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The article misses one big point. Social is all about generating noise whereas google products are all designed to cut through all the noise and bring you somet

The article misses one big point. Social is all about generating noise whereas google products are all designed to cut through all the noise and bring you something that you need by filtering all the noise. There has not been a single social network I have been able to stand for more than 10 minutes because of the noise problem whereas google products are a joy to use for somebody that wants to get things done.

ThomPete 16y ago
Buzz? wave? you call these designed to cut through the noise?
- greenlblue 16y ago
  Wave certainly since it's a collaborative tool for people that want to get things done. Buzz is a twitter clone but we already have twitter so I didn't really understand why they launched buzz in the first place.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    Wave is noise IMHO. The very fact that you can go back in history and replay, have multiple people talk together and the way that it's built up is not what I would consider cutting out the noise. But that might just be me.
    - roc 16y ago
      Would you say that's more or less noisy than the email chain that exchanged and integrated as many changes and additions? A busy wave is noisy. But I think it can be quite an improvement over plain email.
      - ThomPete 16y ago
        I think the problem is that Google does great when it comes to behind the scene filtering. For instance their spam filter in gmail is almost flawless at least from my experience. Anything that's about algorithms being part of the design they are great. But they fail completely when it comes to allowing people to interact with each other. They simply don't have the design principles for that. It's not part of their DNA.
        roc 16y ago
        I don't think that's fair at all. Google docs, gmail, gchat - these are all inherently about interaction and they're great. What Google doesn't do successfully, is frame those interactions to make their own network "sticky". It's those second-order interactions ("likes", "reblogging", "fans", "mayor", etc) that Google doesn't seem to get traction with. But that's a very different thing than enabling interaction.
        ThomPete 16y ago
        There is absolutely nothing elegant about the interaction of googles products IMHO. What is elegant is the stuff that goes on behind the scences. But the actual interaction part could be improved quite a lot.
        jacabado 16y ago
        The proudly presented see-as-you-type Wave feature is a major example of what you are saying. Real people hated it because it was distractive, annoying and embarassing but they never tought about that because it showed their big technical achievement: the wavelet syncronization in real-time. REAL-TIME!!
zephyrfalcon 16y ago
I was thinking along the same lines. Leaving ill-fated attempts at social like Wave and Buzz aside, most of Google's products have been about getting things done. Especially search. You look for something, it finds it. That's all. It's essential that the "application" gets out of the way here and finds what you were looking for as quickly and accurately as possible. To make that happen, technology is needed that is very complex, deep, with almost everything happening behind the scenes. Social networking sites/apps are, by definition, completely different beasts. They're shallow (I don't necessarily mean this in a negative sense BTW), they don't get out of your way, and users generally don't want them to. That's why sites like Facebook don't just have a list of friends, but are crammed full of games (many of which are "social" as well), videos, pictures, ads, polls, questions, suggestions, etc. Building a system like this is diametrically opposed to what Google has been doing. So it would make sense that they aren't good at it... it's just not what they do. But I can understand that they might feel they need to produce something like this, otherwise they're going to miss out on the Next Big Thing. If people are spending all of their time on Facebook or wherever, and Facebook decides to add a decent search engine, well... =/

ThomPete 16y ago

Buzz? wave? you call these designed to cut through the noise?

greenlblue 16y ago
Wave certainly since it's a collaborative tool for people that want to get things done. Buzz is a twitter clone but we already have twitter so I didn't really understand why they launched buzz in the first place.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Wave is noise IMHO. The very fact that you can go back in history and replay, have multiple people talk together and the way that it's built up is not what I would consider cutting out the noise. But that might just be me.
  - roc 16y ago
    Would you say that's more or less noisy than the email chain that exchanged and integrated as many changes and additions? A busy wave is noisy. But I think it can be quite an improvement over plain email.
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      I think the problem is that Google does great when it comes to behind the scene filtering. For instance their spam filter in gmail is almost flawless at least from my experience. Anything that's about algorithms being part of the design they are great. But they fail completely when it comes to allowing people to interact with each other. They simply don't have the design principles for that. It's not part of their DNA.
      - roc 16y ago
        I don't think that's fair at all. Google docs, gmail, gchat - these are all inherently about interaction and they're great. What Google doesn't do successfully, is frame those interactions to make their own network "sticky". It's those second-order interactions ("likes", "reblogging", "fans", "mayor", etc) that Google doesn't seem to get traction with. But that's a very different thing than enabling interaction.
        ThomPete 16y ago
        There is absolutely nothing elegant about the interaction of googles products IMHO. What is elegant is the stuff that goes on behind the scences. But the actual interaction part could be improved quite a lot.
        jacabado 16y ago
        The proudly presented see-as-you-type Wave feature is a major example of what you are saying. Real people hated it because it was distractive, annoying and embarassing but they never tought about that because it showed their big technical achievement: the wavelet syncronization in real-time. REAL-TIME!!

zephyrfalcon 16y ago

I was thinking along the same lines. Leaving ill-fated attempts at social like Wave and Buzz aside, most of Google's products have been about getting things done. Especially search. You look for something, it finds it. That's all. It's essential that the "application" gets out of the way here and finds what you were looking for as quickly and accurately as possible. To make that happen, technology is needed that is very complex, deep, with almost everything happening behind the scenes. Social networking sites/apps are, by definition, completely different beasts. They're shallow (I don't necessarily mean this in a negative sense BTW), they don't get out of your way, and users generally don't want them to. That's why sites like Facebook don't just have a list of friends, but are crammed full of games (many of which are "social" as well), videos, pictures, ads, polls, questions, suggestions, etc. Building a system like this is diametrically opposed to what Google has been doing. So it would make sense that they aren't good at it... it's just not what they do. But I can understand that they might feel they need to produce something like this, otherwise they're going to miss out on the Next Big Thing. If people are spending all of their time on Facebook or wherever, and Facebook decides to add a decent search engine, well... =/