Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java (earlier editions of which are available as free e-books), is worried by a recent announcement concerning Google Groups.
Google announced that it will be shuttering the “pages and files” function of Google Groups, which allowed people to upload files into a holding area where they could be accessed by readers of the group. Google instead would like people to move their file and page storing to Google Docs and Google Sites—presumably so they can better segment file storage duties on their servers and save some money.
Eckel is offended that the announcement “buries” what he sees as the most crucial piece of information—that all content stored in Google Groups pages and files will go away in February 2011—in the third paragraph. He feels that this shakes the foundation of his trust that Google will continue providing the services it says it will.
Obviously the people who invested in Wave might feel a little burned, but it was clear from the start that it was an experiment that most people weren’t figuring out. But it never occurred to me that Groups might be in jeopardy. Someone at Google might rush to say "oh, no, Groups will stay around" but how do I know that? Once you decide that some of my data is OK to destroy, where does it stop?
I’m a little annoyed myself with some other Google functionality reduction—they recently removed page change tracking from Google Reader, replacing it with a Page2RSS thing that doesn’t, as far as I can tell, actually work.
But just because Google decided to remove additional functionality from Groups doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to kill Groups altogether. A slippery slope doesn’t make it so. Let’s remember that Groups’s main function is to provide the same access to Usenet news as the AltaVista service that Google originally purchased (with Yahoo Groups-like create-a-group mailing list functionality stuck onto the top of it). I’ve read Usenet for years with slrn without needing “pages and files”.
