381–390 of 424 posts
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Some people are trying to build a community here: https://neocities.org/
I can't believe that website is still around. I just got teleported to the 90's.
Those who want and for whom $5 is pocket change is encouraged to make a paid account to support it.
(Happy supporter, otherwise unaffiliated.)
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Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.
We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.
Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?
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I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a cool idea at the time, I thought. That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated. They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.
Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.
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Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.
But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar. But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
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Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.
Isn't this exactly what Reddit is? I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in understanding what I was missing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491
What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.
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I was one of those people who switched to Feedly. And I'm also one of the people still using the Feedly Classic app, which they had to launch because of the uproar after they radically overhauled the app. I'm just hoping they decide to keep it around, since they never update it it's not like it's costing them anything.
we'll keep it around, just won't update it
Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+. Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
A world where Google cares about Reader is a world where RSS remains a first class citizen on the web. So it's not Reader the product so much as what abandoning it said about Google's broader ambitions (and their hostility towards the open web).
Reader was a signal that RSS mattered. Google killing Reader sent the opposite signal. If Google cares about something, site owners have to care also (look at AMP) - and by not caring about RSS, they gave site owners permission to abandon their feeds.
In retrospect it's easy to see that the "death of Reader" wasn't some specific inflection point - Google had already stopped caring about RSS or the open web (if they ever even had). But this marked the first time a lot of us really saw and understood that Google had no interest in using its clout to protect us from the walled gardens, and instead it had ambitions to become just another walled garden itself (as became even more evident with the all-in Google+ strategy).
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It was also one of the first times I heard doublespeak from Google and stopped loving them. Saying “it’s expensive to maintain” and killing it because it competed with, and was better than Google+ without giving them control, was such BS. That so many smart people built and run clones as one man shows proves that Google could have maintained it for next to nothing. I hope they never kill Google scholar.
What you have to remember about Google is that engineers are mostly free to choose what teams and projects they want to work on. And there's also a lot of pressure to go promo. So in the context of the times (I joined Google roughly around when this all went down, but this is not insider information, I'm just speculating) I can imagine how it happened -- it likely became hard to staff the project. It probably became…
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Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm…
> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.) Damnatio memoriae? > Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the des…
(The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)