Hacker News Reader

Comment by kin | Hacker News Reader

Collections is kind of like Pinterest. Communities is kind of like Reddit. Plus was kind of like Facebook. Buzz was kind of like Twitter.

They really need to stop imitating and start innovating. At this point I don't even think they know who they're targeting they're just trying to do a little bit of everything but they don't do it well enough for me to want to use it.

View on HN

Pinterest is kind of like delicious, reddit is kind of like forums, facebook is kind of like myspace, twitter is kind of like irc. There's nothing new. Iteration on a good idea is not a bad thing.

The thing is, everything Google is doing is a lesser form of what it's copying so it's not an iteration. That and they're not just copying one thing they're trying to do everything. Why? All of your examples sought to improve upon one thing, do it well, and do it with focus.

My main point is that Google's social products are all over the place. They're firing on all cylinders but not aiming at anything.

I'm guessing they see the integration as an iteration. A lot of people would prefer to have a single sign-on, cross-linking etc. rather than having separate Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Reddit is not kind of like forums, it's almost Usenet ported to the web.

There were many well established search engines readily available when they launched search to.

There were exactly zero good search engines at the time, however. Google was exponentially better than anything else from day 1.

At launch, the actual search functionality wasn't noticeably better than Altavista. It was, however, much faster and aesthetically pleasing.

"much faster" is important.

Speed is a feature

AltaVista was good. Google was better than AltaVista, but not exponentially better. It was just a nice improvement - enough to get me to switch.

I remember doing searches on AltaVista and Yahoo, both unusable for me. The difference felt when starting to use Google's Search was night and day.

I'm not really trying to say anything about the quality of these products at launch compared to competitors. The parent post made a claim that since there was already a lot of innovative products available Google can't do anything special by launching similar applications. I say that's completely off base when you look at the product that made Google one of the largest tech companies in the world fits exactly into this category. It was not doing anything fundamentally different from other search engines at the time. It just did in a much better way, so much so that people overwhelmingly switched; and they were able to make way more money of these users as well.

I recall that I held off on switching to Google from AltaVista because the former didn't initially support searching for multiple phrases using the OR operator (e.g., "first phrase" OR "second phrase"). Am I misremembering? If not, then Google was worse than AltaVista on day 1, day 2, and many days that followed.

>At this point I don't even think they know who they're targeting they're just trying to do a little bit of everything

They're basically trying to brute force their way by now.

Well said. It's as if Steve Ballmer's nephew is now running the products team.

Clarification please,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com