Megalomania.me

Three tweets:

Congratulations to the Bump team for shutting your doors and eliminating the product you worked so hard to build!

— Natan Gesher (@gesher) September 17, 2013

Oooops, please don't read my previous tweet until mid-2014!

— Natan Gesher (@gesher) September 17, 2013

Congratulations to Bump's competitors, if there are any! Bump isn't going to exist in a year!

— Natan Gesher (@gesher) September 17, 2013

From an email today:

Bump and Flock will be shut down on January 31
…
Back in September, we announced that the Bump team was joining Google to continue our work of helping people share and interact with one another using mobile devices.

We are now deeply focused on our new projects within Google, and we’ve decided to discontinue Bump and Flock. On January 31, 2014, Bump and Flock will be removed from the App Store and Google Play. After this date, neither app will work, and all user data will be deleted.
…
we’ve been inspired and humbled
…
Your feedback, enthusiasm, and support
…
we want to thank you all
…
Bump was a revolutionary product that inspired
…
push the world forward
…
our new creations at Google
…

Blah blah.

Google has killed another good product. “Don’t be evil.”

R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013:

… as someone who’s been [blogging] since 1998 and still does it every day, it’s difficult to ignore the blog’s diminished place in our informational diet.

… I used to keep up with hundreds of blogs every day and over a thousand every week. Now I read just two blogs daily… I check my RSS reader only occasionally, and sometimes not for weeks.

Blogging is the new resume: Why less is not always more:

Blogging is an effective way to illustrate expertise, personality, and most importantly, thought process. The way product managers, UX designers, and other “non-technical” roles think, communicates their ability and culture fit. Resumes lack this entirely… blogging amplified peoples’ interest in me and helped market my expertise… blogging is an excellent vehicle to share ideas, expertise, and interests. It’s an evergreen resume… If you read my writing, you will know how I think. If you agree with my analysis and recommendations, you will trust my product decisions. If you disagree, then we shouldn’t work together anyway. Resumes fail to communicate any of this. I hope to never touch my resume again.

I’m a longtime user and supporter of Instapaper, including paying money for the Instapaper iOS app and buying a monthly subscription to it. But for a big chunk of 2013, since Instapaper creator Marco Arment sold it, I’ve actually been using Pocket, its free competitor.

About ten days ago, I switched back to Instapaper to see if Betaworks, its new owner, had introduced any new features that would compete with Pocket’s features.

Now I’ve seen enough and I’m ready to share what I think about each of the read-it-later services:

Instapaper

• Prettier text options. Marco put a lot of effort into offering beautiful display options to Instapaper users, and it shows. I love that I have excellent options for reading on Instapaper.
• Tilt scrolling. It’s perhaps a little gimmicky, but I’ve used it.
• Automatic dark mode. What this means is that I allow Instapaper to take my approximate location so it will know when sunset happens where I am. Then during the daytime, Instapaper shows text that’s black on a white background; at night it flips to text that’s white on a black background; in between, the text is black on a sepia background. This sounds lame, but as someone who loves to read at all hours and in bed when I’m supposed to be sleeping but actually kind of wish I was sleeping, I can’t praise this feature enough.
• Better batch editing/moving articles to folders.
• Costs money. This may seem like the opposite of a benefit, but I’m happy to pay a few dollars for a quality app, and $1/month for a subscription to it, in order to ensure that there’s a financial incentive for the developer to keep working on it and making it better. It doesn’t make me feel like any kind of partner to Marco or to Betaworks, but it aligns my interests as a customer with theirs as a business and disincents them from finding creepy or annoying ways to make money off of me.

Pocket

• Video. It’s not ideal on Pocket, but it’s practically nonexistent on Instapaper. Some of the things I want to save for later and check out in a different venue / at a different time are videos. Some of the articles I read have videos in-line. I simply can’t figure out why Instapaper does such a shitty job, or refuses to do a better job, showing video content. For reference, here are two pages with video that I saved to Instapaper in the past few days: News report from 1981 about the Internet, This Video Will Forever Change The Way I Sleep. Neither worked in Instapaper. Both worked in Pocket.
• PDF. Similarly to videos, Pocket displays PDFs and Instapaper does not.
• Mac app. It completely baffles me that Instapaper has no native app for Mac. There are a lot of times when I want to read articles on a laptop, such as when I’m following instructions from an article and using them to do something on the computer. Pocket has a Mac app and it’s just like the Pocket website. It couldn’t have been difficult or expensive to develop.
• Unread article count. Pocket shows me a count of my unread articles in iOS. Instapaper doesn’t. This has got to be insanely easy to do, and it just makes no sense to me why Instapaper hasn’t done it. How am I supposed to know how many unread articles are even in my Instapaper account? What do they gain by concealing this super basic information from me?

Both Instapaper and Pocket are in IFTTT and this allows me to set up an easy push from one to the other. But the two don’t support mutual two way syncing, which I would really like to use. I’d keep Instapaper and Pocket in sync because I think they both have excellent strengths, like Instapaper’s dark mode and Pocket’s ability to display videos.

Both are supported by Flipboard, Feedly, Twitter for iOS and Chrome’s Defer extension. Both rather suck at getting articles saved from either Chrome or Safari on iOS.

Both have made the insane UX decision to place the button to archive an article right next to the button to favorite it. I read a lot of articles that express opinions with which I disagree vehemently and which I would not want to favorite, so every time I go to archive one of them, I have to be super careful not to press the button to favorite it.

It looks now like I’m actually going to switch back to Pocket, though I look forward to Betaworks building more features for Instapaper and, particularly, reaching feature parity with Pocket, which could certainly be done in the first half of 2014 with the right investments.

I’m trying to choose a new security question on the Verizon website. Here are my options:

1. What is the name of your first school? Is this meant to mean my pre-school, my kindergarten or the elementary school where I went to first grade?
2. What is the title of your favorite book? I own thousands of books and easily a hundred of them could be considered my “favorite.”
3. What is your favorite vacation spot? Does this mean my favorite place to take a vacation or the place where I’ve had my favorite vacation? Or, since I like every vacation I take, what if it’s just my most recent vacation? Or what if my favorite vacation involves travel itself, like a cross country drive?
4. What is your favorite food? See above.
5. What is the name of your first pet? My family’s first pet, a dog that died when I was seven? Or the first pet that I named and fed, a goldfish that lasted about a year? Or the first pet that I adopted and raised on my own as an adult?
6. What is the last name of your best friend? I don’t have a best friend. Nor do I think I should need one.

“What is your favorite food?” is the security question that I have to answer to log into my account on Verizon’s website. Not to retrieve my password that I’ve forgotten, mind you – I need to know the answer to this question just to enter my account.

If you’re an adult like me, it’s not unreasonable to expect that you might have tried one thousand different foods in your lifetime, liked five hundred of them, loved one hundred of them and consider ten – maybe all at once and maybe separately – to be “favorites.”

Pizza is my favorite food.

Chocolate is my favorite food.

Cookies are my favorite food.

Hummus is my favorite food.

Verizon is my least favorite website.

Sometimes Google does strange and annoying things, like when I got a ton of wrong, and even dangerous, information from Google Maps at the same time that the tech press was excoriating Apple for “botching” its own Maps app, or when they ruined Google Voice by making it suck on the iPhone and not developing it for years, leading me to stop using it entirely.

Here’s another confusing and stupid thing that Google is doing that I just discovered today. When I got a vanity URL for my Google plus profile, and then typed a version of that URL into my browser, it sent the URL through a redirect chain with a 301 redirect followed by two 302 redirects, only then landing on their version of the page.

Take a look for yourself:

I typed in: http://google.com/+natangesher. Then it got a 301 redirect to the secure https version. Then it got a 302 redirect to plus.google.com. Then it got another 302 redirect to capitalize my first name and my last name.

This is really shoddy work. They should hire a good SEO to find these problems for them and fix them before launch.

For the past few years since I moved to the United States, I’ve used a Google Voice telephone number exclusively, and before that I used it as an American number for sending and receiving text messages while I lived in Israel. I’ve evangelized for, propagandized about and agitated on behalf of Google Voice, winning for the free service many new users. And now I’ve quit using it. Here’s why.

First, Google Voice is a pretty complex product with a ton of features. Different GV users depend on completely different features than other GV users. The ones that most mattered to me were:

• Choosing my number. Google Voice lets its users pick their own telephone numbers (US only, and only from what they’ve got in their database at that time). For me, that meant I could have a number spelling my name, in an area code (Manhattan) that had personal meaning to me.
• Texting from the web. People who have never carried out entire text message conversations using the comfort of a full sized keyboard have no idea what they’re missing. Typing exclusively with thumbs is for suckers!
• Ringing all my phones. I actually don’t have a landline at home, so I used this primarily in the office. Besides my mobile phone, I set my desk phone to ring when my Google Voice number was dialed during business hours, and it appeared seamless and perfect to anyone who called me.
• Voicemail transcriptions. Google Voice transcribed all my voicemails and sent them to me as emails. I also often listened to them using the GV web app or iOS app. Because of this, I’ve never had to call into my voicemail box from my mobile phone since I’ve been using GV exclusively.
• Call widgets. When I wanted people beyond my friends and family to be able to call me, but didn’t want to post my telephone number online for the whole world to see, I set up Google Voice call widgets. One recent example was when I was selling some furniture in San Francisco before moving to New York: I set up a web page for the furniture sale, added a contact form at the bottom and attached a javascript GV call widget. Someone clicking on the call widget would enter his or her own telephone number to receive a call from GV, which would then call my telephone to connect with me.
• International calling. Plenty of services provide this, but Google Voice is relatively inexpensive and lets me call from my own (GV) telephone number.

So there’s clearly a lot of good and cool and interesting features packed into Google Voice. And though I used a lot of them, I never even touched some others like setting up my contacts into groups and assigning different call greetings for different groups.

Why, then, would I get rid of such an amazing service?

• Poor iPhone integration. Google Voice can easily forward all calls and text messages to a user’s phone, but making outgoing calls and sending text messages from a GV phone is an entirely different story. Because Apple wants to control the calling and messaging experience for iPhone users, this functionality is built tightly into iOS, and Google Voice can’t access outgoing calling or text messaging. Consequently, iPhone users with Google Voice will appear to have two telephone numbers: even though they may tell people to call them at GV number XXX-XXX-XXXX, any calls or texts will come from the carrier’s number YYY-YYY-YYYY.There are ways around this. One is to use the Google Voice iOS app, which is not good. Another is to jailbreak one’s iPhone and install the Call on GV phone extension and the GV SMS Extension, which basically works, but not without a ton of hassle and time and energy and patience (not to mention that these jailbreak tweaks are updated months later than the jailbreaks, which themselves come months behind major new iOS versions).

• Crappy iOS app. Separately from not being able easily to make calls or send text messages from an iPhone using one’s Google Voice number, the Google Voice iOS app is utter rubbish and brings shame to Google every time I look at it. The design is decrepit; basic functionality is missing (like live updating in SMS conversations); there’s not even an iPad version.
• Missing MMS support. MMS is the protocol used for sending pictures in text messages, as well as sending group text messages. When someone sends a text message with a picture attached to a Google Voice user, it never arrives, and that is outrageous and wrong. But even worse than that, no notification whatsoever is sent to the sender or the intended recipient. The message and picture just vanish into thin air. In case you don’t follow what this means, I’ll give an example. Last month, my cousins came to visit me in San Francisco. In advance of their visit, I mailed a set of apartment keys to one of them. He took a picture of the keys and sent it to me with a text message saying that he’d received them. A week later, I asked him if he had ever received the keys I’d sent. I had no idea that he’d sent me the picture, and he had no idea that I hadn’t received it. This flaw alone is enough that anyone with Google Voice should strongly consider abandoning it.To complicate matters further, there is basic support for MMS in Google Voice when the sender’s mobile carrier is Sprint. On a few occasions when people have sent me pictures, I’ve correctly identified that they have Sprint based on this knowledge.

• Google Contacts vs. iCloud contacts. Both systems for contact management, Google Contacts and iCloud contacts / Address Book, are ok but flawed. What I find very annoying is that it’s quite difficult to keep them both in sync without contacts getting duplicated. There is some software that copies iCloud contacts to Google Contacts and vice versa – but it’s clunky – and it’s of course possible to import the contacts from each service into the other manually every once in a while, but I’m not aware of any way to keep them constantly and smoothly in sync with each other. Also, because they’re not set up to play nicely with each other, importing means that they treat data differently. Google Contacts, for example, has a nasty habit of treating a two-word business name as a person’s name (for example, Dhaba Restaurant would be entered as firstname: Dhaba and lastname: Restaurant); iCloud, on the other hand, has difficulty accepting that one of my contacts may have more than one mobile phone number. Bottom line, managing and maintaining one set of contacts is plenty.
• Dropped calls and never-calls. It’s difficult to pin this problem to Google Voice specifically, rather than to my individual phone’s carrier or the phone itself, but since I used an iPhone, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S, on Partner-Orange, AT&T and Verizon, in Tel Aviv, suburban Maryland and San Francisco, it’s fair to say that the constant throughout all of this was Google Voice. And Google Voice constantly dropped my calls.

  Even worse than a dropped call is a never-call, which is my name for when someone calls me, and it rings and rings and then goes to voicemail, except the ringing part never happened and it actually just went straight to voicemail. This has happened to me hundreds of times with Google Voice and it’s stupid and annoying and makes no sense. I have literally been sitting and holding my telephone and staring at it, waiting for someone’s call, when a missed call notification suddenly pops up, followed by a new voicemail notification – without ever getting a ring. This sucks.

• Shortcodes. Shortcodes are the four- or five-digit numbers that many online services, like Facebook and Twitter, use for verification of a user’s telephone number (and identity), as well as for notifications. They are becoming more popular over the years. Google Voice does not support them at all.

If those were the goods and the bads of Google Voice, what is the ugly? The terrifying reality is that ever since Google acquired GrandCentral and turned it into Google Voice, they have been at best apathetic and ambivalent about their astonishingly powerful and interesting service. And it seems clear to me that Google has barely put any resources at all into developing Google Voice in the past three years, which is as long as I have been using it.

Google of 2013 is a different company than Google of 2010 was. Eric Schmidt is gone, and under the stewardship of Larry Page, Google has renewed its focus on areas of its business that make money, or that solidify its lead to make money in the future, or that prevent its competitors from ever becoming dominant enough to prevent it from making money. Google Voice is not in one of these areas, and that is why it has been ignored.

It’s not alone. Many other Google services have been left to die, or have been killed, in the past few years. Google Reader was probably the best of them, and the frustration and anger that poured forth at Google from Reader’s very dedicated users was, at least in part, a function of people’s frustration and anger with Google. That frustration and anger wasn’t purely over Reader’s demise. It was also largely because Google first established itself as the dominant RSS services provider, obliterating all competition by giving Reader away for free, then ceased all innovation and product development for years except to take away users’ sharing options in favor of a favored Google service, Google plus, and finally killed Google Reader when no other service could possibly replace it.

If anyone doubts that Google Voice will one day go the route of Google Reader, I have a bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan to sell him. Google Voice is, in the long run, of zero value to Google’s business and, though I wish they’d sell it to another company or charge money for it, Google will kill it – if not this month than next month, if not this year than next year. But they’ll wait to kill it until they feel like it, and they will keep it alive – but hobbled by missing features – for as long as necessary to ensure that no competing company can develop and launch a similar service. In this way, I might add, Google is evil.

For me, the future is to continue using my Google Voice telephone number as a Verizon number, which is possible because of number portability. More than ninety percent of the people I know have iPhones, so iMessage from my iPhone, iPad and Macs will replace sending text messages from the web. Since a few of my friends don’t have iPhones, I’ll just not get to their text messages as quickly as I’d like.

iMessage is not a mature service, but at least it’s in Apple’s incentive to continue developing it. I wish they would open it up to third parties, but know they won’t, which is a topic for another blog post on another day.

And by the way, when I ported my Google Voice number to my iPhone, I actually set up another one, just in case I ever wanted or needed it. Naturally, it also has my name in it.