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Comment by pverghese | Hacker News Reader

This has been their website for experiments for years. Its for people to try out and not for the entire world to use as yet. It has had a lot of fun stuff over the years

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Is that true? I distinctly remember Google Labs being shut down during Larry's Google+ disaster years, and this article seems to bear it out: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-shuts-down-google-la...

(This is also my personal nomination for the oft-asked "when did Google stop being unique and cool?").

G+ was okayish. the frantic push to use it everywhere was of course typical megacorp bullshit, but there was no real reason to shut it down, they could have kept the brand, use it as the glue between all the other things they have with profiles, sharing, social like yt, blogger, maps, photos...

Do you remember Google Wave? That was the last time Google had balls to try an new vision. The last day of exploration, after that it was just exploitation (make money).

A long time ago they even started a trend - 20% time for personal projects, that was an act of exploration, but now they lost their curiosity and playfulness.

They shut it down and then a few years later Discord was launched and the rest is history.

Really shows the importance of having a compelling UI and a coherent ability to describe what your product is, both of which were sorely lacking in Google Wave.

I agree, G+ the product was fine. Some very good things came out of it (video Hangouts, Google Photos). The push to force it down everyone's throat marked a turning point in my perception of Google and resulted in a bunch of harmful changes and loss of trust. Shutting it down eventually made sense - the brand had zero cachet and no significant population was using it. As an IC or manager within Google, there wasn't much you could do for your career by working on G+. It was a dead end product by the time it was shut down.

Photos came out of cloudifying Picasa, no?

Okay, sure, it made sense to shut it down, but to me it would make sense to do a new one today for the aforementioned reasons (use cases).

(But of course somehow most of Alphabet is still tragicomically bad at B2C, and now YT also seems to be going down the drain with the overemphasis on shorts.)

Ok. Well Google can't just pretend that generative A.I. isn't having a massive moment, and the company has a lot more riding on the future of this particular technology than just an "experiment." They’ve had a weak sauce launch, and while it’s nice there’s a website to launch experiments I don’t think it’s helpful with audience perception of the company.

Maybe it’s time to up their game.

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