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Comment by fwgwgwgch | Hacker News Reader

Not a fan so not defending but I wouldn't classify Google as social login.

A more proper term might be "delegated authentication" but it's a mouthful so people don't use it unless they mean arbitrary Identity Providers.

* Biased as I work on the OpenID Connect and OAuth at Okta where we are an Identity Provider and support many of the social login options.

Email was the original social network (still left).

Nah, the PSTN was the original social network. And they even developed the first cloud app: voicemail.

Email's older than voice mail.

Fair enough, though I wouldn't call it a "cloud" application until webmail became prominent in the late 90s.

Why? You'd log in to servers that were more or less permanently on and connected to public internet in order to access email for the length of it's existence.

Sorry, smoke signals were the first social network. Plus you couldn't even opt out of them.

They weren't even push in a way. You had to manually pull the messages. So I don't think there's a question of opt out. :)

By that definition, the telegraph was the original social network, preceding emails by over a hundred years.

The definition of social networking is debatable, but I don't think one that encompasses every communication medium is useful.

I would say that communications media that addresses based on an individual's identity, and has infrastructure for public and pseudo public group communication counts. Email + listserv counts, IMO, whereas your example of telegraphs would not.

You could probably implement a social network on top of TELEX if your we're feeling ascetic though.

but Google+!!!!

Lol

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