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Google wave pretty much provided infrastructure for Google docs and other realtime communication products. Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Goo

Google wave pretty much provided infrastructure for Google docs and other realtime communication products. Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.

vanderZwan 9y ago
> Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it. Making it even more ridiculous that they killed off Google Reader for it (or didn't bother to revive it afterwards) EDIT: Also, they already had Picasa Web Albums since 2006. I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.
- flavor8 9y ago
  > I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality. The machine learning assisted search. For example, if I want to find photos of whiteboards that I took to record a meeting, I type in "whiteboard".
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Also automatic curated photos, reminders and so on. A mobile app that is very simple and easy to use.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      And automatic sharing suggestions based on the people that was at an event.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Especially with Flickr stagnating at the hands of Yahoo, Google more or less had the market for a high-quality photo sharing site to itself had it wanted it. That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.
  - Terretta 9y ago
    It’s interesting you are thinking of them as the high-quality niche, saying not a huge demand for full resolution. Problem wasn’t full resolution, it was re-compressing your originals. Photographers that care about full res, care about original quality. While there were (and still are) options like SmugMug for photogs, Flickr was the only prosumer one supporting unlimited original quality. Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much? Turns out photographers who posted and curated 50,000 photos are not big fans of having the rug pulled out from under them by people in marketing trying to change the UI for their own engagement metrics.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      >Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much I actually think that's somewhat fair. I could come up with some things that I wish were better with Flickr and there are probably lots of things I'm not thinking of. But I still use it and, in conjunction with Lightroom, I find it's a pretty good way to display a curated collection of edited photographs (as well as serving as a backup of last resort). I did object to the big UI change a few years ago and still don't really love it. On the other hand, I don't actually use the web interface much. I upload from Lightroom and I mostly view from a tablet.
sitepodmatt 9y ago
I thought writely gave them that?
- kentonv 9y ago
  Docs pretty much threw out all the Writely code and switched over to a new editor built from scratch (codename "Kix") in 2010. I'm not sure if Kix used code from Wave, though.
  - snewman 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure there is no lineage from Wave to Kix (which, yes, was the code name for the modern incarnation of Docs). Kix is more of a descendant of the architecture of Google Sheets. Source: I am one of the original authors of Writely, did not work on Kix but I was still at Google when it was being written, had a minor role in reviewing the design.
    - puzzle 9y ago
      What about the OT code and the comments?
      - snewman 9y ago
        Bear in mind that this was almost a decade ago, and I wasn't directly involved. With that caveat: the core mechanisms for client / server coordination in Kix were a direct descendant from Trix (short for "Matrix"), which was the original code name for Google Sheets. And Kix was developed by a team in New York, an offshoot of the Trix team which was also in New York. Writely (post-acquisition) was in Mountain View, and Wave was in Australia (I forget which city), and the picture that might give you of how closely the various teams communicated is probably accurate. I don't know whether Trix originally used OT specifically, or the Kix team borrowed that idea from Wave. But the basic idea of clients performing small, tidy logical operations and then synchronizing them in realtime through a server was part of both Trix and Kix. Writely used a very different (and more primitive) approach. I don't know anything about the origin of the comments feature, but my guess is that there was no connection to Wave, except (again) possibly a bit of inspiration. The Wave team was very separate, both geographically and organizationally, and the tech stack they built was very disconnected from anything that was going on with Trix, Kix, or Writely.

Google wave pretty much provided infrastructure for Google docs and other realtime communication products. Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it.

vanderZwan 9y ago

> Similarly, Google plus was not a total failure - Google Photos came out of it. Making it even more ridiculous that they killed off Google Reader for it (or didn't bother to revive it afterwards) EDIT: Also, they already had Picasa Web Albums since 2006. I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality.

flavor8 9y ago
> I don't know what exactly Google Photos has to offer over it in terms of functionality. The machine learning assisted search. For example, if I want to find photos of whiteboards that I took to record a meeting, I type in "whiteboard".
- tehlike 9y ago
  Also automatic curated photos, reminders and so on. A mobile app that is very simple and easy to use.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    And automatic sharing suggestions based on the people that was at an event.
ghaff 9y ago
Especially with Flickr stagnating at the hands of Yahoo, Google more or less had the market for a high-quality photo sharing site to itself had it wanted it. That said, surveying today's landscape, it would appear that there isn't actually a huge amount of demand for either full resolution user-curated sites focused on photography or RSS readers. The vast bulk of users are fine with throwing their baby and cat pictures up on more casual sites like Facebook and Instagram or getting their news from Facebook/Reddit/etc.
- Terretta 9y ago
  It’s interesting you are thinking of them as the high-quality niche, saying not a huge demand for full resolution. Problem wasn’t full resolution, it was re-compressing your originals. Photographers that care about full res, care about original quality. While there were (and still are) options like SmugMug for photogs, Flickr was the only prosumer one supporting unlimited original quality. Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much? Turns out photographers who posted and curated 50,000 photos are not big fans of having the rug pulled out from under them by people in marketing trying to change the UI for their own engagement metrics.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >Also on the “stagnating” comment — at some point is it possible you’ve hit a reasonable photo site, and shouldn’t tinker much I actually think that's somewhat fair. I could come up with some things that I wish were better with Flickr and there are probably lots of things I'm not thinking of. But I still use it and, in conjunction with Lightroom, I find it's a pretty good way to display a curated collection of edited photographs (as well as serving as a backup of last resort). I did object to the big UI change a few years ago and still don't really love it. On the other hand, I don't actually use the web interface much. I upload from Lightroom and I mostly view from a tablet.

sitepodmatt 9y ago

I thought writely gave them that?

kentonv 9y ago
Docs pretty much threw out all the Writely code and switched over to a new editor built from scratch (codename "Kix") in 2010. I'm not sure if Kix used code from Wave, though.
- snewman 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure there is no lineage from Wave to Kix (which, yes, was the code name for the modern incarnation of Docs). Kix is more of a descendant of the architecture of Google Sheets. Source: I am one of the original authors of Writely, did not work on Kix but I was still at Google when it was being written, had a minor role in reviewing the design.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    What about the OT code and the comments?
    - snewman 9y ago
      Bear in mind that this was almost a decade ago, and I wasn't directly involved. With that caveat: the core mechanisms for client / server coordination in Kix were a direct descendant from Trix (short for "Matrix"), which was the original code name for Google Sheets. And Kix was developed by a team in New York, an offshoot of the Trix team which was also in New York. Writely (post-acquisition) was in Mountain View, and Wave was in Australia (I forget which city), and the picture that might give you of how closely the various teams communicated is probably accurate. I don't know whether Trix originally used OT specifically, or the Kix team borrowed that idea from Wave. But the basic idea of clients performing small, tidy logical operations and then synchronizing them in realtime through a server was part of both Trix and Kix. Writely used a very different (and more primitive) approach. I don't know anything about the origin of the comments feature, but my guess is that there was no connection to Wave, except (again) possibly a bit of inspiration. The Wave team was very separate, both geographically and organizationally, and the tech stack they built was very disconnected from anything that was going on with Trix, Kix, or Writely.