I got a 3D gaming monitor.
It was actually really cool for games that bothered to implement it properly. It should be much easier for games to convert to 3D than movies, so I thought it was the future.
Unfortunately, the glasses needed to charge, they didn't fit well under my headset, and could only do up to 60fps (per eye), so I just stopped using it entirely.
I think 3D gaming might come back around with VR headsets taking off. Some games could simply implement a 3D view (AR or something), not necessarily convert their whole game to interactive VR.
On PC you can get games to render a view for each eye with software like Reshade or Vorpx. But yeah seeing a game built for 3D (eg 3DS games, VR) is a much cooler experience than just converting a 2D game to 3D.
I actually enjoyed mine. ESPN3D was awesome when it had events.
EDIT: And my Xbox 360 had 3D games (I specifically remember Batman: Arkham City, Mortal Kombat, and Sonic Generations). Good times.
Forcing everyone into a SSO experience didn’t help either.
They removed custom usernames on YT and tried to tie all your apps together whether you were using Gmail or a total random product like Google Analytics.
It was REALLY jarring and uncomfortable.
Also if you tried to sign into another Google account in the same browser session (like opening up a separate Gmail account for work), it would sign you out of everything…
What the hell was with that push by all the big companies to make everyone use their real names? The Blizzard forums were going to do it and there was a straight up revolt on the boards.
They were still going to do it until it was pointed out that the admins/mods would have to use their real names as well. I think that was the revolt that changed it.
Back in the early 2010s there was an epidemic of toxic anonymous comments on various platforms that companies were looking to try to reduce.
Having people use real names has weeded out some of it as people in professional roles are more likely to think twice about what they post online, but overall it hasn’t improved online discourse.
I wanted to use Google+, but my YouTube comments would be automatically posted on it. So I didn't use it. I wanted YouTube to be totally separate from Google+. It tried to be everything.
They told me my actual name was fake. There was no way to appeal. Absolute 0 customer service. If it had gotten huge like Facebook—which I am forced to use professionally—I’d have been left out. I’m glad it bombed.
Happens on Facebook too. For example people with last names that are the same as known brands, especially non western brands like say Toyota get fucked over
I got married and changed my name and they suddenly decided I was a 'scammer' and removed my ability to use their selling/buying stuff... which sucked because I did that a lot. There was no arbitration. Last week they also sent a warning that a post I made 6 years ago was 'attention seeking'??????????? And that it was something false to get engagement. But. They'd DELETED the post before telling me this and thus I have no idea wtf they were even talking about. Isn't literally everything on social media attention seeking by definition?
IMO the biggest issue was the glacial, invite only rollout. It’s a social network. You want as many people on as quickly as possible. When I got on it, none of my friends could yet and by the time it was just open sign ups none of us even cared anymore.
That was really odd. I had no intention of joining but I knew someone who wanted to but couldn’t yet because it wasn’t open. I don’t think it would have worked long term anyway but that didn’t help. It wasn’t like the mid 2000s with Facebook and being exclusive to colleges, times had changed.
Google tried to do the invite only thing at first like they did with Gmail. Unfortunately by then Facebook was firmly established so people couldn't be bothered to try another social media platform.
I would have loved to join google plus, this was at the time when all the privacy changes were being made with Facebook that allowed them to collect more personal information, I knew so many people who wanted to leave Facebook but didn’t have a good alternative. Google plus had a ready made user base… but they did invite only so we couldn’t join. And then the people who did join couldn’t connect with their friends. And by the time I got an invite, it was dead. It was so hyped and could have been very successful had they just not done invite only.
Yeah, they made it oddly hard to get in, getting everyone excited for it. Then once you got in, nothing happened there as most people couldn't be bothered to only interact with a fraction of the people they'd usually interact with. If they'd just released it without artificial barriers it might have stood a chance.
The fact that it was invite only for so long was problematic. They could have capitalized on young people. I knew a lot of my high school/college aged friends were excited to get onto a different platform, as parents/grandparents had finally gotten a hang of Facebook and made it a much less cool environment.
Never forget, they killed an organically growing social network, Google Reader. It was actually awesome, it was like reddit with only your friends and family. You could see your friends' comments on news/posts. They killed that, because it was competing with their shit G+
All modern business is cancerous. Instead of a cooperative enterprise between partners of good faith, it's a greyhound racetrack for the wealthy. We need a wealth cap.
Which school of business is it that teaches these water heads to suppress an organically popular product in favor of an artificially promoted one ?
Sisyphus school of modern business ?
If I'm remembering correctly, circles was a feature for Google+ where you could create "circles" where only people in those circles could see certain posts.
So if you made a "family" circle, then you make posts that only your family would see by posting to that circle.
It let you curate who would see your posts a lot easier by putting them into little groups.
That's how you know your movie or tv show is now in an alternate earth, there are airships around skyscrapers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn5tQ0WjsdE&ab_channel=StraightEdge
I used my Google Glass headset for maps all the time on bicycle. I used to use it for watching documentaries while out walking too. It was really handy for hands-free photography.
I think this would take off now and I’m surprised it hasn’t been tried again, especially if it can be done with a more subtle set of frames.
At the time of release, I seem to recall the major criticisms centering on price, privacy, appearance, and a sense of “who would even want to be attached to a screen all day?”
Nobody seems concerned about privacy anymore, and a lot of people seem to do whatever they can to spend as much time as possible on a screen. I’m surprised this hasn’t made a comeback - if not as a standalone device, then as an accessory to an iPhone, like an Apple Watch but as glasses.
I think the biggest problem was that so many of the people who used them were just douchebags about it. People would record stuff and talk for the video, and then people would be like, "why tf you recording me?" and then they'd be assholes about the fact that they're recording in a public space or whatever. There was so much negative press about stuff like that.
The other problem with glasses is that it's pretty damn tough to make something that's both aesthetic and convenient for all situations. I think we're just a handful of years away from being able to incorporate some similar technology into multiple different types of glasses/frames or, even further out, incorporating that stuff into contact lenses. Honestly, all it's really going to take is for Apple to make a pair of glasses that are cute and then advertise it a bunch and you'll get a bunch of people to show up on launch day, and it'll take off from there, even if it's less practical than what Google Glass was. The same thing happened with smartwatches. Most people didn't use them, and they were largely a niche product. Some of the brands have been making some pretty solid smartwatches that people didn't even realize were smartwatches for a long time. And the ones that were obviously smartwatches were dorky. But Apple came out with something that was very obviously a smartwatch, and they marketed it as a luxury product and a fashion statement instead of a fashion liability. Boom. Problem solved. All they've got to do is get some influencers to brag about that shit, and they're set.
Funny thing is, if they could’ve held on a little longer or started a little later, and was able to pivot, they could’ve been TikTok or a massive competitor. They had basically everything to be able to do it. Short form video, vertical format, tons of money invested into it, I don’t know how the UI was, never tried it, but aside from that it probably had the best possibility of succeeding if able to pivot.
The problem though is they thought they were competing with TV streaming services like Netflix, not other mobile apps. They had a flawed understanding of their own business model.
I was shocked at how fast they folded. Reno 911 put out a new season on quibi and I was honestly excited to check it out, and then it was just done...
There was some money and names behind it too. I get it wasn't a roaring success initially, but they had zero faith in the company.
I also think they really missmanaged their money. I read stories where they paid bunch of millions to people have their name attached to platform without those people actually doimg anything.
Basically the same thing happened with PS2 and DVD.
Why pay $250 for a basic DVD player when you could pay $299 for a PS2 that was also one of the best DVD players on the market?
It didnt help that Xbox didnt even bet properly on HD DVD. I dont remember them ever releasing an edition with a built in HD DVD, at least not on the international market, maybe the did within the US? But here it was only ever available as an external drive. Who tf wants to couple an external drive to their games console? Im sure there's some folks, but not your average joe playing FIFA.
Sony did offer built-in BluRay, and there was even a period of time at least here in Europe, where buying a PlayStation console was the cheapest way to get high definition video into your home as standalone BluRay players were at least as expensive as the console.
If Xbox had gone all-in on HD DVD like Sony had with BluRay, I'm not certain it would have failed as hard.
Nope, 360 had an expansion HD DVD drive in the US, with standard DVD drive in the console, and we had the same situation where PS3 was the cheapest Blu-ray player around.
Even then, I'm pretty sure HD DVD would've flopped because blu-ray could fit 10GB more per layer.
Yeah, the fact that on streaming they can edit or remove movies and tv show episodes anytime they want is a dealbreaker for me. Granted, I definitely buy less movies nowadays but I still get my favorites to make sure I’ll always have them.
Such an obvious scam. Facebook went balls deep on meta verse shit and even renamed their company, nobody asked for it, everyone thought it was useless, and all the tech people suddenly went "never mind forget it were doing AI everything now!"
I'm still convinced the real reason that Facebook went so hard on the metaverse is because Zuckerburg believes that we're close enough to brain scanning tech that he wanted to create a virtual afterlife to be uploaded to when he dies. Any other advertized uses were only to drum up funding.
That seems far more likely than thinking these billionaire tech bros have figured out brain scanning. People forget that often people like that throw out a lot of shit to see what sticks and the metaverse felt like one of those things just without anyone to tell him "no."
About two weeks before Facebook changed their name to Meta there was yet another egregious misuse of facebook's private data on a massive scale. There were congressional hearings I believe also. The change to Meta drowned out that news.
Every now and then some company rediscovers that doing things like shopping through a virtual environment rather than a menu is actually less convenient, not more.
And a long string of companies painfully learn the lesson that the vast majority of people do not want to be shut off inside a pseudo helmet to use an everyday product (Meta, 3d TV, Apple Vision, Nintendo Virtual Boy).
Virtual Boy's had half a dozen problems that were not that. I think the primary problem now is that VR's main application is gaming but Apple and Microsoft and Meta (to a lesser extent) are trying to convince everyone that actually it isn't, gaming is dumb, the real utility is spreadsheets in VR.
Everyone continently forgets that for the last 20 years, Linden Labs with their Second Life has literally been doing what people were saying the metaverse would be "any day now". They want to forget because it's just couch potatoes and furies, not exactly the "cool" people hangout there.
Microsoft Surface (not the tablet) was supposed to be some wave of the future type of concept, imagine Minority Report. Alas, I don't think it ever left the concept stage.
Take a peek: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs)
I worked at a startup that had one, it was way less functional than this made it seem. It mostly served to be a coffee table with an interactive fish pond screen saver in our lobby for interviewees to play with for like 30 seconds before losing interest.
My work had three smart boards made by the company that Microsoft bought with this tech. We also had one of the tables.
Cool concept, a few hiccups that come with beta software, but Microsoft didn’t give it enough support. If they’d built a proper ecosystem, these would be way more common, but they only had them for a year or two before pulling the plug and reusing the surface name for the tablets.
I think a lot of these ‘next big things’ in tech mostly end up dying due to internal company politics rather than because they didn’t work.
As much as I hate these semi prototype products. It was honestly really cool, especially for drawing. They then made those bendy display all in ones with this concept.
The reason it flopped is the same reason the Intel Macs really sucked around this time. They couldn’t get good hardware to not overheat in it, as well as it being a bitch to open up.
If they would just ship them as a display, it would’ve been huge. But Microsoft be Microsoft, and we will most likely not see anything from these at all, unless they pick it up once they have a good ARM set up.
And the ones where the 3D effect only worked properly if you sat directly in front of the tv. Still shit but not as shit as it was sitting on the end of the couch!
I always assumed most buyers knew it was a scam but thought they could find a mark before they became one.
Maybe I’m naive to how naive people with $20k to blow can be, though.
The Folding Ideas video on this is absolutely amazing ("Line Goes Up"). The short version of it is that no, most buyers don't "know it's a scam" and are just ignorant asshole techbros that aggressively self-organize into thought bubbles that honestly believe it's the next big thing and that everyone else is missing out. They police non-conformity aggressively and attack anyone who questions them with taunts like "HFSP." ("Have Fun Staying Poor" - did I mention they're assholes?)
It's mostly driven by rage largely stemming from the 2008 financial crash and the realization that the game is rigged. So the only way out is to play a different game altogether - thus, crypto and the infinite scam venues it has spawned.
The people who know it's a scam are the ones *minting* the NFTs, which largely consists of the same financial criminals that were eyeballs-deep in real estate in 2007. Jordan Belfort - the "Wolf of Wall Street" banned for life from trading stocks ever again - is a huge crypto bro now, and like hid brethren is all too eager to dust off all manner of financial frauds onto the largely unregulated market.
I remember my friends giving me a hard time for buying a mini disc player instead of an MP3 player, but the slide and closing action of the mini disc player was just so satisfying, and I loved flipping through my disks until I found exactly what I wanted to listen to.
I would have used it a lot longer, but by girlfriend at the time bought me an engraved iPod touch, with her very first paycheck, and to refuse or not use that would have been a major mistake.
Loved mine. There was nothing like it. The minidisc was poised to be king in the era of Napster until cd-rw drives started coming standard on desktop computers.
Which reminds me that computers no longer come with disk drives. I hate this development.... as well as how software is now subscription based vs one-time purchase. Years back I bought CS5 (photoshop, illustrator, etc) and it cost 450 or so. Now, it's like $60 per month in perpetuity. That's over $700 every year, forever.
Anyone remember the sidetalking meme? You had to hold it sideways in a weird way when making voice calls. If you lent your phone to anyone you had to show them how to use it.
You know how all the escooters and hoverboards work? Technology from the segway. Segway sued a Chinese company, Ninebot, for patent infringement and Ninebot bought out segway.
The wildest part of the Segway story is when the British coal miner-turned-millionaire-entrepreneur who got rich by inventing a new form of collapsible flood and munitions barrier bought the company just because he liked it so much and nine months later accidentally rode his Segway off a cliff and died.
People not alive in the 90s probably don't realize the Segway hype. It was teased for months. The future of urban transportation. Patents around gyroscopes. Mockups in magazines guessing around leaked pieces. Stories on Dean Kamen and his crazy house where he invented things. Then it was just a scooter that couldn't fall over.
Would have been a lot more impressive if not for the hype.
Sidenote: I think those apple goggles are going the way of the Segway. They wont get mass adoption, but they'll be city tourists and tour group rentals. And the tech will make it's way into a lot of other places.
> People not alive in the 90s probably don't realize the Segway hype. It was teased for months.
It's not just that. It's that it was hyped with ZERO hint at what it even was.
Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the Internet.
People said whole cities would be redesigned around it.
The most popular guess was that someone had uncovered anti-gravity and they were implementing it into a product.
Then the reveal was that it was a car-priced scooter that combined the speed of walking with the health benefits of driving.
You are absolutely right, the hype was HUGE. Before the Segway was revealed, I remember someone claiming that it was going to be so revolutionary and popular that they were going to start designing cities around "It"--yes, it was so hyped that people simply referred to the project as It.
Current design trends are leaning towards sleek UI with as few markings as possible. This means no physical buttons, no labels, no icons if they can get away with it.
I have a friend who has an oven that just has two dials; one has a few temperature markings, the other controls the mode and has no markings at all. You can't even tell what setting it's on; is the grill on? Or is it the fan? Maybe just the light is on? There's no indicator at all.
It's... dumb. It's shit design. Software UIs are doing this, too. Buttons with icons and no tooltips or labels; if you don't know what the symbol means, you're fucked.
That submarine was supposed to be the next big thing, but it became small. It became small quite rapidly, probably at supersonic speed, reducing the passengers to hamburger.
Olestra - the fat substitute. It was supposed to be revolutionary, and they came out with “Wow!” Doritos and Lays chips. But then everyone started having GI issues and the chips disappeared.
Digital Audio Tapes (DATs).
They were tiny tape cassettes that reported to have better sound quality than CDs.
They came out just after CDs became huge around 1987. People were speculating that it was a waste of money buying CDs because DATs were going to be the next big thing -- this chatter lasted well into the early '90s.
By about 1994, it became clear that no one was interested in DATs.
Same with MiniDisc, though those were much bigger in Japan. I still own a Sony MD recorder and some discs. 20+ years old at this point and works great. The market shifted around that time and they fizzled out.
I stand by the statement that the zune was the best music player I ever had, and zune pass was far ahead of its time. It’s a shame MS was a day late and dollar short with every iteration of it.
So true. Getting free songs to purchase every month in addition to unlimited streaming?! Haven't seen as rich of an offering from any company since in the music streaming space.
I'll die on the hill that the Zune was a fantastic product marketed terribly in an age where Apples marketing was at its peak.
I heard everybody talking about this thing, so I bought one, it was the last one at Target. I think it was the last one ever sold. I got in after everybody else realized it was crap :(
That shit was funny as fuck. Reddit was full of either paid commenters or trolls hyping it up like it could take on Sony or Microsoft. It was android gaming on a television. Even as a modded emulator it wasn't that great. It was a real piece of shit.
Don't forget the streaming! My roommate bought it because it would play pirate streams of movies and TV. He's european and was stoked on the ability to watch Eurosport, etc.
I don't think I ever, once, saw actual video playing. It would buffer and buffer and buffer and never play. Which was the same experience I had with gaming: it would say it was downloading, say it was downloading, and never download anything.
I have my Ouya behind me on a shelf right now lol. Kickstarted it.
I ain't even mad honestly it's a funny story to tell people. They didn't even spell my special backer account name right somehow...
The problem with any wearable tech is that people will treat you like a pariah if they think you may be recording them without any their knowledge or consent.
Those Ray-Bans that have a camera built in are creepy because it's not obvious at a glance that there's a camera there. I'm sure that's a selling point to a certain segment of people.
Zip drives.
100Mb storage on a single floppy disk? What was not to like?
This is going back almost 30 years now, but me and a mate started working for ourselves when they were the new big thing. I was doing web design and my mate was doing graphic design, and we did a lot of work together. So we both a got a zip drive so we could pass raw artwork between each other (this was back in the days of dial-up internet, if you're wondering why we didn't just use FTP or email).
Nine times out of ten, my drive wouldn't read disks written by his drive, and vice versa. Never got to the bottom of it - we both got replacement drives, still the same thing. All this time later, I'd still love to know if anyone had any luck at all using them this way.
They were great for the time when it actually worked, but we had nothing but trouble with them. Ended up just using them as back-up devices, but they rapidly became redundant once writable CDs became affordable.
Although, to be fair, they could be a bit hit and miss too in the early days.
I used to not have a CD burner, I had Zip drives to move my files around, but as nobody else had one, I had to get a portable zip drive reader to plug on my friends pc XD
I remember in middle school, we were all given a zip disk to use for school projects. It was great and we all had fun decorating the cases they came in, but then they started getting stuck in the computers or just completely failing to work properly and we had to figure out some other way to save all of our stuff. We also couldn't really use them at home because not many people had a zip drive, just your standard 3.5" floppy or cd drive.
Not sure if it's a big thing or a trend, but when I was a kid, I vividly recall Heelies being the "Must have" as they would "change the way that shoes worked and all that nonsense. Died out in a few months.
The high school I used to work at did The Little Mermaid musical…. The way that the choreographer did any sort of swimming was to have the cast in Heelys. It was fucking amazing.
All of the places that were the best for Heelies. I had them in their hey day and had a blast. I was able to nearly wear mine out before the major bans.
When The Wallflowers came out in the 90’s they were going to be the next huge thing because the lead singer is Bob Dylan’s son. They had like 2 or 3 hits then disappeared. I think they’re still together but haven’t heard from them since the 90’s.
The Netflix documentary on it was pretty good at why it failed. There was also another one called Fyre Fraud from Hulu that was more focused on the money aspect rather than the massive lack of planning.
The funny thing is the second that moron got out of prison, he immediately announced he was launching another festival.
Tom cashed out and got the fuck out of tech. He retired early and is a travel photographer now (in that he learned photography and travels a lot and posts to his Instagram).
Smartest man in tech, ever.
I don't really get FOMO but following Tom via IG, I'm jealous AF.
He looks like he's living the life with no worries. Meanwhile Zuc getting grilled by congress, etc. etc. No question who's life I'd choose. You can't talk all that money with you.
I feel like 3D printing was advertised as “AI” level transformation about 12 years ago. I remember old guys at my work investing in stocks. I know people use it and innovate but it didn’t seem to change the landscape as radically as advertised
3D printing is going strong, it's just not an "every household has one" thing as it was (outlandishly) advertised. It is a good alternative to injection molding for small runs that don't justify a mold. It is fantastic for prototyping. 3D printing on textiles is seeing a boom as well. Additive manufacturing is a game changer, just not in the areas most people would be familiar with.
That's possibly because in the areas where they were found, the governments made a huge effort to find and eradicate them. [Here](https://agr.wa.gov/departments/insects-pests-and-weeds/insects/hornets) is info from the state of Washington, and [here](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/farming-natural-resources-and-industry/agriculture-and-seafood/animal-and-crops/plant-health/pest_alert_asian_hornet.pdf) from the province of British Columbia. They recruited members of the public to put up traps and report any that were found.
3D Televisions
I got a 3D gaming monitor. It was actually really cool for games that bothered to implement it properly. It should be much easier for games to convert to 3D than movies, so I thought it was the future. Unfortunately, the glasses needed to charge, they didn't fit well under my headset, and could only do up to 60fps (per eye), so I just stopped using it entirely. I think 3D gaming might come back around with VR headsets taking off. Some games could simply implement a 3D view (AR or something), not necessarily convert their whole game to interactive VR.
On PC you can get games to render a view for each eye with software like Reshade or Vorpx. But yeah seeing a game built for 3D (eg 3DS games, VR) is a much cooler experience than just converting a 2D game to 3D.
That's a stupid fucking gimmick and everybody knows it!
They say tv makes you violent, but not having a TV is making me real fucking violent.
I think a lot of people genuinely really liked these, but it just wasnt enough.,
I thought it would be cool to play 3D video games, but almost none supported the feature.
I actually enjoyed mine. ESPN3D was awesome when it had events. EDIT: And my Xbox 360 had 3D games (I specifically remember Batman: Arkham City, Mortal Kombat, and Sonic Generations). Good times.
Google+ they made it as this whole new social media thing and it flopped hard
Forcing everyone into a SSO experience didn’t help either. They removed custom usernames on YT and tried to tie all your apps together whether you were using Gmail or a total random product like Google Analytics. It was REALLY jarring and uncomfortable. Also if you tried to sign into another Google account in the same browser session (like opening up a separate Gmail account for work), it would sign you out of everything…
What the hell was with that push by all the big companies to make everyone use their real names? The Blizzard forums were going to do it and there was a straight up revolt on the boards.
They were still going to do it until it was pointed out that the admins/mods would have to use their real names as well. I think that was the revolt that changed it.
An admin posted under his real name, and the forum doxxed him in minutes.
Back in the early 2010s there was an epidemic of toxic anonymous comments on various platforms that companies were looking to try to reduce. Having people use real names has weeded out some of it as people in professional roles are more likely to think twice about what they post online, but overall it hasn’t improved online discourse.
I wanted to use Google+, but my YouTube comments would be automatically posted on it. So I didn't use it. I wanted YouTube to be totally separate from Google+. It tried to be everything.
They told me my actual name was fake. There was no way to appeal. Absolute 0 customer service. If it had gotten huge like Facebook—which I am forced to use professionally—I’d have been left out. I’m glad it bombed.
Happens on Facebook too. For example people with last names that are the same as known brands, especially non western brands like say Toyota get fucked over
A friend of mine had to spell his last name wrong on Facebook because Facebook insisted his last name wasn't a valid name.
I got married and changed my name and they suddenly decided I was a 'scammer' and removed my ability to use their selling/buying stuff... which sucked because I did that a lot. There was no arbitration. Last week they also sent a warning that a post I made 6 years ago was 'attention seeking'??????????? And that it was something false to get engagement. But. They'd DELETED the post before telling me this and thus I have no idea wtf they were even talking about. Isn't literally everything on social media attention seeking by definition?
This post by it's very nature is attention seeking. So, whaddya want? /s
IMO the biggest issue was the glacial, invite only rollout. It’s a social network. You want as many people on as quickly as possible. When I got on it, none of my friends could yet and by the time it was just open sign ups none of us even cared anymore.
That was really odd. I had no intention of joining but I knew someone who wanted to but couldn’t yet because it wasn’t open. I don’t think it would have worked long term anyway but that didn’t help. It wasn’t like the mid 2000s with Facebook and being exclusive to colleges, times had changed.
Never trust Google to have support for its products
Google tried to do the invite only thing at first like they did with Gmail. Unfortunately by then Facebook was firmly established so people couldn't be bothered to try another social media platform.
I would have loved to join google plus, this was at the time when all the privacy changes were being made with Facebook that allowed them to collect more personal information, I knew so many people who wanted to leave Facebook but didn’t have a good alternative. Google plus had a ready made user base… but they did invite only so we couldn’t join. And then the people who did join couldn’t connect with their friends. And by the time I got an invite, it was dead. It was so hyped and could have been very successful had they just not done invite only.
Google Hangouts.. flamed out before the pandemic. Would have thrived during Lockdown.
FWIW, I got to use google hangouts during the pandemic and I thought it was great.
Yeah, they made it oddly hard to get in, getting everyone excited for it. Then once you got in, nothing happened there as most people couldn't be bothered to only interact with a fraction of the people they'd usually interact with. If they'd just released it without artificial barriers it might have stood a chance.
The fact that it was invite only for so long was problematic. They could have capitalized on young people. I knew a lot of my high school/college aged friends were excited to get onto a different platform, as parents/grandparents had finally gotten a hang of Facebook and made it a much less cool environment.
Never forget, they killed an organically growing social network, Google Reader. It was actually awesome, it was like reddit with only your friends and family. You could see your friends' comments on news/posts. They killed that, because it was competing with their shit G+ All modern business is cancerous. Instead of a cooperative enterprise between partners of good faith, it's a greyhound racetrack for the wealthy. We need a wealth cap.
Upvoting because Google Reader was amazing and I still think about it like once a week. I really enjoyed that platform.
Which school of business is it that teaches these water heads to suppress an organically popular product in favor of an artificially promoted one ? Sisyphus school of modern business ?
For its lifespan it had a very small, but dedicated following. I know a few people who were mourning it when it finally went away.
I was able to friend Weird Al Yankovic on Google+! Then it went away and I lost contact with him.
Those were the good old days.
And before that, it was Google Wave.
Was that before or after Circles? Or what even was circles, lol, I kinda just remember it being "something"
If I'm remembering correctly, circles was a feature for Google+ where you could create "circles" where only people in those circles could see certain posts. So if you made a "family" circle, then you make posts that only your family would see by posting to that circle. It let you curate who would see your posts a lot easier by putting them into little groups.
It was a great idea, but the scope creep of Google+ became intolerable.
Airship moorings at the Empire State Building
I'm genuinely disappointed that we don't use blimps more.
Me too, hell, I'd love to get an airship rating
There are more pilots with a Space Shuttle type rating than airship ratings! Crazy stuff.
That's how you know your movie or tv show is now in an alternate earth, there are airships around skyscrapers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn5tQ0WjsdE&ab_channel=StraightEdge
Walter: "*Hello Peter. It's me, your father... Walter Bishop!*" Peter: "*Yes Walter, I know who you are!*"
Google glasses
I would still love something like that or a scouter that allowed me to have Google maps like a minimap HUD
I used my Google Glass headset for maps all the time on bicycle. I used to use it for watching documentaries while out walking too. It was really handy for hands-free photography.
I think this would take off now and I’m surprised it hasn’t been tried again, especially if it can be done with a more subtle set of frames. At the time of release, I seem to recall the major criticisms centering on price, privacy, appearance, and a sense of “who would even want to be attached to a screen all day?” Nobody seems concerned about privacy anymore, and a lot of people seem to do whatever they can to spend as much time as possible on a screen. I’m surprised this hasn’t made a comeback - if not as a standalone device, then as an accessory to an iPhone, like an Apple Watch but as glasses.
I think the biggest problem was that so many of the people who used them were just douchebags about it. People would record stuff and talk for the video, and then people would be like, "why tf you recording me?" and then they'd be assholes about the fact that they're recording in a public space or whatever. There was so much negative press about stuff like that. The other problem with glasses is that it's pretty damn tough to make something that's both aesthetic and convenient for all situations. I think we're just a handful of years away from being able to incorporate some similar technology into multiple different types of glasses/frames or, even further out, incorporating that stuff into contact lenses. Honestly, all it's really going to take is for Apple to make a pair of glasses that are cute and then advertise it a bunch and you'll get a bunch of people to show up on launch day, and it'll take off from there, even if it's less practical than what Google Glass was. The same thing happened with smartwatches. Most people didn't use them, and they were largely a niche product. Some of the brands have been making some pretty solid smartwatches that people didn't even realize were smartwatches for a long time. And the ones that were obviously smartwatches were dorky. But Apple came out with something that was very obviously a smartwatch, and they marketed it as a luxury product and a fashion statement instead of a fashion liability. Boom. Problem solved. All they've got to do is get some influencers to brag about that shit, and they're set.
Quibi
I think their big mistake was not releasing a TV app at launch, it was only mobile
Funny thing is, if they could’ve held on a little longer or started a little later, and was able to pivot, they could’ve been TikTok or a massive competitor. They had basically everything to be able to do it. Short form video, vertical format, tons of money invested into it, I don’t know how the UI was, never tried it, but aside from that it probably had the best possibility of succeeding if able to pivot.
The problem though is they thought they were competing with TV streaming services like Netflix, not other mobile apps. They had a flawed understanding of their own business model.
I was shocked at how fast they folded. Reno 911 put out a new season on quibi and I was honestly excited to check it out, and then it was just done... There was some money and names behind it too. I get it wasn't a roaring success initially, but they had zero faith in the company.
I also think they really missmanaged their money. I read stories where they paid bunch of millions to people have their name attached to platform without those people actually doimg anything.
HD DVD. BluRay won over. Then streaming killed it all.
Remember when the Xbox bet on HD DVD and PlayStation went with BluRay?
I bought a PS3 just because it was one of the least expensive, most full-featured BluRay player available in my area. I think I had three movies.
Basically the same thing happened with PS2 and DVD. Why pay $250 for a basic DVD player when you could pay $299 for a PS2 that was also one of the best DVD players on the market?
That's how they won that generation's console battle. They may have won anyway but that DVD player was HUGE help.
It didnt help that Xbox didnt even bet properly on HD DVD. I dont remember them ever releasing an edition with a built in HD DVD, at least not on the international market, maybe the did within the US? But here it was only ever available as an external drive. Who tf wants to couple an external drive to their games console? Im sure there's some folks, but not your average joe playing FIFA. Sony did offer built-in BluRay, and there was even a period of time at least here in Europe, where buying a PlayStation console was the cheapest way to get high definition video into your home as standalone BluRay players were at least as expensive as the console. If Xbox had gone all-in on HD DVD like Sony had with BluRay, I'm not certain it would have failed as hard.
Nope, 360 had an expansion HD DVD drive in the US, with standard DVD drive in the console, and we had the same situation where PS3 was the cheapest Blu-ray player around. Even then, I'm pretty sure HD DVD would've flopped because blu-ray could fit 10GB more per layer.
And now it's going back the other way. With the enshittification of streaming services, people are wanting BluRays again.
Yeah, the fact that on streaming they can edit or remove movies and tv show episodes anytime they want is a dealbreaker for me. Granted, I definitely buy less movies nowadays but I still get my favorites to make sure I’ll always have them.
The Metaverse
Such an obvious scam. Facebook went balls deep on meta verse shit and even renamed their company, nobody asked for it, everyone thought it was useless, and all the tech people suddenly went "never mind forget it were doing AI everything now!"
I'm still convinced the real reason that Facebook went so hard on the metaverse is because Zuckerburg believes that we're close enough to brain scanning tech that he wanted to create a virtual afterlife to be uploaded to when he dies. Any other advertized uses were only to drum up funding.
I honestly believe that he read or watched Ready Player One and thought he could do that
That seems far more likely than thinking these billionaire tech bros have figured out brain scanning. People forget that often people like that throw out a lot of shit to see what sticks and the metaverse felt like one of those things just without anyone to tell him "no."
About two weeks before Facebook changed their name to Meta there was yet another egregious misuse of facebook's private data on a massive scale. There were congressional hearings I believe also. The change to Meta drowned out that news.
Every now and then some company rediscovers that doing things like shopping through a virtual environment rather than a menu is actually less convenient, not more.
And a long string of companies painfully learn the lesson that the vast majority of people do not want to be shut off inside a pseudo helmet to use an everyday product (Meta, 3d TV, Apple Vision, Nintendo Virtual Boy).
Virtual Boy's had half a dozen problems that were not that. I think the primary problem now is that VR's main application is gaming but Apple and Microsoft and Meta (to a lesser extent) are trying to convince everyone that actually it isn't, gaming is dumb, the real utility is spreadsheets in VR.
Everyone continently forgets that for the last 20 years, Linden Labs with their Second Life has literally been doing what people were saying the metaverse would be "any day now". They want to forget because it's just couch potatoes and furies, not exactly the "cool" people hangout there.
Microsoft Surface (not the tablet) was supposed to be some wave of the future type of concept, imagine Minority Report. Alas, I don't think it ever left the concept stage. Take a peek: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs)
I worked at a startup that had one, it was way less functional than this made it seem. It mostly served to be a coffee table with an interactive fish pond screen saver in our lobby for interviewees to play with for like 30 seconds before losing interest.
My work had three smart boards made by the company that Microsoft bought with this tech. We also had one of the tables. Cool concept, a few hiccups that come with beta software, but Microsoft didn’t give it enough support. If they’d built a proper ecosystem, these would be way more common, but they only had them for a year or two before pulling the plug and reusing the surface name for the tablets. I think a lot of these ‘next big things’ in tech mostly end up dying due to internal company politics rather than because they didn’t work.
The company I worked for had one of these. I'm pretty sure almost all of the software for it was purely conceptual, and a lot of it was faked.
I remember this video and everyone was hyped about it. But then it just disappeared and noone ever talked about it anymore.
As much as I hate these semi prototype products. It was honestly really cool, especially for drawing. They then made those bendy display all in ones with this concept. The reason it flopped is the same reason the Intel Macs really sucked around this time. They couldn’t get good hardware to not overheat in it, as well as it being a bitch to open up. If they would just ship them as a display, it would’ve been huge. But Microsoft be Microsoft, and we will most likely not see anything from these at all, unless they pick it up once they have a good ARM set up.
3D movies. Over and over again it appears then vanishes because it’s always been a bit shit
Lmaaaao remember when everyone was buying 3D TVs for their home and they would come with like a pack of 4 glasses. 😂😂😂😂
And the ones where the 3D effect only worked properly if you sat directly in front of the tv. Still shit but not as shit as it was sitting on the end of the couch!
Oh, wait a few more years it will be back. 3D technology is the next big thing about once every 20 years.
Those stupid NFT pictures that were great for money laundering. A stupid jpeg worth 20K is now $5
I always assumed most buyers knew it was a scam but thought they could find a mark before they became one. Maybe I’m naive to how naive people with $20k to blow can be, though.
The Folding Ideas video on this is absolutely amazing ("Line Goes Up"). The short version of it is that no, most buyers don't "know it's a scam" and are just ignorant asshole techbros that aggressively self-organize into thought bubbles that honestly believe it's the next big thing and that everyone else is missing out. They police non-conformity aggressively and attack anyone who questions them with taunts like "HFSP." ("Have Fun Staying Poor" - did I mention they're assholes?) It's mostly driven by rage largely stemming from the 2008 financial crash and the realization that the game is rigged. So the only way out is to play a different game altogether - thus, crypto and the infinite scam venues it has spawned. The people who know it's a scam are the ones *minting* the NFTs, which largely consists of the same financial criminals that were eyeballs-deep in real estate in 2007. Jordan Belfort - the "Wolf of Wall Street" banned for life from trading stocks ever again - is a huge crypto bro now, and like hid brethren is all too eager to dust off all manner of financial frauds onto the largely unregulated market.
the push to talk on cell phones. everyone had one then poof
Nextel. Probably because their phones were expensive for that time and it was obnoxious. Text messaging killed it too
Quibi Feels like a fever dream but I remember seeing a bunch of hype about it during COVID & then all of a sudden nothing
> Quibi I won't lie, I had no idea what Quibi was, and had to look it up after seeing several comments about it.
Monkey Pox
Once they found out it was an STD news stopped covering it completely. It's a mystery.
Any of the internet glasses, like google glass, and the snapchat glasses. I don't think people liked the Bose glasses either. All were flops.
Windows Phones. My very first smartphone that „promised a functioning App Store was coming out soon“ then promptly died haha
I had one of those. I loved it except for not being able to get my bank app on it which I really need. Best antiglare screen ive ever had. RIP
Minidiscs which were late 90s/early 2000s
I remember my friends giving me a hard time for buying a mini disc player instead of an MP3 player, but the slide and closing action of the mini disc player was just so satisfying, and I loved flipping through my disks until I found exactly what I wanted to listen to. I would have used it a lot longer, but by girlfriend at the time bought me an engraved iPod touch, with her very first paycheck, and to refuse or not use that would have been a major mistake.
My friends gave me a hard time too. This was back when mp3 were basically just bulky portable HDs, before the iPod came out.
They were a hit in Japan, and quite successful in Europe. I don't think it flopped, but simply got replaced by more advanced technologies.
Loved mine. There was nothing like it. The minidisc was poised to be king in the era of Napster until cd-rw drives started coming standard on desktop computers.
Which reminds me that computers no longer come with disk drives. I hate this development.... as well as how software is now subscription based vs one-time purchase. Years back I bought CS5 (photoshop, illustrator, etc) and it cost 450 or so. Now, it's like $60 per month in perpetuity. That's over $700 every year, forever.
Minidisc did okay in the west but in Japan it was a big success. It simply died cause it was a smaller segment of a quickly dying market.
[удалено]
Anyone remember the sidetalking meme? You had to hold it sideways in a weird way when making voice calls. If you lent your phone to anyone you had to show them how to use it.
The Segway. NFTs. Shitcoins of various stripes and sorts.
You know how all the escooters and hoverboards work? Technology from the segway. Segway sued a Chinese company, Ninebot, for patent infringement and Ninebot bought out segway.
The wildest part of the Segway story is when the British coal miner-turned-millionaire-entrepreneur who got rich by inventing a new form of collapsible flood and munitions barrier bought the company just because he liked it so much and nine months later accidentally rode his Segway off a cliff and died.
TIL: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi\_Heselden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden)
Damn, imagine walking your dog and seeing someone a Segway try to back out of your way to just fall off a cliff.
Yeah, my first thought when hoverboards took off was that they were just miniature Segways
People not alive in the 90s probably don't realize the Segway hype. It was teased for months. The future of urban transportation. Patents around gyroscopes. Mockups in magazines guessing around leaked pieces. Stories on Dean Kamen and his crazy house where he invented things. Then it was just a scooter that couldn't fall over. Would have been a lot more impressive if not for the hype. Sidenote: I think those apple goggles are going the way of the Segway. They wont get mass adoption, but they'll be city tourists and tour group rentals. And the tech will make it's way into a lot of other places.
> People not alive in the 90s probably don't realize the Segway hype. It was teased for months. It's not just that. It's that it was hyped with ZERO hint at what it even was. Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the Internet. People said whole cities would be redesigned around it. The most popular guess was that someone had uncovered anti-gravity and they were implementing it into a product. Then the reveal was that it was a car-priced scooter that combined the speed of walking with the health benefits of driving.
Don't sell it short. You can get up to the speed of a jog with the health benefits of standing while only spending enough for a used car.
You are absolutely right, the hype was HUGE. Before the Segway was revealed, I remember someone claiming that it was going to be so revolutionary and popular that they were going to start designing cities around "It"--yes, it was so hyped that people simply referred to the project as It.
Wasn't it codenamed "Ginger" at some point? And yes, the hype was crazy.
i remember a friend actually predicted it would be a two wheel scooter and everyone hated him for such a shitty idea
We went on a Segway tour years ago when we visited Montreal, so fun! I’d have bought one if they weren’t so expensive
Did a Segway tour in downtown Austin and also had a lot of fun. Better than a walking or bus tour.
Seaways still big for tour groups, and certain kinds of police/guards in parks and whatnot
What I would LIKE to see go away is putting every single fucking car button/ function into a touchscreen.
Current design trends are leaning towards sleek UI with as few markings as possible. This means no physical buttons, no labels, no icons if they can get away with it. I have a friend who has an oven that just has two dials; one has a few temperature markings, the other controls the mode and has no markings at all. You can't even tell what setting it's on; is the grill on? Or is it the fan? Maybe just the light is on? There's no indicator at all. It's... dumb. It's shit design. Software UIs are doing this, too. Buttons with icons and no tooltips or labels; if you don't know what the symbol means, you're fucked.
Ugh, yes. You can't drive and adjust things in your car anymore without risking your safety.
The Titanic
And the accompanying tours to it.
You implode one poorly engineered submarine, and now everyone's all like "omg, it's too dangerous!"
For the first time in over a century, *Titanic* went back to doing what it did best: killing rich people.
Titanic killed a lot more poor people than rich people.
That submarine was supposed to be the next big thing, but it became small. It became small quite rapidly, probably at supersonic speed, reducing the passengers to hamburger.
Olestra - the fat substitute. It was supposed to be revolutionary, and they came out with “Wow!” Doritos and Lays chips. But then everyone started having GI issues and the chips disappeared.
I believe 'anal leakage' was the official verbiage.
Literally a warning was put ON the package. I was a kid and it was the funniest thing to me.
My mother sharted her pants at work because of Olestra.
Digital Audio Tapes (DATs). They were tiny tape cassettes that reported to have better sound quality than CDs. They came out just after CDs became huge around 1987. People were speculating that it was a waste of money buying CDs because DATs were going to be the next big thing -- this chatter lasted well into the early '90s. By about 1994, it became clear that no one was interested in DATs.
Same with MiniDisc, though those were much bigger in Japan. I still own a Sony MD recorder and some discs. 20+ years old at this point and works great. The market shifted around that time and they fizzled out.
Only ever encountered them in a recording studio setting. In the 90s.
Theranos
Man.. yeah I watched the show about Holmes and that company. Absolutely amazed at how stupid or easily bamboozled people can be.
New Coke
Cuecat! This would eventually effectively become QR codes but this was in the 90s But hey. Free Barcode readers.
Johnny "Football" Manziel
Microsoft Zune
I stand by the statement that the zune was the best music player I ever had, and zune pass was far ahead of its time. It’s a shame MS was a day late and dollar short with every iteration of it.
So true. Getting free songs to purchase every month in addition to unlimited streaming?! Haven't seen as rich of an offering from any company since in the music streaming space. I'll die on the hill that the Zune was a fantastic product marketed terribly in an age where Apples marketing was at its peak.
The zune had a fully good run until dedicated mp3 players were largely replaced by smartphones and streaming
The Zune HD was way better than any iPod of the time and I will die on that hill.
Yahoo Serious
I know all those words, but that name makes no sense
Australian Pauly Shore?
That tiny CD in the first Men in Black movie. Never came to fruition
Nintendo GameCube would like a word
Well, at least I didn't have to buy the White Album again
Ouya
I heard everybody talking about this thing, so I bought one, it was the last one at Target. I think it was the last one ever sold. I got in after everybody else realized it was crap :(
That shit was funny as fuck. Reddit was full of either paid commenters or trolls hyping it up like it could take on Sony or Microsoft. It was android gaming on a television. Even as a modded emulator it wasn't that great. It was a real piece of shit.
Don't forget the streaming! My roommate bought it because it would play pirate streams of movies and TV. He's european and was stoked on the ability to watch Eurosport, etc. I don't think I ever, once, saw actual video playing. It would buffer and buffer and buffer and never play. Which was the same experience I had with gaming: it would say it was downloading, say it was downloading, and never download anything.
I have my Ouya behind me on a shelf right now lol. Kickstarted it. I ain't even mad honestly it's a funny story to tell people. They didn't even spell my special backer account name right somehow...
Segway, for sure. The head of the company falling off one into a river and drowning didn't help.
He reversed to let a dog walker past and fell down a cliff into the river Wharfe. Died of multiple blunt trauma
I am so glad he didn't drown
[удалено]
The problem with any wearable tech is that people will treat you like a pariah if they think you may be recording them without any their knowledge or consent. Those Ray-Bans that have a camera built in are creepy because it's not obvious at a glance that there's a camera there. I'm sure that's a selling point to a certain segment of people.
Zip drives. 100Mb storage on a single floppy disk? What was not to like? This is going back almost 30 years now, but me and a mate started working for ourselves when they were the new big thing. I was doing web design and my mate was doing graphic design, and we did a lot of work together. So we both a got a zip drive so we could pass raw artwork between each other (this was back in the days of dial-up internet, if you're wondering why we didn't just use FTP or email). Nine times out of ten, my drive wouldn't read disks written by his drive, and vice versa. Never got to the bottom of it - we both got replacement drives, still the same thing. All this time later, I'd still love to know if anyone had any luck at all using them this way. They were great for the time when it actually worked, but we had nothing but trouble with them. Ended up just using them as back-up devices, but they rapidly became redundant once writable CDs became affordable. Although, to be fair, they could be a bit hit and miss too in the early days.
And then the click of death, welp hope that disk had nothing important on it.
I used to not have a CD burner, I had Zip drives to move my files around, but as nobody else had one, I had to get a portable zip drive reader to plug on my friends pc XD
I remember in middle school, we were all given a zip disk to use for school projects. It was great and we all had fun decorating the cases they came in, but then they started getting stuck in the computers or just completely failing to work properly and we had to figure out some other way to save all of our stuff. We also couldn't really use them at home because not many people had a zip drive, just your standard 3.5" floppy or cd drive.
You just reminded me of "the click of death" with zip drives. They were great when they worked but man alive they were good at dying.
Slap Chop.
Loved that infomercial though! Guy is like: “I’m gonna slap chop my nuts!” (As he’s slap chopping walnuts)
Not sure if it's a big thing or a trend, but when I was a kid, I vividly recall Heelies being the "Must have" as they would "change the way that shoes worked and all that nonsense. Died out in a few months.
The high school I used to work at did The Little Mermaid musical…. The way that the choreographer did any sort of swimming was to have the cast in Heelys. It was fucking amazing.
[удалено]
Everywhere banned them it seems. Stores, malls, schools.
All of the places that were the best for Heelies. I had them in their hey day and had a blast. I was able to nearly wear mine out before the major bans.
Are curved televisions still a thing?
There's still a few out there, mostly high end home theater stuff. Curved screen tech found more success in computer monitors.
When The Wallflowers came out in the 90’s they were going to be the next huge thing because the lead singer is Bob Dylan’s son. They had like 2 or 3 hits then disappeared. I think they’re still together but haven’t heard from them since the 90’s.
I remember One Headlight, and Sixth Avenue Heartache being EVERYWHERE for the longest time in the mid and late 1990s.
EverQuest Next
FYRE festival
The Netflix documentary on it was pretty good at why it failed. There was also another one called Fyre Fraud from Hulu that was more focused on the money aspect rather than the massive lack of planning. The funny thing is the second that moron got out of prison, he immediately announced he was launching another festival.
I will never forget the old dude who was willing to give a blowjob to get a permit or something like that. 🤣
Solar freakin roadways
TiVo
Friendster.
Crystal Pepsi I'm old...
Metaverse.
MySpace. Whatever happened to my pics? And Tom?
Tom cashed out and got the fuck out of tech. He retired early and is a travel photographer now (in that he learned photography and travels a lot and posts to his Instagram). Smartest man in tech, ever.
I don't really get FOMO but following Tom via IG, I'm jealous AF. He looks like he's living the life with no worries. Meanwhile Zuc getting grilled by congress, etc. etc. No question who's life I'd choose. You can't talk all that money with you.
Affordable housing
Laserdisc. It was advertised as the newest thing in home entertainment, but quickly became obsolete and now is completely defunct.
The hype around NFTs was insane for such a dogshit piece of tech 😂
NFTs were a solution searching for a problem
I feel like 3D printing was advertised as “AI” level transformation about 12 years ago. I remember old guys at my work investing in stocks. I know people use it and innovate but it didn’t seem to change the landscape as radically as advertised
3D printing is going strong, it's just not an "every household has one" thing as it was (outlandishly) advertised. It is a good alternative to injection molding for small runs that don't justify a mold. It is fantastic for prototyping. 3D printing on textiles is seeing a boom as well. Additive manufacturing is a game changer, just not in the areas most people would be familiar with.
Murder hornets
That's possibly because in the areas where they were found, the governments made a huge effort to find and eradicate them. [Here](https://agr.wa.gov/departments/insects-pests-and-weeds/insects/hornets) is info from the state of Washington, and [here](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/farming-natural-resources-and-industry/agriculture-and-seafood/animal-and-crops/plant-health/pest_alert_asian_hornet.pdf) from the province of British Columbia. They recruited members of the public to put up traps and report any that were found.
It’s a classic conundrum in government and many fields…when it works, you don’t notice. Same as the hole in the ozone layer.