Seven Developers - a non technical founder's search the One - <AUTHOR> http://www.ankursingla.com/2011/06/11/7-developer-maaf-a-single-non-technical-founders-search-for-a-good-tech-guy/

<comment><USER2> That's an insane ride. Bad luck is one possibility, but 6 developers... Jeez, that almost has to be something being done wrong. He does admit at one point that he wasn't doing enough to try to keep good talent.

Programmers aren't really primadonnas, but they will leave if they don't think they are being treated right or fairly. (That isn't to say they ARE being treated poorly, jst that they think they are.)

For instance, I left my last job after 2 bad raises and a vague promise that salaries would be 'fixed' sometime later in the year. I was told that if I was 'really serious' I should see my boss's boss about it. I chose the other direction. And I make a lot more money now.

To be fair, I loved my job in both companies. It was only the unfair salary policy that drove me away. Now that company is forced to try to hire someone as good as me for less than they are worth, or pay them what they could have paid me but without my 5 years of experience with their systems. It's lose- lose for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> The site covered a lot but there were a few things I think it failed to cover in all this hunting for a cofounder. What value was he bringing to the table beyond the idea and outsourcing for those he was willing to vest as a true cofounder or even early engineer with or without salary. The biggest thing most tech guys want is a competent cofounder. While he did mention he tried to pick up some technical stuff, there was no mention of any other businesses skills whatsoever i.e. legal, hr, marketing/distribution, etc etc etc... about the only thing he mostly proved is he can't retain talent so hiring and recruiting is probably not one of his strong suit.

There's also no talks about the process to which he determines how the product works (essentially product management, UX, etc..) for all the stuff he's outsourcing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would love to hear experiences about outsourcing from other non-tech guys. I have been debating as I wait for a couple developers I know to leave their jobs and come on in a more full time capacity.</comment>


Where are the data brokers? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/data-brokers-senate-hearing-privacy.html <comment><USER2> I suspect the lack of attention on these companies comes from politicians preferring to publicly flog companies with brand recognition. Voters pay a lot more attention that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Much of the initial attention does not come from politicians. It comes from whistle blowers and journalists.

<comment><USER2> Good point, but same logic applies to journalists - they're just seeking clicks instead of votes. A story about Facebook gets peoples' attention more than one about Exactis.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/08/02/google-plus-history/ <comment><USER3> I believe Google+ failed simply because it was Google. Had it had any kind of a human, friendly, or small startup, perhaps people might have given it a try.

People don't want Google integrated with their YouTube account, coupled with their Facebook pages, coupled with their email, coupled with their contacts, and on-and on it goes with Google. No respect for separation of the information.

I darned sure didn't like it when Google took over my YouTube experience. Now I have pray that I don't accidentally access a sexy YouTube video with the computer logged into my wife's account. Now, all of my previous viewing will be highlighter all over her YouTube page the next time she logs in.

These guys are really stupid in trying to unify every internet experience we have all into one nosy mother-in-law. It's the essence of evil they promised not to become a part of.

<comment><USER4> Google did manage to strike the worst possible balance of size and network effects. Facebook was good because everyone was on Facebook - Google+ was bad because everything _else_ was on Google.

The positive network effect of social media is that it helps you find everyone you want to talk to. The negative effect is that it denies you the ability to compartmentalize your behavior - to talk about indie bands on Pitchfork, and then secretly enjoy Nirvana on Youtube.

Google+ didn't have any active users, so it lost the positive network effect, but it was incredibly aggressive about forcing you to use it in every place possible (and with more sharing than you wanted). The result was that they _only_ got a loss of compartmentalization, without any actual social benefit.

<comment><USER5> Thank you. That's an _excellent_ expression of Google's negative value proposition IMO as a social network.

I actually _somewhat_ like G+. But _because Google has so much of the rest of my life_ , I'm:

1\. Not willing to participate on G+ as "me" under a real name.

2\. I'm going to withdraw as much _other_ content from G+ as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I honestly think that some areas of social networking phenomena are dying and Google+ came on board at the beginning of the end. From my observation, Facebook is dying a slow death. I see most of my Facebook "friends" aren't posting anything anymore and just browse. Some only post check-ins when they travel, otherwise everything is deadly silent. I have my Facebook disabled most of the time, but every once in a while i login to see what's going on with some folks across the pond and all I see is everyone reposting news. Facebook has become a boring place to read quirky news and get on with the rest of your day. And when discussing this with some friends who were at some point active on Facebook I consistently get the same "there is nothing going on it" response. I can't imagine that this will continue for much longer.

Frankly, another big reason G+ failed is because most people using Facebook didn't need anything else. Google essentially tried to fix a problem that wasn't even a problem. Yes, Facebookers complained about privacy concerns, but those who did were likely not even 2% of the entire user base.

<comment><USER7> Facebook did great at bringing people together online, but once we were online together, we had no clue what to do. Meetup is the opposite, encouraging you to meet offline and I think that's the future of social networking.

<comment><USER8> Facebook actually solves that quite well - that is my primary use of Facebook: to schedule and Rsvp events with friends. One of the key reasons it works so well for that is that it's ubiquitous (something that meetup is not)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google lost the plot with G+. The reason that Google is where it is is because it made things people wanted to use, they _naturally_ came to use these things.

Around this time Google just simply _forgot_ this, killed reader, killed ig, killed labs, and then tried to herd people into using an inferior social network, then tried to shove all of google's other products into this terrible product nobody wanted to use.

This is different than what happened during the search engine wars, where google's product was simply _better_ than all the others and that's why people used it.

<comment><USER10> People really wanted Facebook the product without Facebook the company. G+ had a golden opportunity, and they blew it.

<comment><USER11> I assure you, that nobody outside our bubble ever thought something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think where G+ really missed a trick was in not publishing a write-API. They were clearly trying to force people away from FB, but an open API would have allowed for a smoother migration over time. Without automation, most people simply couldn't be bothered to post the same thing twice. Third-party twitter clients, which were being shafted around the same time, would have jumped on it.

This mistake, coupled with a double-edged focus on privacy (as people shared with less friends, others wouldn't see much content) and their disastrous Real Name idiocy, was their undoing - G+ became a me-too.

<comment><USER11> You do not want to be the service people just dump their stuff to. Google tried that with Buzz and in failed even more horribly than +.

What you could do is be the service people use to write to other services and then gradually lock them out. Unfortunately the fight you have to take on against the platform you are cannibalizing is really something a few fast moving guys, who fly under the radar and have nothing to show for anyway, can do for a few months, but nothing a Google scale corporation can do.

<comment><USER12> Realistically though, _nobody_ can now beat facebook at network effects, not big nor small. And that was already the case when G+ was launched. The best you can do is to allow people to try out your system with little investment, and then slowly persuade them to prefer it to the old system.

Buzz failed for very different causes: it was a twitter clone that offered no additional functionality and even compromised your gmail privacy.

<comment><USER13> Facebook has too much network effect - if you don't want to share your life with your parents you need to be on a platform they aren't.

In my case I never friended my parents on FB, and keep G+ for family - <USER2> means I don't share things with the wrong group.

<comment><USER14> For normal people. sharing their lives with loved ones is a positive. Creating a _social_ network for antisocial people makes no sense.

<comment><USER15> You never share some things only with certain groups of people, because of relevance or intimacy ?

<comment><USER14> I don't think you understood the comment I was replying to, which advocated going to a totally different platform from the one your parents use in order to not share your life with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lots of people throw out technical or social reasons for G+ failing, but I'd point to the factor that tends to be one of the most important make-it-or- break-it variables for any new venture's success (according to Bill Gross[1] anyway): timing.

If G+ had been released pre-Facebook (or at least earlier in Facebook's history) I doubt any of those technical points would have been show stoppers. G+ has/had a lot of little advantages over competitors, but none large enough to bring about the mass migration that G+ so desperately needed. With _good_ timing, none of the little annoyances or problems with G+ would have likely mattered. Good product; unfortunate timing - at least with respect to the fundamental product being offered.

[1] [http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reaso...](http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed/transcript?language=en)

<comment><USER17> Actually I think G+'s timing was just fine. Sure, earlier would have been better, but in 2011 a lot of people were very ready for an alternative to Facebook.

Google did an excellent job of targeting influencers and creating a wonderful experience for a few million people in the first several weeks of the "closed" beta. While most of the advantages were indeed small, there was one very big carrot: the possibility of improving your SEO via G+. [Of course a lot of people don't care about this, but they influencers they were talking about disproportionately do.] Facebook got caught somewhat flat-footed; Zuck threw everybody into lockdown mode for a few months, and when they surfaced, the general reaction "this is the best you can do?"

So while I agree that the technical issues weren't a major reason (Hangouts might have been janky but Facebook didn't have anything remotely comparable), I really do think it was the social stuff that killed them.

\- the nymwars turned off a lot of their most enthusiastic early supporters, and turned the overall energy negative at a crucial time

\- the failure to create a developer ecosystem (due to the lack of a write API) left them unable to leverage their deep pockets for a longer-term war of attrition against Facebook

<comment><USER5> Google were _tremendously_ effective at killing off early enthusiasm.

Nymwars. Relevance. Hinky UI (and still). Lack of search. Poor formatting options (and still almost wholly neglected.) Forced integration. Too many SEO types.

Much of it screams "this sovles Google's problems, not yours."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hindsight is 20-20, of course. But in this case, _foresight_ was 20-20: G+ has failed in almost exactly the way that I (and everybody I was talking to at the time) expected it to. For me, the saddest thing about G+'s failure has been its plodding inevitability.

It would be really interesting to see a more in-depth analysis of how this happened. It didn't happen because the folks at Google are stupid: from top to bottom, they are wicked smart. So how did such a mass delusion take hold? I'd be genuinely interested in hearing from people who expected G+ to succeed, and _why_ they had this expectation, and how its failure has changed their perceptions.

<comment><USER19> I've seen similar patterns elsewhere: company X brings on powerful, smart, and egotistical person Y, who browbeats others into believing their pet project Z has to be top priority; those who disagree with Y leave Y's team (or perhaps leave X altogether); groupthink takes hold, and this perception of priority becomes reality; groupthink mutates into sunk cost fallacy to convince everyone to keep going.

This process is often reinforced with incentive structures:

\- raised salaries for everyone working on Z; \- higher performance bonuses offered to top performers on Z; \- greater social cachet for those working on Z (more mentions in Q&A sessions, presentations, etc.; more marketing punch; more opportunities for advancement; air of secrecy; etc.)

Once the incentive structures take hold, even smarter employees have rational reasons to perpetuate Z.

<comment><USER20> Understood, but its not that google went social that was a problem, it was that they had no vision about how to do it in the first place. They perfectly executed their vision to create a social network, but people already had that.

It has little to do with egos and everything to do with bad planning and a panicked knee-jerk response to the crisis at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What killed G+ for me was how hard they made it to actually read anything. Originally it was okay, but as time progressed they favoured images over text, and then kept spreading text out further and further apart. I took a screenshot at one point where I highlighted in yellow the actual readable content, making up a tiny proportion of the page: [http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png](http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png)

Of course they had years of experience in helping people read content with Google Reader, so that had to be shut down and lessons ignored. Then they made sure there was no API, or even RSS feeds, so no one else could make a more efficient reader either.

Or in other words, did anyone at Google actually try using their product? (I seem to say that a lot about different Google products.)

<comment><USER22> I've been saying the same thing for ages... there even was a hashtag around at the time in 2012 if I recall... #waronwords

Google could never decide if they wanted to G+ to basically be Instagram (not surprising given Horowitz' Yahoo/flickr background), or if there was something to be done along the Interest Graph angle a la Reader / HN / Reddit / asf. The info density for the latter has always been terrible on G+, not to speak of various other iniquities that text-heavy posts (or post shares) had to endure for years, like much smaller images in the stream for the longest time.

Really they should have just split these two use cases into either two separate apps (maybe to prescient for 2011), or at least provided alternative UI views. Of course, a solid API including Write could have solved it as well as you alluded to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think where Google could build momentum is to try to go for a _private_ ecosystem where everything you store (photos, notes, etc.) would be private. The facebook opposite.

That would be a solid alternative to Apple's ecosystem and you would see the benefits of going from Facebook to Google.

Google has a much better chance of competing against Apple's photo/notes/cloud services than it would beating Facebook. Also I believe there is going to be a tendency in the next few years to move out of Facebook because of the social network effect people want to get out of.

Google would be the only solid candidate for anyone not wanting to jump into Apple's products.

<comment><USER11> Google tried something like that. The whole circle idea was about control for the user of who he shares stuff what content with.

Facebook cannot be killed with something so similar to Facebook like Google+, much like Google cannot be killed with something like Bing. They are at a local maximum amassing lock-in and buying up every improvement on the status quo.

What might ultimately kill them is either EU regulation, a big Chinese domestic market or some jump in technology or business model. The end result might again look very similar to what we have now. I think in the beginning it would start out as something like Whatsapp or Siri. It could be something that takes over or kills advertisement completely like Amazons various tries to create a platform for all online commerce.

<comment><USER24> Whatsapp was a good strategic investment. Most of my friends spend more time on Whatsapp then facebook.

<comment><USER11> That is why I said something like Whatsapp could have been a potential Facebook killer. Imagine them gaining users quicker than FB - what they did - and carefully branching out to take usage time away from FB - what you described.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've never seen this mentioned so I'm doing to mention it. I suspect Google+, and the cannibalizing of other projects, was directed by Page. He became CEO in April 2011. G+ launched in late June 2011. April-May-June is about 90 days. From the article:

> The massive Google+ launch effort had all the hallmarks of a technology > corporation: a code name ("Emerald Sea"), __an artificial timeline (100 days > to launch!) __, a dedicated secret building ( __with the CEO relocated there > __) and a full PR blitz once completed.

The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the driving force behind this. The article says:

> "Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill > us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive. "I am > pretty sure Vic managed to frighten Larry into action. And voila: Google+ > was born."

But for what actually happened to have happened, Page had to have bought into the idea independently (assuming he is independent). Every article I've seen about G+'s failure fails to mention anything about Page's role - this article goes _out of its way_ in this strange way to try to say Page was just 'whispered to too much'.

> By early 2014, less than three years after its big launch, the Google+ team > had moved out of its coveted building to a spot on campus further from Page. > Gundotra announced his departure from the company that April — in a Google+ > post, of course — to pursue "a new journey."

The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014. Evidence that Page was the driving force, not Vic.

This was an organization-centric article, but I wish it had mentioned the other potential causes for G+'s failure, such as being invite-only during the media attention, and the rude forcing of people over from other platforms (Reader, YouTube, Maps, business listings, etc).

<comment><USER26> > The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the > driving force behind this.

No, that reads as Vic Gundotra being the driving force behind this and Page buying in fully. If Page was the driving force, Gundotra would have put his office by Page's.

> Page had to have bought into the idea independently (assuming he is > independent).

I don't think Page was independent. He was a brand new (in some sense) CEO with a lot to prove to shareholders and he had to make a big splash. Although his leadership has improved and he clearly came back to power with a vision to unify Google's services, he still had a vibe of being a bit unsure.

My perception of the management at Google is that they mostly come from the engineering side and don't typically do things like overhype themselves or their projects—they generally call the importance of their projects as they see them.

So along came Gundotra, who had spent 15 years at Microsoft in the most political meat grinder on the planet and was wayy more politically savvy then the rest of the management—and sells Facebook as an existential threat and G+ as salvation with unflinching confidence, plus a little bit of brown-nosing that would go a long way with an insecure new CEO. Feeling this versus the even-keeled/mildly pessimistic reporting styles that the rest of his engineering management had, I think Page bought into it hard, and G+ was history.

Although it's circumstantial evidence, the conditions inside the G+ team were insanely political versus other Google orgs. I think this is a mirror of Gundotra's style.

> The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014.

Really? Everyone knew it was dead. I perceived that as merely consolidating the unified logon/identity system they'd build in G+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think there is a very simple reason why this did not take off: google is not in it for the long haul on social projects (see 'orkut') so why invest in their platform?

As long as a company pulls the plug on projects that involve user investment with some regularity there is little chance that they'll be able to launch a social platform requiring significant investment from the audience they seek. You can kill only so many projects before people will become wary of trying out your next project, no matter how hard you try to force it on them. In fact, forcing it on them reeks of desperation and that is another nail in the coffin.

Technology and the real-names fiasco were for sure factors but I just don't see google 'getting' social.

</comment><comment><USER28> You could tell right away that Google didn't have a clear vision for how people would use the service. They could have differentiated from Facebook with an emphasis on privacy or decent features. Instead of a social experience where people could interact with each other, you got something that was you could post something on your profile and people could comment on it. There was nothing special about the experience.

I've seen this multiple times when interacting with Google employees, just a sense of removal from the real world that permeates some of their choices. Stuff like, "oh, I guess the page on accessibility should be accessible."

<comment><USER29> When you build a work environment that encourages people to spend their entire waking lives at work, this may be one of the outcomes.

<comment><USER30> How's Facebook's work environment any different?

<comment><USER29> I am sure there are differences, and many factors beyond the time spent at work that affect product decisions. At the same time, insulating your employees from the real world by providing services at work that allow them to spend more time at work is bound to create a disconnect between those creating your products and their ability to understand customers who operate in the real world. This may have been why Facebook was slow to figure out mobile...all their employees were spending all their time at work on desktops, and failed to see the fundamental shift happening as their users started accessing the site via mobile. Keep in mind I'm just speculating here...I have no inside knowledge of how either company operates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Puns aside... you can'd do social without having some kind of _face_.

Facebook really has _face(s)_ (puns aside again): it has Mark Z's friendly looking _face_ , it has the _faces_ of all your friends and family that are already there, it has a warm-looking humane-looking brand (not with a damn mathematical sign like "+" _in. its. freaking. name._ ), even the annoying-to- most-geeks UX has a "face" that you can recognize. Even when they do their ubercreepy stuff we all complain about, they do it with a _face_ , you viscerally hate it or you get freaked out just like you would get freaked out by a stalker watching you naked... you don't just feel like your privacy is invaded by a mathematical equation. Facebook, the company, really feels like a "person" and not a "thing". (Yeah, to me at least it feels like an ubercreepy person for whom I want a restraining order and maybe a vicious guard dog too and few extra alarm systems to keep it as far away as possible... but it's still a "person"). And it's not a reaction, Facebook wan't born out of a reaction to MySpace, it "authentic" and people can feel this about a brand. That's why corporations can spend millions on buying a brand that "feels authentic" instead of "manufacturing a brand".

Facebook started with a bunch of cool faces and a cool story. They even made a movie out of that story! And a totally shitty technical platform, but that didn't matter. The gargantuan effort to make Google+ succeed looked like some folks' effort to make Esperanto into the de-facto international language instead of English. _You needed the literary face of a Shakespeare, and the military face of a British Empire to make a language succeed, an beneath them an authentic foundation (English was not invented as a reaction to Latin!)._

</comment><comment><USER32> When G+ launched people were primed to move away from Facebook. When people saw that G+ was both twitter and facebook in a single package they were wowed.

G+ was ready to succeed big.

RealNames killed G+, the most transparently Moronic decision of the last decade or so in tech

<comment><USER33> It wasn't just real names though.

I agree the world was ready for a Facebook/Twitter hybrid network with the semi-anonymity of twitter but the interactive capabilities of Facebook.

In fact, I think it still is TBH.

But Google+ also integrated into your email and all other Google products. It was like Facebook but without the walled garden.

So yes, real names were a part of it but Google really wanted 'real everything', which was presumably to increase the users juicy ad relevance.

The 'real everything' thing had another effect - confusion. Google+ to comment on YouTube? I had friends literally not know Google owned YouTube, so when they needed this account to set up channels and comment they rightly noped out of there.

The name, Google Plus, didn't help. It was never its 'own' thing - it sort of 'was' Google, and Google is massive and has many services. If they have even limited it to a semi-walled garden network they might have had some success with real names, but so open, so interconnected and pervasive was just asking for failure.

They do have a chance still though. Get rid of real names, make it a separate network walled off from the rest of Google properties, still public like twitter but with the granularity of circles for semi-private stuff and it'll fly.

It's really a good service, much better than Twitter and despite the more 'anonymous' nature of the network it would still keep laying the golden advertising egg for them.

<comment><USER34> > _The name, Google Plus, didn 't help._

Yes! What a stupid, simplistic and limited name. Most product names with Google are stupid ("Play"?!??) but Plus has to win the stupidity contest.

I remember when Vivendi's CEO invented "Vivendi Plus" (in 2000 or so) and even registered vivendiplus.com just to show how unprepared the company was (at the time of the announcement, it was a big surprise at headquarters...)

Brand extension never works, NEVER. There are many books written about this subject, one of the best being "Positionning" by Al Ries.

Google Video failed, Youtube thrived; there is no "Google mobile", but Android is doing pretty well, thank you very much. Gmail is not exactly "Google Mail".

Google Maps is a counter example, maybe because it feels like an extension of search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Google ripped out its elaborate internal video conferencing system and > forced employees to use the Google+ Hangouts video chat feature in Plus, > which one employee described as "janky."

This is still the worst fallout for me. Whenever I need to do a video call with someone it involves lots of hair pulling trying to get everyone to press weird "say hi" buttons on profiles before it will ever even manage to show messages between each other, let alone video conference. Half the time it doesn't and we all just use Skype which is reliable. Google Talk was actually good, Google Hangouts is just broken and killed it for an inferior product.

</comment><comment><USER36> > The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the > thing taking off

This is a constant in every struggling project / startup.

</comment><comment><USER37> I never understood why Google tried to create a "closed social network inside the web", when Google (almost) is the web.

The technology behind Google+ seems nice tho ( so was Wave ), very snappy but that is probably because of lack of users. I like some of the communities there, but it seems to die slowly.

At the same time, a lot of people never gave G+ a chance, because they felt Google already had too much power. It felt like giving Google the "missing link". At least, that is my experience.

<comment><USER38> I never gave G+ a chance in retaliation of the closing of greader. I'm a pissed off user, and since Google has 0 notion of user satisfaction, I'm glad G+ is a failure."Free services" providers should not underestimate the fact that pissing off users will have a negative effects on potential new "free services". Who trusts Google with any service lasting on the long run ? I certainly don't. Why should I invest in something that will be gone soon? because I know in my guts G+ WILL be retired.

<comment><USER39> Unless Wikipedia is lying, Google+ launched almost 2 years before the announcement of Google Reader's imminent shutdown.

<comment><USER25> In closed beta at first.

During those years, they let Reader languish, it was treated as a dead project, then finally shut down. So it felt like a continuous series of events.

<comment><USER39> Hmmm, I found this [http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/10/how-survive- switch...](http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/10/how-survive-switch- google-reader-google/44069/) which talks about Google ending the Reader social features as of the end of October 2011, sort of in favor of Google+ but that wasn't done well/thought out; I can't figure out if it was out of private beta by then.

So the narrative of at minimum neglecting Google Reader in favor of the not a substitute of Google+ would seem to be correct.

<comment><USER25> Nice find!

And yeah, at the time there was discussion about how they should have kept reader and somehow rolled it and its users into G+. Reader was their only organically successful social sharing product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I can't help myself, but since Google+ I feel like Google lost its way - forcing us by nagging to accept various unpleasant and not very well thought out ways to use their services while seeing their search quality deteriorating (feels to me like Altavista now, XX search result pages clicked through and still being unable to find relevant stuff way too often). I am really worried about their future now and hope they won't end up as SUN...

</comment><comment><USER41> > "Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill > us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive.

He could also have said: "Apple is going to block ads in their new version of Safari. Soon they will introduce iPhone native search, and nobody will ever see Google again."

</comment><comment><USER42> One aspect of Google+ that always grated on me was that the name was terrible branding. I don't know if I'm in the minority for feeling this way, but with with all their other services that one gets tied up with, you don't want a 'plus' you want to think about the social aspect as a compartmentalized, separate section. They'd have been much better off calling it something else, or at least trying to be a lot quieter about tying all of it together.

I am sure the social media trend numbers looked great on paper, but they severely underestimated how tired people would get with it. (I'd say only a small fraction of my facebook friends still are active there, for instance.)

Anyhow, my troubles with the G+ branding may sound like a nitpick, but I think it was a lot of the problem. People already had privacy concerns about Google, now they could have privacy concerns+.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sure Google made some mistakes with Google+ but it is a success as far as I am concerned. I use Google+ about an hour a week, Twitter about 20 minutes a week, and Facebook about 15 minutes a week.

If Google+ has a few hundred million regular users, that sounds good. Why the need to comptere with Facebook on numbers?

<comment><USER44> By that logic, they never should have shut down Google Reader, though, right?

Reader was my top visited site daily by far. Nothing replaced it.

<comment><USER25> I still have a reflex to type 'rea' in the url bar when I'm looking for interesting content. And every time it makes me irked with Google+.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The article touched on this briefly, but my personal opinion about why Google+ failed is because it isn't needed. People who have spent hundreds of hours cultivating their Facebook profiles, building out their networks, etc. had zero reason to switch. Any time I asked a friend to join Google+ the answer was always "Why? Facebook works fine." While people in the tech echo chamber are always searching for new products and new ways to use online services, the vast majority of people simply don't care. Honestly, G+ could have been the best platform in the world and I doubt people would have switched only because what they had already worked.

<comment><USER46> Indeed, it broke Google's #1 rule for new products; make something 10x (i.e. substantially) better.

Google+ was great. It just didn't do a much better job of solving a problem that Facebook already had.

One strategy would have been to integrate Google+ into Google Contacts, Photos, Messaging, basically forcing people to integrate their social network into their phone and gmail contacts, messaging etc... People would have been pissed, but it would have actually provided a unique utility (one place for all your social interactions).

A bold move is what it takes to dethrone a king.

<comment><USER47> I would give up Gmail, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> G+ tried to be too much like facebook social netwrok. Instead it should be like topic related like reddit more dicussions rather then memes. I do liek the communities and collections feature. The Android app is also very well designed.

</comment><comment><USER48> Google+ missed the chance to become an introvert-style social network. Facebook with its 'Like' buttons and tendency to self-exposure is clearly targeted at extroverts. Google+ could've made its bet on introverts.

<comment><USER49> I'm surprised to hear "likes" associated with extroversion.

I tend towards a mere like when I'm feeling more introverted. To me, commenting and sharing are the extroverted alternatives — and liking is the absolute least one can do that still technically qualifies as "social".

Lowering the friction to increase social participation is precisely catering towards introverts, from my perspective, and that is what Like and +1 do.

<comment><USER48> Since "like" counters are public they are often become a form of competition or a way to boost self-esteem which is a very extrovert style of socialization. Though I'm not sure what introvert-style socializing should be. I guess it should include mostly small groups (circles?) because introverts usually don't large social groups. Also a different approach to "friending".

<comment><USER49> Oh, I see: you're thinking from the perspective of the person competing to obtain the likes (an attention-seeker), but I'm thinking from the perspective of the person deciding whether to give one. Thank you for clarifying that. I see where you're coming from now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Google plus has one terrific feature: it's a safe choice for both websites and users as an oauth login. Most people have an account, but nobody uses it as a social network (unless you know a lot of Google employees).

</comment><comment><USER51> As a social network it has failed , But as an Identify Platform it's really good . My g+ profile while doesn't have many posts like facebook/twitter or instagram but has the most data ,my search history,my app downloads,youtube browse history, knows my phone ,my number ,All the places I have lived ,places I have worked . If I log on a new device with my gmail/g+ all over sudden I have all this data working to make my surfing better.

Now if only they used that data to make a better Google plus feed ,It's the feed that died.

</comment><comment><USER52> There's no Google+ landing page.

If you want to participate and create a g+-account you'll automatically sign up for google search, gmail, google drive, youtube, google maps, play store, google maps with no option to opt out.

Now who thought this was a good idea?

But even if someone wanted all that, if you signed up for your business to have a youtube channel and a g+ page, you don't get your custom vanity URLs with the chosen account-name. That's remarkably bad UX.

<comment><USER5> I pointed that out to Vic and Shindig YEARS ago. Drives me fucking nuts still.

These days I blackhole services that do this. Pinterest most recently.

<comment><USER5> "Shimrit". Not "Shindig".

Fucking autocorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Facebook's killer feature, the one everyone uses, is messenger. The timeline is dead, none of my friends really post much anymore, the primary reason people I know still use it is because of the ubiquitous messenger presence. If google went after that with a messenger focused network I think they would have had a great chance at taking over Facebook.

<comment><USER25> If Facebook's really just a messenger then it's in trouble. You use a messenger to chat with people you actively want to talk with, and that type of messenger service booms then disappears after a few years as most people move on. (AOL, ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > As Google stumbled and failed and stumbled again, Facebook grew larger and > more influential.

This just tells me the market is not open, and allows for no competition.

</comment><comment><USER54> Google+ did not make big mistakes. For example, their mobile experience is much better. People just didn't want to leave the social network most of their friends are on already. Same with Ello. People are lazy. But Google+ pressed Facebook to innovate. We won, Google lost.

<comment><USER5> No, it committed numerous cardinal errors.

#nymwars, noisy content (with poor controls), confusing UI, and intent that was _expressly_ counter to users' interests really didn't help.

See Tim O'Reilly's Aug 23, 2011 post requesting topics for conversation with Bradley Horowitz:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/A1qHbykj...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/A1qHbykji1f)

As I commented recently on a private re-share:

What's telling to me are:

1\. How many times Real Names / Nymwars came up.

2\. The alienation issue: how Google were (and frankly, have) demolished goodwill with their core tech evangelist community (I used to be one, I no longer am).

3\. How lacking Google's first instance of G+ was: no search. For reals.

4\. Requests that remain unanswered. Especially subscribable circles / feeds, RSS, and tags.

5\. How many names I recognize here. Many are in my Circles. A few are long gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> How many Google+ failures do you think it would take to match the gigantic write off that Microsoft made for acquiring Nokia? The answer is a lot.

<comment><USER56> Not really comparable. Microsoft bought a unit with tens of thousands of employees, factories around the world, a (modestly) profitable featurephone business...

All that had some value in 2013 (although perhaps not the amount Microsoft paid for it). Microsoft's own decisions post-acquisition expedited the loss of value and resulted in them writing off the entire purchase price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Didn't Google learn from Buzz that the world didn't want another social network of the kind that already existed? I guess not.

Google's just amazing at building technology no one wants/needs. Wave, Buzz, G+, are all great examples of that. If only they could hire someone like me (and many others with common sense in this area, I'm far from special in this regard) who would have told them even before release the G+ would have been a failure. And Buzz and Wave and probably a whole bunch of other great technology that ended up being useless.

<comment><USER58> > Didn't Google learn from Buzz that the world didn't want another social > network of the kind that already existed? I guess not.

I disagree - I think a lot of people were expecting exactly that[1]. But I think the big mistakes were a_ forcing every Gmail/Toutube user to use it (and with real names, which was even worse), and b_ stop halfway and claim "it's not a social network, it's an identity service", essentially giving up.

Had Google stuck to the "Facebook for those that hate Facebook", I think it could have worked.

[1] [http://xkcd.com/918](http://xkcd.com/918)

<comment><USER57> That's possible, but it would have required proper execution from the Buzz, and later, the G+ team. From a security / privacy point of view Buzz was worse than Facebook almost instantly, though it clearly tried to emulate Twitter feature-wise. Considering that the security / privacy angle was the reason most people who didn't like Facebook didn't like Facebook, Buzz failed miserably, exposing conversations and connections that its users didn't want exposed. That was even more of a mistake than the real names issue as it instantly destroyed credibility in the network (at that time I don't even think Buzz had been completely rolled out). At that point, at least, a shrewd executive would have realized Google's inability to deliver a proper social network (as if the Youtube social experience didn't already indicate this) and not started G+. Either way you look at it, G+ was an avoidable failure with years of warnings that it would fail and at least one defining failed preceding network (two if you include Youtube).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> G+ could be more popular if Google knew how to launch products - not tech demos. They launched the thing and made it invite only, when people were eager to try it out. I don't know who had this clever idea, maybe they thought they could repeat the Gmail launch or FB exclusivity.

<comment><USER5> That's one constant criticism I disagree with strongly. Google released G+ _too early_ and _before_ it was ready. Some months to listen to criticism and address it would have helped massively. But Google were neither ready to iterate or listen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Facebook succeeded in a crowded space, full of mediocre but wealthy competition, because of where it started. It began at Harvard, moved out to the Ivies, then the top 100 universities, then all universities, then everyone. By this point, it had iterated its way out of the technical failings of the initial product (except for the use of PHP, which still hasn't been entirely undone).

Google+, when it started, was superior in almost every way to Facebook in its first few years. (That's not a fair comparison. Facebook was a startup social network; Google+ came out of the gate at 120 mph.) It had Hangouts, which would have been a killer app if people had actually used them as a sharable social space (i.e. to "hang out") as the execs thought they would. The problem was that Google thought its muscle would allow it to take a greatest-fixed- point approach (i.e. a "stay popular once popular" strategy) whereas any social network needs to focus on the _least_ fixed point, because that's where it's going to land. It had wealth but no users and no credibility, and it wasn't able to get those.

Hangouts are genuinely useful and there was some guy at Google who argued that courting independent game developers (and getting high quality products, rather than third-string products and Zyngarbage from mainstream publishers who expected Google+ to fail and weren't going to use their best stuff) would have allowed Google+ to grow organically and inductively, with the same "cognitively upscale" initial user base that made Facebook, thus proving Hangouts and moving to progressively larger subsets of the population. It became obvious that the failure of Google Games (and, possibly, of Google+ in its entirety) came from Google's leadership not listening to him. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

<comment><USER60> The one person at Google more wrong than Vic Gundotra still thinks that G+ failed because people didn't listen to HIM enough. How shocking. (and seriously, do you really think one person could have fixed the turd of G+ even with a billion dollar idea?)

<comment><USER59> Google+ needed to establish a core group of users who (a) weren't associated with Google, and (b) liked their offering better than Facebook, and (c) were in a space that Facebook would have trouble taking over. Games was prime territory, because Facebook fucked it up by letting Zynga be its tapeworm for so long. If we could show caution and attention to quality in this space, people would have been more likely to trust us in a time when they were (much moreso than now) upset with Facebook.

U.S. Facebook engagement was actually _dropping_ in 2011 and the Zynga games were the reason why. People hated those games.

Google+ could have gotten some more air time with that idea. What they did with it, I can't predict. Sometimes, more air time means not crashing; sometimes, it just means crashing later. It would have had a chance with Real Games, though, and I'll take "a chance" over "no chance" any day of the week.

Anyway, I'm glad that Google lost. A closed-allocation company with stack ranking deserves to get beaten. So there.

<comment><USER61> > U.S. Facebook engagement was actually dropping in 2011 and the Zynga games > were the reason why. People hated those games.

That doesn't make any sense. Facebook goal is to have people staying connected to Facebook as much time as possible. Be it to check their friends status, the fan page of their idols or to play whatever game is trending. If Zynga's games are popular, the better for them since they monetize that popularity, and the better for Facebook since people spend more time on their platform, and they can water their virtual crops or whatever in between checking the cat pictures some friend posted and reading about the new thing some other friend's baby did. If Zynga's games lose their popularity, someone else will overtake them (it was King with Candy Crush) and Facebook will not be impacted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


To boldly go: Ars explores 45 years of Star Trek - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/#!/science/news/2011/09/to-boldly-go-ars-explores-45-years-of-star-trek.ars <comment><USER2> I have been a Star Trek fan for many years but I'm not much of a scientist. I learned something not so long ago about Star Trek that literally blew my mind. Everything you see in Star Trek, every series, movie, etc. takes only place in our galaxy. The four quadrants (alpha, delta, gamma, etc.) refer to a quadrant of our galaxy, not the universe. Apparently there are billions of galaxies out there...

<comment><USER3> and actually mostly all eps/movies take place in the alpha quadrant except voyager and a bit of ds9.</comment></comment>


Wireless Electricity Demo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/wireless_electr.php

<comment><USER2> This technology is not interesting to me. The efficiency is too low, the coils are too big, the distances are too short, and too much alignment is required. The talk of replacing batteries is just hype.

But the real reason I'm not excited is I don't believe this technology is going to improve much. People look at this and think that it's just like computers, so in 10 years these things will be 10 times smaller with 10 times the range. That's simply not true; there's no Moore's law for wireless power. We've known how to do this for over 100 years and the basic physics aren't changing. In 10 years the coils will still be that big, with the same range and the same alignment issues.

Batteries, on the other hand, have plenty of room to improve. In 10 years batteries will definitely be storing more energy with less mass at lower cost with faster charging and longer lifetimes. That's a technology I can get excited about.

<comment><USER3> Wireless doesn't necessarily mean remote. There are already power mats that charge a cell phone that's resting on it, without having to plug in the phone. I've even seen a prototype kitchen counter with a wireless blender - just set the blender on the counter and it gets power.

<comment><USER4> Countertops and appliances with this technology would be genuinely useful. Wires and plugs are only a hinderance on a kitchen countertop. I can see this introduced as a high-end luxury, then have it filter down into the mainstream. Tables and other furniture with this tech would be great. Step in the door and set your smartphone down on the stand, and it charges. Desks would be awesome. Laptop stands would be great too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think nobody can really say if it is safe or not. Animals are sensitive to magnetism - they can "see" where the north is. So it is not like magnetism doesn't have effect on us. And saying that it is just like Earth's magnetic field is downright wrong - that field doesn't have a MHz frequency and it is nowhere near that strong. Besides with sufficiently high powered magnetic field everything becomes magnetic <http://www.hfml.ru.nl/froglev.html>

I think I'll stick to the cables for some time

</comment><comment><USER6> How far could this technology reach physically?

He addresses proximity on a desktop and such; is it feasible to get the magnetic coil to provide power within an entire house?

<comment><USER7> I think the trick for now is to strategically position charging stations in common areas (desk, bedroom table, kitchen, etc.). Also, it looks like alignment is required, so it's not quite like the wireless router in your home reaching all of the rooms, more like your TV remote reaching the TV set.

<comment><USER8> Right. I'm nowhere near an expert in this but I would guess that the receiver has to be orthogonal to the planar field lines (parallel to the rectangular transmitter). Mostly that's a guess though because I'm not sure I understand how the magnetic resonance works, however he does seem careful to place the devices in that alignment.

<comment><USER9> Resonant energy transfer has been known for a very long time. Any electrical system that has inductance or capacitance (which means all electrical systems) will have a resonance point. This resonance point is the like the resonance point of a mass spring system or like resonance of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. If you drive a system at its resonance point, you will maximize the energy transfer into the system. That is all that is going on. If both the send and receive coils resonate at the same frequency, maximum power transfer can occur. There is no magic. This isn't a technology.

Also, the coils do indeed have to be parallel to each other. Fields gradients are function as vectors in space and the receive coil must be positioned to "capture" as many field lines as possible emitted from the transmitter.

<comment><USER8> OK, thanks. That's what it sounded like but his description was low on the details so I figured I wouldn't make that stretch. Anyway, yes, my guess was mostly based on Maxwell and a little vector calc (physics minor, nothing more) but it seemed to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anybody know about the commercial availability of such a system?

<comment><USER10> Those were my thoughts exactly. I'd buy this now and I'm sure other people would as well. The quicker they get this to the market, the better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Invest in recycling plants... there is going to be a lot of cable taken down and given a new life... this technology is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I expect this within 10 years. This might be the 'next big thing'

</comment><comment><USER5> Hope is luggage doesn't get "lost" on the way back to US ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh please, don't risk my health even more!!!

Because it's not enough to have so much contamination, smoking, diesel particles, polymer additives, pesticides, nuclear waste,mercury fillings, let's add even more.

Because you are too lazy to make a hole for your TV once in your lifetime, you add something that radiates 50% of their energy out there. YES, it's radiation, no matter what this pseudo scientist say(don't try to fool ignorant people), it's an electromagnetic wave, it is not static = radiation. This energy are photons of big wavelength.

1mW-3miliWatts laser light could be dangerous, let's put 50-400Watts(look at TVset specs)and radiate 100-800Watts out there(2·10^5 times more energy). What could go wrong??

Just do it, profit and if people get cancer, it's very difficult to prove. For the people that says that this can't resonate with cells and so on, look at the size of your brain, is that an electrical system? could it be affected in any way , look at your spinal cord, your testicles-ovaries(the size of the cell phone)...

Don't get me wrong, People here are young and healthy, but I have seen people die very very bad from cancer - leukaemia after working near telecom towers(20 from 40 got cancer, the company make an statistic using the total company workers "diluting" it and saying that it's an statistic atypical, that it has nothing to do with their work). When my father worked in chemical industry as a chemist, when all the workers in one place lost their teeth they(the company) said that surely the workers got a venereal disease or something their fault.

If someone dies or is affected from this thing, they are going to say: hey, it can't be our system.

I don't care about people using this on their own taking responsibility, I care about people using it near me, or my family(neighbours), invading my airspace and polluting it.I care about systems capable of radiating 40KWatts for powering electric trucks (hey, it's safe!!) on public roads and I don't want it. Let me chose.

<comment><USER12> _YES, it's radiation, no matter what this pseudo scientist say(don't try to fool ignorant people), it's an electromagnetic wave, it is not static = radiation._

When you can explain the terms in this simple equation:

         E = hv

... we'll all be interested in your opinion on this subject.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand the question.

Do you mean that the energy that carries each photon is quantized (when the energy state of the excited atom is quantized in orbitals) and is inverse proportional to the wave length?

¿That is not radiation because it bounces a lot and don't penetrate?

If you use a lot more photons, you will have a very different effect that a single one.

Also, if you start making this devices, you will make it smaller and smaller and use less L on the inductances because it's more efficient, and that means use bigger frequencies, even microwaves( I heard they were using far radio in the first experiment), that are going to resonate with molecules bonds like ADN and stuff.

<comment><USER12> _If you use a lot more photons, you will have a very different effect that a single one._

No. You will not. That's exactly why I sent you to the library with that equation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


7 Actually Useful Things You Didn't Know Static Typing Could Do - <AUTHOR> http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/04/14/useful-things-about-static-typing/ <comment><USER2> Or "why I think OCaml is great"

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Of course there's nothing wrong with that as such, it'd just be nice if the title was a little less link-bait-y.

<comment><USER4> Weeeell... There is a back-story here, as evidenced by teh links he provides. I think his view is that there is a very misleading debate between Ruby/Python and Java/C#, with much strawmanning on both sides, namely that all dynamically typed languages are like Ruby and Python, while all statically typed languages are like Java and C#.

I think what he is trying to say goes beyond "What I like about Ocaml" to "What YOU like about Ruby can be had in Ocaml and have strong type inference to boot."

Of course, his contention that people shouldn't assume static typing == Java ought to be familiar: Lispers have been crying foul that people shouldn't assume dynamic typing = Ruby for a while now.</comment></comment></comment>


Rutgers Releases Report on How Cultural Factors Affect Chinese Americans' Health - <AUTHOR> https://www.newswise.com/articles/confirm/716956#.XVGBJyof2nU <comment><USER2> Requires an account to view. Can't you just link to the Rutgers report itself?

EDIT: Are you referring to this 2019 one? [https://news.rutgers.edu/research- news/asian-americans-face-...](https://news.rutgers.edu/research-news/asian- americans-face-barriers-healthy-aging/20180718#.XVGgoxgpA0M)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, this is a new collection of studies. Here is the link to the studies: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15325415/2019/67/S3](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15325415/2019/67/S3)</comment></comment>


Most Advanced JavaScript Monero Miner - <AUTHOR> http://cloudcoins.co <comment><AUTHOR> I know we're not the first one, but give us a chance- we're the most advanced, from a team of ex-googlers :-)

Unlike others, we monitor and adapt the difficulty of each hash a miner is calculating to optimize total 'score', which is a better indicator of work than just number of hashes per second. In terms of pure H/S, we're the same rate as coinhive- but due to the adaptive difficulty system we have, each submitted hash from our miners is 'worth' more to the Monero network- i.e each of our hashes has a higher chance of winning a block than any of our competitors. We also give out bonuses when it's one of your miners that submits a hash that captures a block :-)

We have an API already up that we're working on writing the docs for. We are calculating + storing advanced statistics that we're working on documenting and creating graphs coming soon, too :-)

Another thing to consider is these other services are just 'dumb' websocket proxies to existing open source pools- ours is a completely new websocket pool that's super fast, resilient, and efficient. Tech wise, we're the furthest ahead and most capable, and we're actively working on leveraging our awesome tech into even more awesome features.

<comment><USER2> you should show USD/hr in your ui, instead of hash rate or score.

USD/hr is more comprehensible.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea! We'll get that on there later today :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would love to promote your product on CharityCoin - the first coin for Charities. How do I contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can reach us at firstname.lastname@example.com !

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kaspersky blocks your mining script instantly with a sound warning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. We'll get that sorted out within 24 hours, these silly false virus alerts are thankfully easy to get around :-)</comment></comment>


Never Too Late to Learn:My (meandering) path to a career in software engineering - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattdionis/never-too-late-to-learn-my-meandering-path-to-a-career-in-software-engineering-308f81912cdb <comment><USER2> Cong! I'm wondering if 35-40 is too old lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's absolutely not too old! Hell, I'm trying to break back into competitive powerlifting at 37. Haha</comment></comment>


Giving Up On Patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/02/22/Patent-Fail

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that the rules are different (and probably less broken) elsewhere in the world. However, the US market has a tendency to affect people outside its borders and force the system on others via treaties.

But right now, one option for non-US software startups is to sell only to Europe and counties with sane patent systems.

<comment><USER2> _"... However, the US market has a tendency to affect people outside its borders and force the system on others via treaties. ..."_

That is an understatement ~ "IIPA would rather people "pirate" than switch to legal competitors" ~ <http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/5115> The <http://www.iipa.com/> represent publishers, music, picture, entertainment software, business software. All American

<comment><AUTHOR> I was trying to be polite about our colonial friends.

<comment><USER2> _"... I was trying to be polite about our colonial friends. ..."_

I always miss this from replies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another article that recently reaffirmed my distaste for software patents is this article on the future of web video by an x264 developer:

<http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292>

In a summarising comment: "The best choice [for web video] will always be a deeply patent-encumbered format until someone gets rid of software patents. There is no other feasible solution."

</comment><comment><USER4> Patents are so difficult to go with. Some people know they have the best idea ever, spend the 13k to get a patent, and do good on it.

I'm not that confident that I could spend that much money upfront without a guaranteed return (not to mention I don't have that much money).

Also I read lots about patents that are challenged because someone somewhere else thought of it, and wrote it down 6 months before.

<comment><USER5> provisional patents only cost a couple hundred.

<comment><USER6> Lawyer costs, though not compulsory, quickly push that up tenfold (we just filed a patent - not for software though)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great to know that the he's given up on patents but for once I'd like one of these guys to propose a workable way to _actually_ get rid of them.

I myself have no clue how you could go about it. But saying they have to go without proposing a way to get rid of them doesn't actually help the issue very much.</comment>


Twilio's Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-23/twilio-s-dutch-rival-messagebird-plans-an-ipo-in-gold-rush <comment><USER2> I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.

<comment><USER3> Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option.

Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It's not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America.

This is why they are building on top of the underlying commodity and moving upmarket into things like call center automation products, which start to compete directly with many of their customers.

You can easily negotiate down your SIP/SMS Twilio prices the second you realize they have plenty of competitors.

If a smaller competitor gets their name out there by doing some basic guerrilla marketing against a behemoth public company with tons of money, it seems pretty benign. Everyone wins but the overpriced incumbent.

<comment><USER4> SignalWire is also a Twilio competitor. Their SMS pricing is much, much cheaper and they have cloned the Twilio APIs. I am not affiliated with them, other than as a customer of both Twilio and SignalWire at different times (small dev accounts.)

[https://signalwire.com/pricing/messaging](https://signalwire.com/pricing/messaging)

<comment><USER3> Off top I know of

Messagebird, Plivo, Nexmo (part of Vonage), Telnyx, Voxbone, Signalwire

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would consider using them but Taiwan is not a province of China ([https://messagebird.com/en/numbers/](https://messagebird.com/en/numbers/)). If a company has has many factual errors on their website like this, then I cannot trust their service to be reliable.

<comment><USER6> Upvoted. Thanks for pointing that out. As someone who lived in Taiwan and has friends there that's a big issue.

Taiwan has democracy, doesn't threaten its neighbours, has a working legal system, respects human rights, and has an educated population with access to the free world.

Calling it part of China is highly offensive and bowing down to the communist propaganda is simply unacceptable. They have Huawei as a client so choose money over morals.

<comment><USER7> Its an honest mistake and we'll correct it.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's good to see more Dutch (or European in general) software companies succeed. I hope VC will be easier to come by in Europe, I think it's the main set back European founders face.

</comment><comment><USER9> I misread that as Twitter's Dutch rival. MessageBird would be a hilarious name for a Twitter competitor.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been a happy customer for years. Their services work well. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said (anymore) about their dashboard. Slow, unreliable, buggy... I got really close to trying Twilio this time. It concerns me when companies want to grow faster when it seems they are having problems with having grown too fast already.

<comment><USER11> I've had the exact opposite experience.

I don't know how many 200 OK I've received but the message was never delivered (and soooo many times during vital demos). I had several support cases with them and they simply ignored me. My product is built around SMS so I could have been easy money for them if it actually worked reliably.

I ditched them for Twilio, never had any issues since then. A couple of months later someone from sales at MessageBird reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked if I wanted to try their service. Spilled my guts to him and he wasn't surprised...

How certain are you that your messages are delivered? When I started digging, it was scary how often it failed successfully.

<comment><USER12> Was it not a matter of leaving out a country code or something? I was getting 200 OKs and not receiving messages, until I realized that my number without a +1 in front is a valid Peruvian number.

<comment><USER11> Nope, unfortunately not. Really liked their API so it's sad I had to jump ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am surprised that for smaller countries there is such big difference between Twilio and MessageBird. For instance, for Albania, in Twilio, the per-number price is $1.0, and inbound sms are not even supported. On the other hand for MessageBird the per-number price is $32/month (!) while inbound sms are free. Feels like MessageBird has more "real" numbers.

Edit: For which ever country I choose from, they always have sms inbound Free. Feels like a marketing/sales trick ? I can't believe that MessageBird has managed to implement inbound SMS for all those countries, while Twilio hasn't.

<comment><USER7> We actually do. Difference is we are direct with the carriers and dont pay middle man so we can make inbound free in most countries (which is also how global telecom works from an interoperability standpoint) We also have numering access across local, mobile , tf in over 150 countries.

<comment><USER13> Ok thanks for the clarification. I ll definitely look out to use your service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a Twilio competitor for which per-minute rates to Belarus aren't ~ $0.50 USD? I remember purchasing "calling cards" in the 90s at convenience stores with better rates.

<comment><USER15> I'm in a nearby (EU) country and the VOIP rates to terminate calls here are also quite expensive compared to Western EU countries. In a lot of cases it's actually cheaper to make calls to numbers here on a mobile phone from another EU country, than over VOIP.

Telephony in general is fairly cheap, so I'm guessing there's only one or two providers here providing VOIP termination, and without much competition they price their services as high as enterprise companies who need it will allow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are many Twilio competitors and there have been for a while now. However, Twilio has been really resilient in terms of keeping their high growth year over year. What is the reason for that?

<comment><USER17> As a former Twilio engineer, whose opinion in no way represents the company's, I know that a large part of my job was reliability.

Reliability in the telecom space is a difficult problem, it's a large ecosystem of providers, aggregators, regulators, and lots and lots of hidden complexity. Then there's actually running the service, keeping the REST API up 24/7/365, making sure the TwiML processors are processing, keeping everything humming along smoothly for billions of requests a week.

When I was there, we would see "Twilio Killers" launch once or twice a year, normally competing around price. Their launches would almost always have the same 53 countries that they could deliver messages to, which we knew from operating in the space meant that they had just white-labeled Bandwidth's offering. They would be relying on a single aggregator and have the same reliability, resiliency, and reach as that one network.

There's a lot of reasons that people choose Twilio, network effects can't be denied, a lot of effort was expended on keeping it top of mind in developers heads. But that only scratches the surface.

We focused a ton on being reliable, being easy-to-use, and on backwards compatibility. There's a lot of unmaintained WordPress plugins that were written 9 years ago, abandoned 8 years ago, and still work fine because API compatibility was a top priority. There's something to be said about being able to just build an integration and then mostly ignore it and it just hums along sending SMS out reliably. A developer spending a day debugging a less reliable service can obliterate the savings in price, sometimes, depending on volume and use case.

Ease-of-use and network effects shouldn't be discounted. Most mainstream languages have a reasonably good library, Twilio officially maintained 6 of them while I was there. Our Developer Education team spent a ton of time and efforts creating tutorials, quickstarts, blog posts, and presentations. The Developer Evangelism team could be found at nearly every Hackathon, Conference, and Meet Up, spreading the word about Twilio, with well-polished live coding demos that would spark a lot of "Wow moments."

Even knowing exactly how every part of it worked, there's something magical about a presenter having everyone in the room text a number, then having a 3 line ruby program hit the API, pull down all the messages, and display them in the terminal. Then with two or three more lines of code, text everyone that texted in a message. That kind of demo takes maybe 10 minutes to do, but people would practice and polish it until it was seamless. You could look around the rooms at some of the events and see the wheels turning in people's heads as they started thinking about how they could integrate this functionality into their product.

First-mover, network-effects, reliable, resilient, easy-to-use, and in the beginning there were a number of highly promoted price drops to keep the momentum up.

<comment><USER18> Thank you for this thoughtful answer. The part about developer advocacy seems especially important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> YC company, but not your usual startup

<comment><USER20> Why not a usual startup?

<comment><USER19> Special terms. They already did a few million rev.

<comment><USER21> I don't know anything about the terms or whatever, but we were in the same batch. It was really funny with the whole batch practicing for Demo Day giving revenue numbers, growth rate, etc. We had in tens of thousands of dollars per month in MRR, which was on the higher end.

MessageBird, as you said, came to the US already with a _well_ established business. Obviously they weren't competing for the same investors/checks as most of the rest of the batch, but it was still hilarious to hear them pitch next to everyone else.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, that was annoying as a demo day participant.. I had flagged messagebird as the one I was most interested in to put my $25K check into. And then found out they already had like $50M in revenue I think it was?! Oh well, now I guess I'll be able to invest soon..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> this probably a dumb question; how do you participate in an ipo?

<comment><USER24> In general, you don't. The buyers of an IPO are usually large institutional investors who have been courted directly by the company and the banks managing the IPO. You can of course try to get in on the first public trades on IPO day, but you won't get the IPO price (unless things go very wrong for the company).

Direct listings have been getting a little more popular; in a direct listing a company just puts their stock up for sale on an exchange without going through the IPO process, and it just starts trading at whatever the market thinks is fair. But it's still fairly rare to see a direct listing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Aside: Annoying new trend in news sites used here is to inject their homepage in the browser history to make it so that the back button goes to their homepage instead of back to where you were.

<comment><USER26> Didn't happen on Safari Version 14.0. What browser you using?

<comment><USER25> Chrome, iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Plivo is another Twilio competitor for voice and sms.

Been using it for a while for mostly US sms, works fine:

[https://www.plivo.com/](https://www.plivo.com/)

<comment><USER28> Which, if any, of these Twilio competitors will allow me to CC: a SMS to an email address _without involving third party providers_ ?

I have begged Twilio engineers in person at multiple Signal and over email/support channels _as well as_ the CEO and here in this very forum: For the Love Of God will you please add an 'email' twiml verb ?

If you want to CC: a SMS to email currently, within Twilio, you need to build functions, sign up for a Sendgrid account, authenticate in sendgrid with _real names and physical addresses_ ...

It's a no-brainer use-case and it is _nothing but pain_ to implement.

<comment><USER27> > It's a no-brainer

Actually it's not:

First, email and sms are different transport mechanisms.

Second, email requires a To (envelope) address.

Third, some mgmt. like bounce and DKIM/SPF is needed.

You could write a subroutine to hide some of that, but I'm not sure there's a clear general solution.

<comment><USER28> A few things ...

When I say that it is a no-brainer, I mean that it is a no-brainer _feature_ ... that is, something that everyone would have a very ready use-case for.

Second, I think we're all well aware of the vast gulf between email service and the mobile phone network. That's the point of a service like Twilio: they have _both_ systems (email and SMS) terminating inside of their own cloud environment. This means that "forwarding" an SMS to an email address, which would be rocket science for me, is easy for them.

In fact, it's so easy that we can readily describe exactly how to implement it: _just give us an email verb in twiml_.

<comment><USER29> What's your use case here? Want to make sure I'm clear on it.

<comment><USER28> "What's your use case here? Want to make sure I'm clear on it."

There are a lot of ways I would use this, but the basic use-case is as follows ... my primary phone number lives at Twilio and I receive SMS with this simple twiml:

      <Response>
      <Message to='+14155551212'>{{From}}: {{Body}}</Message>
      </Response>

... and I would simply like to do this:

      <Response>
      <Message to='+14155551212'>{{From}}: {{Body}}</Message>
      <Message email@example.com'>Subject: Incoming SMS {{Body}}</Message>
      </Response>

... whatever ... you get the idea. I just want an email verb that I can plug into twiml and use in programmable messaging.

The immediate issues that comes to mind is spam and unwanted messages, etc., but that's easy to solve - just have a simple challenge/response proof that you own whatever email address you are sending to and only allow people to send to email addresses they own. I am, after all, just emailing myself.

cc'ing SMS, in programmable messaging, is currently _very very difficult and time consuming_. You either need to host code at some third party site[1] or you need to sign up for a sendgrid account (again, third party, additional account, etc.) and write functions to pass onto the sendgrid account ... but you can't actually fire off emails from sendgrid unless you authenticate with actual real names and physical addresses ...

I just want to cc: myself from within twiml. Christ.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44768719/can-i- forward-s...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44768719/can-i-forward-sms- to-an-email-using-only-a-twiml-bin)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon.com was down - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/ <comment><USER2> Down from LA also. Really curious what their revenue loss per minute is in this kind of situation.

Edit: based on product-only revenue for Q1 2020 (since AWS was unaffected), it looks like around $325K per minute if Amazon is down for all of North America. Naively assuming that people wouldn't just wait to order, of course. That's actually lower than I thought.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, it's a Virginia data center thing. We're working on it.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on the issue/fix?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, down for me too (DNS doesn't resolve, using google dns). Wonder how many $$millions they're losing every minute.

<comment><USER6> Revenue of 280.5 billion USD in 2019 works out to roughly $500k/minute.

<comment><USER7> The calculation is accurate in one sense, but I don't think it represents actual revenue loss for two reasons. Firstly, spending is non-uniform and peaks a lot on Black Friday, near Christmas, etc. Second, assuming the site is down for only a few minutes (it's back now), a significant fraction of people will probably just try again later. I still imagine this is a significant loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://smile.amazon.com/](https://smile.amazon.com/) is working for me.

I've got a chrome extension that redirects, so I didn't even notice the issue.

<comment><USER9> Same here. Smile Always for Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aaand it's back.

<comment><USER5> Yep, back up for me, too. Lucky them - DNS outtages can sometimes take a lot longer to resolve (heh).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I checked and checked again before submitting.

[https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/amazon](https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/amazon)

All green here -- [https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/) \-- although I cannot login to AWS as one of the redirects in the flow is through an amazon.com url.

<comment><USER11> I know the AWS status page is known for delayed updates but AWS itself is up. Amazon.com (retail) is what is down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazing how many times simple configuration issues can kill you.

</comment><comment><USER6> % nslookup www.amazon.com

Server: 184.108.40.206

Address: 18.104.22.168#53

 __server can 't find www.amazon.com: SERVFAIL

Colorado, USA

<comment><AUTHOR> When I do `dig amazon.com @184.108.40.206` I get a number of round-robin IP addresses. But `nslookup` returns SERVFAIL. Why are they showing different results?

<comment><USER6> looks like `amazon.com` is just a redirect to `www.amazon.com`. `dig www.amazon.com @18.104.22.168` returns nada.

% curl -v [https://amazon.com](https://amazon.com)

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Location: [https://www.amazon.com/](https://www.amazon.com/)

Could also be that your default DNS isn't 184.108.40.206?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, thanks. `dig www.amazon.com` for both `@188.8.131.52` and `@126.96.36.199` return no IP addresses. Same for CloudFlare's `18.104.22.168` ... ouch.

<comment><USER6> Ouch indeed! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cannot log into aws console at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER7> Down for me as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> DNS doesn't resolve somehow. works now.

</comment><comment><USER15> GCPL Do you need help? :troll:

</comment><comment><USER16> It's down for me too...

</comment><comment><USER17> seems to be up on mobile

<comment><AUTHOR> To which URL are you connecting? amazon.ca is up for instance.

<comment><USER17> amazon.com and aws.amazon.com

<comment><AUTHOR> aws.amazon.com works here while amazon.com does not, over both my home internet connection and mobile (via my carrier's LTE connection).

Which continent are you on out of curiosity?

<comment><USER17> I'm in the US (New York), but Amazon.com just went down for me on mobile (and the app). AWS is accessible though.

<comment><USER6> DNS Lookups to www.amazon.com are what's failing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> No it is not.

Let's not post this generally incorrect type of post.

<comment><USER19> You waited too long to post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems to work now.

Nairobi, Kenya.

</comment><comment><USER21> so much for high availability...

edit: I'm don't understand these swarm of downvotes?

If I was a VP/CXO of a $1.2TN company's website being down for even an hour, I would be in a fit of rage and would request a full investigation of how this happened.

<comment><USER11> Mistakes happen, highly available systems fail, being enraged and demanding heads isn't going to make anyone happy but just scared. A full investigation is probably going to happen and steps will be taken to make sure this doesn't happen again but it's hard to blame it on a particular individual. Ideally you'd have steps such that one person alone can't screw up and it also requires other people to let that happen.

<comment><USER22> Shit happens, and rage is pointless. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that even the best HA just isn't that good. Certainly I wouldn't care to fly in a plane that critically depended on any web provider, even Amazon.

<comment><USER23> I feel like that comparison is less compelling after the Boeing 737 MAX debacle.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I feel it. And as if I needed another reason _not_ to get on a plane these days.

<comment><USER23> I was thinking the other day about how I would explain to my son about how much more appealing air travel was in the 90s. The food wasn't great on U.S. carriers but most of the other details were so much more pleasant.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anime industry business crosses 5.6 billion $ - <AUTHOR> http://animejunkie2010.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> I think the link is wrong and searches on that blog and Google don't reveal anything.</comment>


8 weeks to become a software dev in Vancouver...? Sure. - <AUTHOR> http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2014/01/12-reasons-to-join-vancouvers-tech-revolution-in-2014/ 8 weeks! Also, Vancouver salaries suck. <comment><AUTHOR> Found this sneaky advertorial for CodeCore Bootcamp, which promises to make you a software developer in only 8 weeks! 8 weeks! Sos that you can access fabulous jobs in Vancouver for the exceptionally high average salary of $50k a year! FIFTY K, PEOPLE.

Amusing rebuttal here (more about Vancouver than the 8 weeks aspect): [http://blog.deliciousjuice.com/2014/01/07/12-reasons/](http://blog.deliciousjuice.com/2014/01/07/12-reasons/)

So. 8 weeks? To make a software dev? A Hootsuite intern, perhaps...

I'd argue that it takes several years to develop a problem-solving toolkit, best-practices, and just enough fundamental theory to be a half-decent developer with both breadth and depth enough to write non-embarrassing, maintainable code without needing tonnes of support, feedback (which is always helpful, but particularly essential in early days), and nights spent falling asleep with K&R on your face. Whether that's in school or out, getting employable takes time: time spent doing code, and thinking about it, and talking about it. I feel like these CodeGuru guys are being misleading at best, and that article reads to me almost like satire.</comment>


Ask HN: Steeper learning curve for back end using phonegap. Rails or Node.js? - <AUTHOR> I am about to start learning either rails or node.js (express) for back-end development. The plan is once I have learned, down the line I would like to make my web-app also be on mobile. I don't foresee myself learning the native languages for iOS and Android so the plan is to use phonegap.<p>For rails vs node.js , if I already have a back-end built for a web-app would one or the other be better/easier/more suited to link up to phonegap? Or would it be more or less the same? (just individual preference for which one to use) Thanks! <comment><USER2> I would use node given that your plan sounds like it will involve several distinct JS clients.

I don't actually consider node/JS the most ideal choice for developing good backend habits if back end development was your central goal. But it will introduce you to a JS development process that is a lot better structured than you are likely to commit to when working with JS only on the client side. It will also make it easier to restructure with less of a mess if you realize you need to move between thin/online and fat/offline clients.

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't matter what you use to build your back-end APIs. All your client will see are REST endpoints that produce/consume JSON.

I'd do the API in Rails, just because there are probably more resources available and the framework is very REST oriented. Don't know much about Node though, could be just as good.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree, for a new comer I think Rails will be much more forgiving and easier to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for answering! That seems to be the common consensus

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Backend choice is irrelevant. If you have a working backend it is trivial to make it work with phonegap.

</comment><comment><USER6> Instead of Phonegap, check out React Native. RN has much better future prospects.</comment>


Learn GraphQL with GitHub - happy-go-lucky https://github.com/blog/2412-learn-graphql-with-github <comment><AUTHOR> To all considering using graphql, let me tell you something that was unclear to me when I first tried it: If you plan to use it with a schemaless (nosql/graph) backend, graphql will force you to write a schema for it. If you can't (due to dynamic data), you will just end up forcing graphql treat your data as json-blobs with no schema. Graphql turns into a json-blob transmitter with no benefits. Also, if you have deeply nested/recursive data structures, the client performing the query needs to know just how deep it should query. This can lead to ridiculous queries if you're running on a graph db where the client doesn't know how many vertices it should traverse. REST is a better fit if the above is true for you.

<comment><USER2> To help solve the nested/recursive query problem, Facebook created dataloader: [https://github.com/facebook/dataloader](https://github.com/facebook/dataloader) There's graphql integration info on the blog: [http://graphql.org/blog/rest- api-graphql-wrapper/#taming-pat...](http://graphql.org/blog/rest-api-graphql- wrapper/#taming-pathological-queries)

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably was a bit unclear. Lets say I've got a family tree stored in a db that goes back 1000 years.

Through graphql I want to find my first ancestor following all mothers backwards. The query would be:

      query familyTree {
        name,
        mother {
          name,
          mother {
            ..and so on for an unknown number of nestings
          }
        }
      }

Dataloader solves batching of the nested query on the server, but doesn't solve the problem of not knowing what the correct number of nestings the query should have.

Of course it's possible to create a new graphql endpoint for this type of query, but then we've just recreated REST in graphql.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, you're not quite thinking in GraphQL properly. That isn't how your schema should be designed.

Your mother field should resolve to a Person type, with a mother and/or ancestors field, which would be a graphql list type of the Person type.

Something like this:

      Person {
        mother: Person
        femaleAncestors: [Person]
      }

<comment><USER4> Yeah ideally ancestors would be a `connection`/`edge` with filters:

``` Person { ancestors(gender: Female, orderby: [AGE], first: 10) { node { name } } } ```

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. Personally I haven't made much use of NoSQL, I'm sure there are plenty of use cases, but for ancestry I would still use a relational db.

I do see how nested objects might look like a perfect fit for this, since families are literally "nested objects". Perhaps there are plenty of advantages to using NoSQL and shaping the data this way... but the thought of creating an API With that structure is terrifying to me, haha.

Question to OP: are you using this structure for a live api/website I can take a look at? Does each node have an absolute ID? Do you normalize your data? Maybe I'm thinking too much in relational terms here? I'm genuinely curious about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet another tutorial about using a GraphQL client. It's nice but I think the hard part is implementing a GraphQL server. Are there any examples of a full blown GraphQL server, interpreting complex queries as SQL/NoSQL queries in a performant way?

<comment><USER6> > Are there any examples of a full blown GraphQL server

Sure! But here's the thing to know: the meat of a GraphQL server is in the schema. Every server implementation you see will have you define a schema, and then will execute queries against it. I would do the setup for the implementation in the language of your choice (instructions for which is usually listed in the README of the git repo), and then take a look at example schema, the most famous of which is the Star Wars schema:

For JS: [https://github.com/jahewson/graphql- starwars](https://github.com/jahewson/graphql-starwars)

For Python (Graphene): [https://github.com/graphql- python/graphene/tree/master/examp...](https://github.com/graphql- python/graphene/tree/master/examples/starwars)

> interpreting complex queries as SQL/NoSQL queries in a performant way

Something which is often confusing is that GraphQL is completely _database agnostic_. However you were fetching data from your database of choice before, you will continue to do. GraphQL has you define types (i.e. a user type, a blog post type, etc.), and then _you tell it how to fetch that data_. It could be a library for SQL, NoSQL, or even another API.

<comment><USER7> Question, how well do GraphQL APIs compose?

For example, imagine I define my GraphQL schema which is pretty similar to another GraphQL schema (of a remote API server).

Could I implement my GraphQL server's resolvers in such a way that they simply rewrite/reinterpret the incoming query by forwarding the (modified) query to the target remote GraphQL server? Or will it be very inefficient and very hard to write this kind of GraphQL-schema-to-similar-GraphQL-schema adapter?

To compare REST, one can imagine (a part of) your REST API being similar to another external REST API. It's relatively straightforward to have your HTTP handlers map to remote REST API endpoints and make the neccessary conversions. (Assuming your REST endpoints map relatively 1:1 to the other API's REST endpoints).

Hopefully my question makes sense...

<comment><USER8> I'm still fairly new to GraphQL, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's my understanding that a idiomatic GraphQL server would implement a single purpose resolver function for _every single field_ in the schema, and these field resolvers would then compose together to resolve larger query fragments. Often a request caching & batching layer like Facebook's own DataLoader library is necessary to make data fetching efficient and performant under this model: [http://graphql.org/learn/best-practices/#server-side- batchin...](http://graphql.org/learn/best-practices/#server-side-batching- caching)

So in other words, for parts of your schema that are similar to each other, you'd simply include and compose together the relevant resolver functions for the fields they share. The conceptual model is similar to reducer composition in Redux, where top-level reducers (analogous to the root query resolver in GraphQL) can delegate to child reducers each responsible for only a part of the application state (or child resolvers each responsible for resolving a single fragment of the whole query), and this delegation can continue to arbitrary depths.

EDIT: I see your question is actually about composing with third party GraphQL APIs, so I haven't really answered it. GraphQL resolvers are just functions that return data. So you can certainly just implement an async resolver that forwards the received GraphQL query to a remote API of interest, and take the response returned and merge/override it with additional data to form the response to your own query.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If anyone is interested in jumping straight in to GraphQL, I recommend graph.cool. It was posted a while back when the service was first released. Their free developer tier is awesome, and their project tier is completely reasonable.

<comment><USER10> There is also the graph.cool slack channel if you're looking for an active GraphQL community. You can usually find someone to help you out with questions there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For Go users interested in accessing GitHub's GraphQL API v4 [1], you should know that there are existing efforts [2][3] to create a Go client for it.

[1] [https://developer.github.com/v4/](https://developer.github.com/v4/)

[2] [https://github.com/google/go- github/issues/646](https://github.com/google/go-github/issues/646)

[3] [https://github.com/shurcooL/githubql](https://github.com/shurcooL/githubql)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've created a really basic server + client tutorial here:

[https://github.com/theogravity/graphql-apollo-server- client-...](https://github.com/theogravity/graphql-apollo-server-client- example)

I actually have stopped using Apollo on the server side (outside of the middleware) to build the GraphQL definitions.

I use the vanilla graphql-js lib instead with the join-monster library for queries + batching + paging and objection.js for modeling + mutations.

join-monster is built for using your database with graphql (I use postgres). Objection.js is great for mutations because of its insertGraph / upsertGraph functionality, where you can feed in your entire mutation input as a nested structure and it will perform the right insertion queries to multiple tables based on your objection.js models that you've defined.

I've learned much more since then (eg authorization / authentication / mutations / implementing paging via relay connections) that I'll probably start up another project in the future talking about how to build a full-scale GraphQL server.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any way to watch this without signing up or registering for anything?

I'd just like to download the video directly, if at all possible.

<comment><USER13> They put up recordings later, hosted on Vimeo; for example:

[https://resources.github.com/webcasts/GitHub- communicating-w...](https://resources.github.com/webcasts/GitHub- communicating-with-issues/)

With some digging you can get an MP4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To get started and understand how to build a GraphQL server, here's a nice video: Zero to GraphQL in 30 Minutes [0].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBGzsb2UkeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBGzsb2UkeY)

</comment><comment><USER15> Huge thanks to the GitHub team for putting together this webcast!

For everybody interested who already wants to get familiar with GraphQL, check out this getting started tutorial for GraphQL: [https://www.howtographql.com/](https://www.howtographql.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is that 10 PDT or 10 PST? Trying to convert but confused...

<comment><USER17> Most likely PDT. There aren't any regions currently observing PST

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is the purpose of webcasts? Why not just post a video? I presume it's not interactive Q&A -- too many people would be watching.</comment>


The Indestructible Idea of the Basic Income - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/03/the-indestructible-idea-of-the <comment><AUTHOR> KERA Think Podcast with the author of the article: [http://think.kera.org/2017/06/12/how-a-basic-income-could- en...](http://think.kera.org/2017/06/12/how-a-basic-income-could-end-poverty/)</comment>