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Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#121

Post by Double_a_92 »

thatgerhard wrote: post #107
CryoLogic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat. But than again if we look at their finances (and stock), they have always been in the red and are resorting to selling glasses and hotdog costumes now (huge losses). So maybe they aren't that successful after all.

snapchat's biggest problem is the interface, it's extremely hard to use. I think the plan was to make it complicated so that older people don't get into it, turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app

I think that's on purpose. So friends have to show you the app first... It kinda creates a "lock-in" effect, like "I already bothered to learn this with my friends, why change now?"

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#122

Post by nemothekid »

thatgerhard wrote: post #107
CryoLogic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat. But than again if we look at their finances (and stock), they have always been in the red and are resorting to selling glasses and hotdog costumes now (huge losses). So maybe they aren't that successful after all.

snapchat's biggest problem is the interface, it's extremely hard to use. I think the plan was to make it complicated so that older people don't get into it, turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app

>turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app

Tons of people use the app. The interface is central to its virality. Snap's growth wasn't a problem until Facebook did everything they could to clone it. Snaps failing because everyone is starting to realize that if you aren't GOOG or FB, you aren't worth spending $$$ on. Just the other day I saw an "OfferUp" ad on Snap that looked like a 90s banner ad. I can't tell if Snap went full self serve or if they are struggling to find people to buy on their platform. And who would after advertisers have been spoiled by FB's demographic data and GOOG's intent data?

Edit: I feel like I spend a lot of time defending snapchat when I hardly use the app.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#126

Post by btown »

Jtsummers wrote: post #17

I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial propos…

Wave's rollout was botched, its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware, and its UX (which didn't seem to "get" that sometimes you need to isolate your current work context from the global feed of activity in order to focus) was perplexing. But its legacy of helping to popularize Operational Transforms (and by extension, CRDTs) beyond academic circles did indeed live on - for instance, OT was adopted in Google Docs [0], and CRDTs were used in yesterday's release of Atom's real-time collaborative editing [1]. So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do.

[0] https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...

[1] http://blog.atom.io/2017/11/15/code-together-in-real-time-wi...

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#127

Post by lowlevel »

Jtsummers wrote: post #17

I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial propos…

My recollection is no one could figure out what it was or how it worked... and yes, no one to figure it out with.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#129

Post by jhanschoo »

the_decider wrote: post #6

Semantic ontologies that would totally change the nature of search.

As I've previously mentioned, it turns out that natural language processing on the natural language webpage that users see is a better way rank pages than invisible metadata.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#130

Post by btown »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #90

Optical computing. I remember talking to a bloke working on it back in 1990, and he said they had a working optical transistor so all the hard bits were done. Soon we'd have computers that used multiple frequencies of light to process operations concurrently on the same hardware! Still waiting...

These computers do exist on tabletops in labs; the problem is that it's comparatively difficult/expensive to mass-produce and miniaturize these components compared to silicon (where you can etch billions of transistors at once on a modern CPU). There are really cool things you can do, especially in terms of continuous/non-discretized-time computations, but I wouldn't hold your breath for this to become mainstream.
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