6 ms·

I fully agree with you. I also dismissed Google Glass and other hypes. I feel smart about that. On the other hand, if someone would have pitched Facebook to me

• jandrese 8y ago
  Eh, Facebook was a natural evolution of social networks going back to MySpace, Friendstr, SixDegrees. Each one fixing mistakes of the past and becoming the next big thing until their own mistakes caught up to them. The one that I dismissed was Twitter. In fact I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it, something making fun of how long winded boring blog posts on services like Livejournal tended to be. I also thought Vine would be doomed to fail.
  • captain_perl 8y ago
    I also thought twitter was a joke until I realized most Americans are too lazy to write a blog post, or even read one. “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” - Mencken (paraphrased) http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-broke-underestimating.html http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-brok...
    • briandear 8y ago
      How many blog posts are being read and written by the French? The “Americans are too lazy” trope is just ridiculous.
      • monkpit 8y ago
        I find that many comment like gp online are equally valid with the word “Americans” replaced with “people”. It irks me as well.
        • solarkraft 8y ago
          Yes, but it does preserve some uncertainty about the rest of the world. The author may only feel comfortable enough to make a comment about Americans.
        • JoshCole 8y ago
          This comic kind of captures what you two are getting at, though I think you are applying the idea a little more generally. https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
    • ISL 8y ago
      "Yo" did die (or at least appears zombified, with 32 Patreon supporters). One bit appears to be too few.
    • dboreham 8y ago
      Twitter is the weird thing it is because it began with an SMS interface (hence 140 characters). It took off originally because you didn't need a smart phone or a data plan or a PC to use it.
      • vilmosi 8y ago
        I thought it took off because they managed to get celebrities on it.
        • TheKarateKid 8y ago
          This. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore were amongst the first celebrities on Twitter to actually post the content themselves rather than by a manager/PR agent. This got a lot of media attention and many other celebs followed shortly after. I still remember finding it strange to see how Ashton and Demi personally wrote short messages, since every form of communication from famous people at the time were formal statements released via the press.
        • tomhoward 8y ago
          That happened a couple of years after it initially took off. Celebrities only took to it after it had gained solid traction among Silicon Valley types and social media early adopters.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      It’s not about being “lazy”. Most of the people I follow are both bloggers and podcasters. But not everything is not worthy of a blog post and I would hate for my RSS reader to be polluted with everything they tweet about (even if it is interesting.)
  • waynecochran 8y ago
    I never thought Uber nor Airbnb would be successful. Who invites strangers in their home or car. I was told as a kid to never get in a stranger's car ... now, as an adult, I am riding with strangers all the time.
    • jandrese 8y ago
      You never take taxis? Airbnb is even less of a stretch since B&Bs were the original hotel. Uber was not a surprise at all for me because I'd been complaining about the bloated and horrible taxicab system for many years. It was a market that was crying out for disruption. I remember in 2008 my local taxicab company had exactly two ways to hail a cab: phone or fax. They might or might not show up at the appointed time, and they'd certainly never send you any kind of updates. It cost upwards of $5 to step into the cab, and after that there were fees out the wazoo (per 1/6th mile fee, per 45 seconds fee, fee for having a bag, a fuel surcharge, a license surcharge, a regulatory recovery surcharge, and a couple others I forget). The cabs might have credit card readers but they were always broken so it was cash only. Drivers took weirdly roundabout backroads paths and always claimed it was fastest if you asked them about it, even though I knew the highway was not busy at 4am. Every single thing about the experience sucked. When they started crying later that Uber was killing their business my response was "good".
      • SimonPStevens 8y ago
        Except Uber didn't start as a taxi replacement company. If you only remember it as a taxi company it was already after it had started to become successful. It was initially a carpooling app. The original pitch was that regular drivers would just drive to their own intended location and have an ability to see people on route who wanted to go the same way. Much harder to pick that idea out as a future billion dollar company.
        • nixme 8y ago
          What are you talking about? The original pitch was a black car service to fix the hailing problems of SF. It was even originally called UberCab. https://medium.com/@gc/the-beginning-of-uber-7fb17e544851 https://medium.com/@gc/the-beginning-of-uber-7fb17e544851
  • noblethrasher 8y ago
    Before Twitter, people on AIM and similar services would use status messages to broadcast short little notes to their buddy list. I had the idea of turning that into a service in the early 2000s. What surprised me was seeing a serious journalist like Wolf Blitzer regularly reading people's tweets on his prime time show.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • toomuchgov 8y ago
    Facebook bought Friendster's patents.
  • skinnymuch 8y ago
    The degree of Facebook (and Whatsapp and Messenger) amount of users is insane though. How many people possibly thought they would be at numbers or around 1.5B and 2.2B users?
• jt2190 8y ago
  This is an excellent point! We should also keep in mind that chatbots are clearly a thing that people want; we're just using capitalism to test whether society, technology, etc. are "there" yet, so it's not entirely irrational for investment to flow into this area. (We might debate the scale of the investments, or we can just let the market determine that for us.)
• the-dude 8y ago
  The famous HN Dropbox comment!
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• orb_yt 8y ago
  Glass wasn't hype by any means, it just didn't take hold in the consumer market (which, who's to say Google didn't predicate that). It's been in use by massive enterprises for years now, from Boeing to GE to large healthcare organizations.
• throwawayqdhd 8y ago
  I wouldn't dismiss Facebook for the simple fact that it plays to something deeply human: to connect with other people. But while it does that, it also plays to something even more deeply human: to watch other people from afar, and to replace complex, anxiety-ridden face-to-face interactions with easier, gentler text-based communication. Google Glass and all the other hyped techs never struck at anything deeply human. VR is nice and all as a tech, but it's not something we've always done.
  • scabarott 8y ago
    I would say it is still early days for VR. I was a skeptic at first till I got my own VR rig, now I'm convinced it's the future even if I don't know what time-frame that is going to be. As for Google glass it was just a little ahead of it's time and it's even gaining traction on the enterprise side.
    • Fnoord 8y ago
      It seems you and GP are confusing VR and AR. VR, virtual reality, is a complete immersion in a virtual world. A 3D game, a 3D movie, a 3D Minecraft, you name it. AR, augmented reality, is additional "augmented" information in the real world. VR is nowhere NEAR ready for mass consumer market. There's 2 screens on the glasses with very low resolution. Because the glasses are very much near the eyes, pixels are very apparent. That's ugly. Furthermore, you need a big fat gaming rig with a 1000 EUR/USD graphics card for the current low resolution. And then there is the issue of the data transmission. Those huge wires (its not wireless yet, and wireless suffers from more lag). Finally, it is pricey. AR from Google Glass flopped due to privacy concerns. It would aid users in their day to day life like a smartphone or smartwatch does. Its being used for this purpose in business settings (also due to its price) just like some other expensive tools by Microsoft such as Hololens and Surface Hub (84"). The user interface isn't quite there. For example I'd say eye tracking is useful. Some cars also get HUD in windscreen. (YMMV but as a glass user who uses glasses which also work like sunglasses in the direct sunlight, I'd love to have a pimped glasses with AR.) Anyway, in short, my conclusion, is: VR is mostly fun, though some useful sims (e.g. flight trainers, but also things like 3D meetings would make Hyperloop and air travel redundant which saves time & environment) do use it as well. It is more of a niche than AR. AR is going to be part of our every day life in useful/productive ways. AR will be vastly more rampant, and it will be in use in a massive scale earlier than VR will be. As a side thought imagine going on vacation in VR and it being just like the real thing cause you're on a robot. Your 5 senses get stimulated while you walk through Cairo. You smell the spice whilst you walk through the market on your robot which you control. Why actually still go on vacation then? I already have enough pleasure with Google Photos or the new Windows 10 login screen as it is. Going to see the Eifel Tower which you already saw hundreds of time on pictures is boring as is receiving that piece of metal on a postcard. Oh well.
• NicoJuicy 8y ago
  Google Glass and chatbots solve both something though. Onboarding new users in production and reducing customer queries
• mongodude 8y ago
  It's great to learn Machine Learning even now!