Google's culture has no respect for successful social applications. YouTube's office is still far from the Google campus to avoid the toxic attitude described by a former Orkut employee, "[Google has] an environment that viewed social networking as a frivolous form of entertainment rather than a real utility, and I'm pretty sure this viewpoint was shared all the way up the chain of command to the founders."
I am not social networking's biggest fan - far from it. But the totally weird thing for me has been how Google has stepped away from even search-related functions of social utility, eg. withdrawing Public Calendar Search. The above statement would go some way towards explaining that - I'm still so baffled by the whole thing.
Google's culture has no respect for successful social applications. YouTube's office is still far from the Google campus to avoid the toxic attitude described by a former Orkut employee, "[Google has] an environment that viewed social networking as a frivolous form of entertainment rather than a real utility, and I'm pretty sure this viewpoint was shared all the way up the chain of command to the founders."
I am not social networking's biggest fan - far from it. But the totally weird thing for me has been how Google has stepped away from even search-related functions of social utility, eg. withdrawing Public Calendar Search. The above statement would go some way towards explaining that - I'm still so baffled by the whole thing.