Does anybody remember Google People

[j16sdiz]

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]

I loved his antimemetics series, which you can buy a book of on Amazon:

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

[nickcw]

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

[mike31fr]

Unrelated: does anybody remember Google Wave that was supposed to replace the Gmail experience?

[eszed]

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.

[Chatting]

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

[d3w4s9]

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)

[girishso]

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.

[xnx]

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).

[ahmadmijot]

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]

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).

[op00to]

Google Docs is where that technology ended up.

[donatj]

My coworkers and I played with it for a day or two. We never really figured out what you would use it for.

[blfr]

Yes, I miss its threaded structure and wish there was something like this for projects still.

[mikecoles]

It was quite an enjoyable product to use.

[mkl95]

> 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]

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!)

[testplzignore]

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!

[op00to]

Does anybody remember why this page keeps reloading and crashing my mobile browser?

[JW_00000]

It contains 100s of Twitter embeds.

[ipsin]

We're at the point where "read my emails and generate a bunch of crazy content" is more a business proposal than a joke.

[sandworm101]

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.

[wildrhythms]

I think 'creepypasta' like this is the lowest hanging fruit of fiction writing. Is it just me?

[michelledepeil]

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.

[john-radio]

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.

[silveraxe93]

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.

[serf]

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!".

[op00to]

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!

[5-]

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]

Works for me, glad I got to read it!

[donatj]

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.

[nomilk]

> 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]

I hope it gets picked up by OpenAI. I really really hope I can ask ChatGPT about Google Person some day.

[NoraCodes]

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.

[tuatoru]

> .. when I realize “Oh, I am being lied to, thanks.” The worst is that years from now I will ...

have well-developed critical thinking/reading skill and recognize AI generated pasta more easily thanks to the training.

[FridgeSeal]

I really dig Qntm’s stuff, always such fun and interesting stories.

[martimarkov]

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

[andyjohnson0]

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]

See the breadcrumbs at the top or the "go back to <parent category>" at the bottom. It's sorted under fiction...

[fiforpg]

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".