This might be just a coincidence but in the last month or so I've seen this:
1. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the way of the dodo.
2. HN has a story of a person having his Google acct randomly shut down with no warning and no recourse (and I don't have highly-placed friends in Google so for me something like that would mean I'm screwed forever).
3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google.
I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It'd be probably impossible to quit cold turkey but I'm starting to look into the way to minimize the impact of Google on my life (much of which is related to information services).
> 1. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the way of the dodo.
Yes, we know. This is brought up on any given technical forum a dozen times a day. You're beating a dead horse at this point.
The years of neglect and the nerfing of Reader during the Google+ launch gave you plenty of forewarning.
> 3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google
Go to Google or DDG. Type "google status" and hit enter. Click the very first result.
That page shows 20-minute problems that affected "0.634% of the Google Calendar user base", which were able to access Calendar, but saw some error messages. For me, I could not access the calendar for hours yesterday.
> I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me.
It seems like this has been the Google narrative of late for a (possibly growing) segment of people in the tech community. However, I wonder how many outside said community share the feeling. Probably not many.
That's an awfully fine straw man you've got there. I see you knit him a sweater and everything!
Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside."
I honestly don't know if the tech community has a non-proportional influence over those on the outside, but your statement is almost a non-sequitur.
>Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside."
No, I just have a longer perspective. You're probably too young to remember that most of the tech community, their mother and their dogs considered Linux "ready for the primetime" during late 199x.
The time when every other pundit was quoting "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and VCs invested in several Linux distributions (which included relatively established companies like Corel, Novell, et al). There wasn't even OS X (or Google) to keep them amused, it was all Linux and OSS.
It was said to happen "any day now", nay, it was "already happening". Including huge over-valuation for Linux companies, from VA Linux to Eazel and whatever Xamarin was called back then. They abandoned that thinking around 2000-2002, after the dot com crash etc.
reader and igoogle are what's doing it for me.. and the past few days dialing out via google voice on my android phone has been spotty as well.
Maybe they're being DDoS'd (though with Google's resiliancy), but it's really making me question a lot of things... I was hoping to use my GVoice number for a long time.. but spending the weekend explaining I'm calling from my real cell phone number was just weird.
"2. HN has a story of a person having his Google acct randomly shut down with no warning and no recourse (and I don't have highly-placed friends in Google so for me something like that would mean I'm screwed forever)."
They are thousands and thousands of such stories. But there's recourse...if you make HN's front page or if you have 150,000+ Twitter followers. For the rest of you: Google is to busy trying to make users click on ads, no time to offer even the most basic support.
That's exactly what I am talking about... The thing that worries me the most is not that they don't provide 5-minute support for a billion people - I know it's impossible. The problem that they have exactly nothing - you could as well erect a statue of Larry Page and pray to that. They officially don't care.
Google didn't just shut down my Calendar, they shut down everything. I am travelling and trying to use Google for various services, then Google locked me out because I logged in from somewhere different to my usual location.
Now they want me to verify my account using a mobile number. Except that I'm overseas and I don't have global roaming enabled (because otherwise turning on my phone will cost $2 and every text I send costs $2, and I get charged $5/MB for data).
Whether the "verify your account by giving us information we've never demanded from you in the past" is related to my lock-out, or is simply a new demand they started making over the weekend I don't know.
In the meantime I have to find alternatives to Google for everything.
> then Google locked me out because I logged in from somewhere different to my usual location
I very recently had this happen to me too, except it took them 3-4 days after I arrived at my destination to disable my account and demand a phone number.
I have two-factor authentication, and I did a very thorough inspection to ensure I had no malware - nope, it's just because my location changed. Their "kill this account" algorithms really need some tweaking.
This is a really weird one. It has happened to me once, when I traveled to Thailand, but not when I've traveled to Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, China, Belgium, or anywhere else in the last couple of years. In all of those instances, I had other devices (tablet, Chromebook, laptop) at home that were still logged into sessions with the same account. It would be handy to know how they decide when to flag accounts. Facebook, too, for that matter, and Paypal, who seem to be the most draconian.
I just checked the past 5 SIM cards I've used from 5 different countries and they all had free incoming SMS while roaming. Seems to be a general rule. I guess there could be exceptions?
I doubt iPhone CalDAV support is going away though:
> Update March 15, 2013: We worked with the developers who provide 98 percent of our current CalDAV traffic to assure access to the CalDAV API, which means many popular products will not be impacted. We remain committed to supporting open protocols like CalDAV.
This seems like an unrelated, isolated outage. I'm using CalDAV on my iPhone and iPad and haven't had any issues (although I don't use 2-factor authentication like a few of the commenters in the thread).
Oh. No more open APIs from Google? A shame. That's what used to make them great.
I used to be all over the Googleverse. I searched using Google, I did email and contact management in GMail, had my calendar in GCal, read my news in GReader, and IMd in Google Talk. And the great thing about these was that they used open standards and I could choose from a multitude of clients for accessin my data.
And then they shut that down one by one. Now, GMail remains the only one of those services that has not been publicly deprecated.
Well, I abandoned ship long ago. Nowadays, Google Hangouts and Google Maps are the only part of Google I use. Occasionally.
I have the same issue from France. First thing I checked was the blog post announcing the end of CalDAV, and yes, that's September.
Something else is not working right. Google may be testing just how much trouble shutting down CalDAV would cause... Or they may simply have made a mistake.
Question: how hard would it be to write a Google Calendar API proxy that serves CalDAV requests? I'm reading the spec and it seems to be only about 100 pages long. I guess the question is whether there is any economic incentive to do so.
A rule of thumb is that anything which involves calendar-sync, no matter how trivial it at first seems, will get hairy, ugly and have potential for amazing bugs you could never even imagine, the second you stop thinking about it and start writing code.
The amount of edge-cases is usually beyond belief.
My day job is writing a calendar product. I'm currently re-writing the entire product as an API. Something as simple as "Create a new event" has taken months of work (when you save an event you have to update recurrences, alarms, attendees, etc.)
Our legacy code has an event save method that's a few thousand lines long. It's the one part of the code that we avoid at all costs because a seemingly minor change can break some weird edge case.
We also have a CalDav module that works but also has weird edge cases when different calendars handle things in different ways. For example, you have an event that starts on a Monday, set to repeat on Wed and Fri for 10 occurrences. Do you display the Monday occurrence of the original event even though it's not in the recurrence rule? If so, does it count as one of the 10 occurrences or not? In our testing, iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook all handle this same case in completely different ways.
I don't blame you.. I had to work on an access request system, and the SLA/Scheduling bits were nightmarish with huge swaths of hard to follow code... I finally got so frustrated I spent a 15 hour straight period pretty much ripping out the majority of said logic and had it all in UTC from front to back, and had any "local" conversions client-side... there was still a bunch of code in place to handle weekends, and holidays (which don't count against SLA), but this really wasn't timezone dependant so much.
Can't imagine what a pain a full on calendar project would be.. I looked at CalDAV at one point, because I wanted something that ran outside of Apple's OS early on, but pretty much dropped the idea less than a week into it.
Last weekend I decided to move my non-profit email off of gmail. Running my own mail server always seemed silly or negligent (everyone I know who runs their own has had mail bounce back at me at least once).
It took me the weekend to setup and secure Kolab. It's GPL, built on top of postfix, has a nice webmail client through Roundcube, and it's actively developed. The current version (3.0) doesn't have CalDav support, but it is on the roadmap for 3.1 in a couple months.
Learned a lot of about anti-spam techniques while setting it up. The config file settings were a little lax for Roundcube, but all-in-all I'm happier with the setup than with Gmail. This CalDav problem was just a random outage, but how long till they make another change that users can't opt out of?
Ok good, it's not only me... :\ I started getting incorrect password about 5 hours ago. When I go to settings to type it in, it says "Can't login using SSL, do you want to try without SSL" to which I say no...
Hopefully it is just an outage that will get fixed.
Surely they wouldn't do that.. they killed off Google Sync (ActiveSync/Exchange) for personal / free accounts, so all of those customers have to rely on either CalDAV or a specific calendar app on mobile, right?
Free lunch is over , Google tricked you into relying on them now you are about to understand that there is no such thing as a non paying customer , even in the internet world.
Wow, I actually just realised there are (supposed to be) ads in gmail. It seems I used adblock for so long they would be ridiculously annoying if I kept it turned off.
1. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the way of the dodo.
2. HN has a story of a person having his Google acct randomly shut down with no warning and no recourse (and I don't have highly-placed friends in Google so for me something like that would mean I'm screwed forever).
3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google.
I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It'd be probably impossible to quit cold turkey but I'm starting to look into the way to minimize the impact of Google on my life (much of which is related to information services).