This is especially interesting, considering he left Google 3 years ago, according to his website. It’s a bit misleading to put this old tweet up alongside a recent Google screenshot.
He posted about it on mastodon 7 days ago, so I don’t think it’s an old tweet. Maybe his personal website is just out of date? https://social.coop/@scottjenson/112468182058087636
The difference is that Google+ was actually a wonderful product.
But a couple years down the line Google did what Google does and destroyed it from the inside making it worse and worse until it was just a shell of what it started out being.
Google did what Google does
I remember wrapping my head around “Google Wave” and being like “Hey that sounds nea–oh it’s gone already?”
Dude for real. Wave was awesome.
It was a fine product I don’t know about wonderful. The communities could be good that was true. But the actual UX was pretty middle of the road IMO.
If you were into tech, the tech people were amazing. Yonatan Zunger comes to mind. He was a backend engineer at Google and the guy was great.
I also met many people who are still friends, many of whom became real life friends too.
I even got an amazing job thanks to my contacts on g+.
The feed layout was awesome. The fact that everything got fed to rss. The fact that you could tailor posts so easily. God I miss it. Only social media I’ve ever really been a part of.
It was wonderful ♥️
Also basically every Linux big name posted there. It was so great. I’m still sad it’s gone
A wonderful product or a wonderful community? It sounds like you’re describing the people who were on it and not the platform itself.
The platform was wonderful. Intuitive, powerful, everything every other platform was not. Google started killing it slowly long before it died, but in its heyday it was amazing.
Hey like I said the communities were great! But no worries I’m glad it was a great experience for you and I don’t want to be needlessly contrarian here
Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that your experience isn’t valid, I am merely providing a counterpoint based upon my own experience.
I feel you
I am a software developer, this story isn’t really about that though. When I was first becoming interested in coding I was reading about vr and ar and how it would be this huge multi billion dollar market in the next few years and I thought that sounded awesome, as it could enhance our lived experiences with info for the curious, or decorate the real world with computer generated architecture, sculpture, even some ads to pay for the whole thing. I said I’m gonna get into computer programming and then transition into vr/ar once I learn a few things.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down. Just another big tech grift, like cryptocurrency and now AI. Ai is probably the worst example of all because it got pushed out to soak up a bunch of excess cloud computing when crypto crashed, and now its a huge real estate scheme as well since there’s a big rush to build data centers to handle the artificial demand. You wanna know the next big bubble to bet against? Its ai and all the related industries.
It requires massive amounts of computing power to accomplish the most mundane tasks, which require electricity created by burning fossil fuels. All so your boss can spend less time writing emails letting you know you’ve been laid off, and political advisors can mass produce legislation to take away your rights.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down.
The way advanced capitalism can’t even grow a product before trying to strangle it for every last penny is all that saves us from special Black Mirror levels of hell.
Google AI search is certainly good for memes
vs Andi AI
Asking Andisearch to generate AI jokes
OK I like the 3rd one actually
Yes, the sense of humor is still somewhat limited in AIs. Anyway, Andi is not designed to tell jokes, but rather to give reliable answers to questions and this it does quite well…
I mean if this is Google’s new Google+ moment there’s only one person we can call upon in our time of need:
░░░░░███████ ]▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
▂▄▅█████████▅▄▃▂
█████████████████ ☻ I███████████████████]… ▌ ◥⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙◤… / \🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🎩🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕
🌕🌕🌖🌑👁🌑👁🌓🌕
🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑👄🌑🌔🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🎀🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌔🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌔🍆🌑🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌖🌒🌕🌗🌒🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌗🌓🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌘🌔🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
🌕👠🌕🌕🌕👠🌕🌕🌕I legitimately can’t stop laughing at this omg
Running with scissors is good exercise if you don’t fall, and good for your pores if you do.
The difference between G+ and now is that Google search is actually bad now and they need to do something to fix it, but they just did the completely wrong thing…
To be fair, this could be very make or break for Google. If someone else solves AI search properly, and they can’t catch up, it would be really bad for them. G+/Facebook were another market completely so it wasn’t really taking any of their current market share.
But I do think they are panicking a bit too much.
Yeah that’s what happens when you throw your engineers out for business majors at a tech company
This reminds me: I need to change my default search engine.
SearXNG: poor man’s Kagi (one seemingly reputable instance)
On iOS, I set my default search to DuckDuckGo, and enabled Hyperweb on the DDG domain to redirect to SearXNG. I use a Google Images bookmark saved as a favorite when I need images (SearXNG results inferior even when using Google as the sole engine).
I anecdotally suspect Kagi of astroturfing btw, but after some free trials it seems to be about the best Google alternative - gotta be [earning like] a [US-based] knowledge worker though, or really care about search.
ddg image search is superior to Google’s though.
I’m kidddddding I’m kidding!
You’ve once again reminded me to properly catalog my comparison searches. Only one I could find in my screenshots:
I start with !ddgi but more than half the time hit it with a !gi bang to go over to the Alphabet Adware Image search. I swear I’m gonna catalog this stuff and then maybe it’ll be apparent:
- I do weird searches
- Google is search bubbling me even when I’m private browsing
- I’m misperceiving the frequency at which DDG image searches actually fail me
Or maybe my use cases are fairly normal and Goog really is superior, TBD!
I’ve been really liking Kagi. It’s been my default for about 5 months now.
One thing that keeps me coming back to Google is shopping, or searching for online stores, or searching for prices. The shopping tab is somewhat useful and I don’t know any other search engine that does it (because it’s barely a search engine thing tho)
you don’t even have to go to the shopping tab anymore… even if you’re just looking for information on something they mix in shopping results right at the top
google is gigantic piece of shit
It told me today that Harvard did research to show 165 degrees killed H1N1 in milk. The reference? Recommended cooking temp for chicken.
Reminds me of a facebook reel in which allegedly a doctor recommends to drink at least 3-5 coffees a day
Me when self medicating adhd
Self-medicating ADHD sufferers recommend consuming 3-5 entire pots of coffee a day, and a treat of another 150-300mg before bed
Tbh 3 cups could still eaidpy be me while properly medicated.
I drank more coffee when I was taking Adderall than when I stopped.
Mine was a monster every two hours on my break. So much sugar and caffeine.
Fucking lmao
I’m glad I use Qwant…
