What we can learn from Google Plus (2014)
intercom.com
intercom.com
I think an interesting question is, what would it take for google to create a social network that would succeed nowadays?
They have quite the reputation [1]. If Google suddenly came out with an all-other-social-network-killer, and successfully killed all the other social networks, I'd still expect them to shut it down three years later.
... which unfortunately puts them in the position that it'll be incredibly hard for them to put out a true market-segment killer for anything, nowadays. Can't take over a market segment if no-one trusts you can be relied on, and therefore doesn't move to your product.
I say this even though I met my wife on Orkut, one of Google's previous social networks that, sure enough, got shut down.
If it’s a miniseries (e.g. Queen’s Gambit), then I’ll try it out. Otherwise I won’t watch something if the rug’s going to be yanked out.
Which of course adds to the likelihood of that happening, if others take the same wait-and-see approach.
https://gizmostory.com/mindhunter-season-3-release-date-rumo...
EDIT: In response to the comment below me, I am sad to learn Glow isn't coming back.
I, too, largely have stopped watching Netflix shows with one season for exactly this reason
Films don’t go on forever, neither do series. I don’t think putting finished series together with outright cancelled series is fair, and thus I have no idea what all the other items in the list mean.
But it's also got its 6th, final, season coming in 2022..
The OA and Santa Clarita Diet are a couple others off the top of my head.
There’s a lot more, but I’m already not watching them until they’ve done 3 seasons. (Unless of course they’re intended from the outset to be just 1 or 2. That’s different)
Altough I'm sad that the show ended, I'm pretty happy on _how_ it ended.
(Don't get me wrong - Mindhunter is amazing TV. I just don't see what justifies the cost).
Like, I am missing something there.
The absolute dumpster garbage that is Paradise PD that can barely scrape past 50% rating is now in its fourth season or something.
They get money to produce 1 season. If they end that season with a cliffhanger there is a larger chance that viewership demands a season 2, than if it ends cleanly.
I feel like the writers are taking the viewers hostage, so to speak.
I guess you could say that Netflix should demand season 1 to stand on its own. Or at least be clear if a given season ends cleanly.
- anyone can make a post (video, text, image, etc), either to an individual (instant messaging) or to a group (public or selected people)
- people can reply to other people's posts
- communities form automatically from the above two interactions
The only somewhat social interaction happens between the content creators, not between any user of the site. And those creators seem to care more about beefs and making money.
An individual (or organisation) can only maintain so may relationships. Dunbar's Number is a pretty good proxy. Ultimately, what each relationship is competing for is time, and that is a nonfungible resource. Ultimately, our relationships are defined largely by arity, the number of connections between parties and communications, the n:m relationships: 1:1, n:1, 1:m, n:m.
The vital groups I've been involved with have been 1) highly curated and 2) about 40--50 people, of whom maybe 10--20 were highly active. (One such group was a privat G+ community. Whilst it lasted it was excellent. I ultimately opted to kill it off due to concerns with the platform.)
A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each.
Over an 80 year life, the time you can devote to individual members of a group (assuming you sleep 8 hours/day) is roughly:
10: 5 years
100: 6 months
1,000: 20 days
10,000: 47 hours
100,000: 5 hours
1,000,000: 28 minutes
10 million: 3 minutes
100 million: 17 seconds
1 billion: 2 seconds
10 billion: 1/4 second
If we rely on a more realistic estimate of about 100 million actively-engaged profiles, that engagement increases considerably to ... 1 2/3 seconds.
In a parasocial relationship the fandom devotes a significant portion of its life to the star (often minutes or hours per day). The star ... cannot devote much time to individual fans.
The largest followings on G+ tended to be around the 10 million mark, allowing about 17 seconds of star attention per fan if the star devoted every waking hour to such relationships.
My more modest 2,000 or so followers might have received a days' attention from me, were I particularly obsessed with such engagement.
In practice, most of my engagement was with 20--100 or so people. Several of those I've continued to stay in touch with.
We seem to be under the delusion that technology allows us to scale intimacy. That's a fundamental impossibility, as true intimacy (measured in both time and distance) simply cannot be mediated. The problem isn't just the arity mentioned above, but context, expectations, understandings, intentions, and more. Intermediated communications quickly gets quite complex. Intimacy does not scale.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e...
Not really. But parasocial comes more natural with scale. The main difference is the nature of relationship and communication. You can have a parasocial relationship even in a 1:1, and a social realtionship in a 1:billion.
The defining point is the type of power a relationship has. In parasocial it's one-sided, parasitic. While social is multisides, symbiotic. Though of course there is nor purely social or parasocial relationship in any group, there are some which are more like one or the other.
> A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each.
Social does not mean you must share personal connections with each individual. The crowd can also interact anonymous and indirect. The crowd can be social or parasocial, depending for whom they act and how much power it's head has.
No, it's not possible to have high-arity social relationships.
For example, I’ve now been added to a chat with all my extended family, one for my local community group (and subgroups), and a couple friend ones from college. And now when I have something to share I pick the relevant scope just like Circles, and finding my contacts are more open to sharing casual thoughts vs standard posting.
I have a hunch that it works because the moderation/curation becomes a group effort instead of just a maintenance activity asked of me alone, but it was an interesting realization when I realized what was happening
This is so hard to fight for. I worked on a feature for our product where we leverage a UI component initially built to show ML recommendations, but to surface hard coded recommendations made by our partner's software, not coming from AI but hard coded. These recommendations are contextually sound because the devs _know_ what is possible given the context, which for all intents and purposes makes them much, much more relevant than anything that would come from an ML model. But for the life of them the other team will not let us use this UI because they're afraid that it might tarnish the opinion people have of their AI. So we're in this situation where the user would greatly benefit from a consistent UI, the partners as well, but because that team is afraid it will dilute their baby, we can't do it.
Had similar examples where 3 months in designinga feature it becomes clear that it doesn't fit with users, that a simpler solution would be better, but designers and PMs will take a hard stance that it's how we planned it and now is too late to change it even if dev hasn't even started.
Between sunk cost and babies, it's hard to forget our own interest in favor of our users.
It’s not that they (middle managers) are stupid. It’s political. KPIs and objectives and individual careers are misaligned or work against what is good for the user and ultimately, good for the company. Blame the CxOs.
FWIW, Tesla seems to be more willing to shake the ant farm. The tear downs and comparisons with other EVs are instructive. Tesla's octovalve, heat pumps, gigacasting, and I'm sure a dozen other things, just wouldn't happen (didn't happen) elsewhere. One blocker was functional silos.
Maybe it takes a tyrant like Elon Musk to dare the things Deming, Drucker, Goldratt, and others were proscribing.
Or external, existential threat. Like Churchill said about America: They always do the right thing, after first trying everything else.
In my experience, the only times I've successfully busted silos, the circumstances were dire and everyone else had given up. Other times were much less successful.
Google kind of did this though, and everyone hated it. Remember on YouTube, the mess they made when they introduced Google+. Maybe the author means "if a single identity had existed from the beginning..."
I think Microsoft does a reasonable job at this. If you violate the TOS of Office 365, you may lose access to that, but the rest of your account stays usable.
Photos is the spiritual successor to Picasa, integrated into the web. It was a response and a one-up to (again) iCloud and SkyDrive which both have phot syncronisation, which is something that is missing in Android. It was initially integrated into Google Drive, and became a fully-fledged separate product just now, when the integration has been cut.
So Google's next successful product would be
1) When Apple and Microsoft has bothered to be the first, and
2) whatever is connected to Google Photos.
(btw, since Stadia has became a meme, it partially fits 1 (xCloud) but sure it isn't connected to Photos in any way)
I don't think this is sufficient treatment of what was, at the time, the biggest objection to Google+ that I heard. The hamhanded forced real name thing killed Google+ for virtually everyone I knew on there, less for the actual concern about using your real name than for the attitude it displayed towards users' privacy.
I know I was well on the way to moving completely over to Google+ at the time they announced that change, and dropped it entirely almost immediately thereafter.
Post (@friends !bob) "let's surprise Bob for his birthday" is about as normal as it gets
> Post (@friends !bob) "let's surprise Bob for his birthday" is about as normal as it gets
Because while I would love that UI, there would be 1% of the population on their site.
Look at how much they had to simplify search syntax to appeal to the wider market.
I even said so at the time! (Back when we naively believed Google wanted feedback)
Why would 40 years of computer science experience be relevant to predicting how most people behave? If you had said psychology or something, I can see it being relevant.
"most people don't think like that" is an odd statement. How do you know how most people think? You think most people don't understand how to ideate "all my friends except bob" to invite people to bob's surprise birthday party?
Thats syntactic sugar, right there. You don't need a degree in psychology to get this. You need a degree in computer science to know what syntactic sugar is.
I know they used to. I know people claim they still do. If they do, they seem to only treat it as a suggestion (like searching for a significantly less popular by very similar word) and ignore me when I tell them to exclude specific terms.
> How do you know how most people think?
Okay, I'm not going to play the game where I have to keep supplying evidence and you keep denying it. What do you want. Google agreed with me, you have no training in anticipating how people think and the rarity of people capable of being programmers are sufficient for me to say it's time for you to start supplying proof of your blatant assertions.
> You think most people don't understand how to ideate "all my friends except bob" to invite people to bob's surprise birthday party?
Correct. And certainly even if they can it's only because that example is particularly simple (it's the same as always only without Bob). It doesn't solve 99% of use cases.
I'm not disputing that syntactical sugar is nice, I'm saying people are not capable of the complex operations to make the system you are positing work the majority of time for the majority of people, they will either quit in frustration or send their drunken party pictures to their boss or mother.
But from my experience, people who quit and say “I don’t understand” in front of the login screen of Windows, have no problems setting up an OnlyFans account with 3 levels of verification and linked with a bank account.
So true that it is almost sad.
That's why they don't give up