Google closes yet another program

[Clinton]

You may not have even heard of it, but it was launched in Feb 2011 and revamped in Feb 2012: One Pass.

It allows publishers to create a paywall.

Try to access it today and you get an error (though you can still see it in the Google cache).

At the rate Google keeps closing its programs is it safe to rely on any Google program as a long term solution including Analytics and Apps? The suddenness with which they announce these closures doesn't give their users much of a chance to switch. I bet there aren't many happy bunnies among One Pass users. Announcement was made on April 20th at the start of the weekend and here on Monday morning the service is completely offline.

One Pass, our payment platform for online news publishers, has been shut down. We are working with existing partners to make the transition from One Pass to other platforms, including Google Consumer Surveys.

My suggestion: Ask for some written guarantees from Google if you're moving to another Google product.

In this announcement Google discloses also that it is changing various APIs, dropping Google Related, ending the mobile app for Google Talk, ending Picasa support in Linux and a few other changes.

[JJMcClure]

At the rate Google keeps closing its programs is it safe to rely on any Google program as a long term solution including Analytics and Apps? The suddenness with which they announce these closures doesn't give their users much of a chance to switch. I bet there aren't many happy bunnies among One Pass users. Announcement was made on April 20th at the start of the weekend and here on Monday morning the service is completely offline.


My suggestion: Ask for some written guarantees from Google if you're moving to another Google product.

I think there are pertinent aspects of this that you didn't mention.

Firstly, it's pretty obvious when a Google tool isn't very popular, no one was taken by surprise when Google Knoll or Google Plus closed. The writing was on the wall for a long time. So, if I were taken by surprise by a Google service/tool being withdrawn, then I probably wasn't paying attention...

Secondly, why would you ask Google for guarantees when you wouldn't do that with other businesses? Imagine if you were building a tool that relied on using other services, you'd probably just make sure that the ones you included looked like they might be around for a while and make sure that your own tool degraded gracefully in the event that a service closed, right? You'd accept that as the most you could reasonably do and what you could expect from a third party for free. Why would Google, when providing a free service, have to provide guarantees that you wouldn't expect to get from another company?

You might also have mentioned this:

"One Pass, our payment platform for online news publishers, has been shut down. We are working with existing partners to make the transition from One Pass to other platforms, including Google Consumer Surveys. While One Pass is going away, we will continue working with publishers to build new tools."

They're not just casually abandoning their 'partners'. Whilst we might not be able to access the service from the website, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes or how much notice partners were given by other means long before the service shut down or how much better the replacement service is.

[Clinton]

I think there are pertinent aspects of this that you didn't mention.

Yes, sorry. Google's charge for the service was 10% of your takings, it wasn't a freebie.

Secondly, why would you ask Google for guarantees when you wouldn't do that with other businesses?

I would ask it when signing up with any provider where I'm going to be expending time and money to customise my business to use their tools (and rely on those tools for my business).

[JJMcClure]

Yes, sorry. Google's charge for the service was 10% of your takings, it wasn't a freebie.

That's a commission, which does raise the interesting question of what obligation a service that charges a commission as opposed to charging for membership, has to it's users.

And, as I pointed out in my OP, Google are working with partners to ensure a smooth transition so their business isn't affected by the closing of One Pass. Also, unless you were a user, and you didn't say that you were, we don't know how much notice they gave their users so your comment about "the suddenness" with which the service was closed might be considered somewhat presumptive at best, deliberately damning at worst, almost as if you were actually trying to make them look bad instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I would ask it when signing up with any provider where I'm going to be expending time and money to customise my business to use their tools (and rely on those tools for my business).

Really? You have in writing an assurance that Paypal, for example, won't suddenly decide to close their business? What assurances have you had (or can be gotten) from other businesses that you do use, that you feel Google don't offer?

[Clinton]

Google Shutting Down Business Video, Team Apps, Listen, Company Blogs

The company said that it would be phasing out its Google Apps for Teams and Video for Business services as well as a number of its company blogs and the Google Listen podcast platform....

Likewise, the company said that content hosted on the Video for Business platform would be transitioned to the Google Drive service, while podcast subscriptions stored on the Google Listen service would be migrated to the Google Reader and Play platforms...

The move is one of several mass shutdown, or "cleaning" operations which Google has undertaken recently. Last month, the company shut down a number of products and services including Google Mini and the iGoogle.