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Comment by rafaelcosta | Hacker News Reader

Orkut was HUGE. Google acquired it and it basically had *the* social media platform in Brazil pre-Facebook. IIRC, it also had a big-ish market share in some other countries. When Facebook came along, it was clear that Google was not doing as many updates as they needed to compete, so Orkut felt more and more "outdated".

They killed it after a while to replace with "something better". That was Google+.

I still think that it was one of the most impressive fumbles of a social media "monopoly".

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It was built in-house at Google, not aquired. Orkut (the person) had been working at Google for several years before he built orkut.com. He'd done a similar site at Stanford pre-Google (and pre-Friendster!)

IIRC it was a 20% time project. Up to you to decide if that makes 20% time more or less of a good idea.

I was the Associate Product Manager assigned to Orkut as it prepared to launch. It was not 20% of his time ;-) Orkut was the backup name we had to go with because we couldn't reach a deal to get the name he wanted (eden.com) from a domain squatter.

They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.

Looks like somebody got it. Do you remember what the squatter's terms were then, or was it simply not for sale at any price?

Good to know! But did it originate as a 20% time project? Because this is not the first time I've heard this.

Today I learned! The aspx and the lack of branding really had me fooled. And when the Google branding came along, that’s when it started to go down in my circle, so I never knew that it was a Google (20%) project!

Google+ had some clever ideas: Circles, Hangouts, integration with Google's ecosystem, etc. But it was designed from a top-down product strategy. Google didn't necessarily make a mistake by trying Google+, but made a mistake by failing to recognize that social graphs are infrastructure; treating social networking as a new product to bolt onto Google, rather than recognizing that Orkut already contained the social graph and behavioral lessons Google needed.

Then they finally shut the thing down just in time to make sure that it couldn't attract any kind of exodus of unhappy users from Twitter or Facebook.

I _really_ liked the "hangout" idea of Google+. Where you could just start a video call and whoever among your friends wanted to join, could, without having to accept or reject an actual invitation to them specifically. I could work on a project out in the garage and people could hop in and make small talk while I was doing stuff. It was great.

It doesn't feel like there is a great modern alternative to this.

TikTok Live, I guess? You can limit it to followers or just friends.

Discord VC works like this

Yep, this is the exact use case that voice channels are used for in the community-oriented Discord servers I'm in. With the important note that voice channels support not just voice but video, multi-person screensharing, text chat, and even built-in games, though I've never actually seen the last of those get used in practice. Voice channels are just passively there in the channel sidebar with a list of people currently hanging out there, and you can drop in and drop out as you like. You can also send individual invites to join you in VC to server members.

So does "Live on X."

Signal calls within a group. Try it!

I like Signal a lot. I would much rather use Signal than Discord, or :::shudder: Facebook (because in SE Asia a lot of people think that's the internet).

There’s a difference — (essentially) everybody was on Google+ and no one is on Signal.

Maybe it's just how my friend groups have changed over the years, but I've had the opposite experience

Yeah. I know zero people from HN or, say, Reddit, and even from the tech/coding world (and past workplaces; not that they were a Signal weilding crowd even by a stretch). I have friends I can count on the fingers of one hand, at most both hands. I will never have to reach for the toes :) So if that's the opposite for you, then it might be the case. Or, honestly, even if that's not the case, it might be so. And since I don't have empirical research other than what I see "around me," I can't just say that's how it is "generally," even though that's exactly what I see :D

(PS. There was a time when WhatsApp ended up having really bad press a few years ago and I was abl to make almost 30-40 of my contacts to Signal but Sigal being Signal and its team/leadership successfully pushed them all away, a lot were crashes and what not. Even I was frustrated. It was the first time I was "using" Signal beyond "trying" it which is like an annual or half-yearly ritual now)

A majority of those of my friends and family who are on any IM platform at all are on Signal.

I don't know a single person who used Google+, unless you mean in the sense that Google forced it on everyone with a Google account.

This is Discord for many folks. You have voice/video channels alongside your text chats. Anyone can hop on into any themed voice/video channel at any time with the added bonus of screen-sharing game content.

Anyone who consents to giving Discord their phone number, and installing literal spyware.

I also think it would've been great if Google+ had leveraged Google Reader and its sharing functionality.

"Google Reader had to die for Google+ to live" (urs and larry said something like this)

Google Wave was so cool prior to trying to make it a social network.

I don’t think we ever tried to make wave a social network.

Might’ve fared better if they didn’t alienate the entire company who could have helped them pre-launch, or come in to help after the release flopped.

So what's all this wave about Google Wave?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

Google Wave, was ahead of its time!

We used it HEAVILY at work (IT), then all the sudden--boom! It was not going to be developed any more. I still don't get it. Google, with all their resources couldn't support this?

Ok, instead of getting upset (AGAIN!), I'm just going to go back to the initial post from 16 years ago. Perhaps reading the comments might calm me down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892

I worked on one of the launch widgets...to make a phone call from inside a wave...it was such a bad idea and surprising to no one, it was quickly abused.

"A new direction for the Sydney office"

I loved Google Wave. The first time I used it, I said out loud, "Wow, this really has possibilities."

The double-whammy of them killing Reader and Wave was super deflating when it came to my view of Google as a company.

I remember signing up but there was no way for me to invite co-workers! I thought it looked amazing but getting others to use it would've required an alpha invite or something, can't remember the details.

True. Google also had Youtube, but it managed to completely fumble the integration with Google+ and generate backlash in the process.

...and before that they also fucked up by trying to leverage Gmail into Google Buzz.

They didn't just 'fumble the integration', it wrecked the comment section and people LOST ACCOUNTS over it

"Use real name? Y/N - N. Okay, we'll ask you again later"

If you haven't seen it, this doc: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/237221/ISM7505/10-Why-Google-... predated Google+ and I think it inspired many of the features. It's dated now, but when it was first shared internally, many Googlers thought it was a great idea. It's just too bad that the execs swallowed the emerald sea kool-aid and tried to reorganize the company (including major bonuses) around it. At the time, many of us wanted Google to go all-in in cloud, and instead, they focused on Google+ while applying stupid rules around user names. They basically strangled the baby in the bed with bad decisions. Only after finally killing that could they focus on cloud, and continue to develop youtube as their main social network. That cost the company as both AWS and MSFT were heavily building out their cloud systems, so google lost all its advantages.

I've never before or after worked at a company that made so many dumb decisions in such a short time. It felt like a cult, while the rest of us were trying to pull Larry back into the real world.

They also opened it to the public too late.

Other poster is correct, it was a 20% project, so it didn't even cost Google any money to acquire, which is crazy.

I remember it getting absolutely destroyed by Spam at some point. Then they tried some redesigns, and an integration with Google+ that caused more problems than it solved. Each one of these events drove people to other websites.

Also, the implementation and infrastructure was a total shit show.

True, its downtimes predated the Twitter fail whale.

Interestingly, the first version used ASP.NET, visible in the .aspx domains, which really deviated from other Google tech.

Yeah, internally it was, uh, an issue.

Just before launch there was a attempt to hide that it was google.

What is (and was) Google tech? I naively thought Google didn't have a praised stack.

Back then it was mostly Java, Python and C++.

They even made a Java-based framework that would generate Javascript, GWT. Orkut was rewritten to use in 2009.

I used to use GWT. It was such a mess to work with, but an interesting mess.

Well it used what was available at the time. Which was not a lot, that it even worked is insane

We still have it running somewhere. Not pretty but zero issues for a largish GUI

But also a highly specific Linux runtime environment, distributed storage, etc.

It was also huge in India. I remember most of my classmates were on Orkut and only a few were using Facebook. Apparently, Facebook felt a safer place for girls.

I remember making an account in FB, post the 2008 US elections, and me being one of the couple of people from my group to have an account till 2010-11, post which FB took off like crazy and orkut died some years later. It was a couple of nice years for socmed.

It was also a product of its time and its sunsetting was just a side effect of the consolidation of the economy of attention. It would fail today just as it ended up failing back then unless people change how they consume social media altogether.

Which honestly would be a very good thing

Technically Google never acquired Orkut (they owned it from the start).

From what I remember, it was developed more or less in secret by one person (or a small team) who managed to convince management to put it online. I was an early user of Orkut and I recall there being zero Google branding or style, aside from a link in the footer of the page.

I think Google's biggest social media fumble was just letting gtalk fade away into irrelevance.

Personally I think it was not being the frontrunner of video call tech in 2020

It was such a bummer when they closed it down. 12 years later, I am still close to the people I met via Orkut. It was a true social network without any fucking algorithms to keep you hooked whatsoever. It had some bland and boring ads, but what a great network it was. It let you even see who visited your profile and communities on orkut were great. I owe a great deal to the communities on orkut for learning 3d modeling and animation.

Even at the time I thought it was crazy that google bought the best social media platform (being a brazilian) and tried to promote Google+ to everyone when google+ didn't have anywhere close to the feature set that orkut had.

Still makes me mad that some of the games in Orkut are just lost media now too. Still looking for Cafe Mania... maybe one day someone will find a copy of the flash files.. Ugh.

When Facebook arrived Orkut was dying as it was essentially left to die and Google+ absolutely had no chance. Even this new Orkut, if it happens, will be DoA if it tries to become everybody’s social network. “Everybody” wants doom scrolling.

also:

- early social media really struggled to scale the social graph algorithms. Facebook made real technical innovations.

- early social media had serious problems with trust/safety and really nasty content. Many complex problems from deeply adversarial userbase.

Together, Orkut got bogged down and couldn't compete for resources with ads/search/maps/etc.

this never made sense to me, how can Google buy a growing/successful social network and essentially let it die?

When you have everything you could ever want, you spend a lot of time worried someone might take it from you.

> I still think that it was one of the most impressive fumbles of a social media "monopoly".

you call it "fumble" - I'd call it intentional internet colonization

your government failed to secure its cultural safety on the internet, and community was transferred to US-controlled platform

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