Comment by refulgentis
6 months ago
Okay.
Pretending you said something conversational, like: "is that quote accurate in this case? The API may have literally enabled the creation of video conferencing. I, for one, remember we didn't used to have it."
I see.
So your contention is:
- if anyone thinks a statsd web API, hidden in Chrome, available only to Google websites is worth questioning
- they're insufficiently impressed by video conferencing existing
If I have that right:
I'm not sure those two things are actually related.
If you worked at Google, I'm very intrigued by the idea we can only collect metrics via client side web API for statsd, available only to Google domains.
If you work in software, I'm extremely intrigued by the idea video conferencing wouldn't exist without client site web API for statsd, available only to Google domains.
If you have more details on either, please, do share
Scoping the data collection to Google domains is a reasonable security measure because you don't want to leak it to everybody. And in general, Google does operate under the security model that if you trust them to drop a binary on your machine that provides a security sandbox (i.e. the browser), you trust them with your data because from that vantage point, they could be exfiltrating your bank account if they wanted to be.
But yes, I don't doubt that the data collection was pretty vital for getting Hangouts to the point it got to. And I do strongly suspect that it got us to browser-based video conferencing sooner than we would have been otherwise; the data collected got fed into the eventual standards that enable video conferencing in browsers today.
"Could not have" is too strong, but I think "could not have this soon" might be quite true. There was an explosion of successful technologies in a brief amount of time that were enabled by Google and other online service providers doing big data collection to solve some problems that had dogged academic research for decades.
To be more clear:
After your infelicitous contribution, you were politely invited to consider _a client side web API only on Google domains for CPU metrics_ isn't necessary for _collecting client metrics_.
To be perfectly clear: they're orthogonal. Completely unrelated.
For some reason, you instead read it as an invitation to continue fantasizing about WebRTC failing to exist without it
What would the alternative be?
(Worth noting: Google Hangouts predates WebRTC. I think a case can be made that big data collection of real users machine performance in the real world was instrumental for hammering out the last mile issues in Hangouts, which informed WebRTC's design. I'm sure we would have gotten there eventually, my contention is it would have taken longer without concrete metrics about performance).
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