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G+ and Wave didn't stick. They're giving up on those already. Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting

by jpetso 10y ago

G+ and Wave didn't stick. They're giving up on those already. Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. Moxie's latest blog on Open Whisper Systems goes just as much for Google and carries even more weight there. So they just keep throwing darts at the (centralized) social network space and hope that something will stick eventually. It wasn't a website yesterday, it might be an app today, maybe it'll be a VR/AR environment tomorrow.

fosco 10y ago
I consider Federated and decentralized to be very different solutions. pertaining to google wave specifically, by joining the federation there is still a heiarchy of how connections are made. If you join a federation for google wave all of your messages still go through the top tier of that federation, to my knowledge this was by design (obviously this is all deprecated) if my statement is incorrect please let me know, but I see federated and decentralized as have some similarities but at the core are different solutions. I am referring to this message [0] from Apache Wave mailing list in regards to how the Wave federation was designed, I took it as face value but do not know how to verify for accuracy.... above my head. [0] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave-dev/201604.mbox/%3CD7929031-7330-4BFF-BC94-DAC472D5BEEB%40gmail.com%3E http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave-dev/... wrong link earlier...woops
patrickaljord 10y ago
> Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. I see what you mean but having a decentralized network where google can get a decent market share is still better than what they have now compared to facebook which is close to 0% market share if you don't count youtube. Think of it like gmail, thanks to imap and smtp being open and decentralized, Google was able to grab a sizable part of the market with gmail (they have 100M users now I think). So a decentralized social network with a google hosted endpoint would definitely be much more interesting than whatever they have right now. However, problem is that Facebook already won and also Google already tried this decentralized strategy with open social and google buzz and they were huge failures. Also google suck at social mostly because the ceo doesn't care about social and is admittedly bad at it. Also Spaces is probably the worse name possible as it is really asking for MySpace jokes.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  Yep, you said this way better than i could have! Cheers!
- chienr 10y ago
  > they have 100M users now I think http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-monthly-active-users/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-...
fmap 10y ago
They make their money off of advertising. Facebook is competing with them in this regard and if they can't replace them, the next best thing would be to undercut the competition. I think that's the scenario the parent was thinking of. But, as you said, Google is still going for replacing Facebook. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out...
qznc 10y ago
Google gives up on messaging, realizing they will not beat Facebook, WhatsApp, etc? Then they should create an open protocol! "If I cannot have it, then nobody should."
- tdkl 10y ago
  RCS is in works and it's the only thing that makes me excited for the future instead of all these messaging silos.

by jpetso 10y ago

fosco 10y ago

I consider Federated and decentralized to be very different solutions. pertaining to google wave specifically, by joining the federation there is still a heiarchy of how connections are made. If you join a federation for google wave all of your messages still go through the top tier of that federation, to my knowledge this was by design (obviously this is all deprecated) if my statement is incorrect please let me know, but I see federated and decentralized as have some similarities but at the core are different solutions. I am referring to this message [0] from Apache Wave mailing list in regards to how the Wave federation was designed, I took it as face value but do not know how to verify for accuracy.... above my head. [0] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave-dev/201604.mbox/%3CD7929031-7330-4BFF-BC94-DAC472D5BEEB%40gmail.com%3E http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave-dev/... wrong link earlier...woops

patrickaljord 10y ago

> Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. I see what you mean but having a decentralized network where google can get a decent market share is still better than what they have now compared to facebook which is close to 0% market share if you don't count youtube. Think of it like gmail, thanks to imap and smtp being open and decentralized, Google was able to grab a sizable part of the market with gmail (they have 100M users now I think). So a decentralized social network with a google hosted endpoint would definitely be much more interesting than whatever they have right now. However, problem is that Facebook already won and also Google already tried this decentralized strategy with open social and google buzz and they were huge failures. Also google suck at social mostly because the ceo doesn't care about social and is admittedly bad at it. Also Spaces is probably the worse name possible as it is really asking for MySpace jokes.

mxuribe 10y ago
Yep, you said this way better than i could have! Cheers!
chienr 10y ago
> they have 100M users now I think http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-monthly-active-users/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-...

fmap 10y ago

They make their money off of advertising. Facebook is competing with them in this regard and if they can't replace them, the next best thing would be to undercut the competition. I think that's the scenario the parent was thinking of. But, as you said, Google is still going for replacing Facebook. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out...

qznc 10y ago

Google gives up on messaging, realizing they will not beat Facebook, WhatsApp, etc? Then they should create an open protocol! "If I cannot have it, then nobody should."

tdkl 10y ago
RCS is in works and it's the only thing that makes me excited for the future instead of all these messaging silos.