Today's episode in "Read Your Deprecation Warnings"
Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
81–90 of 145 posts
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#82This is a good story, but Google can still literally kill any business that relies on the Play Store or Chrome Store with a flick of a switch today (like mine). No human even has to get involved. At any moment, some code running on a Google server can decide to flip a bit and disable access to an app or extension in their stores.
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#83TLDR: Facebook built the app responsible for their entire ad platform on a chrome-only tech (WebSQL), and when it was deprecated, instead of dropping in a widely-used polyfill, they decided to do a major 3yr rewrite risking 25% of their revenue in the process. I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail" permits.
Another option would have been to use a chromium build with WebSQL still in place.
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how they are doing it but Google manage to fail at anything social. By that I mean communication platforms, social networks and instant messengers. They have promising starts but they fuck it up later. Their only successes I'd say are GMail and YouTube. I'd say for GMail, it is just an email client they started out excellent, thanks in part to its huge storage space and good search features. And they did…
disclosure: I work for google "People who understand human beings" and the have the ability to synthesize those insights into compelling technology products are exceedingly in demand in 2021. Rest assured, we hire as many as we possibly can and offer them a lot of money/benefits. However, they can pretty much get jobs anywhere and many choose to start their own venture. You seem to think it's quite easy though. Do yo…
Can you make full text search work in Gmail?
Can you make youtube to not to recompress video?
Can you make Youtube search filtering by time work for at least few months? Having sorting by time fixed for at least few hundred search results will be good too.
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#85I laugh whenever the tech futurists talk about AI, machine learning, automation, singularity coming in the near future.
Most of the important software, that run Trillions of dollars in online economy, have dependencies in ancient tech. No one wants to work in that jumble, and updating has failed in one way or another.
Google ACH and ask why it’s takes several days to transfer money from bank to bank.
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#86TLDR: Facebook built the app responsible for their entire ad platform on a chrome-only tech (WebSQL), and when it was deprecated, instead of dropping in a widely-used polyfill, they decided to do a major 3yr rewrite risking 25% of their revenue in the process. I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail" permits.
There are a lot of big, messy, "terrible" applications with dumb dependencies that seem to live far longer than they "should". It's mostly in large companies but not really related to these companies. These same applications usually have unique functionalities and user who have become expert in the use of apps, including knowing the "stupid parts".
Writing these apps is hard and it's a completely rational decision to jury-rig deprecated libraries to make such an app work however irrational it might look from the outside.
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#87> This became a closely held secret in Facebook Ads leadership. We didn’t want to take any chance that word our this vulnerability could get back to Google. Considering the tracking Google does with Chrome, I suspect they recognized the traffic still occurring over WebSQL and left it active for exactly this reason. It's highly unlikely that nobody at Google was able to recognize this. Alternatively, maybe Google didn…
At the time this story takes place Chrome didn't have a way to collect web feature usage metrics broken down by site. It was aggregated across all sites to protect user privacy. That came years later with Rappor: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/rappor
WebSQL usage was too high at the time to remove though, so while the story is fun to read Chrome never would have actually turned it off.
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#88Google actually had a successful social network project, Orkut, they just continuously marginalised it for it to be too NIH for US headquarters.
I don't know how they are doing it but Google manage to fail at anything social. By that I mean communication platforms, social networks and instant messengers. They have promising starts but they fuck it up later. Their only successes I'd say are GMail and YouTube. I'd say for GMail, it is just an email client they started out excellent, thanks in part to its huge storage space and good search features. And they did…
How much is YouTube Google's success though, rather than their own, and Google mostly rode on that success after buying them?
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#89Google actually had a successful social network project, Orkut, they just continuously marginalised it for it to be too NIH for US headquarters.
gReader also had a social network component...
Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
#90TLDR: Facebook built the app responsible for their entire ad platform on a chrome-only tech (WebSQL), and when it was deprecated, instead of dropping in a widely-used polyfill, they decided to do a major 3yr rewrite risking 25% of their revenue in the process. I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail" permits.
> I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail" permits.
Or just how technology actually mostly works out in the wider world.