if the files he is worried about are deleted, it's due to his
inaction. I don't want to see anyone just throw up their hands and accept
victim status when there's a better option.

As for other people, I thought Google added a notice to the Groups files page
along the lines of "Hey, dude, you might want to download this stuff before it
goes bye-bye". I don't use the service, but that's what I heard. Was I
misinformed?

EDIT: Yup, it's there. The notice, in bright red at the very top of the page,
reads: "Google Groups will no longer be supporting the Pages and Files
features. Starting January 13, you won't be able to upload new content, but
you will still be able to view and download existing content. See this
announcement for more information and other options for storing your content."

~~~
timtadh
I mean not so much my inaction as I am no longer running those groups :-p

Actually what I was concerned about wasn't the disappearance of the data, but
the disappearance of the feature. I chose groups because those features made
it really easy to manage the entire group. I worked hard to set up a process
around how the google groups worked. So the sense that the organization is
"screwed" is that they will have to completely change the way the function
internally and find a new centralized portal for managing there stuff.

As far as the warning goes they gave plenty of warning. I am just disappointed
the feature disappeared.

------
melipone
That happened to me with my blog when they removed the ftp feature. I didn't
want to convert automatically to a blogspot blog because I didn't have to time
to deal with the privacy issues. Fortunately, I was able to download the data
and I still have a web page for it that I could parse to convert it to another
format but in the meantime I'm without blog.

I still haven't decided to which format to convert my blog but I'm very
tempted to convert it to an emacs org-mode format and then decide later.

------
aufreak3
On that notice page, Google suggests using "Google Sites" for pages and attach
files to pages on the site. If it is straightforward for someone to do it, I
find it strange that they don't do it automatically and tell the people "we'll
be migrating your data to Google Sites" instead of taking it down.

------
jsmcgd
This is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I don't think society is ready
yet for the consequences of an internet that never forgets. I wish more
websites would periodically delete content (with adequate warning).

------
edge17
I actually find a lot of good content for debugging purposes in google groups

------
qeorge
There's a big red warning at the top the welcome page (web version).
Impossible to miss, although I know many people only use Google Groups via
email.

------
binarycheese
Google Groups is one of the worst Google web apps (from a programming stand
point). You cannot add code snippets easily, the search is horrible and you
cannot even format code/text easily like in <http://code.google.com>.

Have they seen stackoverflow.com?

