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Google dusts off the Google+ playbook to fight ChatGPT
- nailer 4y agoBut Google Plus succeeded - all the permanent employees got a special bonus because of Google’s success in social (first part is sarcastic, second is true).
- fbdab103 4y agoI suddenly want a listing of company KPIs that were graded successful, but were outright failures. I have personally witnessed my fair share of tire fires which were communicated in a rather fantastical way to management.
- lumost 4y agoThis is the fundamental reason large organizations struggle in the long run. If a cisco vp started a network generative ai initiative tomorrow, and in a year posted some results - do you think those results would ever be received badly? Or would they be massaged until they were good?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 4y agoEvery Google employee’s OKRs are supposedly readable by anyone in the company. I don’t know if the OKR scoring is also public, but regardless an enterprising individual could scrape other people’s OKRs every quarter and see which keywords are correlated with later promotions.
- aix1 4y ago1. Promotions are not public (by which I mean accessible by anyone at the company). 2. OKRs are not automatically public (some teams choose to publish theirs; many don't).
- hot_gril 4y agoIt's amazing to watch even the lower level SWEs, who don't need to play politics, looking at a dumpster fire and telling their bosses it's great.
- izacus 4y agoThat would probably be 95% of KPIs across all big corporations anywhere. It takes incredible and very rare leadership to be able to admit failures downstream.
- Minor49er 4y agoGoogle Plus succeeded in getting people to provide their real names and other personal information across all of Google's services
- dorkwood 4y agoYes, this is why I stopped leaving comments and reviews. I really can’t have YouTube comments showing up when people Google my name.
- sitzkrieg 4y agoyou can change your youtube display name
- Intermernet 4y agoAre youtube comments indexed by Google for public search? I've never managed to find my own comments via search!
- choppaface 4y agoG+ was indeed an internal success in that: * It made a lot of coddled high-energy employees continue to feel valued and engaged and not jump to a competitor. * It forced users to unify accounts making cookie joining and user data from different segments much more universally accessible to ads. * It brought design uniformity to G on the web, which is an important to contrast the Google brand with the otherwise fragmented Android space. * Lasting revenue and user data from Google Photos and Drive. Google plus was Google doing what it does best: solving Google problems. It never had a chance as a product, but they didn’t need for it to win. They needed to re-consolidate data input to Ads and defend against a talent drain.
- clnq 4y agoWas it really planned for that? This sounds like just a list of initially unplanned effects it had, used as internal PR spin at best.
- choppaface 4y agoThe user account consolidation was pretty explicit. It might have been explained as necessary for UX consistency, but for Ads it was a huge way to whitewash otherwise verboten underwear-smelling. G+ birthed the "create account / log in with Google" widget for non-Google websites, that could go alongside the "log in with FB" widget that was getting popular. Those widgets let Google / FB join your account cookies with whatever other ads get shown on the page. G+ lead to a dramatically changed privacy policy that dramatically increaed data sharing.
- cloudking 4y ago+1 Google Photos is very successful, the product spawned out of G+ auto syncing photos.
- llampx 4y agoWasn't that more from the acquisition of Picasa?
- 4y ago
- gfuwhsbfrtwgs 4y ago(burner account) I was at Google watching the tech all hands with my boss when they announced that "social multiplier" (bonuses tied to success of G+) was going to apply to everyone in the company. I turned to my boss and said, shit, our bonuses are going to be fucked because G+ is going to flop. My boss told me not to worry, since "they are never going to be able to admit that this was a failure". Sure enough, management tried to bullshit everyone on how successful G+ was and we ended up getting a high multiplier for the "success".
- oo00oo00o 4y agoboq though
- hyperhopper 4y agoEasy to succeed when you transitively infect the entire codebase due to conformance and the way build dependencies are set up.
- diceduckmonk 4y agoWhat framework would you have preferred be endemic instead of Boq?
- marmee 4y agopod? boq acts as if it gives you modularity but try attaching C++ code to Java
- rhaway84773 4y agoWhat’s hilarious about the G+ rollout (in a highly dark comedy way) is that G+ was probably a superior offering than the competition. If Google had given it time and opportunity to fail, it would have succeeded because they could then fix the minor issues people didn’t like. Instead they forced it on everyone using any Google product, hurting the product itself, but also preventing the critical feedback loop that would have allowed G+ to improve, and become organically successful.
- milsorgen 4y agoI found G+ quite compelling. It was pleasant to use and I'm sure could of grown into a platform of its own. A place for features that made sense in their time and place and some kind of integration in some products. It seems YouTube is gaining some social features, for instance posts to followers and live chat. I think these would of been interesting areas to utilize g+. But then again I'm outside looking in, I can't speak to the costs they might of incurred letting things unfold at a more measured pace.
- jimbob45 4y agoIt wasn’t meaningfully better than FB (at the time) and there was no reason to switch.
- browningstreet 4y agoScoble loved it /s
- lern_too_spel 4y agoHis former boss lit that dumpster fire. https://scobleizer.blog/2006/06/28/wow-vic-gundotra-leaves-microsoft/ https://scobleizer.blog/2006/06/28/wow-vic-gundotra-leaves-m... https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/vic-gundotra-the-father-of-google-is-leaving-google-after-8-years/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/vic-gundotra-the-father-of...
- hyperhopper 4y ago
- senectus1 4y agoman I miss G+ I have FB and refuse to use it, Twitter is purely for bored doom scrolling and thats about all I use. Google+ was great, worked exactly how i wanted it and didn't try to sell me crap i didnt want to know about
- labster 4y agoThe Facebook was great in 2005, too. If G+ had lasted longer I’m sure it would have gotten worse by now.
- hot_gril 4y agoFB in 2005 was better in some ways, but iirc it didn't have pages, events, or communities yet, and those were truly useful features. I was a holdout until I went to college and saw how many clubs and stuff, even marketplaces (pre FB marketplace), were usefully organized on FB. I could log into FB, browse the world-famous UC Berkeley meme page, RSVP for a comp sci talk, message my 8 group chats, sell my iClicker, buy a dining commons swipe, and message one of those "my sister needs a date for a party" ads all in one place.
- hot_gril 4y agoI remember the video screenshotted in the article. The one with the Bob stick figures fighting Google+, the same pasted in YT comments with utf8-art tanks. Bad times. But I don't see what G+ has to do with Bard (for those unfamiliar, their answer to ChatGPT). Really a stretch.
- emodendroket 4y agoAccording to the article, there is a top-down directive to integrate generative AI into products all across Google, much the same way everything got Google+ integration at one point.
- raverbashing 4y agoAnd we all know how well did that work... "Why do I need a G+ account to comment on YouTube?"
- hot_gril 4y agoI wouldn't compare the two like this. "Google+ playbook" makes me think, let's rework how our products integrate together in the user's eyes while also pivoting the company's focus. Google was already focused on AI, and Bard integration is probably more behind the scenes and less broad. If anything, Google Assistant getting shoved onto everything a few years ago (even the wifi routers) was the classic Google+ move. And the Cloud push was bigger.
- xiphias2 4y agoEngineers would have made services smarter by themselves, if PMs wouldn't give them new ,,features'' to implement all the time. Top level goals make sense for focusing, but for generally just improving products significantly, getting rid of blockers is what's important.
- emodendroket 4y agoI have my frustrations with PMs like everyone else, and this plan does seem over corrective and destined for failure. But I don't mind having PMs, all in all. I'm not an idea guy, I'm an implementation guy.
- happymellon 4y agoPMs are not idea people either. They do not generate worth through ideas and they do not generate worth through implementations. They solicit other people's ideas, count how many votes each idea gets, and passes them to the grunts. They are middle management distilled.
- f6v 4y agoYou’re going from OP’s: “I’m not an idea person” to “All PMs aren’t idea people”. This is such a fallacy. It just bothers me how easily some people fall into the trap of wrong generalizations.
- happymellon 4y agoThe role of PM is not a creative one, the purpose is bureaucracy to improve the noise/signal ratio.
- f6v 4y agoMy experience was different. I had product managers who tried to come up with new features in a very creative way, instead of just collecting requirements from the customers and passing those to developers.
- AlbertCory 4y agore social: Vic Gundotra (the head of Google Plus) was the most hated executive in Google. There was even a popular meme of him in his sweater vest, where the caption would always be "If you don't like <x>, then you don't have to use <x>."
- dralley 4y agoThis interview of Conan, where Vic was the interviewer, was hilarious. Conan spent 20 minutes skewering him and then kicked him off the stage. I imagine a lot of Googlers enjoyed that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s
- chris_wot 4y agoThe guy was an absolute train wreck.
- AlbertCory 4y agoWow. Trying to match wits with a guy who does it for a living is never a good plan.
- klabb3 4y agoWow this is industrial strength cringe, like straight out of an episode of Silicon Valley. As a xoogler I knew about the meme and somewhat his rep, but can’t believe nobody showed this to me. Thanks! (I guess)
- aix1 4y agoThank you for sharing this gem. It cheered me up no end. (Haven't come across it before.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kyrra 4y agoThere was a scene from an internal meeting where an SVP rolled their eyes while Vic was talking about G+ and the real name policy. Even others as Vic's level were not a fan of him.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pyuser583 4y agoI mean the Microsoft playbook is to buy the tech you want. Maybe Google should try that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saurik 4y agoI mean, Google also does that a lot: Google Maps/Earth, Google Docs, Android, YouTube and Firebase (and likely a bunch of others I can't think of quickly) were all originally acquired.
- krade 4y agoAnalytics, AdSense, Doubleclick, Blogger, Google Groups, Google Voice, Picasa, AdMob, Postini, recaptcha, Nest. AdWords was stolen from Overture, after their ridiculous idea of a monthly, flat fee for a keyword failed. Afaik, Gmail is the only successful Google product that wasn't an acquisition.
- saurik 4y agoOh yeah, duh: I normally lead with AdWords--as that's like their core business ;P--as the guy who founded DoubleClick lives right around here, but I forgot! Yeah: the reality is that Google really doesn't know how to start anything itself.
- shalmanese 4y agoI can only hope this new push for the G+ization of ChatGPT will result in a repeat of the most inceliest ad of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRxKUXJj1WU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRxKUXJj1WU
- pests 4y agoThat was... something.
- cuteboy19 4y agoWe should have stopped at the 15 sec mark
- zpeti 4y agoInstead of this we got... Tinder. Not sure which is better :D
- pnt12 4y agoWow, "creeps" turning into keepers... Yikes. Would have been actually great without the "love of my life", and if the "creeps" were just "friends" or something.
- sidcool 4y agoGoogle photos was the best thing to come out of Google+
- miked85 4y agoWasn't that their Picasa acquisition?
- jmmv 4y agoI mean… there is a huge stretch between the Picasa they acquired and what Google Photos is today.
- skybrian 4y agoHangouts was pretty good too. Eventually replaced by Meet.
- aix1 4y agoI'm not sure if we used the same Hangouts, but the one I used couldn't always reliably deliver messages.
- hnav 4y ago> While Google releases research papers, OpenAI releases products—and the company's generative chat AI OpenGPT has led to a stratospheric rise for OpenAI. the author is really taking liberties here, hooking up an LLM to a chatbox is not a product, it's a technology demo
- wpietri 4y agoI mean, it's a thing they're charging money for, and people are paying it. So that sounds pretty product-like to me. But there's certainly something missing here in terms of a demonstrated value proposition here.
- chii 4y ago> But there's certainly something missing here in terms of a demonstrated value proposition here. if people paid, then that demonstrates value doesn't it?
- wpietri 4y agoDoes it? As an example, suppose I come in to your business, flash the gun in my waistband, and offer you a subscription to my protection service. You gulp nervously and pay. Has value been demonstrated? Suppose I as a software developer create tools for ransomware gangs, who pay me handsomely for each new version. Have I created value?
- dangIsABadMan 4y ago[flagged]
- zamnos 4y agoMaybe for you/us as developers. For anyone in a human to human job who's main business is writing text for other people (not just emails), it's already indispensable. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/tech/chatgpt-real-estate/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/tech/chatgpt-real-estate/inde...
- wpietri 4y agoHah! My first thought was, "Oh, is their plan this time to give the playbook to Microsoft?" I confess that the current ChatGPT hype wave leaves me feeling cold. A lot of people are obviously excited about it. But then, a lot of people have been excited about VR and blockchains, and I'm still waiting to see significant uptake. I have to wonder if this is another area where it's more sci-fi driven novelty hypnosis than the beginning of a revolution.
- carom 4y agoThe computer vision capabilities of deep learning are pretty amazing. I'm surprised they aren't being utilized more.
- Tanjreeve 4y agoThey are. Its just mostly gone into giving people cat ears on social media sites.
- happymellon 4y agoChatGPT - Write for me the next superhero script for Marvel about someone who magically has super powers. That's essentially where we are going with this.
- taylorius 4y agoThough to be fair, GPT 0.1 could probably do a plausible job of that.
- pipo234 4y agoAs a general critique on 2023 society, it's remarkable how much discourse is about AI becoming like humans, while there is little talk of how creative human roles are increasingly behaving like robots. Block buster Hollywood scripts for the most part seem to come straight out of Southpark's Computerized Automatron.
- diceduckmonk 4y ago> As for exactly what these forced AI integrations will look like, the report cites a recent YouTube feature that would let people virtually swap outfits Is that really based on generative A.I. and large language models though ?
- joe_the_user 4y agoDoes it matter? If Google can supply the features investors and consumers want without actual neural networks, it would be cheaper as well as being mildly amusing.
- Arch485 4y ago> with the CEO saying the technology would be “more profound than fire or electricity.” It's unfortunate; this statement will probably never be true due to the privatization of research and corporatization of these technologies. AI will more likely have a profoundly negative effect than a positive one.
- eximius 4y agowell, it will also probably not be true because it's a dumb statement.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoPresumably it was meant as a hyperbole.
- hot_gril 4y agoYeah. He should've just said that Bard is gonna be "thoughtful."
- seydor 4y agoHow was the research privatized? Organizations like the EU spend comparative number of billions on this research
- ddalex 4y agoA lot of the recent Google moves make more sense if you see them as something suggested or driven by an AI.... which gives credence to rumors that top execs rely heavily on AI to make decisions. Of course an AI would say that the most important thing to work on is an AI.
- bostik 4y agoI want a faster horse, or at least one that isn't saddled [sic] with the weight of all the crap hoisted on it. The winning formula may well be something like... "OK Google, now repeat that search with all the SEO spam and content marketing cruft filtered out."
- izacus 4y agoTime to bring out the popcorn and see how it implodes.
- Aissen 4y agoAnyone who has been following the last 7 Google I/Os knows that "AI" has already taken a central place in the way Google markets itself to the outside world. So this time it's not a last-minute pivot.
- dev-3892 4y agoprevious additions of ai added to google products seem to have been tempered by usefulness and tech maturity. while controversial, predictive text in gmail is actually useful, is very conservative relative to chatGPT, and has been around for quite a while. predicting what measurements you want out of analytics is handy, and gives accurate information google docs/drive uses ai to surface relevant docs based on time of day, audience, and frequency of editing. it works remarkably well. google photos is mainly an ai product, and it's all-around amazing google translate is an ai product and it's gotten pretty good over the years, though it's not without competitors google's speech recognition is very good, and built in all over google products, though I never use it b/c i don't like talking to computers .... i feel like this push is likely to lead to messiness. strategy messiness, messiness in ux, messiness in terms of new ai products not being vetted the same way they were before - allowing more inaccurate results to be presented to users. maybe users will be ok with it, idk. i've appreciated the ai enhancements to google products so far, i think they've done a good job being even-handed. I hope they manage to keep their hands on the wheel.
- bg24 4y agoThe article is a bit critical in my opinion. The fact per the article is "a directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months.". This is very different than "we have this new product called Google+, and every business must integrate with it." The first case (generative AI) is open-ended directive, asking the products to leverage generative AI". The later (Google+) case is a closed-ended instruction (integrate a solution without a clear problem).
- asah 4y agoTo be fair, Google copied this playbook whole-cloth from how Microsoft fought Netscape and survived its transition to the Internet - I was there when billg sent the famous memo. LLMs are obviously a sea-change and existential threat to search, and Google will be looking to survive the transition, even while its core ad serving/matching business has a moat, YouTube has a moat, Android and the App Store have moats, ... disclaimer: I'm long GOOG after the selloff. https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ "I want every product plan to try and go overboard on Internet features."
- cubefox 4y agoThis is a Ron Amadeo piece. Ron is infamous for his hyperbolic cynicism. His articles should always be read as opinion pieces, not as news.
- lakomen 4y agoGoogle+ was the BEST. Only idiots protested the integration with YouTube. It was when they changed it to work like Facebook and be article-centric vs. comment-centric when I started hating it. It was however the best source for news and to meet like-minded tech people. Rip G+. The best social network so far.
- stackedinserter 4y agoWhat part of it was any good? I remember terrible UI and strong connection between gmail account (which is primary email for many people), social activity and search/browse history. Google pushed something that we didn't want, at the same time killing something that many really wanted and used (Wave and Reader).
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoAm I the only one who actually liked Google+? I know that some of the features were available later in some other social networks too, but the original premise of making groups (friends, family, coworkers, random people I met I don't know where,...) and posting selective content into selective groups was great.
- anonyfox 4y agoit actually was a great idea and had a good implementation. but google seems not capable to promote/market/maintain/grow a product, especially not something targeting the younger side of the B2C market like a social network. and then the monetarization was pretty bad I guess, so it was orphaned and then killed. Now its tiktok, and these "first gen social networks" (like facebook, twitter, ...) are a boomer playground mostly, even instagram is slowly getting to that list. Aside from the tech or the medium (video vs photo vs text vs ...) I think this will happen every few years when the youth receives friend requests from tgeir parents on platform X - thats the peak/decline moment no matter how great it is.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoMost of those social networks are responsible for their own demise... Facebook was for looking at content from friends, and then it moved to mainstream media recommended content, ads, and every 20 or so posts, something from a person you actually knew. People then switched to instagram, where it was based around photos (and not "statuses"), and it was great... now it's 20 photos/videos of "suggested content" and one of someone you actually know. Social networks should stay social, not become another cable tv provider with "recomended content" and ads.
- hot_gril 4y agoG+ wasn't designed to be very usable, even ignoring the part where they had 0 users. It was a nerdy design seemingly trying to bring the fun of ACL systems to the public. Btw, one lasting disconnect between most Google SWEs and the general public: many SWEs consider YouTube a social network today.
- 4y ago
- roody15 4y agoMircosoft's implementation of ChatGPT in Edge (Dev) is weak. They have really neutered its ability and length/number of queries you can ask it. It also tries to sprinkle in some web suggestions as well. This is worrisome because I think mega corporations like Microsoft and Google want AI to just be a fun little tool for drafting emails and writing jokes and recipes. Any more powerful language constructions are too risky to their existing business models or too risky in terms of PR. People will just screenshot something the AI says philosophically and it will get retweeted and people will lose their mind. I really hope a open source workable competitor to chatGPT emerges soon.
- toddmorey 4y agoKind of maddening & ironic that we now need an open alternative to OpenAI, considering their original positioning.
- v8xi 4y agoWould love it, too. But at this stage locking it up behind a corporate paywall is probably better IMO - at least until governments around the world are prepared to address a tsunami of misinformation, fraud, and abuse that these systems enable.
- fwn 4y agoThis really does not sound like you would love it to be an open source workable competitor at all. IMO it's not the task of governments to be prepared to address misinformation. It's an individual responsibility. This requires an educated civil society with the media literacy necessary to make a democracy work in the 21st century. It's an ongoing, aspirational project. ...and we can't wait until we think we're ready.
- solarkraft 4y ago> a fear of rolling out imperfect products has meant Google locks a lot of technology away in a lab somewhere Haha, what? Almost all Google products I know feel like prototypes.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoSo just imagine how bad are the ones they don’t release.
- fumeux_fume 4y agoAfter reading the headline I thought to myself, "sounds like Ron Amadeo wrote that." Hard to find a tech journalist who has covered a company as long as he has and still takes every opportunity to lampoon them. The man is a treasure.
- dekhn 4y agoI worked for Google when the Google+ announcement went out and they tied our bonuses and other successes to social. I worked in Cloud, building a non-social product, and it was absolutely demoralizing. Guess what? Google+ crashed and burned, but now Google is doing cloud in a sort of semi-serious way, but still chasing after ML and not rewarding the hard-working cloud engineers. Really a messed up incentivization system.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoJust my personal opinion: I wish Google could make money on what I consider their very best services to be: GCP, YouTube, YouTube Music, and Play Books. I have been done using their search service for quite a while. One thing I wish they could improve is a consumer version of Google Workplace that did: 1) easily share purchased digital assets with your free Gmail account. 2) Include the most excellent Cloud Search option (without the business/enterprise pricing). 3) Include in transit encryption for everything. - Then charge about $10/month for that and they would likely pick up a lot of consumer customers.
- vlark 4y agoThis will end well.