Thursday, May 28, 2015
Google cuts off third-party posting programs without warning
As of Tuesday night I could no longer use Windows Live Writer to post to my blogger accounts, including Disappeared News. Oh, well, thought I, better reboot or check what my Windows 7 OS has done to me today. Calling it a night, I deferred the problem till Wednesday morning.
Nothing I could do would make WLW work. So I googled the forums and found a few more users with the same complaint. I also found a feeble reply from a Google (?) minion that it is a Microsoft problem, they have failed to update the login method in WLW.
After a few hours, complaints were flooding in all over the place. Google had uncermoniously cut off all or nearly all of the third-party Windows posting applications. Just like that. With no warning to users at all. Our recourse is to use the blogger.com on-line posting form, which is mediocre at best--which is why all those other apps exist to begin with. Posting images via the on-line form is a royal pain.
Yes, it seems that Microsoft indeed ignored a warning that the older login method would end in April, which it didn't, actually, but there was no warning to users, who must number in the hundreds of thousands or millions or something like that.
Today, on Google's developers forum, is this notice (for developers, you see, not for us):
Windows Live Writer has not seen an update in more than two years, so I wonder if they will bother to fix a problem not of their own creation. Zoundry Raven, Blogjet and the others are also disabled.
The wrath is growing, if the rapidly increasing number of complaints is a reasonable measure. Some users say they will move to WordPress, but that is not easy to do, and staying with Blogger has many advantages.
This just reminded me how little we really seem to matter to Google. It's our data, the information on our behavior, that they want, but that's not the same as caring about their users.
And yes, I understand that Blogger is a free service (though I paid for the enhanced version when it first came out). But nothing is free. In exchange for the free services Google provides, they get your data. And they are not a poor, struggling little company. That data must be extremely valuable and profitable for them.
Somehow, I think that Google will see all the complaints (they see everything, don't they? Like a private version of the NSA?). I wonder if they plan to fix this.
Somehow, I think not.
Somehow, we'll adapt.
But the trust has been broken, yet again.
Somehow, I don't think they'll care about that, either.
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