131–140 of 152 posts
I disagree, It felt unpolished and raw and did not have any distinct style or consistency. You can hate facebook but they managed to cramp a lot of functionality in a pretty clean looking design.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The formality around making a discrete group of "Circles" was the problem. If they just let you have multiple feeds and you can add and remove people from those feeds it would have been fine. In those circumstances, the issue isn't you sitting there categorizing how close you are with each of your friends. You're just deciding who you want to share things with, it's not unlike a group chat you might have with a bunch…
Couldn’t you have the same person in multiple circles?
Some of this could also be "What did LiveJournal (and therefore also its clones) get right?" Oddly LiveJournal seems to always get left out of these discussions, even though it had more features than many later sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc). There's good reason to avoid LiveJournal itself these days, but the clone sites still live (e.g. Dreamwidth).
Wasn't LJ just a blogging platform? I used it in early 2000 and was blown away by what MySpace offered compared to LJ.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure some googlers can chime in or someone will dig a post from that time but I seem to recall the inability for Google to crawl facebook private profiles, where juicy profiling bits live, was one of the incentives for google to get into the game. And the fact that someone at Google freaked out over the sn revolution but don't quote me on that. I am pretty sure I read the demise of google reader was because it…
Yep, I recall that the FB like buttons proliferating the web was perceived as a huge threat (and drove the +1 buttons.) > Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed. Wave failed, but was a fantastic experiment, and the learnings went into Google Docs/Sheets for collaborative editing. Blogger and Orkut didn't fail. They w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buzz had some horrible privacy problems and was too smart for its own good if I remember correctly.
The Buzz privacy problem were almost exclusively at launch, the way they seeded the network. Not sure what "too smart for its own good" means exactly. It was a pretty vanilla feed, with no fancy features.
It was a reference to how they seeded the network by inferring contacts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure some googlers can chime in or someone will dig a post from that time but I seem to recall the inability for Google to crawl facebook private profiles, where juicy profiling bits live, was one of the incentives for google to get into the game. And the fact that someone at Google freaked out over the sn revolution but don't quote me on that. I am pretty sure I read the demise of google reader was because it…
Yep, I recall that the FB like buttons proliferating the web was perceived as a huge threat (and drove the +1 buttons.) > Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed. Wave failed, but was a fantastic experiment, and the learnings went into Google Docs/Sheets for collaborative editing. Blogger and Orkut didn't fail. They w…
I liked Wave, even if nobody knew what the actual use cases for it were.
I was an early proponent of G+ when it first opened. I loved the idea of Circles and their implementation of Groups was really good. I didn't love the UI, which I found bland, but the functionality was well thought out. For a while I used it as my primary social media site but Facebook was entrenched even back then and nobody I knew used G+. I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing usef…
> If I was Google I would be providing ... a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate. They did. It was called OpenSocial, which originally released in late 2007, and was implemented by MySpace and others to compete against the Facebook platform (also released in 2007). I remember when I first looked at its co…