Google to Add Social Feature to Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Google to Add Social Feature to Gmail

online.wsj.com

15 pointskarthikv20 comments

Yay! ReadWriteWeb (aka, me) just posted on this too: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_creating_twitter...

The best part is, they've invited me/us to the Googleplex tomorrow for an event explaining "some innovations in two of our most popular products."

I'm so excited! It'll be my first time at the Mountain View campus. =)

That WSJ article was REALLY low on information (at least in my non-payer's view), so I was glad to read your write-up.

Hopefully, this will integrate with other Google products really well and be available on my Google Profile, etc.

Dear Google,

Please stop adding things to my Gmail that make it a worst email reader. If you want to make some sort of social center, please create a new tool that ties into Gmail. Gmail was a really great product 2 years ago, but you keep adding dumb shit to it and making it less stable. Please stop. Thank you.

The additional functionality is okay with me, so long as Google keeps it in the Labs section.

Just out of curiosity, what is being added that is making gmail less stable for you? In the years I have been using gmail, I've never had any issues, and I currently have 17 labs features running (FWIW).

I'm really not sure what makes it unstable for me. I've had issues across browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Safari) and OSes (Windows and Mac OS X). Something the page just stops responding, or clicks result in it's error message showing. Or clicks do nothing and I have to reload the entire thing. Nothing reproducible just lots of small issues that are basically crashes.

I use no labs features.

What's with companies trying to be something that they're not these days? Facebook changed user's privacy settings so they could be more like Twitter, but why? Facebook does/did sharing photos, updates, and news with family and friends very well, and I can't understand why they're trying to go against that original goal of "closeness". I see the same thing happening here. I can't really see how tacking a status update feature onto Gmail will help Google in the social space.

more info: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/technology/companies/09soc...

The meat:

The Gmail move signals that Google remains serious about becoming a social media force at a time when some of Silicon Valley’s younger start-ups have stolen some of its thunder.

"It might look like a minor feature advance, but this is another blow in the war against Facebook," said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a technology consulting company.

This is confusing to me. How many GMail users who want to use social networking don't have a Facebook account already? It seems unlikely to me people will want to maintain a second (third, forth, etc) list of friends and upload their pictures multiple times. There's not much chance of people quitting Facebook to use GMail as a social network. Just a bad idea all around. Sometimes I feel like Google is really lacking focus. They want to be involved in everything yet they only do a few things really well.

Is it appropriate to flag a link that requires you to access a paid service to be of any use? I mean, you can argue it's a "spam" link, as if a WSJ cohort posted it, they may be hoping for subscriptions.

I'm eyeballing the link pretty intensely right now...

The submitter probably went to the link from google and didn't realize it was a pay wall.

Go ahead and try it http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

It is under the nytimes article at this time

Weird. Still likely shouldn't be a link here, though I can grant it's more likely a mistake.

Hooray! Congrats to the team!

I wish they'd add spelling correction to their search.

I wish the search would search contacts...

(Yes I know I can go to the contacts widget and do a completely different search in there - not the same)

Amazing what the power of Google's brand can do for press coverage on feature releases.

Yahoo Mail implemented this feature maybe a year ago and has the LARGER user base but got very little coverage.

http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/The-Email-Battles-Gmail-...

The media is also more likely to report on a pretzel choking incident when it concerns a person of interest like the president rather than a less interesting subject like me...

>> "[To continue reading subscribe now]"

Yeah how about [To continue having a viable business model stop pissing off visitors with stupid pay/subscribe walls].

Sorry, offtopic I know. It just irritates the hell out of me.

How do you suggest places like the Wall Street Journal continue to fund themselves?

If it's exclusively a paid service, then why do they have ads? I can't tell for certain if they do in the paid version, but looking at the sample page on the "subscribe now" link, there appears to be an ad for something like a smartphone.

And plenty of other newspaper sites give content for free, and only lock older articles. They seem to be doing well enough with that model.

edit: and then why allow Googlers to access everything for free?

Ads. This is throw away content. Maybe make some of the interesting stories into a book and sell it? :/

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