151–160 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember AIM having the ability to forward messages to SMS when you were offline, and Pidgin had the ability to "pounce" someone, which would queue up a message to send them next time they logged on.
Pidgin - now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Made me immediately think of Adium, which I used to talk on MSM via my mac because the official client was woeful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day .
My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second. And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the…
I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets . Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to…
> Google Play Music This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point? But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service. At least with transitions like MOG->Bea…
Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and au…
Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the costs were in the employees required to operate and maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally pretty light weight...
If you read blog posts and the like from people involved in those projects (MSN Messenger and AIM/ICQ, specifically); the companies would take advantage of protocol updates or other scheduled downtime to failover to newer hardware. So I doubt they were ever stuck on any “obsolete hardware”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets . Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
I wouldn't romanticize Orkut. It wasn't that great and I think Facebook would've steamrolled it all the same, much as it did numerous other regional social networks around the world.
Of course we will never know, but I think that betting on Orkut would have a better chance of facing Facebook than starting from scratch with Google+
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was talking on the phone for people who don't like talking on the phone. If that makes any sense.
This makes perfect sense to me. I don't know what it is about talking on the phone, but it's an extremely anxiety inducing experience for me. I'm generally fine with people, but if I have a choice of walking down the street to talk with them in person or call them on the phone, I will make the walk every time. Best I can figure out it stems from being verbally abused as a teenager when I had a job making cold calls.…
I was absent from AIM for several years, but then my first job out of school (2009) used it as the official chat service. Eventually the corporate overlords brought in a series of other sanctioned chat tools, but most of us kept AIM going to have a backchannel we knew wasn't monitored.
It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…
I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact your grade very quickly.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets . Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how online communities worked. Facebook must have been the first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure capital destruction if they had done that. I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the whatsapp investment. At least Instagra…