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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Unclear is what kind of "deal" they are talking about.

A considerable buy in? A full acquisition?

And, assuming a full acquisition... what would be the gain?

Google has a bad story with attempts at social media, apart from YouTube. (Bought Orkut, killed it, tried Google Plus, went nowhere). Twitter is hard to make profitable without alienating the users with too many ads.

For Google, it would probably be an acquisition like YouTube. With the knowledge that it might never be profitable, but intended to get control over a significant asset. But sharing Google infrastructure and resources could probably bring down operating costs in the medium term.

We'll see.

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>Twitter is hard to make profitable without alienating the users with too many ads.

TBH I don't think google would buy Twitter with the expectation of making money off of it. Its value is its continued data gathering, which would inform other google products.

This, and perhaps a deeper integration in Android.

Bought Orkut, killed it, tried Google Plus, went nowhere

> Don't forget Buzz! That time when they default opted-in Gmail users into publishing a list of frequently contacted users on their google profile. Auto-follow was a terrible terrible idea.

And Wave.

Wave was too ahead of its time. Bots in channels that could translate and issue arbitrary actions? In 2009? Nonsense.

I really liked Wave. It came out when I was in college and moving into an off-campus apartment with two other guys. We used it to coordinate who was bringing what (to not end up with 50 pots and three sets of chairs), and being able to have reply threads in the middle of a previous post was a great format for that sort of small group discussion.

It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it. That is the designers fault. They needed to relate it to existing ideas and beat those ideas at their own game, even if that mean restricting what it can do to familiar domains. Then over time they can evolve it while taking the users along with them. Instead people bounced off it and decided to wait it out to see if they really needed it and it turns out they didn't.

Spereately, I think it's hilarious that many websites pester hard for emails, making them effectively pamphlets for their email content. If only there was a way that I could subscribe (and unsubscribe) to a stream of short notifications from content creators and be confident that I see all of them in a timeline order. Like what Twitter used to be before they screwed with the timeline. They're going to lose to email, and not for being ahead of their time.

> It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it.

Eh, the biggest problem with using Wave was that it was only just barely usable on top-tier hardware of the time. So, for most people, it was impossible to run on their own hardware (especially on their laptops).

I think that if the performance hadn't been an issue (ie, the average hardware in 2009 had been capable of what it is in 2016), it could actually have been comparably successful to Google Docs or Google Calendar.

The ideas behind Google Wave are very very old, like Lotus Notes old. I worked on plugins Lotus Notes to do all sorts of Google Wave stuff. There is nothing new there. These ideas pop up on a regular basis and fail for the same reasons. My plugin took a week of training by very motivated users and they still struggled with all of the freedom. It was domain specialized, which helps, and all these years later it is still in use and they love it.

Google Docs and Google Calendar are very restricted in comparison. Gmail is as well. And search - type some words get an ordered list. If you don't get what you want try some different words. Pretty damn simple to use and explain.

> The ideas behind Google Wave are very very old, like Lotus Notes old.

The ideas behind Slack are very old. Doesn't stop Slack from being incredibly valuable as both a product and a company.

In many ways, Slack is trying to become what Google Wave tried to be at the beginning (a tool for real-time communication with, not just in chat/text form, but with other embedded forms of media as well).

Lotus Notes was very successful. They were acquired for $3.5B in 1995, long before our current bubble economy. It's likely Slack will progress along the same path - except it will be much faster now. If they don't sell out soon enough they will ride it into the ground and a new fad will take over. Remember Yammer? I don't see Slack as being different to the others. They don't have the talent or motivation to fix their core issues (Facebook does). Bots are not a panacea. Anecdotally I've noticed lots of people have already abandoned Slack because it is distracting and doesn't provide enough value. I expect this to continue. Busy people with jobs and lives will be the first to go and it'll be left with the annoying people with nothing better to do, kinda like Twitter. I think Facebook can and will eventually do a better Slack than Slack.

I imagined a "gmail inbox", but with each "email" instead being an arbitrary widget. So you'd share a spreadsheet via "email", but it's not an attachment... it's an actual spreadsheet being shared.

I was less excited when I found Wave was its own product, rather than a Gmail integration. Putting the widgets inside the same email inbox you have open for hours each day would be the best way to get people to actually use it.

Wave was Slack before Slack existed.

Aren't bots in channels a 1990s IRC feature?

Wave was actually rather great for groupware-like work on textual documents.

The Wave technology also now powers a lot of the "collab" features in their Office suite. So the "product" died, but the capability found a home.

http://hello.com/ I'm not 100% sure of it now but at one point there was some side group inside google building this.

Orkut wasn't bought, it was created by an employee as a 20%-time project.

> Bought Orkut, killed it, tried Google Plus, went nowhere

Add Jaiku.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku

Sorry I don't think youtube is profitable by itself and sustainable.

Although its the biggest video platform in the world attracting 1/3 of the worlds population to it. I think the data itself that can be gathered via youtube are profitable for google and google's purpose really (AI).

If they buy twitter it won't be because they can turn it into being sustainable itself but because they can make it profitable for them and not in money. Personally I don't think that google has a money issue and I think for them its easier to value data more as a currency.

I said that they probably bought it with the assumption that it might never be profitable.

As far as public information goes, Youtube is most likely not.

If it's Google then cue endless jokes about shutting it down.

I'm not saying they don't have some issues with their corporate attention span but I do get sick of that one being wheeled out without any real insight or cause.

> If it's Google then cue endless jokes about shutting it down.

Haha. That'd be the world's funniest acquihire.

Google wasn't given that reputation randomly or casually. They earned it through their actions and they deserve the consequences. People who don't know the pattern deserve to be educated about it. I weaned myself from Twitter when they added the algorithmic timeline but if I hadn't, I'd begin doing it now and I would be better off for starting it now at my own pace than later, forced to abruptly.

The point is everyone knows the pattern and it's not adding anything further to the conversation to keep repeating it. It's no better than parroting "Embrace Extend Extinguish" every single time Microsoft are mentioned.

Everyone knows because it gets pointed out and discussed, like this. It's myopic to assume that everyone is as old as you are and has been paying attention for as long as you have. There are people who are younger or newer to the Google ecosystem for whom it's not common knowledge.

How is a company which "might never be profitable" considered a "significant asset"?!

I assume it's because another company is in a position to capitalize on it in ways Twitter alone could not.

As a social network, this is probably valuable to Google's Ad business - gives more dimensions to a Google user if you link your Twitter account with Google account...just guessing ATM.

There's a lot of signal to be had in Twitter, signal which can be (and has been) turned into revenue not directly gained from it's users or advertisers.

Remember the story about Dataminr and its Government contracts?

The same thing was said about YouTube because of its immense costs of operations and the fact that few/nobody had figured out how to do a good job monetizing video advertising at that point.

Google being the ad monster that it is, could significantly boost Twitter's business and they could slash the operating costs very considerably. Twitter should be solidly profitable at $3-$4 billion in sales (which Google could deliver).

Money isn't everything.

YouTube is a hugely popular service, driving lots of data, traffic and brand image towards Google.

Could be the same for Twitter.

I'm not sure if brand image is something YouTube gives Google. I honestly don't think the general public knows that YouTube is a part of Google. YouTube seems like its own separate thing to the casual user. It would be interesting to see a poll of the general public.

But the data. The data is key. They have rocked image recognition and video is a huge data source for their ML efforts.

YouTube isn't profitable either.

http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-goo...

Controlling the narrative.

See who has been banned from Twitter. It's not BLM people celebrating cop murders, it's people posting too many #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen tweets.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/21/twitter-suspends-wo...

If Google buys Twitter and then kills it, we should mint them a freaking medal for services to humanity.

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