Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch • Hacker News Board

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#141

Post by ontouchstart » Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

gretch wrote: post #79

GuB-42 wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

> "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.

How is Google to address this issue? Buying more startup teams and then abandon their products? What about the talents who do actually want to work for Google but have no chance to pass the high barrier of engineering culture which is the symptom of lacking “understanding of human beings“?

These are serious social engineering challenges Google is facing and deserve serious discussion.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#142

Post by ontouchstart » Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

gretch wrote: post #102

joe_the_user wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, the thing is, back when G+ came out, myself and many others pointed-out how Google's real name policy combined with Google merging all the existing Google accounts into G+ sank the effort - 'cause lots of people didn't want all their youtube or other data available to their friends and lots of others didn't want strong real name policy enforced - and Facebook had a real name policy that was and is only…

These are all valid feelings / hypotheses about what happened, but even with the benefit of hindsight we can’t confirm them. For example, you think the real name policy tanked the effort. But did it really? Twitter verified status is considered to be coveted, people are lining up to get their real named acknowledged. Is that not enough to introduce plausible doubt? Similarly, we always complain about “network effects…

Currently, for the side of me as a non-technology user, one service that is the most valuable is the free unlimited high quality Google Photos.

I don’t know who made the decision in Google to sunset that and start to charge for quota.

That stupid decision is going to destroy a very popular and useful social network service.

Then you will have a “G+” hindsight again.

Somebody might have already submitted a ycombinator proposal to take over that market when Google Photos is dead.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#143

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

yyyk wrote: post #54

hoten wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it? I can believe people inside Facebook really thought it was a critical problem, but I don't see how it could have become any more than an inconvenience. - There's a websql polyfill. I don't have experience with it, but it looks like a drop in replacement. This is such a strong counterpoint, the rest almost doesn't matter. - Features tend to be disabled in Chrome with some advanced warning. Not overnight.…

- Safari supported websql until safari 13 (september 2019), long after this issue stopped being relevant. How many people in an organization need to use PE? Probably only a few in marketing. Surely these few people could have just bought a macbook. A few macbooks must be a very small expense compared to facebook advertising. - Or IT could have arranged a VM with an old version of Chrome.

So this was an application used by extremely non-technical customers (i.e. marketers) spending money on behalf of many, many brands.

Relying on their IT to do this just wouldn't have worked and was definitely not scalable.

For context, if Power Editor disappeared along with its revenue, Facebook would have needed to report this to the market.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#144

Post by yyyk » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 2:46 AM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #143

yyyk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Safari supported websql until safari 13 (september 2019), long after this issue stopped being relevant. How many people in an organization need to use PE? Probably only a few in marketing. Surely these few people could have just bought a macbook. A few macbooks must be a very small expense compared to facebook advertising. - Or IT could have arranged a VM with an old version of Chrome.

So this was an application used by extremely non-technical customers (i.e. marketers) spending money on behalf of many, many brands. Relying on their IT to do this just wouldn't have worked and was definitely not scalable. For context, if Power Editor disappeared along with its revenue, Facebook would have needed to report this to the market.

The idea that businesses would forego Facebook because some non-techies find the most powerful ad manager to be difficult to run completely mistakes where the focal point is. Brands need FB more than the other way around.

If Chrome were to remove WebSQL, bosses would have told people to 'run this or else', and you'd have found that every process was scalable with enough human labour.

There were multiple workarounds present. Probably they'd have bought a mac, at worst they'd just have used a 3rd party app until FB fixed this, which wouldn't have taken long with FB's resources. Hardly fatal for anyone.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#145

Post by ADefenestrator » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 4:43 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #95

PeterisP wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have to get all their advertiser customers to use that custom chromium build, which would be possible but would not be good for their ad sales.

Given how long some of us had to hang on to Internet Explorer 6, I'm pretty sure the advertisers would have required their IT staff's to comply and install the "Facebook Browser".

Wouldn't have necessarily had to be nearly as bad as IE6 for security, either. Just lock the special browser to facebook.com only, or even just the ads API, and there's not a lot of room for exploit.