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Does anybody remember Google People
- martimarkov 3y agoIt seems some ppl were able to access it in 2019. Is there a way to still access it? I seemed to have completely missed this
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
- andyjohnson0 3y agoQntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes, who writes science fiction. So I'm pretty sure this is fiction in the form of fake tweets, and that Google People didn't ever exist. Their book There Is No Antimemetics Division is pretty good but also a bit disturbing (in a good way).
- proto_lambda 3y agoThe tweets are real, and a couple people joined in on the collaborative fiction at the time.
- maleldil 3y agoThis story also appears in _Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories_, a brilliant collection of short stories. Anything by Qntm is awesome, to be honest. _Antimemetics_ is my favourite.
- Aachen 3y agoJust because they're a fiction author doesn't mean everything on their site is fiction. See the page called gay (I remember that link from reading it a decade ago, interestingly enough) about database normalisation, or the things mentioned in a top-level comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37725082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37725082
- Aachen 3y agoSee the breadcrumbs at the top or the "go back to <parent category>" at the bottom. It's sorted under fiction...
- mike31fr 3y agoUnrelated: does anybody remember Google Wave that was supposed to replace the Gmail experience?
- mikecoles 3y agoIt was quite an enjoyable product to use.
- op00to 3y agoGoogle Docs is where that technology ended up.
- girishso 3y agoIt was dead on arrival because of the “artificial” scarcity of accounts, you needed to be invited to create your account. Google assumed they can recreate the Gmail invites craze.
- blfr 3y agoYes, I miss its threaded structure and wish there was something like this for projects still.
- ahmadmijot 3y agoYes. Back then during forum era we tried to use Google Wave to discuss our project (music collaboration). it had a really nice way to do collab.
- d3w4s9 3y agoI thought it was the predecessor of Slack/Teams, since you can send messages/files and do all those stuff on the same page. Too bad they didn't pitch it as an enterprise product. They aimed it at consumers but couldn't find a use case, and then shut it down. (...If my memory serves me right)
- mpixel 3y agoIt had multiple angles it could succeed on really. It had two major issues. The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though. The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at. You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on. You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function. You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days. And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.
- j16sdiz 3y agoThis is fiction, in case you are wondering. The breadcrumb reads "Things Of Interest >> Fiction >> Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories >> cripes does anybody remember Google People" "Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories" is one of his book available on Amazon.
- BenoitP 3y agoI loved his antimemetics series, which you can buy a book of on Amazon: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
- op00to 3y agoDoes anybody remember why this page keeps reloading and crashing my mobile browser?
- JW_00000 3y agoIt contains 100s of Twitter embeds.
- op00to 3y agoOh god.
- Aachen 3y agoMy system has twitter blocked by hostname, it couldn't load a twitter resource if I tried. The page loaded fast for me, so those "quotes", if that's what they are, are just text on the page and not embeds Edit: huh you're not alone though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37724652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37724652 And checking a traffic capture, indeed it shows platform.twitter.com being loaded and blocked. Wtf is it trying to load (to the point of crashing browsers) if not the twitter posts?!
- 5- 3y agoall the twitter crap makes ios safari crash. looks like the author put up a cleaned up version, linked (but good luck clicking the link): https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
- op00to 3y agoWorks for me, glad I got to read it!
- wildrhythms 3y agoI think 'creepypasta' like this is the lowest hanging fruit of fiction writing. Is it just me?
- serf 3y agoI don't think you're wrong, and I got the same feeling while watching the 'found footage' style of horror movie ; Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, etc. It feels like weak writing to fall back into a narrative first-person account for the entirety, but I can't place my finger on why. Maybe it just seems like it's the easiest 'fiction' to write because it is so predicated on the fantasy being narrated by a perspective that is entrenched and anchored in a normal reality while witnessing something extraordinary? Cloverfield is essentially constructed by the acting prompt : "Pretend you're a bystander seeing not-Godzilla, react for the camera!".
- michelledepeil 3y agoI disagree, because I believe it's quite difficult to write in that uncanny valley of particularly creepy texts, without showing any matching creepy imagery.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- silveraxe93 3y agoIf by lowest hanging fruit, you mean in the original sense of: Equally as tasty as higher hanging fruit, but easy to pick because it hasn't been relentlessly exploited yet. Then yeah, I agree.
- john-radio 3y agoIf you think it looks so easy, I urge you to start writing it! It's one of my favorite genres of fiction and I think that effective horror can be harder to write than it might seem.
- op00to 3y agoI dunno. I have memories of my grandma trading around huge plastic bags full of romance paperbacks with her old lady friends. The sheer volume makes me wonder how they could all be unique books!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 3y agoI remember it. Wasn't it meant to challenge linkedin? I think the Shazaam movie tie in killed it. They really jumped the shark by using Sinbad as a tech spokesperson.
- mkl95 3y ago> it existed for like fifteen minutes between Orkut but before Google+, and had the wildest features like your profile image had to be smiling. "No, wider," it would say. Sometimes it would just accept a frowning image and modify it to be smiling Actually, that was Google Folks. It was followed by Google People which was then renamed to Google Town. They shared bleeding edge features such as instant messaging and videotelephony.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI think my favourite phase of that journey was when they grew to Google City and got sued by then-Maxis. At least the whole legal kerfuffle brought us Sim Google (which I have an unopened copy of!)
- testplzignore 3y agoThe functionality eventually made its way into Google Pay. No, not that Google Pay, the other one. No, not that one either, the other one!
- mkl95 3y agoMy personal favorite was this weird spinoff called Google Coin. The app made random metallic sounds and the loading animation was a spinning coin. Too bad it was cancelled after three months.
- ipsin 3y agoWe're at the point where "read my emails and generate a bunch of crazy content" is more a business proposal than a joke.
- FridgeSeal 3y agoI really dig Qntm’s stuff, always such fun and interesting stories.
- nickcw 3y agoThat was very funny (read to the end!). I've read most of qntm's books [1] and enjoyed them greatly. See also hatetris [2] and absurdle [3]. Also qntm invented base32768 [4] encoding which is in use by many happy rclone users to store long encrypted file names more efficiently on storage systems which are based in UTF-16 (eg OneDrive, Dropbox, Box). [1] https://qntm.org/fiction https://qntm.org/fiction [2] https://qntm.org/hatetris https://qntm.org/hatetris [3] https://qntm.org/absurdle https://qntm.org/absurdle [4] https://github.com/qntm/base32768 https://github.com/qntm/base32768
- donatj 3y agoMaybe I am alone, but I find fake stories like this that act to dirty histories less entertaining and more just irritating when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will likely be left with vague recollections of this story and my brain won’t have adequately marked the memories as fiction. It plays on the cheap shock value of starting off sounding entirely plausible, and I can see people falling for it here ITT. I don't like it.
- NoraCodes 3y agoPeople are allowed to write fiction. The page is clearly labelled as such (the fourth word on the page is "fiction"!) and qntm is a relatively well-known fiction author. If anything, posting it to HN is the issue.
- amptorn 3y agoIs fiction not allowed on HN?
- op00to 3y agoOnly hard sci-fi.
- dang 3y agoIt's not disallowed, but it has never been common or very popular here.
- dredmorbius 3y agoI'd thought that Usula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" might have been an exception, but though it's had nine submissions, it's only ever earned single-digit votes, and a single comment: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=The%20Ones%20who%20Walk%20Away%20from%20Omelas&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Far more success in comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=The%20Ones%20who%20Walk%20Away%20from%20Omelas&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> (I thought I might have first encountered it here, though it might have appeared elsewhere.) Harlan Ellison's "I have no mouth and I must scream" has had some success: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22I%20have%20no%20mouth%20and%20I%20must%20scream%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Marshall Brain's "Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future" (2003) was what I'd had in mind when finding the Ellison story, but it's also had little success: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Manna%3A%20Two%20views%20of%20Humanity%27s%20future%2C%20Marshall%20Brain&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Cory Doctorow's Little Brother by comparison did well: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390441>. Though still hardly spectacularly. E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" has seen both multiple submissions and comparatively decent discussion: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22The%20Machine%20Stops%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> (Searching specifically for fiction is something of a challenge, I'm trying a few different queries as they occur to me.) I suspect both length and copyright limitations work against fiction submissions generally.
- fiforpg 3y agoIt turned out to be a nice little piece of fiction, thanks for posting! From comments in this thread I learn that it is written in the style called creepypasta. Not entirely familiar with the culture, but it felt similar to some indie horror games, such as those Markiplier plays in his YT series "3 scary games".