Comment by voxleone
6 hours ago
Google+ had some clever ideas: Circles, Hangouts, integration with Google's ecosystem, etc. But it was designed from a top-down product strategy. Google didn't necessarily make a mistake by trying Google+, but made a mistake by failing to recognize that social graphs are infrastructure; treating social networking as a new product to bolt onto Google, rather than recognizing that Orkut already contained the social graph and behavioral lessons Google needed.
I _really_ liked the "hangout" idea of Google+. Where you could just start a video call and whoever among your friends wanted to join, could, without having to accept or reject an actual invitation to them specifically. I could work on a project out in the garage and people could hop in and make small talk while I was doing stuff. It was great.
It doesn't feel like there is a great modern alternative to this.
Discord VC works like this
Yep, this is the exact use case that voice channels are used for in the community-oriented Discord servers I'm in. With the important note that voice channels support not just voice but video, multi-person screensharing, text chat, and even built-in games, though I've never actually seen the last of those get used in practice. Voice channels are just passively there in the channel sidebar with a list of people currently hanging out there, and you can drop in and drop out as you like. You can also send individual invites to join you in VC to server members.
TikTok Live, I guess? You can limit it to followers or just friends.
[dead]
Then they finally shut the thing down just in time to make sure that it couldn't attract any kind of exodus of unhappy users from Twitter or Facebook.
Google Wave was so cool prior to trying to make it a social network.
I don’t think we ever tried to make wave a social network.
So what's all this wave about Google Wave?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug
Might’ve fared better if they didn’t alienate the entire company who could have helped them pre-launch, or come in to help after the release flopped.
I also think it would've been great if Google+ had leveraged Google Reader and its sharing functionality.
True. Google also had Youtube, but it managed to completely fumble the integration with Google+ and generate backlash in the process.
...and before that they also fucked up by trying to leverage Gmail into Google Buzz.