I'm also a user and I've noticed significant changes.
In that time I’ve noticed Real Estate, Ads, Marketplaces, Interest groups, completely redesigned apps, etc. and probably a bunch of stuff that I haven’t noticed as well.
So Nextdoor will have a competitor soon. I was honestly wondering when this would happen because the geographic based reviews and advertising approach totally aligns with the type of service that Google would NOT kill after a couple of years.
Maps, business reviews and advertising...only makes sense.
Yep. At this point I’m burned out on google products and moving on. No way would I commit more data to google for something they’ll abandon when the person who used this project as their resume builder moves on to the next job.
They used to have a neighborhood feature, but I am guessing it just fizzled. Also I don’t really want my neighbors to have a view into my Facebook profile
Unless they're going to leverage their monopoly in Search or Android to get into this business, Nextdoor doesn't have anything to worry about. Google doesn't have a history of releasing products that succeed organically.
And they probably will, but that's why the EU's antitrust cases against Google are so important!
Also, a good part of Nextdoor's growth is due to real-world hands-on activity. Things like actual people being rewarded for handing actual neighbors flyers. Nextdoor will even send its members postcards to get their neighbors on board. Again -- physical objects.
Google doesn't do physical. If a problem can't be done remotely through machine learning, it's not worth doing.
Does Nextdoor have employees delivering those rewards for the flyers? If not, I don't see what's so different. Sending a postcard is just calling a different API.
Remember sidewalk? There have been a number of players who could have parlayed into nextdoors turf, but have not been successful. Google has the budget and heft, so maybe.
Wild animal activity is relevant to some people. We've had mountain lions kill deer within 100 meters of our property. Better to keep the dogs in when they're around.
NextDoor and email lists are a terrible way of disseminating scares. I'd rather have a "apex predator weather" feature that tells me, day-by-day, whether to keep the dogs in.
Unfortunately / fortunately in my area ... there was no bear (at least no evidence) and it was HIGHLY unlikely to have occurred (bears haven't been around these parts for decades).
But there was a siting, and lots of photos of bear (deer) poo, and trampled flower beds as evidence!
Making neighborhood gossip easier is worrying on many levels.
A hack that has been used in the past to scale totalitarian social control is to employ what is essentially a viral enforcement mechanism: basically, getting people to inform on their neighbors. It only takes one or two visible instances of this behavior with a violent outcome and it replicates quickly, following an exponential growth rate until the population is saturated with informants.
Reporting on neighbors and peers is much of the glue which has held together the worst authoritarian regimes: DPRK, East Germany, Nazi Germany ... as well as being a primary strategy for causing the revolutions which put those regimes in place.
A platform like this:
- lowers the friction of informing
- is vulnerable to anonymity / spoofing / automation / remote manipulation
- allows for stories of informing to persist in the community memory as always-online posts, increasing their effect across time
- is connected to a de facto surveillance apparatus (the internet) to boot
Prediction: This app is just an A/B test between A = asking the users of the Google Maps app structured questions and B = This app doing so with machine learning & user-powered Q&A.
Depending on how that goes one or the other will be removed within a year.
They already sort of do some checking of their location services with follow up queries in the Android Rewards app. I would swear a large percentage of stores/location it asks me if I have visited recently are stores that I have never heard of but it either thinks I visited or is doing some sort of sanity check to make sure I am answering honestly.
That's kinda nifty for advertisers, if Google will allow advertising there (which I assume they will). Hyper-local advertising surely has its perks: low cost/high success I think are quite possible.
Hyperlocal advertising is the space that tries to gather up the long tail as the efficacy of mainstream adtech is questioned.
Ad money is dominated by spray-and-pray big name brand awareness whose correspondence to conversions is opaque, but most of online adtech is about tracking metrics for particular targeted ads, and big buyers are frustrated about their opaqueness and questioning their value [1]. Then there's the long tail of everyone else, from a small band to a local restaurant, who are just trying to get their names out there, but lack the clout to lobby Facebook's ad policies.
This hyperlocal advertising is what many Facebook ads have been tending towards. It's only natural that Google would try to corner as much of it as it can, with services that are more content-driven than Maps.
This isn't just a competitor with Nextdoor. It might also compete with Quora, or at least fill the local need that Q&A platform can't address. Might also be a less scammy alternative to Craigslist.
I was wondering when something like this would come out. My community uses a Facebook group, and I've seen others do something similar (or even email listservs)
NZ has, https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/ which looks like a local competitor with same name. Things might get a bit confusing here if Google's stars to pick popularity
Yeah, was about to point out the same thing. I’m a little surprised - it’s one thing for a global tech giant to build a service that competes with yours, but it’s another to use exactly the same name. Is that actually allowed?
Given someone could register Stripe, Inc. in a different US state than where Stripe, Inc. is incorporated: https://stripe.ian.sh/ I would suggest... arguably, yes? Presumably within the realm of NZ, Neighbourly could go after Google for trademark infringement of some sort, if Google launches it in NZ, but from a global standpoint, what authority does anyone have to protect their name worldwide?
The only form of trading name protection is a trademark. So if neighbourly.co.nz wanted to expand into new markets, their next move would be a WIPO filing for their trademark - but you can't just register a trademark in a country and not trade under it there, it's easily challenged.
And after having searched IPONZ's website, it appears that there's not even a registered trademark in NZ for neighbourly - so if Google were to start trading in NZ using "neighbourly", neighbourly.co.nz would have to rely on the passing off provisions of the Fair Trading Act and be able to produce evidence that Google had caused them loss by confusing their customers.
TL;DR - trademarks are important.
As an aside, based on spelling (-our vs. -or) I presume this Google product comes from a non-American market.
Took 7 years until there was "Gmail" in Germany, might be harder for google in NZ though if there's a company and not just an individual who holds the trademark.
In the mission, it mentions Indian cities specifically "In big cities across India, it’s getting harder to get good answers" https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/
Which of the businesses they've dropped is this true for? Few of the examples I can think of were market leaders when they were dropped, and none of those were monopolising the market completely.
Google Reader? The diaspora that followed is often considered to be the "death" of RSS, and certainly the "death" of "Social RSS". RSS usage in general did tank after Google Reader.
Though, there's a correlation/causation question there. Google Reader shutdown to entrench Google's attempt at a walled garden social network, but Google was considered late to the "walling in your garden" party at the time, so market forces (Facebook, Twitter) what they were at the time, it's possible that even if Reader didn't shutdown, RSS probably was "doomed".
Similarly, Google Talk? For a brief period everyone was using XMPP (whether they knew it or not), to the point where even Facebook capitulated to using XMPP for real-time communications, partly to integrate with Google Talk, just in time for Google to drop most Talk support and XMPP support in the "upgrade" to Hangouts.
Again, things are washy in the correlation/causation question. If Google had pushed Talk longer, would XMPP be more of a thing today? Or was the walled garden communications network too tempting to the market that it would have gone that way anyway?
Personally, I think Google losing a lot of its "roots" in trying to use standards to best fit (RSS, XMPP), versus rolling everything internally/proprietarily was a key change in the web at the time, and I'm willing to ascribe it more to the causation side of things, but there's certainly a healthy debate to both sides.
Right, but Google Talk didn't take over some large XMPP market. The dominant IMs at the time were using proprietary protocols. XMPP just fell back to where it was before they came in.
They can also take market because they likely have better tax arrangements, so running their experiments would be much cheaper than for independent start-up.
Personally I couldn't care less about whether Google innovate or succeed or whatever. I just care that when I bother to invest (time) in a service it sticks around. If it's not a companies core service/product then it's not worth the effort. Google have demonstrated this more than most. They're at the bottom of the list.
Other than Google Reader I'd include Hangouts and Picasa. And as someone else pointed out, latitude. It was broken but they could have fixed it. Odd that they have all the creepy spying capabilities but don't let you use them. Maybe they're worried that it'll let people see the creepiness for themselves.
Maybe a class action lawsuit - not for money - but for the promise of open sourcing and leaving some funding for any future projects that have customer support, but that they want to squash without adequate reason.
If Google deprecates something = HN complains they deprecate everything
If Google launches something = HN complains they deprecate everything
I Google migrates, renames, merges, spins off, sells = HN complains they deprecate everything
Google Reader was 5 years ago... what other example is there of a successful or even well-liked product that was killed, and not simply renamed or migrated? Picasa albums made it to Google Photos, for example. Google Talk became Hangouts. Where exactly does this meme come from? What product are you mourning that you actually used? Buzz? Wave?
I see from a different branch of this thread that the other answer is "XMPP support for Hangouts," which seems like a pretty specific feature to carry all this water.
Google Wave, yes. For as much as they pushed it and acted like they were confident, they bailed really fast. Google Talk, Google Code, Google Notebook, iGoogle. Various APIs for maps etc. Big pushes that never go anywhere like Google Books. Wasn't there Google shopping at some point? Or non-discontinued things that aren't really taken seriously: Google Plus, Allo, Google Scholar, any number of rebrands of their payment service. Lots of acquisition-shutdowns or just embarrassments like Nest.
But more importantly, they just don't seem to actually have a strategy. Every few months we hear this is the future, and then that thing is never mentioned again. Or they announce a clone of some existing successful service and then don't seem to have any follow-through willpower.
All these renames/migrations/rebrands usually come with breakage of the UI/API/functionality. It's irritating to actual users and feels sloppy to everyone who pays attention.
However Google earned this reputation and however fair it is or isn't, it undoubtedly hurts new product launches. So the question is, how does Google throw off the reputation of being completely untrustworthy?
The cynic in me wonders whether this is just a way for Google to "mine the consciousness". They will use the findings from this to feed into another product (Search, Maps, Assistant, etc.) and drop the service in a few years.
As long as we're reporting issues, the language chooser at the bottom right is white text on a white background when I actually click it. Whichever one I put my mouse over becomes white on blue, and I can read it. This is while using Chrome on Linux.
My wife somehow became our neighborhood's leader or whatever it's called on NextDoor. Half the stuff is garbage like that. The other half is upper-middle class adults behaving like spoiled children.
Racist busybodies were nattering racists long before they had a social media platform. If anything, platforms like Nextdoor are helping the issue by shining light on it, allowing the nutjobs just enough of a safe space to feel free to talk while letting the rest of us see what they're doing.
Regardless, Nextdoor in my area is hardly toxic. It's actually pretty stale -- mostly a mix of home services referrals and junk for sale. They've cranked up the ad content very significantly over the last year without really bringing/encouraging much in the way of better neighborhood content. I don't know if Google is going to do it any better, but some competition in this space certainly couldn't hurt.
It’s true that nuts existed before but social media can have an amplifying effect when it helps them find fellow travelers and convince themselves that their views are common and normal.
Anyone building platforms needs to take that problem seriously since it leads to both serious real-world negatives (e.g. antivax) and driving more reasonable people away.
They seem to have gotten the racist freak outs under control in my area. In the last year we’ve moved on to animal welfare freak outs.
A couple of weeks ago there was a thread condemning jogging with your dog. The OP was pretty upset about someone jogging with their dog during the heat of the day. There’s plenty of validity to the concern that someone could overheat their dog, but the crazy just exploded from the woodwork. A flame war erupted and several of the commenters stopped just shy of calling for dog joggers to be stoned.
Nextdoor seems to bring out a special brand of crazy.
Nextdoor was nice, but it seems to be full of anima people in my neighborhood. Every week is a post on how some loud noise distressed their tiny dog and then a bunch of posts about what kind of thunder blanket is best.
My neighborhood was mostly black when I moved here 15 years ago. Nextdoor was definitely the go to place for people moving into the neighborhood and then realizing they were surrounded by suspiciously non-white folks.
For good or bad everyone is now fixated instead on the local homeless encampment after the mayor and ACLU created a situation where those folks can't be dislocated. It's less "how do we help those days unfortunate souls so they aren't in this situation" and more "how did we get rid of these stinky campers bringing down my property value?"
(iirc) color and favor are the 'original' english spellings, which are more alike to latin. the additional U is a result of french influence, specifically via the norman conquest of england.
Anyone know how this integrates with Maps? I could imagine some really cool innovations by applying machine learning or somehow connecting the data from this app to Maps users.
Interesting. Although the mobile gold-rush is considered over, I think there's still real potential in 'hyper-local' realtime information. There are some examples of this--Waze for traffic, the 'Citizen' app for crime--but there's so much more that can be visible. Power outages, roads needing repair... of course it's (relatively) easy to make an app that tracks all this but the tough part is giving people a reason or incentive to post the information.
I liked Yik Yak a lot before they destroyed it. It provided this type of information and allowed people to ask local questions like what this looks like it aims to do.
Google probably see that many people are searching on Google for such information and they plan to steal the users from current sites. I wonder if this is Google's new growth strategy - find out what is hot by looking at what people are searching for, then try to enter that market.
What's worse is that by network effect certain bad Google products killed good non-Google products. Then the Google product was retired or never evolved and so forth.
174 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadIn that time I’ve noticed Real Estate, Ads, Marketplaces, Interest groups, completely redesigned apps, etc. and probably a bunch of stuff that I haven’t noticed as well.
Maps, business reviews and advertising...only makes sense.
And they probably will, but that's why the EU's antitrust cases against Google are so important!
Also, a good part of Nextdoor's growth is due to real-world hands-on activity. Things like actual people being rewarded for handing actual neighbors flyers. Nextdoor will even send its members postcards to get their neighbors on board. Again -- physical objects.
Google doesn't do physical. If a problem can't be done remotely through machine learning, it's not worth doing.
I look forward to the next 'bear in the neighborhood' scare hosted by Google ;)
NextDoor and email lists are a terrible way of disseminating scares. I'd rather have a "apex predator weather" feature that tells me, day-by-day, whether to keep the dogs in.
Unfortunately / fortunately in my area ... there was no bear (at least no evidence) and it was HIGHLY unlikely to have occurred (bears haven't been around these parts for decades).
But there was a siting, and lots of photos of bear (deer) poo, and trampled flower beds as evidence!
Is this a feature that's coming out globally or just in India?
[0] -https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/google-launches-neighbourl...
A hack that has been used in the past to scale totalitarian social control is to employ what is essentially a viral enforcement mechanism: basically, getting people to inform on their neighbors. It only takes one or two visible instances of this behavior with a violent outcome and it replicates quickly, following an exponential growth rate until the population is saturated with informants.
Reporting on neighbors and peers is much of the glue which has held together the worst authoritarian regimes: DPRK, East Germany, Nazi Germany ... as well as being a primary strategy for causing the revolutions which put those regimes in place.
A platform like this:
- lowers the friction of informing
- is vulnerable to anonymity / spoofing / automation / remote manipulation
- allows for stories of informing to persist in the community memory as always-online posts, increasing their effect across time
- is connected to a de facto surveillance apparatus (the internet) to boot
It's an article of clothing worn by Indian women.
Depending on how that goes one or the other will be removed within a year.
Ad money is dominated by spray-and-pray big name brand awareness whose correspondence to conversions is opaque, but most of online adtech is about tracking metrics for particular targeted ads, and big buyers are frustrated about their opaqueness and questioning their value [1]. Then there's the long tail of everyone else, from a small band to a local restaurant, who are just trying to get their names out there, but lack the clout to lobby Facebook's ad policies.
This hyperlocal advertising is what many Facebook ads have been tending towards. It's only natural that Google would try to corner as much of it as it can, with services that are more content-driven than Maps.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362705#16363374
The only form of trading name protection is a trademark. So if neighbourly.co.nz wanted to expand into new markets, their next move would be a WIPO filing for their trademark - but you can't just register a trademark in a country and not trade under it there, it's easily challenged.
And after having searched IPONZ's website, it appears that there's not even a registered trademark in NZ for neighbourly - so if Google were to start trading in NZ using "neighbourly", neighbourly.co.nz would have to rely on the passing off provisions of the Fair Trading Act and be able to produce evidence that Google had caused them loss by confusing their customers.
TL;DR - trademarks are important.
As an aside, based on spelling (-our vs. -or) I presume this Google product comes from a non-American market.
1. Try out new business
2. Take over the market due to Google’s name/search power
3. Decide business isn’t worth it and pull out
4. No one is left, people have to start from scratch again
Though, there's a correlation/causation question there. Google Reader shutdown to entrench Google's attempt at a walled garden social network, but Google was considered late to the "walling in your garden" party at the time, so market forces (Facebook, Twitter) what they were at the time, it's possible that even if Reader didn't shutdown, RSS probably was "doomed".
Similarly, Google Talk? For a brief period everyone was using XMPP (whether they knew it or not), to the point where even Facebook capitulated to using XMPP for real-time communications, partly to integrate with Google Talk, just in time for Google to drop most Talk support and XMPP support in the "upgrade" to Hangouts.
Again, things are washy in the correlation/causation question. If Google had pushed Talk longer, would XMPP be more of a thing today? Or was the walled garden communications network too tempting to the market that it would have gone that way anyway?
Personally, I think Google losing a lot of its "roots" in trying to use standards to best fit (RSS, XMPP), versus rolling everything internally/proprietarily was a key change in the web at the time, and I'm willing to ascribe it more to the causation side of things, but there's certainly a healthy debate to both sides.
This comment gave me an idea: what does Trends say for RSS?
It has two results:
- For the search term: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss
- For the "computer file format": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Both charts are nearly identical.
There's a noticeable blip in March 2013 when the closure was announced, but that blip sits within a concretely downward trend.
I had to dig a bit to locate the very tiny downward slope in July when Reader actually shut down; there's nothing noticeable there.
Flu trends
Latitude
But in Goog’s case it’s not so much innovating and failing as it’s poor product design and sticktoitiveness with +, Wave, a hundred chat apps
Google Reader was 5 years ago... what other example is there of a successful or even well-liked product that was killed, and not simply renamed or migrated? Picasa albums made it to Google Photos, for example. Google Talk became Hangouts. Where exactly does this meme come from? What product are you mourning that you actually used? Buzz? Wave?
But more importantly, they just don't seem to actually have a strategy. Every few months we hear this is the future, and then that thing is never mentioned again. Or they announce a clone of some existing successful service and then don't seem to have any follow-through willpower.
All these renames/migrations/rebrands usually come with breakage of the UI/API/functionality. It's irritating to actual users and feels sloppy to everyone who pays attention.
However Google earned this reputation and however fair it is or isn't, it undoubtedly hurts new product launches. So the question is, how does Google throw off the reputation of being completely untrustworthy?
Kune: https://kune.ourproject.org/about/
(ex-Novell) Vibe: https://www.microfocus.com/products/vibe/features/
SwellRT: http://swellrt.org/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-profiling-i...
Regardless, Nextdoor in my area is hardly toxic. It's actually pretty stale -- mostly a mix of home services referrals and junk for sale. They've cranked up the ad content very significantly over the last year without really bringing/encouraging much in the way of better neighborhood content. I don't know if Google is going to do it any better, but some competition in this space certainly couldn't hurt.
Anyone building platforms needs to take that problem seriously since it leads to both serious real-world negatives (e.g. antivax) and driving more reasonable people away.
A couple of weeks ago there was a thread condemning jogging with your dog. The OP was pretty upset about someone jogging with their dog during the heat of the day. There’s plenty of validity to the concern that someone could overheat their dog, but the crazy just exploded from the woodwork. A flame war erupted and several of the commenters stopped just shy of calling for dog joggers to be stoned.
Nextdoor seems to bring out a special brand of crazy.
As another poster pointed out in a way the fact that racism is obvious in these platforms is an improvement over it hiding in plain sight.
For good or bad everyone is now fixated instead on the local homeless encampment after the mayor and ACLU created a situation where those folks can't be dislocated. It's less "how do we help those days unfortunate souls so they aren't in this situation" and more "how did we get rid of these stinky campers bringing down my property value?"
I believe the American spelling is "favor".
(iirc) color and favor are the 'original' english spellings, which are more alike to latin. the additional U is a result of french influence, specifically via the norman conquest of england.
Nextdoor is a hive of NIMBYism.
I really wish they would just become a Platform company and let the next doors of the world build on them and let goog take 30% of revenue.
They are bad at network/human stuff. As evidenced by this site “coming soon.”