There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.
Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.
Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.
Forced increased followers + notification of every single one: creepy experience
Cool, I know them.
Oh, yeah, I haven’t talked with her in a while.
Wait, who’s that guy?
Huh, she responded to one Craigslist free stuff listing 3 years ago. Who cares?
That’s the landlord we sublet from for 3 months a decade ago.
… repeat for days …
Make it stop!
Today I have two Youtube accounts despite every effort to not end up with a real name G+ account. And while all of my main activity is on my non-real name account - i.e. the one I actually want, I'm forced to use the other to connect to rewards (Overwatch League tokens to my Battle.net account for watching Overwatch League), because I'm not allowed to do that on my "branded" account. An account I never wanted to exist.
I mean, it was given a team with unlimited free rein. That org's leader did not just want to grow organically.
It picked up where FriendFeed left off when it was acquired by FB. But then was killed by the G+ project.
Facebook already had friend lists with identical functionality when Google+ Circles were created.
In practice, for Circles to actually be useful, they need to be scrupulously maintained.
If you send a message to a certain circle about a pool party, and it turns out that you forgot to add a friend to the circle they will be insulted.
Or if you send a message to a circle that included someone who the message was not intended for, once again, you’re in trouble.
Group chats tend to work much better because they are simpler and are only created when you have a specific need. They can last beyond that need if the people in it end up being a useful grouping for the long term, but this filtering happens organically.
It's all subjective of course, but I could practically "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and still during it for the most time, Google was this incredible company that people, including me, were in awe about. All their products were so good. So technically refined, so methodical, you could really see that the people working on them were really smart, and really cared about it all.
And then it changed and became this "corporation", and nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that is probably just a normal consequence of the immense growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that Google+ had a large part in it.
I don't think the whole place went to hell at that moment, or anything, and your description is maybe a little more dramatic than I'd go with, as to the role of G+... but it definitely seemed like one of the big turning points.
I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.
That says it all.
Having many friends who work at Google, I think they have the wrong system of incentives in place. Rightfully, people optimize and prioritize based on their path to promotion rather than building products that people love.
It’s much easier to get a promotion if you build something new vs keep iterating on existing products making it better.
But it wasn’t Google’s game at all: cloud computing is a low margin business (relatively speaking). Amazon knows how to run low margins businesses, and Google doesn’t.
Google was so unimpressed with cloud, that they got serious about it only around 2012, when it became obvious that other clouds will outgrow Google as a whole. I think it was Google’s Internet Explorer moment.
I can rent a dedicated server at Heztner. 8 hyperthreads, 32 GB RAM, 4 TB HDD. €33.
Amazon EC2. t4g.2xlarge 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, $194. 2 TB EBS HDD $30. $224 total.
Also Amazon charges for traffic.
Surely Hetzner is not working at loss. Surely economies of scale allow AWS to have better deals.
I mean, AWS is literally 7x compared to Hetzner. How is it bad margin?
My initial guess would be AWS is relying on its advantage that users who are currently using AWS heavily are unlikely to switch clouds if they suddenly have to go from VM's to dedicated servers, and thus they can profit off such capture. e.g. 7x cost is probably fine when you consider what the cost might be to employ people for a cloud migration.
You don’t buy AWS because it’s cheaper than a dedicated server but because you can get that Linux server using the same management services (API, authentication, monitoring & logging, etc.) that you use to get serverless functions & containers, object storage, managed ML services, normal and reporting databases, development tools, etc.
That’s not saying that either one is wrong, just different - it’s like asking why someone used a hotel for a conference when you had a great tent site on your vacation to the mountains.
My gut feeling tells me, that it's not much.
The big confound here is scale: AWS can amortize the cost of someone really digging into firmware security over millions of customers but a smaller provider can't. You might not notice that until you either need to get your environment certified or some kind of vulnerability / supply chain attack against a hardware vendor is revealed. That can mean that AWS is both making a hefty profit reselling those engineers' work to all of their customers but also that it's still cheaper to pay them than it is for you to do that work yourself.
Now they get a lot of business because they are the least bad option. Which still makes Google useful but I'd love for some actual competition. But with the network effects at play any viable competition can be stifled.
Before that I was a strong advocate for Google, I used any of their products that made sense and I would jump in and try anything new.
Then reader was shut down and I had to start re-evaluating the services I used. Slowly that meant distancing myself from anything google.
Throwing away that capability is demented. We were lucky, really.
It seems like reader comes up on nearly every article about google screwing up something like this.
What I never understood though, why did they cancel it in the first place. I always figured that the crawler likely used RSS for discovery. I mean why wouldn't it? I constantly find that RSS has articles before I see them on the website.
So how much extra data were they really storing for supporting Reader? I mean they had to support the UI but it just seemed like an odd removal.
My understanding on Reader is that it was less the data than that it was older code and the internal dependencies were rotting.
So much stupid.
It was more an intergrated workplace thing - sort of a predecessor to Notion+Slack in a single app. But it was very flaky to use.
The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it.
The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2]
[1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...
- A public and open protocol that could have replaced email with structured messages if it got popular, and
- A series of self-love technical exercises like the scrollbars and the live-typing which nobody cared for and killed adoption (worked in Chrome only, very few people care to share half-composed emails with their correspondents).
A textbook example of losing sight of the goal and giving devs too much rope to hang themselves with.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091012020227/http://www.easier...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/https://www.compl...