Google Criticized Over Its Handling of the End of Google+ (vortex.com) 150
Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein shares his report on how Google is handling the end of its Google+ service. He's describing it as "a boot to the head: when you know that Google just doesn't care any more" about users "who have become 'inconvenient' to their new business models."
We already know about Google's incredible user trust failure in announcing dates for this process. First it was August. Then suddenly it was April. The G+ APIs (which vast numbers of web sites -- including mine -- made the mistake of deeply embedding into their sites), we're told will start "intermittently failing" (whatever that actually means) later this month.
It gets much worse though. While Google has tools for users to download their own G+ postings for preservation, they have as far as I know provided nothing to help loyal G+ users maintain their social contacts... As far as Google is concerned, when G+ dies, all of your linkages to your G+ friends are gone forever. You can in theory try to reach out to each one and try to get their email addresses, but private messages on G+ have always been hit or miss...
And with only a few months left until Google pulls the plug on G+, I sure as hell wouldn't still be soliciting for new G+ users! Yep -- believe it or not -- Google at this time is STILL soliciting for unsuspecting users to sign up for new G+ accounts, without any apparent warnings that you're signing up for a service that is already officially the walking dead! Perhaps this shows most vividly how Google today seems to just not give a damn about users who aren't in their target demographics of the moment. Or maybe it's just laziness.
I'd be more upset about this if I actually used Google+ -- but has Google been unfair to the users who do? "[T]he way in which they've handled the announcements and ongoing process of sunsetting a service much beloved by many Google users has been nothing short of atrocious," Weinstein writes, "and has not shown respect for Google's users overall."
It gets much worse though. While Google has tools for users to download their own G+ postings for preservation, they have as far as I know provided nothing to help loyal G+ users maintain their social contacts... As far as Google is concerned, when G+ dies, all of your linkages to your G+ friends are gone forever. You can in theory try to reach out to each one and try to get their email addresses, but private messages on G+ have always been hit or miss...
And with only a few months left until Google pulls the plug on G+, I sure as hell wouldn't still be soliciting for new G+ users! Yep -- believe it or not -- Google at this time is STILL soliciting for unsuspecting users to sign up for new G+ accounts, without any apparent warnings that you're signing up for a service that is already officially the walking dead! Perhaps this shows most vividly how Google today seems to just not give a damn about users who aren't in their target demographics of the moment. Or maybe it's just laziness.
I'd be more upset about this if I actually used Google+ -- but has Google been unfair to the users who do? "[T]he way in which they've handled the announcements and ongoing process of sunsetting a service much beloved by many Google users has been nothing short of atrocious," Weinstein writes, "and has not shown respect for Google's users overall."
Welcome to the Cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
You get what you pay for.
Google needs to get their heads straight (Score:1)
Luckily, I don't use Google+, so this isn't a big deal for me.
But, I do use Android heavily and I do NOT like the fact that Google is working on some crappy Fuschia project to replace the Linux kernel in Android. It will be a very sad day indeed if/when Google fucks up Android so royally that we are forced to jump ship to the walled garden overpriced junk from Apple.
Re: (Score:3)
If they screw it up, expect a major company to fork Android and develop a new app store. If it's a smartphone vendor like Samsung, it will probably fail. But if it's a tech company that people are likely to create an account with, it might work.
That or Microsoft revives Windows Phone. They don't want there to be only one smartphone OS with major marketshare, because it will become more costly for them in the long run to be dependent.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, while competing with Google's Android. If they eliminate themselves from competition, it will be wide open again.
Re: (Score:3)
I do use Android heavily and I do NOT like the fact that Google is working on some crappy Fuschia project to replace the Linux kernel in Android.
Why is this a problem? Just like all the other times, Google is just going to abandon the project before it really gets going.
Re: (Score:1)
Are they lying?
Re:Welcome to the Cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic problem with Facebook, Google+ etc. is that you actually don't know the real price - your privacy, and you don't have control over what information that you own anymore when you have dropped it to another site.
In the early days of the internet people experimented by setting up their own homepages, then came Geocities and now everything is essentially collected in either Facebook or LinkedIn.
Re:Welcome to the Cloud (Score:5, Informative)
Agree with this.
Disagree with this.
In the early days, it was really hard to set up your own home page. You had to:
Geocities made it easy. They took care of steps 1-3 for you, and combined 4-5 into one step. All you had to do was craft your HTML files on their server, and your Geocities homepage was immediately active.
Where the train went off the rails was that people refused to pay even a token amount for this service. Within a short time, domain names dropped to less than $10/yr, and web services with shared hosting became available which either took care of steps 1-3 for you or handheld you through it. All you had to do was steps 4-5 to create your own web page (which became much easier to do with Dreamweaver or later even Word). But these web hosts charged about $4-$10 a month. Given a choice between giving up a couple days of coffee per month to pay for your own private website, or getting one from Geocities or Myspace for free (paid for by letting them collect your private info), people overwhelmingly picked free.
Email went down a similar path, except it had additional pressure from spam. I ran my own email server for over a decade, using my own domain. Eventually I had to give it up because my spam filters were becoming increasingly ineffective, and my server was being blacklisted by other email servers more and more often because some spammer managed to weasel an account with my hosting service and fired off a couple million spam emails before the hosting service shut them down. The other email servers would blacklist the entire IP block for my hosting service, and I would have to petition every one of them individually saying I'm not the spammer. When the frequency of this happening rose to once or twice a month, and I wasn't even bothering anymore to try to petition some of the email servers I rarely sent mail to, I finally threw in the towel. I redirected all my domain's email through Gmail, and let them deal with the spam filters and clearing up blacklist blocks.
Re: Welcome to the Cloud (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're in an IP block that is getting blacklisted, it sounds like you were running a mail server on dynamic client side IPs, rather than on a static IP server block. The glut of spam means we can't just allow everybody, and a lack of reverse DNS with your domain name, that is pointing to a static IP, is gonna get you blacklisted.
Your server might have existed before SPF, DEMARC, and other TXT strings to validate authenticity of a domain. A properly configured set of SPF and Demarc strings should prevent anybody else from spoofing your domain.
I found Debouncer.com and MXToolbox.com to be helpful when setting up a mail server, or migrating to a new domain or IP.
Re: (Score:3)
Slight corrections.
1. The .com domains were $100 for two years. Previously they had been free. You registered by filling in a template and emailing it to NetSol, so it was certainly not newbie material though.
2. Time sharing servers went back to the 1960s of course, and university systems were right there at the transition from gopher to www in the early 1990's. We had a lab with NeXT desktop computers that could do it, easily. Commercially did you really have to rent a dedi? I would think you could purchas
Re: (Score:1)
#2 you had to find a guy with a BIG unix box on the internet that would sell shell accounts for a price per month, and go through the hell of getting them to load httpd/gopherd/apache and all that jazz. It wasn't easy.
The real shift in hosting was after 2001 with the advent of UML/User Mode Linux. Now it was possible to run full 'root' access as a user mode program on a powerful enough box, and sell access this way. This is long before Qemu let alone KVM which now dominates the space, but 1991-2001 is a
Re: (Score:3)
Email....had additional pressure from spam. I ran my own email server for over a decade, using my own domain. Eventually I had to give it up because my spam filters were becoming increasingly ineffective,
This is entirely why I don't host my own email right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh god, I feel your pain. I ran mailservers for almost 20 years and there wasn't a day gone by where they didn't command hours of attention because of a spammer, or a joe job (pre SPF or DKIM), or a blacklisting host, or a stupid reply-all'ing user, or... and this is 100% true... one user trying to copy an entire terabyte fileserver into an email. These were the days when in a small company you could generally trust users to not do that kind of stupid shit. Until you learned you couldn't trust users not to
Data harvesting scheme (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of us would have liked to have seen an alternative to Facebook, but Google just didn't care enough to make that.
Re: (Score:3)
What if: Alphabet sunsets Google+ and then sometime after acquires Facebook?
Right now Facebook's market cap (basically how much it would cost to buy all the stock) is $480billion. That's going to be an expensive purchase, but maybe worth it.
Re: (Score:3)
Google plus was a data harvesting scheme.
^^^^This.
Yes, G+ was all about harvesting data. If they'd actually gotten significant traction they might have kept it going, but they got enough of what they wanted.
Re: (Score:3)
Between analytics, free web fonts, recaptcha, free javascript CDN, the occasional image resource (like the hidden 16x16 G+ image loaded on all the slashdot pages and fed from google.com), IP tracking, logged-in GMail sessions and cookies, maybe a bit of saving all relevant HTTP request header information, etc. Google has a huge amou
Re: Data harvesting scheme (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Age and gender? They can probably get that almost as reliably and more usefully via datamining/machine learning from the mass of data.
Weirdly, it can't. There are some very difficult and odd things that data mining can figure out, but there are also surprising limitations. Age and gender are the ones advertisers want the most (because they have many decades of experience and theory using those two things to sell).
I'm changing Google's slogan : (Score:5, Funny)
"Don't get comfy"
Re: (Score:3)
You've nailed it. Your statement though, is giving a positive take on their behavior. My experience has been more aligned with the uproar over the sunset of google+ - google simply does not honor its commitments. To them, change to support inexorable demand that progress be made, outweighs the cost of broken promises. The internet public may be ok with that, but businesses aren't. I've seen this happen with business services that they provide. This, IMHO, is why GCP will never be a serious contender for AWS
I won't miss Google Plus (Score:1)
Loyal G+ users? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
That's the google attitude: anything that doesn't have billions of active users may as well not exist. Google+ only had a couple hundred million active users, so may as well shut it down.
Of course, convincing people like you to adopt this attitude is where Google actually wins. Once you buy into their only-use-humongously-popular-websites theory, you're locked into a few big companies like Google. Perhaps Google+ is a kind of ritual sacrifice to demonstrate to people that they should not consider less popul
Google Rewards (Score:2)
Google+ was as unfortunately named as the WiiU. People must've thought it was a rewards program like Bing Rewards or something. My dad accidentally clicked on some 'make a G+ account' prompt, and suddenly he had a Google+ account. He never seemed to realize this though, and he kept using Facebook blissfully unaware of Google+. They shot themselves in the foot with the '+1' terminology, when every other social media site was using the 'Like', not just Facebook. Hell, calling it an 'upvote' would've been an i
Repeating (Score:2)
This seems to be what happens to all the services Google decides to end.
Fool me once... (Score:1)
Google has a history of shutting down services. This shouldnâ(TM)t be a surprise to someone who is capable of using APIs.
There are even Wikipedia categories about it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_software
Fun while it lasted (Score:5, Insightful)
G+ lasted 7 years and I was one of the happy users. Yes, it was a data-gathering exercise, but we all made many âfriendsâ(TM) who were much closer than you ever find on Facebook. The discussions tended to be intelligent and covered every topic under the sun, yes, including what weâ(TM)re having for lunch, but far more likely to be about tech, science, politics, the environment; and the big one was , of course, photography.
I joined by invite in the second beta wave and ended up with over 19,000 followers (though I know this figure was inflated by Google. As for engagement, right up until a month or so ago, I found it difficult to keep up with my feed each day, with hundreds of posts on my stream on an average day. People who called it a ghost town simply werenâ(TM)t engaging effectively, and probably not generating content. Rather than just getting what you pay for, it was more a matter of getting out to the degree that you put in.
Itâ(TM)s annoying that theyâ(TM)re still soliciting for new users, as it does look like they just donâ(TM)t care. Theyâ(TM)re also still putting up âDo you know [these people]?â(TM) cards in the feed, as if they want us to grow our following in a dying swan gesture. And just yesterday I saw a card inviting me to give G+ a positive review on the Play Store. You know what? I donâ(TM)t really care to.
Nobody knows (except Google) how many active users there were but informed guesses ran from tens of millions up to about the same as Flickr. Many thousands of us have gone to a new Diaspora* pod called Pluspora, run by a couple of really nice Plussers; many thousands more have gone to MeWe, and many to other sites. Many are still looking.
Iâ(TM)ll always fondly remember my seven years on G+. But I wonâ(TM)t mourn it. Iâ(TM)ll be too busy elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Apologies for my keyboard’s apparent inability to put out the correct code for the single quote.
Re:Fun while it lasted (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you should be apologizing for slashdot's inability to handle a 20+ year old standard.
Re: (Score:2)
OK, thanks. I don't recall it happening before.
Re: Fun while it lasted (Score:3)
As Slashdot is unlikely to be fixed, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards and turn off "Smart" Quotes.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, yes, thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Google should be praised (Score:5, Funny)
Surprised they don't find it worthwhile (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
They probably need a decent number of human moderators to keep the illegal stuff off it. Like Facebook does, except that Facebook makes enough money to pay for them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's way dumber than that. It's not about illegal, just porn. Just like Facebook, one female nipple is enough to make an image fail to meet "community standards" which are actually "Google standards", because the community overwhelmingly did not ask Google to censor such content. What we asked them to do was to crack down on spam, at which they failed miserably. So Google provided what the users didn't want, and is now acting surprised that they didn't use the service. And one nipple will get your post kill
SOP (Score:2)
Giving people what they don't want is kind of what Google exists for. They consider the failure to want it to be yours, not theirs.
Re: (Score:2)
The main users of all google products are advertisers and most of those want a clean and family friendly platform for whatever puritan reasons. People complaining about spam are just part of the product and not the group that Google wants to keep happy.
While that's essentially true, Google used the complainers as proxies for the advertisers, so they were trying to keep them happy as a means to keep the advertisers happy. That empowered the complainers, of course, because they felt like Google cared about them. That in turn led to them doing more complaining, which itself in turn led users to create more exclusive private groups for sharing such content. And that makes them less likely to engage with the general public.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Speaking specifically to moderation, Google already has that problem with YouTube.
NASDAQ have figured out how to make audit (moderation) into a profit centre .
See https://leaflessca.wordpress.c... [wordpress.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Looking at Google+'s "Discover" page now, every single popular post has porn site spam link comments featured. Apparently that's what happens when they fire the humans.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It actually take quite a lot of engineers to just keep it running.
One of the reasons for this is that all the internal APIs and services are re-written and replaces at a breakneck speed.
At google, the only way to get a promotion is to launch a new service. This has the consequence that everything is rewritten and replaced, all the time.
Internal APIs and ervices are sunsetted and replaced with a new service.
Remember, no one gets a promo for fixing something that is broken or maintaining a piece of code. It i
Re:Surprised they don't find it worthwhile (Score:5, Informative)
I would think that a project as mature a Google+ wouldn't cost too much to maintain, specially for company the size of Google.
You'd be wrong. Running any decent social media system is a constant battle against spam and ToS-violating content. Unless you want your system to become an ad-ridden cesspool, it takes constant work to adapt systems, policies and processes to the changing strategies of the spammers, pornographers, trolls, etc.
In addition, any system in Google requires constant attention to maintain, even when the system itself doesn't have to change at all. This is a consequence of Google's internal source management and architecture policies. With only a few exceptions, all of Google runs from HEAD (well, very close to HEAD), and has a single-version policy for libraries, tools (e.g. compilers, build system) and infrastructure components (e.g. storage and messaging). So there's a significant level of work required to adapt to the changing environment. This work is usually not performed by the project team, because that would impose constantly-fluctuating engineering resource demands on the team and make it difficult for them to plan their own forward progress. Instead, it's performed by the teams that build the infrastructure components and maintain the libraries. When they decide to make a change in, for example, the core C++ libraries, or upgrade a compiler, or update a third-party library, they have to update all of the project code that depends on their changes.
This is feasible because Google uses a single source repository which all engineers have access to, and because Google has a centralized build system and test infrastructure. So an engineer who changes a library can issue a single command that will rebuild every Google system and run all of their automated tests, to see what breaks. There is also tooling that enables automating changes to code across hundreds of projects and facilitates the management of very large numbers of change lists (commits, or perhaps pull requests, in git terminology). Of course, those change lists have to be approved by project owners before they're merged, so there is some effort required of the project teams, to read and approve.
For bigger, systemic changes, like, say, replacing one storage infrastructure component with another, the process is different. The replacement is built and deployed in a mostly-functional state and then the announcement is made that the to-be-replaced component is deprecated. Project teams then have to build their own migration plans and strategies. For complex and important components, the time between deprecation and turndown is measured in years, so the transition generally isn't urgent, but it does have to be made eventually. A common jokey lament among Google engineers is that for whatever you need to do there are always two options in Google: one that's deprecated and one that's incomplete. Sometimes this complaint is less of a joke and more of a problem, but it's so often true that everyone gets the joke.
The upshot of this is that even a mature, stable system that isn't actively being changed requires significant ongoing code maintenance as the foundations on which it rests are continually rebuilt to accommodate the needs of other projects. Even if most of this work isn't done by the project team, it still has to be done, so there's pressure from the infrastructure teams to shut down under-performing projects to reduce their workload and increase their agility.
The benefit of running from HEAD and enforcing the single-version policy is elimination of dependency hell, reduced fragmentation, reduced server memory use and greater agility. The downside is that mature, stable projects cannot simply be left to run without engineering staff, and even a skeleton crew is often insufficient. That, combined with the fact that such projects find it difficult to retain staff, who tend to move to other teams doing more exciting work (like building the umpteenth chat clie
Re:Surprised they don't find it worthwhile (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
A common jokey lament among Google engineers is that for whatever you need to do there are always two options in Google: one that's deprecated and one that's incomplete.
I'm keeping this one. It explains sooo much.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to work with people at Google 12 years ago. The engineers were great, but everyone else I dealt with there was arrogant, incompetent, and totally smitten with themselves.
I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did and ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... that some people just failed to see the obvious.
It was clear 12 months after launch the service was more or less DOA - it was a ghost town.
"You pays your money and you takes your choice."
Re:I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did and . (Score:5, Interesting)
Quantity is not quality.
FB is the home of memes. G+ was the home of quite a few interesting discussions.. To be honest, I much preferred G+, the problem being not enough of my friends used it, as they already had Facebook, which I can entirely understand.
Re: (Score:2)
Quantity is not quality.
FB is the home of memes. G+ was the home of quite a few interesting discussions.. To be honest, I much preferred G+, the problem being not enough of my friends used it, as they already had Facebook, which I can entirely understand.
In other-words, it was a ghost town.
Re: (Score:2)
Quantity is not quality. FB is the home of memes. G+ was the home of quite a few interesting discussions.. To be honest, I much preferred G+, the problem being not enough of my friends used it, as they already had Facebook, which I can entirely understand.
In other-words, it was a ghost town.
Sure, in the same sense that New York City is a ghost town, because only a tiny percentage of the global population lives there. G+ was very engaging and active for users who used it to explore interests and make new friends. It wasn't very effective for those looking to connect with their existing real-life friends.
Re:I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did and . (Score:5, Insightful)
"It was clear 12 months after launch the service was more or less DOA - it was a ghost town."
You know what I blame this on most? Their real names policy. The web already had a social network which required real names, called Facebook. It didn't require another. Google users were used to going by a psuedonym (Google hates anonymity so much it refused to even autocomplete that word...) and G+ didn't allow that.
Re:I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did and . (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think it's Google's hatred of anonymity so much as a poor seed for the autocomplete engine (you spelled/typed it wrong).
I take your point on the real names policy, but I think your comment about the web already having a social network was really hitting the nail on the head. I never understood what Google+ was, how it was different, what advantages it might have had over the market leader (Facebook) seems to me their marketing was ill-conceived or non-existent.
Re: (Score:2)
"I don't think it's Google's hatred of anonymity so much as a poor seed for the autocomplete engine (you spelled/typed it wrong)."
You're wrong. I typed it correctly, letter by letter, and it didn't show up until I had typed the whole thing. I don't really think it's Google's hatred of anonymity either, I actually just think it's their incompetence. Autocomplete and gesture typing both work a lot less well (which was autocorrected will even though I swiped it and the e and the I are on different sides of the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
now that it's shut down, all the G+ users are coming out of the woodwork with "There were less idiots on Google Plus!" ... if I would have heard this argument louder and earlier, I might have joined.
If you would have paid attention earlier, you might have heard this argument. There's been conversations about it here before in which the same view was espoused.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd have hoped for the policy my credit-card company has.
I have one name, and one main number, the latter an identity I use for lots of personal stuff. I also get single-purpose numbers (identities) for suppliers I don't necessarily trust.
I also have a work card, a distinct identity with separate billing, that I use for stuff for my employer.
And finally I have another work card, for a start-up I've been meaning to spend more time on for a dog's age (;-))
One me, many identities, just like gamer-tag
Re: (Score:2)
You know what I blame this on most? Their real names policy. The web already had a social network which required real names, called Facebook. It didn't require another.
At the time the motivation for the policy was prevention of trolling and hate speech. Remember that Google already had one social media site when it launched G+ -- YouTube. And YouTube comments were an utter cesspool (and are only a little better today). The theory was that if people had to post under their real names, they would behave more like they do in the real world, which almost never includes spewing bile at random strangers. I don't think this theory is correct, but it did appear to work for qui
Re:I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did and . (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
No worries. The rest of us were laughing at you and your ghost town.
Re: (Score:2)
I’m just hoping (Score:5, Interesting)
... the end of Google+ doesn’t break our YouTube channel.
We set up a channel for our work, but quickly found that there were numerous artificial constraints on the channel unless we also created a Google+ account and linked them together. A couple years ago Google said they’d provide a way to unlink YouTube from Google’s+, but as far as I know they never followed through on that. So, with Google+ ending, it will be interesting to see what breaks.
Google products (Score:3)
I'm afraid the only products I can rely on Google for is Search, Maps, GMail, Google Docs and Chrome. Every other product they seem to have brought out they've ditched. Either they've merged it with something else, then ditched it or perhaps they've spun it out again?
Location sharing was latitude, then it went into G+, then it went into maps.
Which chat product do I use? Hangouts (due for decommissioning), Allo, Duo.
They've dumped reader, Google Desktop, Google Enterprise Search, Google talk...
For as much as I might not like Microsoft, at least their enterprise products have a chance of existing in a couple of years time and have an upgrade path, I can't honestly say the same for Google.
Re: (Score:3)
Google Finance was also a reasonable tool to monitor investments. No more! They ruined it a year ago, then kind of abandoned it.
Re: Google products (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And Google Labs.
Once they shut that site down I sort of knew, or at least sort of suspected, that Google had turned into a company where the bottom line became always more important than having happy end users. By that time hundreds of millions of people were using Google Search and Gmail daily so there is little reason for them to maintain an application or site that had a fraction of that traffic.
Re: (Score:2)
For as much as I might not like Microsoft, at least their enterprise products have a chance of existing in a couple of years time and have an upgrade path, I can't honestly say the same for Google.
You can say that for Google enterprise products. Most anything you pay real money for, actually. Note that Hangouts is not going away, it's becoming an enterprise-only tool.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, cause that worked well for Google Desktop and the enterprise search server.
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, you know that's exactly what I was thinking when I was writing that comment, especially as I had to revise it a couple of times and add stuff in.......
I mean aside from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order what have the romans ever done for us!
Really Google? (Score:2)
Google Hub (Score:1)
Didn't the founder of Nest talk about bricking the firmware of the home automation hub that people had hooked their doorbells, security systems and other home automation stuff into?
That and G+ are why I will never buy a Nest or any other cloud based home automation.
I want appliances that will work after the company goes away/loses interest. I have stuff on Linux that I built 10 years ago that still works through OS upgrades, new computers. I had to preserve VMs of Windows XP and Windows 7 to keep some oth
The source of my anger.... (Score:5, Informative)
I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011. That is 2757 days ago.
In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.
They kill all that. So my anger has multiple angles:
1) I pay for G+ as part of my GSuite. So I expect it to work roughly in the way I am used to. But Google kicks off 90+% of the users and says something like "Yeah, we promised you a car but not a motor." So I feel cheated by Google. How can I trust them to not discard the IMAP access to GMail or remove files from my GDrive because of some obscure policy decision?
2) The shutdown is handled in an unprofessional way. It starts by giving us bogus reasons. If the API is the problem, fix it or disable it and the problem is solved. But the shutdown is not even close to a logical conclusion. They have other reasons but decide to give us just PR bullsh*t. All the information about the shutdown is handed out as if letters were in short supply. You can still create a G+ account and you have no idea that you are heading for a cliff. There are dozens of questions surrounding the shutdown. People have tried very hard to get them answered but Google even refuses to acknowledge them. I have seen services run by a single person who outperformed Google by 2 orders of magnitude concerning the communication.
3) The shutdown is done in an unseemly haste. This can be considered to be a part of 2) but it is an insult of it's own. My own leaving is faster than I like, but I want to be on the safe side with my backups before Google messes with things.
4) Google refuses all communication with users. Either you have someone like the ex-boyfriend of the sister of your best buddy that has cousin who works at Google or you will get no information. The ONLY way left to communicate with Google for me is to put all my services elsewhere. Lauren Weinstein has diagnosed similar problems with his request for an ombudsman already some time ago.
I do not hate Google. My anger is born of disappointment, very deep disappointment.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems it wasn't a ghost town for you, either. I feel your pain.
Re:The source of my anger.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope
The "ghost town" discussion was based on false premises outside and within Google.
The service never rivaled Facebook and nobody on G+ ever wanted the service to become Facebook.
The users there came to G+ because they did not like Facebook. So we were just a few million people who were happy with what they had. So were no billions, but it was far from being a ghost town.
My stream had about 400+ posts per day. I can't remember my last post that did not get any reaction.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
G+ was certainly a great place to speak to people from all over the world about common interests, in spite of Google trying to break it again and again. And what was up with all that whitespace? Sad thing is, they finally got it working pretty well, I can actually plus tag people correctly and whatnot, and now it's going away. Typical Google.
You'll go back for more (Score:2)
It sounds like you're, for some bizarre reason, willing to throw your love behind Google yet again, even though, after spending many years giving them countless hours of your work ("content") for free, they dump it out with the yesterday's trash. You sound like an abused spouse, "... but I still love him". You might want to consider why you're doing this. Or, barring that, perhaps see a psychologist to help you. I'm no
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, I don't throw any love at Google and am currently moving all my services away from Google.
What I cherished is the community we had built. Now we have to rebuild it somewhere else.
If you're interested, here is my farewell letter on G+: https://plus.google.com/+Marti... [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I do not hate Google. My anger is born of disappointment, very deep disappointment.
Admitting disappointment is way higher up the anger management ladder than merely kicking the table and stomping off. Why are you seeking to pathologize this so aggressively?
Here, let me FTFY:
Re: (Score:2)
The shutdown is handled in an unprofessional way. It starts by giving us bogus reasons. If the API is the problem, fix it or disable it and the problem is solved. But the shutdown is not even close to a logical conclusion. They have other reasons but decide to give us just PR bullsh*t.
I think the API was the reason, in the sense that it was the straw that broke the camel's back. It pushed G+ from being a minor waste of engineering resources to a potential PR disaster which would have required significant investment.
I don't think fixing the API (which is actually pretty hard) was ever a realistic option. I think the choice was between shutting down the public-facing APIs entirely and shutting down the whole thing.
Not sure why anyone is surprised anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been Google's patter for over a decade now. I'm genuinely surprised someone is still surprised by this.
Re: (Score:2)
Treat every Google product you use as if it may disappear into the ether tomorrow.
Unless you pay for it.
"Professionals" (Score:2)
I call this sort of people "professionals", air quotes included.