[twobitshifter]

1. Google had recently exploited their home page to push chrome browser successfully altering the browser market. They pushed anyone visiting Google to chrome with a popup on the home page. The same opportunity was there for G+, but with updates from friends.

2. Everyone already had a Google account and many millennials were using Google Talk at the time. It appeared Google could undermine the network effects.

3. The UI of G+ appeared better

4. Facebook had released the newsfeed otherwise known as ‘stalker mode’ at the time and people recoiled at the idea of broadcasting their every action to every acquaintance. The circles idea was a way of providing both privacy and the ability to broadcast widely when needed.

5. Google had tons of money and devoted their world class highly paid genius employees to building a social network.

You can see parallels to each of these in AI now. Their pre existing index of all the world’s information, their existing search engine that you can easily pop an LLM in, the huge lead in cash, etc. They are in a great position but don’t underestimate their ability to waste it.

[llbbdd]

Google definitely benefited from being able to push Chrome on the homepage, but it was also a bit of a layup given every other browser completely sucked at the time. Chrome said that browsing the Internet didn't have to be slow and caught MS+Mozilla with their pants down. Safari is still working on pulling theirs back up.

[ch_sm]

> Safari is still working on pulling theirs back up.

not sure about this take, given that chrome‘s rendering engine was famously based on Safari‘s - WebKit - before they forked it (Blink). V8 was indeed faster than Safari‘s JS engine at the time. However, today, Safari is objectively faster in both rendering (WK) and JS performance (JSCore).

[cft]

I'm with you on this. I've been an early paid Antigravity IDE user. Their recent silent rug pull on quotas, where without any warning you get rate-limited for 5 days in the middle of code refactoring, enrages users, not simply making them unsatisfied with the product. It actually makes you hate the evil company.