[HN Gopher] Does anybody remember Google People
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Does anybody remember Google People
Author : prakhar897
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-10-01 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (qntm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (qntm.org)
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I think 'creepypasta' like this is the lowest hanging fruit of
| fiction writing. Is it just me?
| op00to wrote:
| I 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!
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| If 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.
| michelledepeil wrote:
| I 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]
| john-radio wrote:
| If 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.
| serf wrote:
| I 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!".
| [deleted]
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I 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.
| donatj wrote:
| Maybe 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 wrote:
| People 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 wrote:
| Is fiction not allowed on HN?
| op00to wrote:
| Only hard sci-fi.
| dang wrote:
| It's not disallowed, but it has never been common or very
| popular here.
| nomilk wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You articulated something I've been aware of but hadn't put
| into words.
|
| It's the primary reason I stopped reading/watching all news.
| op00to wrote:
| I hope it gets picked up by OpenAI. I really really hope I can
| ask ChatGPT about Google Person some day.
| mkl95 wrote:
| > 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.
| testplzignore wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| My 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I 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!)
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I really dig Qntm's stuff, always such fun and interesting
| stories.
| fiforpg wrote:
| It 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".
| nickcw wrote:
| That 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
|
| [2] https://qntm.org/hatetris
|
| [3] https://qntm.org/absurdle
|
| [4] https://github.com/qntm/base32768
| martimarkov wrote:
| It 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
| Aachen wrote:
| See the breadcrumbs at the top or the "go back to <parent
| category>" at the bottom. It's sorted under fiction...
| wetpaws wrote:
| [dead]
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Qntm 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).
| Aachen wrote:
| Just 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
| proto_lambda wrote:
| The tweets are real, and a couple people joined in on the
| collaborative fiction at the time.
| maleldil wrote:
| This 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.
| mike31fr wrote:
| Unrelated: does anybody remember Google Wave that was supposed to
| replace the Gmail experience?
| girishso wrote:
| It 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.
| donatj wrote:
| My coworkers and I played with it for a day or two. We never
| really figured out what you would use it for.
| blfr wrote:
| Yes, I miss its threaded structure and wish there was something
| like this for projects still.
| Chatting wrote:
| FWIW, they donated the project to the Apache Foundation, so it
| is open source (albeit unmaintained).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
|
| https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave
| ahmadmijot wrote:
| Yes. 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.
| matchamatcha wrote:
| I was doing a IT student job in high school and our team used
| it for a while, it felt like a mixture of instant messing and
| posting on web forums. My impression was, that it looked cool,
| but did not add much in comparison (iirc it also had
| collaborative editing? That was definitely cool).
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| I 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)
| wombat-man wrote:
| My classmates and I tried to find something useful to do with
| it. It was very fun but we didn't really find a great reason
| to use it.
| mpixel wrote:
| It 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.
| happymellon wrote:
| > note taking ... spreadsheet ... slack replacement
|
| Sounds like Teams, but without anyone complaining about
| having to use it.
| eszed wrote:
| I used it for a couple of theatre projects, and thought it was
| _great_. The multi-media sharing was like nothing else at the
| time, and the threaded discussions worked well. I don 't
| remember the details, but I think we had to stop because
| everyone I was working with had collectively run out of invites
| and Google wouldn't give us any more. (And by "wouldn't" I mean
| "completely ignored emails to their 'user feedback' address",
| which seemed to be the only way to contact support for the
| project.) I was, and still slightly am, disappointed that it
| went away.
|
| A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus
| group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project.
| We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different
| tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or
| use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them
| that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with
| blank looks.
|
| There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme
| youthfulness.
| rrdharan wrote:
| I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard
| to believe.
|
| Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team
| was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the
| connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired
| by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by
| Google).
|
| What year was this focus group?
| xnx wrote:
| Google Wave was too far ahead of its time. Even now, products
| are just starting to pivot away from the paper-centric view of
| documents and take baby steps toward living document
| collaboration (intersection of multi-player documents and
| chat/comments).
| op00to wrote:
| Google Docs is where that technology ended up.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I loved his antimemetics series, which you can buy a book of on
| Amazon:
|
| https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| ipsin wrote:
| We're at the point where "read my emails and generate a bunch of
| crazy content" is more a business proposal than a joke.
| op00to wrote:
| Does anybody remember why this page keeps reloading and crashing
| my mobile browser?
| JW_00000 wrote:
| It contains 100s of Twitter embeds.
| op00to wrote:
| Oh god.
| Aachen wrote:
| My 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 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- wrote:
| all 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
| op00to wrote:
| Works for me, glad I got to read it!
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(page generated 2023-10-01 23:02 UTC)