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.

So does "Live on X."

TikTok Live, I guess? You can limit it to followers or just friends.

Signal calls within a group. Try it!

I like Signal a lot. I would much rather use Signal than Discord, or :::shudder: Facebook (because in SE Asia a lot of people think that's the internet).

There’s a difference — (essentially) everybody was on Google+ and no one is on Signal.

Maybe it's just how my friend groups have changed over the years, but I've had the opposite experience

Yeah. I know zero people from HN or, say, Reddit, and even from the tech/coding world (and past workplaces; not that they were a Signal weilding crowd even by a stretch). I have friends I can count on the fingers of one hand, at most both hands. I will never have to reach for the toes :) So if that's the opposite for you, then it might be the case. Or, honestly, even if that's not the case, it might be so. And since I don't have empirical research other than what I see "around me," I can't just say that's how it is "generally," even though that's exactly what I see :D

(PS. There was a time when WhatsApp ended up having really bad press a few years ago and I was abl to make almost 30-40 of my contacts to Signal but Sigal being Signal and its team/leadership successfully pushed them all away, a lot were crashes and what not. Even I was frustrated. It was the first time I was "using" Signal beyond "trying" it which is like an annual or half-yearly ritual now)

A majority of those of my friends and family who are on any IM platform at all are on Signal.

I don't know a single person who used Google+, unless you mean in the sense that Google forced it on everyone with a Google account.

In the days before Mastodon it was the geek/nerd social network of choice, and the majority of all the people I knew in the Linux and FOSS world were active on G+.

This is Discord for many folks. You have voice/video channels alongside your text chats. Anyone can hop on into any themed voice/video channel at any time with the added bonus of screen-sharing game content.

Anyone who consents to giving Discord their phone number, and installing literal spyware.

Funny story -- one of the first few days of the internal launch, a colleague didn't know what the feature was and clicked it on Sergey's page one night. Suddenly was face to face with Sergey at home. And he wasn't the only one, from what I remember.

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.

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 missed out on this drama, is there an article digging into it somewhere?

So what's all this wave about Google Wave?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

Google Wave, was ahead of its time!

We used it HEAVILY at work (IT), then all the sudden--boom! It was not going to be developed any more. I still don't get it. Google, with all their resources couldn't support this?

Ok, instead of getting upset (AGAIN!), I'm just going to go back to the initial post from 16 years ago. Perhaps reading the comments might calm me down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892

I worked on one of the launch widgets...to make a phone call from inside a wave...it was such a bad idea and surprising to no one, it was quickly abused.

"A new direction for the Sydney office"

I loved Google Wave. The first time I used it, I said out loud, "Wow, this really has possibilities."

The double-whammy of them killing Reader and Wave was super deflating when it came to my view of Google as a company.

Wave was effectively M365 SharePoint with more collaborative features?

From what I remember, it was more like Slack on crack, with tree-style nesting, and tons of integration so you could do something like create a document and collaboratively edit it within a chat.

I remember signing up but there was no way for me to invite co-workers! I thought it looked amazing but getting others to use it would've required an alpha invite or something, can't remember the details.

I also think it would've been great if Google+ had leveraged Google Reader and its sharing functionality.

"Google Reader had to die for Google+ to live" (urs and larry said something like this)

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.

They didn't just 'fumble the integration', it wrecked the comment section and people LOST ACCOUNTS over it

"Use real name? Y/N - N. Okay, we'll ask you again later"

If you haven't seen it, this doc: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/237221/ISM7505/10-Why-Google-... predated Google+ and I think it inspired many of the features. It's dated now, but when it was first shared internally, many Googlers thought it was a great idea. It's just too bad that the execs swallowed the emerald sea kool-aid and tried to reorganize the company (including major bonuses) around it. At the time, many of us wanted Google to go all-in in cloud, and instead, they focused on Google+ while applying stupid rules around user names. They basically strangled the baby in the bed with bad decisions. Only after finally killing that could they focus on cloud, and continue to develop youtube as their main social network. That cost the company as both AWS and MSFT were heavily building out their cloud systems, so google lost all its advantages.

I've never before or after worked at a company that made so many dumb decisions in such a short time. It felt like a cult, while the rest of us were trying to pull Larry back into the real world.

They also opened it to the public too late.