Inside the Failure of Google+ 279
An anonymous reader writes: An article at Mashable walks through the rise and fall of Google+, from the company's worries of being displaced by Facebook to their eventual realization that Google services don't need social hooks. There are quotes from a number of employees and insiders, who mostly agree that the company didn't have the agility to build something so different from their previous services. "Most Google projects started small and grew organically in scale and importance. Buzz, the immediate predecessor to Plus, had barely a dozen people on staff. Plus, by comparison, had upwards of 1,000, sucked up from divisions across the company." Despite early data indicating users just weren't interested in Google+, management pushed for success as the only option. One employee said, "The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off." Despite a strong feature set, there was no acknowledgment that to beat Facebook, you had to overcome the fact that everybody was already on Facebook.
Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Biggest detraction was the unknown of how much of your browsing and searches and youtube video history would end up on your public profile. :)
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
As compared to Facebook?
Re: Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
Real Name Policy (Score:3)
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
. . . and is made immeasurably worse by the real name policy. If you want me to participate in an online community in a lasting and meaningful way, there's no way in hell I'm using my real name.
Even worse, Google tried to confuse the issue (i.e. talk out of both sides of its mouth) by drawing a practically meaningless distinction [slashdot.org] between your "real" name and your common" name. See, your common name is "the name that you commonly go by in daily life," as opposed to your real name which is . . . fuck if
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Oh, and the creepy thing- most pseudonyms or handles are chosen to be OBVIOUSLY pseudonyms or handles. This is deliberate- no one is going to think that a name like "cfalcon" is real (it doesn't fit the real name pattern). A name like "sjames" is more likely to be real than not, however, and people will interact with both assuming that fact, that one is partially anonymous and the other is reasonably easy to find in meatspace.
By having an aggressive algorithm that detected pseudonyms, it forced a lot of
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google isn't for you. don't use it. stop complaining that it doesn't meet your anachronistic principles
It is noteworthy that it is an article about the failure of Google+, not that of Kunedog. So it was arguably Google+ that had anachronistic (or otherwise irrelevant) principles.
Google+ default header image (Score:2)
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They have to first change that big fat default header image that comes with every page for me to even remotely consider using it .
And hangouts has to accept that I don't want notifications and lot lay it on me with that big gigantic red bar saying "NOTIFICATIONS ARE OFF!!!!!"
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
At least with Facebook, you generally knew what non-FB sites would post on your FB, as it would ask for your FB login. Google has the same thing, but the parts of the web that are already Google's don't have that separate login. The big ones would be your search history and YouTube.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook doesn't have a search engine nor the defacto video sharing platform. But yes, Facebook is after the same things; Google had them already and was arbitrarily mesh-mashing them together -- very unsettling to the user.
Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.
This is wrong, and insulting to frogs. Contrary to popular opinion, a frog will not allow itself to be boiled alive, and when the water temperature gets too hot, will simply jump out of the pot. It's an old wives' tale that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if you turn the temperature up slow enough.
It's only humans that are so stupid that they'll accept horrendous conditions if you make the change slow enough.
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Funny)
It's an old wives' tale that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if you turn the temperature up slow enough.
Have you tried leaving the lid on the pot?
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Except that facebook doesn't tie into the same account that I use for almost everything else.
That is it right there, also I have a simple plugin for my browser that allows me to disable websites I visit from reporting back to Facebook via my browser.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, for Google's integrated stuff for Android to work properly, ie, contacts list, mail, documents/drive, calendar, etc, one has to have a Google account. Before Plus, that Google account was essentially private. Plus felt like an unwelcome intrusion that was one messed up privacy setting away from publishing stuff that wasn't meant for more than my own personal interoperability.
Fact of the matter is, most people that want a social network for personal communication have signed up for one already, and they've probably gone with Facebook because it's the biggest, and being the biggest makes it easiest to justify choosing it. Google's attempts to foist Plus on us felt a lot like how Microsoft forced Internet Explorer on us by bundling it with Windows 95 OSR2 and later versions of Windows.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
Sure you do. Even if you don't register for the site, they create shadow accounts based on the contact numbers in people's phones, based on ID'ing the same person showing up in pictures, etc. They, I think, even allow your friends to tag you in pictures using the shadow account.
Nonsense. Microsoft was successful.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's their other mistake. The people that want a FB like service are already on Facebook. Google never stopped to consider why us holdouts aren't on FB, they just assumed we were waiting for something different/better and could be grabbed before FB wore us down.
Offering even more intrusive creepy tracking was never going to convert any of us.
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That's you, and I suspect most Slashdot readers. But for a lot of non-technical users, it *is* their login to everything account.
Facebook pushed the single sign on through Facebook some time ago, and it's worked.
Tons of people use it.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
I've never seen anything on Facebook that I didn't post there, but I did see things on my Google+ page that I didn't put there. That prompted me to make everything I could find private, and that in turn killed Google+ for most people indefinitely. Worst perhaps is that Google+ is linked to what may actually be your real email account, whereas Facebook was linked to (in my case) my 90 year old two-spirit avatar from Stromness. Of course one can create a Google+ avatar, but because its so intertwined you really can't ever kill off one that is linked to your real account, you simply make it all boring.
Facebook has been slower: because only things you send it could be visible by undesireables, people have been slower and laxer in locking down their profiles. So you still see some fun things on FB that make it something to look at, schadenfreude at its finest. Ultimately FB primarily has turned into a conglomerate of a desperate small-business owners way to try to push their bad ideas on their friends, a place to post pictures of your children and a news aggregator. I don't think it has much of a future on its present vector either. It will simply last longer because it is slightly less dangerous.
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I did. I posted something on another site (Yahoo answers maybe?) and a notice and a link appeared in my Facebook page.
That prompted a careful look at Facebook's privacy options and and a "logout unless you're actually using it" policy for Facebook logins.
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll only log in to Facebook from a private browser window. Screw web-wide tracking.
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Ultimately FB primarily has turned into a conglomerate of a desperate small-business owners way to try to push their bad ideas on their friends, a place to post pictures of your children and a news aggregator. I don't think it has much of a future on its present vector either. It will simply last longer because it is slightly less dangerous.
I disagree. What makes you think that people won't always want a place to post pictures of their brats and other shameless self promotion ("look at the meal I ate tonig
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Small business owners always will want a place, but they are relying on a captive audience to get visibility in a way they wouldn't otherwise get. Moths don't go to the zapper because they like electricity, they go because of the cool looking UV light. The current trend on FB is all electricity, no light. I predict this will stop being a thing, because we're going to stop visiting FB for social purposes if the present trend continues.
And you're exactly right, all the anti-obama nuttery, which is very popular amongst the senior crowd, is further drowning out the ability to share pictures of the brats with the people asking for pictures. Dear old mom watches Fox News for the day-time soap that it is, likes all the links and foists her various religious and political viewpoints on people for whatever reason she thinks we'd want to see it. In doing so that content gets served to her more, while my ability to send pictures of the kids, which she's asked for 15 times, gets diminished because she doesn't like or share that (not that I think she SHOULD). So in a nutshell my wife and I are using FB less and less, and back to email for sending pictures because email reliably gets through and is visible. Meanwhile I clearly don't share political or religious views with most FB people I am linked to (being a liberal in Texas), and actively want to avoid reading FB myself. I'm not alone, many of my friends have more or less abandoned their accounts because it's become a cacophony of various types of noise.
My point I guess is that FB is killing itself. It will live on, I'm sure, but its going over the peak and going to drop to some plateau. It's not going to be dominating the internet, and Google was foolish for being baited into believing it was ever a good idea. Social has never been an unmitigated good idea, it has some strengths but some weaknesses that most recently have culminated in inventing nuclear weapons to address.
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I've never seen anything on Facebook that I didn't post there
It works better when you have friends.
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
I went in to Facebook knowing it was using my real name and all my posts were public. I self-censor as appropriate given that limitation.
Google started as a variety of unrelated anonymous and pseudonymous services that I already used when they decided to link them all together and tack on a real-name mandate. No thanks.
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Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, definitely. Facebook IS a social media site. That's ALL it is. When I post things or pictures on there, it's stuff I'm explicitly putting out there for public consumption.
Google on the other hand, has a TON of services that contain private data. GMail, the search engine, and Drive. Heck even Picasa - it's a photo album program but many people were using it before it was "social". I'd upload pictures to link to in various forums and such. Took me by great surprise when I uploaded one right after Google+ went live and started getting comments on it. Granted, it was nothing embarrassing as I was linking it in a public discussion elsewhere, but what had been a gallery I had to provide a link to earlier was now just open for people in my "circles" to view. It's not the situation that's bad - it's that it STARTED as something else and then morphed into that.
Put simply - I don't have any issue with social media existing, but I don't want every single thing I use to be "socially connected".
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Biggest detraction was the unknown of how much of your browsing and searches and youtube video history would end up on your public profile. :)
Exactly. Once google had google+ data on me, what would they do with it? How would it be displayed? What control would I have?
.
google does some stupid things, and requiring google+ IDs for other google services was one of them. I never knew what or how my data from one google service would be publicly shared with other google services because of the google+ connection. I found myself relying upon the privacy ethics of google and, for me, that was like trying to stand on quicksand.
"there was no acknowledgment that ..." (Score:4, Insightful)
Ambition is one thing, but ignoring reality is something completely different.
Re:"there was no acknowledgment that ..." (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse that they still don't realize their failure mode was also forcing users to use it. Google, in a general sense, doesn't do that, and their user base includes several people who simply don't react well to forced participation. Unsurprisingly, those users were upset and very vocal about it, harming acceptance. Hubris did them in.
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I'm probably in Google+'s primary demographic, and I probably would have signed up if they hadn't tried so hard to force me.
That and their forced "real name" policy. If they hadn't tried so hard to force me into *that* I might have gone along with it too -- my name is very common and my real name is more anonymous than my usual "handle." But there were rumors of people losing their other Google services for violating the real name policy, and those other services were far more valuable to me than any soci
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I actually liked Google+ in theory. The idea that you could assign a post to be viewable only by a certain subset of users was perfect. What kept me off was the real-name policy and the lack of third party tools. Slashdot is one of the few places I use my real name online. (This is because I set up my Slashdot account a long time ago and I didn't care who knew my real name then.) I didn't want to link my pseudonym postings with my real name for various reasons - not least of which was because I've been
Re:"there was no acknowledgment that ..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Initially, it was a success. People used it. There weren't a lot of people on it because of their invite-only policy, but its feature set sounded much more promising than Facebook.
The forced-integration with every other service, combined with the real name policy soured practically everybody. The nail in the coffin was when they started killing their services, irrespective of popularity *ahem* Reader *ahem*. A lot of people stopped using a good chunk of Google's services at that point.
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Ambition is one thing, but ignoring reality is something completely different.
True, but compared to some Google initiatives, the market potential for this was much greater if they got it right, thus the willingness to invest more even in the face of a tougher reality. They risked more for the greater reward. That's how it goes sometimes. Of course, it makes it harder to accept defeat as well, that is also par for the course.
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if they got it right
The first not-right thing that they did was to not realize that Facebook is a market force like IBM was in 1981, but without the downside of competitors being able to clone the petabytes of data that sheeple have willingly uploaded to Facebook.
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if they got it right
The first not-right thing that they did was to not realize that Facebook is a market force like IBM was in 1981,
Does that mean they should not have tried to compete? There were lots of failed attempts to compete with IBM, but now look at the others who have moved in to that space.
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Does that mean they should not have tried to compete?
It's easy enough to "clone" hardware and relatively software like MS-DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, etc.
Much more so to clone Windows, it's gargantuan API and wide range of end-user (Office), developer (Visual Studio) and Enterprise software (Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc).
Similarly, cloning those petabytes of user data in Facebook, plus it's API, plus convincing users that there's a reason to change is well nigh hopeless.
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IBM had a customer base in large systems and global infrastructure matched by no one.
FTFY.
34 years ago, the personal computer industry was t-i-n-y. Therefore, it was ripe for exploitation and expansion by *lots* of companies when IBM "validated" that single-user computers were worthy of use by the masses.
Social media was in (almost) the same situation 10 years ago: MySpace was used by a relatively small, but dedicated group, and there were competitors, one of which was Facebook.
It wound up dominating, and has locked up that domination of "the masses" just like Microsoft has.
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You forget that the PC market -- for all the units sold each year, making Compaq the fastest company to $1Bn in sales -- was still t-i-n-y, with *lots* of room for clone competitors.
(I was there, too, and remember Compaq, Leading Edge, KayPro, Gateway 2000, an all the other brands sold in Computer Shopper.)
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Apart from the real name policy, that was my biggest complaint about Google+. I can post to Twitter, Facebook (if I used it), and other social networks using one program. Why not Google+ also? Posting to Google+ meant going to their site and opening a new post. It's adding extra work to the process. Anytime you add extra work to things you want users to do, you'll lose users. Google needed to make it as easy as possible to post to Google+ which meant third party service integration, but that conflicte
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Suddenly imitating competitors out of desperation, at any cost, has been done many times before. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Microsoft was late to the party on browsers and various other things but managed to catch up (more or less) in that case and many other cases. In some cases, though, they poured a lot of money into things that didn't work out, and in retrospect, didn't really make much business sense. For example, there's the Zune player and the more recent Nokia acquisition.
There
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couldn't Microsoft reasonably anticipate that it would turn into a giant write-down?
I think people at our level have a hard time imagining just how much hubris these top-level corporate execs have. You don't usually get to that level without being some kind of egomaniac, sociopath, or both.
Easy Stuff! (Score:5, Insightful)
Media of all kinds pushes, and has pushed Facebook. I have almost never heard any celebrity, actor, "news" caster, etc.. say "G+" in a positive context, only negative as in "nobody ever uses it" or "only tinfoil hatters and basement dwellers use it."
Media made Facebook by doing just the opposite. "follow us" is still heard more often than "visit us at our site".
Invested (Score:5, Insightful)
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No sure why this is funny. I think it is very true and insightful.
Re:Easy Stuff! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Several years ago, when Facebook was less ubiquitous than it is now, I was amazed when our local news broadcast would tell us each night to go to their Facebook page. It was the only form of advertising that they gave away for free. Oh, except for telling us each night to follow their reporters on Twitter. But I never once heard them mention Google+. I guess that's the networking effect in action.
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However most of these people were on MySpace and didn't give Facebook any recognition when it was new.
Heck when I got on facebook it required a .edu email address at the time. It was designed to be MySpace for educated people.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:exactly this. (Score:5, Insightful)
There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.
I actually think a big part of the failure of Google+ was something that, in hindsight, looks so small that a lot of people forget about it: When Google+ launched, it was a limited invite-only service.
Google had previously had good experiences with that sort of limited/phased rollout, particularly with Gmail. The fact that it was hard to get an invite helped generate hype for Gmail, and I suspect they were hoping that creating the same kind of artificial scarcity would help Google+ accounts to become equally sought-after. And it worked, for a little while. There was a brief period of time where lots of people wanted account, and they were nearly impossible to come by.
However, whereas Gmail users can continue to communicate with people who use other Email providers, the utility of having a Google+ account is directly related to having all of your friend on the same social network. Because of this, in hyping the service by limiting the availability of accounts, Google was shooting themselves in the foot. At the time of greatest hype, right when the early adopters and people who are social networking hubs would be most eager to try the service, they either weren't able to get an account, or else they got an account only to find that their friends couldn't get an account. In the very important window of time between when Google+ was launched and when people had made up their minds about it, it had already earned a reputation as being "possibly potentially good, but useless because no one is on it."
And that narrative just stuck. A social network with nobody on it is of no use to anyone, so the narrative became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nobody ever bothered using Google+ because everyone already knew that nobody used it. As Google started to realize it was a failure, they then tried to force people to use it by linking it with all of their other services, but they should have known better. The harder they tried to push people to use it, the more of a backlash it created.
Remembering back to the time, there were a lot of people who had become frustrated with Facebook, and I think that it would have been possible to get a substantial user base simply by offering a viable alternative. Unfortunately, Google tried the wrong marketing strategy, generating hype by limiting availability, and it backfired spectacularly.
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You mean like Facebook and Orkut did?
But seriously, those were due to scaling concerns. Google could have flipped a switch. I think they're problem was they went backwards... feature complete to a limited number of people, as opposed to a slow feature rollout to everyone.
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You mean like Facebook and Orkut did?
Facebook didn't have to compete with Facebook. I mean, Friendster and MySpace existed already by the time Facebook opened up, but they were crap. There wasn't a huge, successful, entrenched player already holding most of the market. Plus, Facebook started by targeting a specific market (colleges), so while it was limited at first, it was still capturing huge numbers of young people.
Orkut? Well, it never seemed to really catch on here in the states anyway, and it's shut down now, so whatever they did, i
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I meant FB and Orkut did so out of scaling concerns, not for any other reason. Yes, it was stupid how G+ did it.
Probably should have just bought Twitter and WhatsApp and Instagram.
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That's probably the best way to summarize it. Aside from shoving it down the throats of Youtubers and Gmailers who didn't want it, my biggest problem with it was that they dumbed it down to Facebook-levels. There's a Picasa plugin for Lightroom which makes it (relatively) easy to sync my DSLR photo database with my online photos on Pi
The network for your one friend who hates Facebook (Score:3)
To me, Google+ was the social network for your one friend who refuses to use Facebook.
Since every social circle only has one of these people, perhaps two at most, there was never enough of a critical mass for it to gain relevancy.
Unfortunately, the real problem is that social networks are very much silo-ed places, so its not really practical to combine more than one of them into anyone's feed of interest. Thus, if one person uses Facebook and the other uses Google+, they're not really going to interact in a convenient fashion.
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To me, Facebook is about people I care about, GooglePlus is about things I care about. Facebook sucks for discussing my eclectic amusements. My family really doesn't care about my Ingress activities, and my Ingress friends don't want to see kitty pictures.
Or to put it another way, GooglePlus filters out all the things I don't care about, nicely.
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Advanced Twitter is a good way of putting it. It's basically Twitter without all the needless restrictions, plus a way to have actual conversations.
Key question now... (Score:5, Interesting)
A key question for communities that have migrated to G+ is where they're going to move to. If Google's other de-emphasized products are any indication, G+'s days may be numbered.
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I also don't get why they should have to shut it down just because it wasn't the smash hit they expected, some of us really enjoy it, and I guess Google gets enough data about us to make even just keeping it as it is, worthwhile. It can't be *that* expensive to keep it in maintenance mode.
Technical superiority means very little (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that distinguishes G+ is circles, which is actually a terrific idea. I have very little use for Facebook, but I use G+ for non-public communications quite regularly. (I won't call them exactly private, since the communications are still being mediated, and archived, by a centralized social network.) However, as with many other examples of technology, technical superiority doesn't mean much of anything with respect to widespread adoption. Facebook is the de facto standard, even if it sucks.
For me, and I would hazard to guess quite a few other people, the thing that makes G+ useful is that it failed to be adopted as a social media standard. I'll miss it when they finally turn it off.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't know if it was really a privacy issue. After all, FaceBook is probably the only site more devoted to mining your data than Google is.
No privacy issues. If I don't want my plus profile to have pictures, I just never download a picture app.
I find your idea appealing in general, and would love to see a social network that worked like that, I'm not sure how it could work. Doesn't that mea
Yes, Circles is a great feature. (Score:2)
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The thing that distinguishes G+ is circles, which is actually a terrific idea.
Circles are great for organizing but I started to get weird, stupid, argumentative people on my posts because of the unidirectional nature, so I pretty much used it only for announcements after a while, and kept my microblogging on FB.
It also still took me more than ten seconds from when I hit 'enter' to when I could start to type into G+ and then reading it was awful. Did the person who did Maps 2015 also do G+? Why doesn't Go
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I agree. the circles concept proved to be useless to me for how I use social media, and probably filtered quite a bit of my experience on Plus.
When I signed up, I categorized contacts into appropriate circles, like family, friends, work, and acquaintances. But it turns out, once people are categorized like that, I shared fewer things with fewer people. I'm not going to post a picture of my cat and consciously decide, yes I want my coworkers to see this. So I don't share it to that circle.
Well when you stop
Metcalfe's Law (Score:2)
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google+ never had enough users to reach that critical tipping point, in spite of google trying to add users by requiring google service users to be google+ members.
(for the kids in the audience, Dr. Metcalfe was one of the co-inventors of Ethernet.)
Rise and Fall? (Score:5, Funny)
It was about identity, not social networking (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.
That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.
So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?
Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.
Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.
Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.
Here is the kille feature (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember back in the day when I got a Facebook account, the colleague next to me asking: so what is this Facebook thing all about? Not very many people had heard about then. But for those family and friends that had, it was a great way to keep track of everyone (staying updated without, you know, actually engaging in social activities like phoning or e-mailing or meeting up). Which was great from the introvert standpoint. Back then, not much thought was spent on the more sinister intelligence-gathering capabilities. Ads were not really obnoxious.
Then it slowly, very slowly, turned up the frog heat. Today it is a place where the few social updates that you are still interested in, are buried between reams of mindless meme reposts, ads in which you have not the slightest interest, and algorithmic down-prioritisations.
Be the time G+ came along, I guess a lot of the more tech-savvy people had become clued-up and wary about the data-collection. I for one didn't want to give more data to yet another company, and strenuously declined to enter details, or use a G+ profile to log in to any of the few other google services I used. I also linked-out, have never twittered, instgrammed, whatsapped etc.
Giving people back a non-data-farmed, non-ad-soldout experience would have needed to be an indispensable part of their required killer feature set. But that of course didn't serve their purpose.
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Be the time G+ came along, I guess a lot of the more tech-savvy people had become clued-up and wary about the data-collection. I for one didn't want to give more data to yet another company...
This is
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Huh? It was obvious when it launched that was their direction.
The name thing, too... (Score:5, Interesting)
The name thing was a huge deal-breaker for a fair number of people, and the pathologically horrible way they handled it made it a lot worse. I know dozens of people who would have used G+ but walked away from it because at least one person they knew had bad experiences with it. I spent months with my G+ account in various kinds of limbo because the "appeals" process for name decisions was completely dysfunctional. I eventually ran into someone on slashdot who knew a person who knew a person who could unstick my account and get my name approved, but by that time everyone had lost interest.
And one of my friends used to have a Picassa account, and then somehow it got marked as a G+ profile thing (even though she never intentionally activated G+), and then suspended because their algorithm thought the name was unrealistic, and then she lost access to the Picassa stuff. I don't know whether that actually got resolved.
Very badly run at every level. The most frustrating thing is, they had a guy writing about this who was apparently in some kind of leadership role, and he talked about how the appeals process should work and how the name stuff should work... And nothing he said actually had any influence on the behavior of the product. The actual appeals process consisted of a thing that did not include any mechanism at all for stating your case or explaining why you felt a given name was the right name to use for you, which was then ignored by a machine or possibly a person, who knows. That's it. No mechanism for response or interaction.
Google's hatred of actually dealing with things personally interacted very badly with a policy which was inherently personal.
Google Plus died when they requried real names... (Score:3)
... they're only just now acknowledging that and putting the Plus corpse into the ground, now.
Passive-Aggressive user management is always the first step to a great fall and and epic fail.
Google+'s worst consequence (Score:5, Interesting)
Google didn't grab the opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Google+ first appeared as an "invite only" service. That was just before Facebook made the huge blunder of putting members' profile photos in ads for any pages they "Liked," suggesting an endorsement. A lot of people everywhere got really angry at Facebook about "faces on ads," and even threatened to leave Facebook because of it.
That would have been a great opportunity to open up the Google+ service to everyone, seize the opportunity when people wanted to abandon Facebook. But Google+ remained invite-only. Only a few people could get new accounts.
Over the next week, pretty much all you saw in the news was how people wanted to leave Facebook because of the "faces on ads" thing. What an abuse of privacy! You're stealing my image to sell products! There were a bunch of petitions for Facebook to undo the new "faces on ads," or else they would delete their Facebook accounts. The only problem was that there wasn't a viable alternate social network out there. Twitter wasn't really a replacement for how most people used Facebook.
And Google+ still remained invite-only. By then, a few people I knew had accounts, but had run out of invites to share. So few others could get in.
After a few weeks, Facebook decided to calm the storm, and undid "faces on ads." And as expected, people stopped freaking out about Facebook. After another week, even the tech websites stopped writing about "faces on ads."
And finally, Google+ went "live." Anyone could join. I had an account, but few of my other friends bothered to sign up. Why? Because they were still using Facebook, they got over the "faces on ads" fiasco. Without other people to share with, Google+ failed to gain critical mass.
Google+ failed because they didn't know how to respond to the opportunity that Facebook gave them.
Well, and it was a pig (Score:2)
Some great reasons as to why G+ never took off, but something I haven't seen mentioned is that the interface was a pig.
Go ahead. Go open it up and time how long the damn thing takes to load up. I have a fairly quick computer and it took over 10 seconds for first load ( around 8 seconds for each subsequent load ). On top of that, it loads my hangouts list again; I already have it in my browser and my email tab.
I am constantly amazed how frequently big companies completely screw up the interface thinking
Re: (Score:2)
Some great reasons as to why G+ never took off,
Never took off? I thought it had hundreds of millions of users. In what world is that not taking off?
Go open it up and time how long the damn thing takes to load up.
I've never really had a problem with it. It's not instantaneous, but it's a big thing and gets all the content asynchronously. I don't find it annoyingly slow to start up, and it's pretty fast once it has started up. The only thing is that it gets pretty heavy if you keep it open.
Re: (Score:2)
Never took off? I thought it had hundreds of millions of users. In what world is that not taking off?
Where people actually *use* it. Sure, it has millions of users, precisely because google tied it to it's various services.
But do people actually post on it? Do people actually open it and use it to keep in touch with friends and family? No, and by your own admission, they couldn't because it gets "pretty heavy" when you keep it open.
Fanboy's aside, g+ isn't used and at least part of that blame has to be o
Failure? It's still there. (Score:2)
And really, if anyone should know failure, it's slashdot. This site is vastly closer to 100% complete failure than google plus has ever been. For those wh
Re: (Score:2)
Like it, hate it, or be indifferent to it - your choice. But don't lie about it and claim that it is a total failure at this point. It does still exist, and people still post to it. Just because people don't jump to it with updates every femtosecond on which coffee shop has the best bathroom or other such useless bullshit doesn't mean it has failed.
Quite the contrary, in fact. That people don't post such meaningless garbage is one of the main reasons behind the high quality of content on Google+.
unfortunately you'll need to buy sourceforge in the same offer which is worth vastly more.
Is it still? I thought the new owners were eagerly working on ruining it.
Re: (Score:2)
Like it, hate it, or be indifferent to it - your choice. But don't lie about it and claim that it is a total failure at this point. It does still exist, and people still post to it. Just because people don't jump to it with updates every femtosecond on which coffee shop has the best bathroom or other such useless bullshit doesn't mean it has failed.
Quite the contrary, in fact. That people don't post such meaningless garbage is one of the main reasons behind the high quality of content on Google+.
That is pretty much my point. I don't exist on facebook - I am told repeatedly I am the last such person in the world - because I don't care about trivial bullshit that people I haven't spoken with in decades have to say about places I don't wish to see. I am on google+, and indeed I do prefer the content there.
unfortunately you'll need to buy sourceforge in the same offer which is worth vastly more.
Is it still? I thought the new owners were eagerly working on ruining it.
Well, it is rather hard to be worth less than slashdot after what has happened here in the past 5-10 years.
Rise and fall? (Score:2)
What evidence is there really of a fall? I know that some media love to bash Google+, and love to proclaim it dead (they've done so since at least 2012), but is Google+ usage actually dropping meaningfully? As far as I can tell, it's as popular as ever among its users, despite Google's attempts to fuck it up.
The fact that Google is going to revert the disastrous Youtube integration is a good thing; the quality of content on Google+ (always its strongest point) can only go up. Google needs to recognize that
So fix it (Score:2)
I believe G+ is a decent enough product.
If Google would simply reduce the staff considerably and make signup optional, then they could reduce their expectations and let it live or die on its own merit.
It isn't like there is a going to be a 2.0 or some huge new feature in this space. There is no need to invest heavily.
Beta (Score:3)
Almost everything from Google is Beta. It is subject to spurious cancellation, hard tacks in direction it is going in, and rarely is "finished" as such.
I avoid most Google things for this reason alone, there is a better chance they will lose interest and kill it than not. It is not clear to me what, if anything, is subject to long term support.
Compounding this is their invite only launches. They build huge buzz, then turn away people who want in. By time they open it up to more people I have forgotten why I was excited in the first place (Google Glass, their phone service with funky data plan, etc). If they want to sell a product, sell it. If you want to provide a service, provide it. Betas should be done quietly under an NDA, not with trumpeting press releases.
The don't mention google's biggest blunder (Score:3)
Back when people were really hating Facebook's draconian "real name" policy, Google plus had a real opportunity to differentiate itself by allowing anonymity. In fact, at the very outset, there was much excitement about that possibility. Such a move would have garnered goodwill and lots of buzz in the beginning. Unfortunately, Google decided to make their real name policy as bad or worse than facebook's which killed any buzz they might have gotten and eliminated their competitive advantage. There was no reason to switch. Google did finally loosen the restrictions, but way too late. It was a fatal mistake.
Real name policy (Score:5, Interesting)
sad thing is, it is better than FB (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's why I no longer rate apps in the Play Store.
Re: (Score:2)
The Youtube integration is the death of the "no unusual name policy" (it has little to do with real names). Youtubers have the weirdest names, and they all count as G+ names now too.
Re: (Score:3)
"Facebook, noun, is yet another [digitaltrends.com] latest fad [instantshift.com] of online social networking services (i.e. previous failed attempts include CompuServe, AOL, Friendster, Plaxo, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) headquartered in Menlo Park, California..... After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as virtual "acquaintances" -- many of which have never physically met -- using the hijacked term "friend", exchange messages, "like" random shit that no one really gives a fuck about with no ability to
#2 (Score:2)
Sit back and watch Facebook turn to #2 in social networks.
I'd say they're #2 already... oh wait you meant second place. Never mind...
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's got better features, maybe not. But if you lean on me to force me to use it, I will dig in my heels. It offers nothing that I can't do without. Neither does Facebook, for that matter. But Facebook didn't use strong-arm tactics to force me to sign up.