I've read most of qntm's books [1] and enjoyed them greatly. See also hatetris [2] and absurdle [3].
Also qntm invented base32768 [4] encoding which is in use by many happy rclone users to store long encrypted file names more efficiently on storage systems which are based in UTF-16 (eg OneDrive, Dropbox, Box).
I used it for a couple of theatre projects, and thought it was great. The multi-media sharing was like nothing else at the time, and the threaded discussions worked well. I don't remember the details, but I think we had to stop because everyone I was working with had collectively run out of invites and Google wouldn't give us any more. (And by "wouldn't" I mean "completely ignored emails to their 'user feedback' address", which seemed to be the only way to contact support for the project.) I was, and still slightly am, disappointed that it went away.
A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project. We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with blank looks.
There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme youthfulness.
I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
Oh, geeze. Probably 2018? I'm sure I'm getting the titles, and possibly seniority, of the Dropbox folks there wrong. They might have just been low-level flacks. All I can tell you - hand on heart - is that I mentioned Wave at least twice in different groups, as a point of (favorable) comparison, and they disclaimed knowledge. Either they were genuinely ignorant, or had been instructed for some reason to play dumb.
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.
I thought it was the predecessor of Slack/Teams, since you can send messages/files and do all those stuff on the same page. Too bad they didn't pitch it as an enterprise product. They aimed it at consumers but couldn't find a use case, and then shut it down.
It had multiple angles it could succeed on really.
It had two major issues.
The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.
The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.
You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.
You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.
You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.
And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.
It was dead on arrival because of the “artificial” scarcity of accounts, you needed to be invited to create your account. Google assumed they can recreate the Gmail invites craze.
Google Wave was too far ahead of its time. Even now, products are just starting to pivot away from the paper-centric view of documents and take baby steps toward living document collaboration (intersection of multi-player documents and chat/comments).
I was doing a IT student job in high school and our team used it for a while, it felt like a mixture of instant messing and posting on web forums. My impression was, that it looked cool, but did not add much in comparison (iirc it also had collaborative editing? That was definitely cool).
> it existed for like fifteen minutes between Orkut but before Google+, and had the wildest features like your profile image had to be smiling. "No, wider," it would say. Sometimes it would just accept a frowning image and modify it to be smiling
Actually, that was Google Folks. It was followed by Google People which was then renamed to Google Town. They shared bleeding edge features such as instant messaging and videotelephony.
My personal favorite was this weird spinoff called Google Coin. The app made random metallic sounds and the loading animation was a spinning coin. Too bad it was cancelled after three months.
My system has twitter blocked by hostname, it couldn't load a twitter resource if I tried. The page loaded fast for me, so those "quotes", if that's what they are, are just text on the page and not embeds
Edit: huh you're not alone though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37724652 And checking a traffic capture, indeed it shows platform.twitter.com being loaded and blocked. Wtf is it trying to load (to the point of crashing browsers) if not the twitter posts?!
I remember it. Wasn't it meant to challenge linkedin? I think the Shazaam movie tie in killed it. They really jumped the shark by using Sinbad as a tech spokesperson.
I disagree, because I believe it's quite difficult to write in that uncanny valley of particularly creepy texts, without showing any matching creepy imagery.
If you think it looks so easy, I urge you to start writing it! It's one of my favorite genres of fiction and I think that effective horror can be harder to write than it might seem.
If by lowest hanging fruit, you mean in the original sense of: Equally as tasty as higher hanging fruit, but easy to pick because it hasn't been relentlessly exploited yet.
I don't think you're wrong, and I got the same feeling while watching the 'found footage' style of horror movie ; Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, etc.
It feels like weak writing to fall back into a narrative first-person account for the entirety, but I can't place my finger on why.
Maybe it just seems like it's the easiest 'fiction' to write because it is so predicated on the fantasy being narrated by a perspective that is entrenched and anchored in a normal reality while witnessing something extraordinary?
Cloverfield is essentially constructed by the acting prompt : "Pretend you're a bystander seeing not-Godzilla, react for the camera!".
I dunno. I have memories of my grandma trading around huge plastic bags full of romance paperbacks with her old lady friends. The sheer volume makes me wonder how they could all be unique books!
Maybe I am alone, but I find fake stories like this that act to dirty histories less entertaining and more just irritating when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will likely be left with vague recollections of this story and my brain won’t have adequately marked the memories as fiction.
It plays on the cheap shock value of starting off sounding entirely plausible, and I can see people falling for it here ITT. I don't like it.
> I find fake stories like this that act to dirty histories less entertaining and more just irritating when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will likely be left with vague recollections of this story and my brain won’t have adequately marked the memories as fiction.
You articulated something I’ve been aware of but hadn’t put into words.
It’s the primary reason I stopped reading/watching all news.
People are allowed to write fiction. The page is clearly labelled as such (the fourth word on the page is "fiction"!) and qntm is a relatively well-known fiction author. If anything, posting it to HN is the issue.
I'd thought that Usula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" might have been an exception, but though it's had nine submissions, it's only ever earned single-digit votes, and a single comment:
Marshall Brain's "Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future" (2003) was what I'd had in mind when finding the Ellison story, but it's also had little success:
Qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes, who writes science fiction. So I'm pretty sure this is fiction in the form of fake tweets, and that Google People didn't ever exist.
Their book There Is No Antimemetics Division is pretty good but also a bit disturbing (in a good way).
Just because they're a fiction author doesn't mean everything on their site is fiction. See the page called gay (I remember that link from reading it a decade ago, interestingly enough) about database normalisation, or the things mentioned in a top-level comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37725082
It turned out to be a nice little piece of fiction, thanks for posting!
From comments in this thread I learn that it is written in the style called creepypasta. Not entirely familiar with the culture, but it felt similar to some indie horror games, such as those Markiplier plays in his YT series "3 scary games".
The breadcrumb reads "Things Of Interest >> Fiction >> Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories >> cripes does anybody remember Google People"
"Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories" is one of his book available on Amazon.