I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010.

We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.

I am not sure what you mean here. I just checked my uploads and all my live music stuff is still there, as well as obscure published records.

Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device.

Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.

AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.

I trusted it in 2008 because none of these things had been around long enough to have a track record of enshittification.

> They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).

Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story.

It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS.

There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"

There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.

The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it

In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and yet in blog comments readers would often reveal in passsing that they were largely consuming blogs through RSS. The technology was much more accessible than you assume.

> I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.

If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.

It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.

And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.

The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter.

But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.

They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous

Buzz was weird because its main impact was killing another Google product, Orkut

G+ plausibly challenged an existential threat: Facebook.

Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.