Google Buzz
google.com
google.com
Every dollar of advertising that Facebook makes is a dollar or even more from Google. Every minute that facebookers facebook, google isn't showing them ads and isn't getting click throughs and this amounts to a vastly larger sum of money than any new search engine or aggregator or individual media company which google has already rendered moot to a large extent.
This is real time search which everyone has been asking for with all the data stored on google's super voluminous uber-fast lightning machine with its neurons and axons keeping the world connected and communicating.
Here it is and we don't want it.
The competition is for virtual real estate. Everywhere there is blank space on the screen or blank time in the consumer day or a blank wall in the virtual world, there will be an ad on it, just as today there are ads in nearly every physical space: Public transportation, Bar room mirrors, big screen tvs... Nothing is safe. No one is safe from Google and they have crossed the nash equilibrium where everyone is competing against them, including the websites where they get their content and the websites where people go to pass time.
Do you mean "we, the people" or "we, the people who think in terms of Nash equilibria"? ;)
More seriously: I don't think I care about how big the company is. Rather, I care about the quality of the product, and whether I am free to leave it for a competitor's product. Google is actually trying to make it easy for you to leave if you choose to, and take your data with you - they're even inviting you to report their failures in that regard at www.dataliberation.org - so that's quite good.
If they don't make it easy for me to interact with Facebookers/Twitterers/whateverers, I'll end up visiting Facebook/Twitter/whatever instead, and vice versa - what's wrong with that? I'm not an economist, but this sounds like a healthy competitive landscape to me?
It's about quality, not size.
The latter, of course. WE ARE A NEW PEOPLE! WE WILL PREVAIL!
More seriously, I don't care about how big the company is either, as such -- but I do worry about a company that gets so big and so diversified that it may become anticompetitive and stifle innovation. Remember when Microsoft had the power to hold back innovation, and we were stuck with IE6 for years and years? Didn't that just suck?
Google is being a lot better about this, mind you. They seem to genuinely care about interoperability and making it possible for competitors to beat them by being better. And they've got good products and smart people and a non-broken management structure. I feel good about Google. Nevertheless, a Google-dominated web is something to worry about. I hope that there are always viable alternatives. Not because I think Google is evil and corrupt, but because I worry that they could become so.
Actually I think Google is just escalating their war with FB, the other companies you refer to could end up being collateral damage though.
I don't see the "shift" as obvious at all.
From the perspective of those other companies they are indeed "declaring war" and it's all very dramatic... but for actual users, this is just another company competing for their attention by providing a better service.
I expect the product will fail because Google sucks at social stuff, but in principle more competition is good, and unless a company competes unfairly through a monopoly (and they don't have one for email or social networking.)
http://www.scansafe.com/content/employers-crack-down-social-...
"76% of companies are choosing to block social networking ... and Webmail (58%)"
Of course, if this thing caught on, presumably more companies would block gmail.
Not a great data point, but interesting none the less.
Next thing we could expect is a Farmville in Gmail.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079765
AT&T To Launch Yelp Competitor - The telco's buzz.com site lets users' "favorite" local vendors and services.
The difference is everyone still loves them. Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.
It's taking the best of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter, Friendfeed and putting it into Google's social graph. It's innovative with the combination of features they've chosen to employ, but it's not original, though. Search was never new when Google started either, remember.
-- edit: I am going to use Buzz to start blogging again. Instant viewer base, who I can identify.
I wouldn't call the 140 char limit an anti-feature either. Its become a key differentiation point, and is in many ways what makes Twitter Twitter.
It would be interesting to have a 140, 700, 5000, unlimited character filters in Buzz. If its display algorithm was used well, it could work out if long posts from a particular person were usually not worth reading to most people.
If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil.
I don't care if Google is evil. They're a large corporation trying to make money like any other. They don't care about us.
* Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.*
My point was that the vast majority of Google's products are clones and yet they're still considered innovative where the same is true of Microsoft and they are not thought of that way.
What are you talking about?
I'm pretty sure Google didn't invent web based maps, e-mail and the web browser. Wave and AppEngine were good but useless...
Perhaps you attach some other meaning to "clone" than an exact genetic duplicate, indistinguishable from the original except for gestational differences?
See for yourself:
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of an example of a successful startup whose products are based on source code from Google?
Google gives away a ton of free services that work. Microsoft sells people something that they have (almost) no option not to buy, and causes a near infinite stream of headaches to just about everyone (even if you don't use it yourself - how many times have you had to help out friends or relatives whose Windows installations got screwed up?).
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill, but I can truly say that Google's services have provided me with a lot of value. In the old days of Microsoft that was true for them, too, but over the past decade Microsoft products have done little more than cost me time and money.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
Actually never... but anyway.
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill
But it's not a cheap ploy. It's a destroyer of value. Once Google moves into a market it's impossible to compete against them (same used to be true of Microsoft and still is in markets they're dominant in..)
My point is that as a community of people interested in startups/founders one would think Hacker News would be upset by this but everyone seems to celebrate when Google moves into a market and destroys it with free.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
I think it's bizarre you think they're different.
it's not like we're gonna run out of problems to solve, because google is solving all of them for us.
If you say yes then I think you need to take a step back and consider the possibility that you've been brain washed.
If Google really starts cloning everything, the way Microsoft is trying, they'll start losing the focus on their core values. As a result, their products will be inferior ... their resources are limited after-all.
Don't believe me? They have a social network for quite some time ... see http://www.orkut.com ... do you see it competing against Facebook? They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?
But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps ... I used AltaVista and the first page of results was always full of junk. I used Yahoo Mail that had a slow interface, and only something like ~ 50 MB of storage ... I still have that account (using it for YIM) and it's practically unusable (their spam filters are crap ... in contrast with 2 GMail accounts + 2 Google Apps accounts that are doing just fine).
Google Apps is also really valuable ... I can have my email setup for my domain in a couple of hours, for free, having all the goodies of GMail.
I'm also using Google Translate ... which is really kick-ass sometimes (I'm not a native English speaker, and my native language isn't really popular, but Google Translate knows about it ;))
I'm also using Google Docs and Google Calendar ... Docs because it's there (came with Google Apps) and Calendar because it is intuitive and it is sending me SMS messages for free, plus my wife can see my schedule without me having to give her my password :)
Android and Chrome are 2 products launched to increase competition. I'm a Firefox user, but Chrome is so fast and so stable that it leaves Firefox in the dust ... I'd use it, but some Firefox-specific features are missing. And Android is the open-source mobile-OS we needed ... polished, backed by a strong brand, with a good SDK, and online-store.
I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do. And what's "innovation" anyway?
Of course you're not going to see revolutionary ideas. That's why patents are so absurd.
But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.
Well, it takes more than simply dumping a free product on the market. It has to be comparably usable.
>do you see it competing against Facebook?
Facebook is also free.
>They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?
Again. Two free products competing with each other.
>But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps
People and companies are not static. Yes, google did a lot of good things for us (as did MS and various other places before them). No, they wont continue to do so forever.
><snip a bunch of stuff about using google for most everything>
This seems to back up my point. You're using all these free things instead of buying something from an aspiring new start up.
>I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do.
Perhaps, but it's not a zero sum game. Them providing valuable services for free means that I will have a much harder time making a start up to provide those things for even a small cost.
>But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.
With google the threat is two fold: a huge company with vastly more resources than any start up will have who gives away most of their stuff for free.
But point taken; that it worked (or not) doesn't negate the fact it was done. Thanks!
Similarly, Maps was fundamentally innovative. If you went to GMaps c. 2005 and then went to MapQuest, there was absolutely no comparison. I kept wanting to drag the map around to see what was just offscreen. And then Maps kept innovating with satellite imagery, and Street View, and local business labels on the satellite imagery, and double-click-to-find-the-best-vantage-point.
Then there are a bunch of me-too products that succeed only because its Google and everyone already uses them.
Unfortunately this includes everything I've done at Google, but I'm hoping they've set things up for future innovation. Real innovation takes time, usually 3-4 years. Google's strength has been that they're willing to devote that time, but you can't have every single product out the door be a hit.
Regarding Maps, the fundamental operations had been in place since at least 2002 at e.g. http://www.nl.map24.com/. Actually I haven't been there for quite some time, and I think in 2002 their interface was actually better than now.
There was also the fact that they blackmailed PC vendors into not installing Netscape.
I'm not sure I agree that there's lack of innovation at Google; I'm trying to think of a big company that does any better in that regard and can't think of any.
Compare how you would reply to an email notification from Facebook or Twitter: you'd have to login to the site and post your reply (or even see the actual reply) there. With Buzz, it's inline.
Migration of my friends to FB email seems far more likely to me than migration of all my social graph to Google Buzz.
It would also be trivial for FB to allow response to notifications via external email if they decide to do it.
I think people are seriously underestimating the value of Facebook's existing graphs. They've been shaped over a couple of years now to what most people want them to be. The vast majority are not going to leave that behind for a me-too service.
For me, I use several of Google's products daily, and always have my Gmail open. That's why I like Buzz, because it seems like it fits me well.
What do you see happening to twitter then, if people move to FB mail, in addition to the introduction of Buzz?
You can actually already do this by replying to the notification email!
A lot of this was elegantly* evolutionary, but it's nice to see them put a name and publicity push behind it.
*In the non-mathematical sense.
I think Sun's revenues also came from Software and Services, but mostly servers. We all know what happen to Sun. I don't know where Google can find its next cash cow.
Microsoft's business strategy has always been a kind of unfocused. They didn't ever sit down and say DOS or BASIC or Word was going to be the cornerstone of their business, they just did what they thought would be useful at the time until they managed to hit on something. You can tell because, though I can't say anything for their old BASIC's, DOS wasn't even very good! As Microsoft got big enough to parallelize this strategy, it turned into a kind of shotgun strategy where they simultaneously tried to build web browsers and gaming consoles and mobile phone operating systems and MP3 players and webmail and everything else. If you read The Road Ahead, Bill Gates writes about Wang, which was enormously successful but missed the PC wave just long enough to go out of business. After Microsoft's own close call with the internet (ironically around the time The Road Ahead was written and first published), I'm sure these fears intensified to the point where Microsoft started jumping after every hot new thing, be it multitouch, MP3 players, search engines, or whatnot.
The contrast to this is Apple in the respective Jobs eras, which focused intensely on building a few great products. It's a far riskier strategy--if Apple invents the Macintosh and no one wants one, what then?
Google's had a shotgun approach as well--I don't know why, but it seems like a good use of the talent they seem so intent on recruiting. Part of the shotgun approach is that some products are better than others, but a likely bad part of the approach is that you are prone to go chasing after every new trend.
It seems like their "shot-gun" approach is to release a lot a half-baked crap just to generate some headlines and then hope people forget about it (e.g. Wave). I think this used to work when they were competing with Microsoft (which also released half-baked crap but for got called on it.. constantly). But now I think a lot of companies are releasing good products right out of the gate (e.g. Apple, Facebook) and this strategy is going to be less successful in the future.
- lower barrier to entry: many people don't consider they have enough interesting things to say to make it worth creating a twitter account. They would more easily buzz it, since it's there in their mail account.
IMHO, this is genius.
The iPod was not a me-too product. It was the first digital music player that took a more comprehensive approach to solving the problem around finding/getting music content from the "cloud" (back when "the cloud" was just simply called the interwebs) to your player. When the iPod first launched, many people did not initially look any deeper then the surface.
Perhaps once we look past the surface of Buzz, we'll see that it brings something to the table that has been missing in social status sites. Or, perhaps Buzz is Google's Zune.
Also, Google's thing has literally always been to launch half baked ideas, get reaction, and then iterate. All the while never charging anyone except for the eyeballs.
Wave is probably ahead of its time, and also suffers from a poor user interface.
Microsoft started off with an unpopular operating system, and forced it down users' throats by tying up with the hardware manufacturers. Users don't have much of a choice in the matter. I think they lost contact with their end users at some point. Today, they're stuck with the NIH syndrome, and keep running around in circles, without making an effort to understand the way the market/ competition has changed.
Google started off making good useful (and I'd say innovative) products like Google Search and GMail. They got their users to like them and focused heavily on keeping up with their customers' wants. They post pictures of their office, and talk about their "cool" work culture, and manage to get the public drooling all over. Microsoft didn't think any of this was important. At some point, Google will probably start becoming a sloppy uninteresting company that forces new products down their existing customers' throats. Still, a smarter successor.
and Wave?
After I got a Wave account I invited a couple of friends, and they checked it out - signing in once, and forgetting about the whole service after that. So I tried including them in a few "waves", but there was no option to get email notifications of new waves! Of course they never returned, and the next time 'round I'd just email them again...
They could transplant GMail/Buzz/Google Talk/etc to run on Wave without forcing people to learn the interface up-front. Users would be building up content 'in' Wave and Google would be slowly integrating the features that Wave makes easy.
Then the Wave interface (the biggest stumbling block for most) can be introduced as an optional power-user interface; but wholly compatible in case people want to bounce back and forth as they ease in and backward-compatible with people who aren't ready to take the plunge. (fully backward compatible, in the case of other GMail users)
I just don't think Wave is there yet.
For the less metaphorically-inclined, Google has so much money and is doing so much development that they've reached the point that they are actively trying to obsolete hundreds of companies. You can certainly argue that perhaps these companies deserve to be replaced. Google is becoming the Wal-Mart of the web.
My point is that they have so many resources and so much raw computing power on the line that almost by accident they can burn to rubble dozens of different business models.
Overall some consolidation is probably a good thing, but I am continuously reminded of WalMart. WalMart perfected retail sales in much the same way as Google is perfecting rich internet applications. WalMart was able to deliver products cheaper than anybody else. Google in many cases just gives stuff away. WalMart drove out lots of small shops. Google seems to be doing the same. WalMart had a goal of dominating the market. Google wants to store every piece of data on the planet.
I'm perfectly happy shopping at WalMart -- they do a great job of providing me stuff at the best prices I can find. I'm not so convinced that I am as happy getting all of my internet data from Google. I'm NOT saying they're some kind of evil empire, just I'm beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable about them. It looks like whatever is the flavor of the week there's Google out there peddling their version of it.
(doesn't work yet for me either)
[edit]
It looks like only Android 2.0+ is supported and the HTC Hero still runs 1.5. Lame.
They'll save the 'superior device' angle for other features where the size of the user base is less important (GPS Navigation).
It seems they've managed to roll up what a lot of others were doing into a seemly nicely integrated package. I would like to think that this will give location based networks the push they need to become more mainstream.
It should be the other way around.
Will be interesting to see if it can gain enough momentum to be useful. I am betting yes - due to the simpler embedding of media.
If it was a Microsoft product, it would probably run right on the desktop in a sidebar. Then they would have a developers conference for it in Las Vegas with a free brunch too. [A different promotional stratagy than Google].
[edit] I missed an 's' in the URL. Android doesn't seem to like that URL, but the iPhone does.
I find that the Buzz interface is highly similar to Brizzly which was similar to Gmail developed by ex-Googlers working on Gmail/Google Reader. Its like all deja vu. O God I'm so buzzed out!
Its definitely a Foursquare killer.
Their main focus is search and adwords ...and more recently snooping dns.
Now instead of letting facebook do their thing and google offering competitive ads, they choose to do facebook thing.
Now what? They are going to clone all the sites that their users spend more than 15minutes on?
They`re going to spread their peanut butter too thin.
The Winter Olympics (& World Cup) are coming up. If we're lucky and live beyond our life expectancy, it's one of maybe 20 we could possibly see. 20. That's how short life is.
A long time ago I was getting into film direction and saw a contest in town for 8mm film shorts. So I wrote a screenplay, gathered eight of my friends together, and in one long day, we shot it. Weeks later when it came back from the labs, I took it to a guy I knew (who was also involved in putting the contest on) who had a projector. I was so excited. I was so proud of what I had done. I began rehearsing, in my mind, answers to such questions as, "How did you achieve such genius with so little background in film?", "What was your inspiration?", etc. The projector spun the film; I held my breath. We couldn't see anything; I hadn't used enough light. (In all my books on film direction, lighting an 8mm didn't come up.) The guy said, as he walked me out, "But you had fun making it right?" I took it almost as a taunt. I thought, "Fuck fun. I didn't want fun. I wanted that fucking film to turn out."
So you're on Hacker News because you like technology? That technology is going to be obsolete in at most a few Winter Olympics from now. You're on HN because you have a startup? If you have a great idea and you execute well with a great team... the odds are not even remotely in your favor. Ask anyone in the business. Not even remotely.
Today when I think back, do you know what I remember from that 8mm film I made? How much fun my friends and I had making it. We had a blast. That day is a wonderful, glorious memory. Whether or not the film turned out was always irrelevant.
Everything you think and love and see and know has an expiration date on it. 20 Olympics -- at most -- if you're lucky. And when you're old and smoking that last cigar (because fuck it) and you close your eyes, what will you remember? Do you know? I'll tell you. Not the film. You won't even remember what the film was about. No, you'll remember the day you shot it. "But you had fun making it?" Did you? It can sound like a taunt, but it's not. It's everything. God, be ambitious. Be smart. Good for you. But have fun. Most of all, have fun.
Laugh, HN. Let your hair down. Have sex. Drink wine from the bottle. Dance like madman. Have fun. For the love of God. You have 20 and it's all you'll ever have. Have fun.