Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.
The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunities more visible.
I'd like to think that's not true, but it wouldn't be the first time such a technique has been used, apparently successfully. Witness the local TV news which is always teasing that some story is coming up next, only to put it at the very end of the broadcast so that you have to watch the whole 30 minute program (including commercials) to hear the 1 minute you care about.
Facebook insiders have admitted that it is. Mike Allen, Facebook's first president, said this in an interview:
“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’,” he said. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.”
So that underscores their general attitude towards user behavior. The 'every once in a while' piece applies to the newsfeed too - it's designed to keep you searching for things you care about, and they carefully mix in things you don't, so that you're never too satisfied or unsatisfied, just constantly craving more.
It's just so bald. I hadn't seen anyone at Facebook so openly describing things like "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." They usually say stuff like "bringing people together," "connecting the world," etc.
He isn't the only person who talks about the dopamine driven feedback loops. Chamath Palihapitiya, who was one of the first engineers at facebook, talks about how they all used to gather in meeting rooms and have intense back and forth discussions on how they actually build this thing so that the entire world wouldn't be able to resist adopting it.
He talks about how at the time they really didn't foresee the foreboding future implications of what they were trying to build at the time.
That's a little like talking about how you didn't foresee the foreboding implications of designing a self-sustaining chain reaction involving neutrons.
Although I think the reaction continues and we can't tell exactly what's happening even now.
Yeah, I see lots of early hires of the tech giants bemoaning the monsters they've created. They are very concerned about the negative societal impacts of their former employers, but not quite concerned enough to give back the millions of dollars they earned peddling these products.
They will use those millions (or at least part of one of those millions) to create "An Initiative" along with an app or two to somehow combat the monsters. Of course that will fail but their conscience will be cleared. But more importantly, they will be able to think that their blood money is now normal money and they can live and die peacefully.
Give it back to who? Facebook? Their shareholders? Doesn't seem to help the situation in any sense. In the videos linked
the early FB engineer says the only thing he can do now is to try use the capital he has earned to combat the ills he created, which is a sensible approach in my view.
not quite concerned enough to give back the
millions of dollars they earned
Do you have a way to undo the social harm done by facebook for a few million dollars?
Or do you think they should just get rid of the money, K Foundation style, regardless of whether doing so would reverse the effects of the work they did to earn it?
I tend to think Facebook is more like a slot machine than anything else, where you are constantly putting in something of value (your posts, pics, etc) in hopes of getting something of greater value back (likes/shares, friend requests, heated debates, etc).
And just like a Slot Machine you are always left wanting to come back to play some more and even if you do your best to quit facebook, you are always being constantly reminded that of its existence everywhere you go.
If so they're doing a really bad job. The only ones in my friends list that is contributing anything except comments are the typical conspiracy nuts and racists. Every one else contributes next to nothing. Maybe a picture at major life events.
Seems like the disbelief was more related to the quote's candor than content. Not surprising that this was the thought process, but pretty surprising to hear it straight up without a thick layer of "we're saving the world" to coat it.
Yeah. I'd defy anybody to think critically about Facebook for five minutes and not come to that conclusion.
> This has been the MO of mass entertainment since the gladiators fought the lions.
Absolutely.
Lots of early proto-social media companies were already doing things like that back in the 90s. Like when AOL was king and "You've Got Mail!" was a household catchphrase and featured in their marketing. They knew that people were thrilled to get stuff from other people.
Probably the most obvious and recent antecedent to gamefied social media would be, uh, well, games. There were a few decades of ideas to cherry pick from the game world.
I actually find Axios to be a pretty great news source. Lots of solid, insightful analysis on categorized topics delivered as regular newsletters that don’t take up all your time.
It doesn't even have to be intentional. Imagine endless ABX testing to increase ad views and session time, cycling through countless feed algorithms. The winners could very well end up being the ones that are most frustrating for the user, but with product and engineering just thinking they are running some tests and reaching goals.
I strongly believe stuff like this doesn't happen by accident. It's easy to write pieces about how a soulless algorithm is determining stuff and we can all be sad about it, but in my experience, that's rarely true.
There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually they get steamrolled by a "product" person who's invented some new terminology for whatever shady shit they are pushing now. "It's just growth hacking" "complimentary contextually relevant ads will improve the user experience".
People know. They always know. They just choose to feign ignorance when they get busted.
Even if we grant them the benefit of doubt, it certainly isn't an accident to keep using the same algorithm once you know its consequences.
There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it.
Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to meet. Someone had to go, "Children are being drawn to extremist videos after watching PewDiePie and that's okay."
I view facebook's newsfeed and youtube's list of suggestions like entering into a popular reddit thread about something dividing the community that has lots of posts.
You enter into the comment section and it's automatically sorted by Controversial. At least that's how I see it.
People don't necessarily know. I can, or there was a time when I could, code a Mandelbrot set generator from memory. Yet that doesn't mean I can draw it myself in its infinite detail. Algorithms have unintended results, in general or in detail.
I've given up every platform that forwent the chronological timeline because other feed algorithms are just frustrating, and Twitter is the only one I miss.
I never realized Twitter curated timeslines because I don't follow enough people for it to cut anything out. It is effectively a chronological order of posts by people I follow.
My big problem with Twitter's timeline is showing me things that people I follow have liked. In every case, those posts are political and divisive, i.e., the "red meat" of social media. They're just throwing those into my feed to get a reaction from me, hoping that I'll "engage" with whatever stupid topic comes up, as though Twitter were a good place for having a discussion about anything.
I've turned off the "show best tweets first" option, and I stick with using Tweetbot. But, like most people seem to indicate here, about Facebook (which I don't use at all), my continued use hangs by a thread. It wouldn't take much for me to cancel my account. Again.
Our local station started doing this where they would list the stories coming up on the right hand side of the screen. They held to it for about two weeks. Then they kept it, but then continually shifted the stories during commercial breaks. After many, many complaints, they finally got rid of it.
Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.
I hadn't watched broadcast TV for a while (lack of time), but when I did I'd just google whatever the teaser was, to see if it was worth waiting for. Very seldom would they have an exclusive breaking story that wasn't already all over the internet.
There's a practical reason for this. Temperature and where they unload (and the perishable nature). Not saying there couldn't be a manipulative reason too, but I wouldn't assume so by default.
You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.
It seems to me that a sensible person buying a lot of groceries gets refrigerated and frozen items last so they have the least amount of melting/warming up on the way home. So the positioning of them after everything else is in the interest of the customer.
the perishables could be closer together, vs having people traipse across a store to get the basics (conveniently seeing hundreds of other opportunities to load up their cart along the way). "interest of the customer" (saving money) doesn't align with "interest of the business" (maximizing rev/profit)
Completely and obviously false (the part about everything in business is about sales). It's not as sexy, but often policies are about reducing costs. Like changing suppliers to save a few pennies per item.
If it were all about sales, then I could buy widgets for $100 a unit, sell them for $50 a unit, and call it a success.
Obviously positioning matters too (hence all the garbage food at checkout), but I wouldn't by default assume that this is the case, and especially not the only driver, behind dairy placement.
No you don't. You can can walk around the outside so you only see the cheap raw produce, bakery, and dairy. There are also plenty of low margin items in the middle (canned beans) and high margin items in the back (meat and fancy dairy)
Ikea is funny because it has "shortcuts" all over the place where you can bypass larger chunks of the full path. You just need to look for doorways outside the main path. Also because most (all?) it's stores follow a very similar layout, so once you've been to one, you'll find the shortcuts in the others very easily and know pretty much exactly where you'll end up. They've just made the obvious path simple enough to mindlessly follow that most people do.
I agree this is generally true, but isn’t the case with my current grocery store shockingly enough. Both are essentially at the front of the store. I’m not sure why they are the exception to the rule, but I love it none the less.
This is the same strategy as news sites where you have to go to the "next page" fairly often within the article (what does that even mean) so the ads reload, or there's a dumb slideshow where every 5 images it's an ad. Or when sourceforge had its full on transition to a money sucking machine and they made the UI worse and everything multiple page reloads away just to show more ads.
"There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this."
Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.
And in subsequent years they've done everything to hide this feature from the users and make it much harder to access (it used to be on the left navigation bar, now it's under 'Friend lists' (which also has been renamed at least twice) and also it disappeared from the mobile app)
I can't even use Facebook without it freezing anymore. I'm using containers and locking down on tracking (no umatrix or noscript though) and Facebook literally craps itself everytime I have it open, helps keep me off of it. It must be my exact setup cause I do the same setup on every laptop / workstation and it slows to a crawl, though mobile.facebook.com works just fine... oddly enough. And I know if I use a vanilla browser it works just fine...
Search discovery is by far my biggest pain point, and I say it as a fan.
I disagree with the GGP (I think) about Facebook wanting you to wade throw a river of crap so you stumble on ads. Their ads have been spot on to my interests so far.
I think an onioned version of Google plus circles could help Facebok influence the AI without preventing discovery.
But TBH, had G+ really been a contender at this point? This sounds like the creak of an abandoned house by now.
The killer feature with circles is being able to post different things to different audiences IMHO, which Facebook can't do without different accounts.
That's not quite what I want -- I don't mind tech things being visible to family, but I suspect they're following me for the baby photos. So I don't want circles, or friend lists, that block people from seeing things, so much as a functional tagging system that lets the viewer decide which of my circles/lists they want to be in.
And I want it simple and easy to understand and use, even for non-techies, such that it "just works". And a pony.
No, but I agree that it would be a nice feature. Not so much as a tagging system, but this strikes me as something good they could finally do with all their ML/AI stuff.
I have friends who will post photos, and I'll love for FB to detect that they often post single photos, and allow me to subscribe to just those. Even if it means relying on FB's algorithms deciding what posts make the cut.
The same goes for friends who will occasionally post blog-style stuff. While I'd prefer it if they actually blogged, being able to go to their profile and getting a FB-suggested 'type' of post to subscribe to would be peachy.
Other algorithmic suggestions I can imagine:
- the friend who consistently posts great links to longer-form journalistic articles
- the friend who posts mostly 'funny comics/pics', but actually funny ones
- the friend who seems to know half the town and diligently clicks 'interested/going' for events that I am also interested in.
- and the above possibly with an option to drill down and get more specific suggestions (I'm sure FB could segment the events at least by a crude party/political dimension.
- the family member who posts all sorts of weird crap, but also the interesting family-related updates. It can't be that difficult to detect which of their posts are the family updates (and perhaps there could be a 'suggest category/tag/whatever' feature so that my dad can diligently mark these updates (which I know he would!).
With the above, or even a crude version of it, I could see myself browsing FB quite a bit, and I wouldn't mind the occasional sponsored post (which could be targeted specifically to the feed/mood I'm in).
I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing about all this, but I feel moderately confident that FB is not doing this, not because of particularly good reasons, but because they're stuck in a particular 'mode' and a bit too conservative about it (shortsighted advertising). I can't tell if this is just because they're a big corporation at this point, or because of 'SV incentives', or going public, or whatever else.
You can do that and indeed could do that before Google+ was even announced. It wasn't even tricky, you could create lists, set any one as the default, then when you wen to post just click and select the lists you wanted to appear to, or alternatively the ones you didn't want it to appear to.
I never got the whole circles thing as a unique selling point... like that functionality existed in Facebook beforehand and the reason people didn't use it much is simply because for a personal social media it's not that useful. I've used it maybe a handful of times in 10 years.
I mean I guess maybe because circles are a nicer design concept?
This is a very cynical view of things. I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts. I can, however, perfectly imagine a PM who is "extremely numbers driven" to look a bad version of the algorithm that increases the time users spend shifting through shit and assume that the algorithm is a huge success because it increased "retention" and reduced bounce-rate.
Seems to me like PM's would think in the most positive terms about the same issue, e.g. what is the maximum amount of ad space that we can use before users lose interest?
No one would directly attempt to be evil, it'd just turn out that way.
“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.”
― Jean Renoir
As a PM, though not one that works at Facebook, I would probably approach it something like, how do we ensure that our users stay interested in the homepage, coming back as often as possible and staying on it as long as possible?
There are lots of other sites competing for attention, and to sacrifice a good UX would be shortsighted, especially with all the “FB is dead” comments people have been making the last few years.
And, to be sure, many will justify it by saying "by maximizing this revenue, we're able to provide even more services that people love for free." Is it a Faustian bargain if practically everyone is begging to be Faust?
Well to be frank I've been in these meetings and yes people do intentionally think of dark patterns. If people are willing to sit in war rooms to murder people and Wall Street board rooms to steal pensions, it shouldn't seem so unbelievable that someone could intentionally obfuscate a social media timeline. In fact they use more technical language, such as "engagement", to discuss these topics so that it seems less repugnant.
"Lard it up with debt, fire down to a skeleton-crew and stop all maintenance" sounds bad, like you're killing the company or something. "Unlocking value", hey, doesn't that sound better?
Similarly, "Let's get rich creating the second-coming of AOL by building a tacky nextgen panopticon" doesn't sound that great. "Creating a community of technical greats to bring people together and foster blah blah blah", while a completely bullshit nothing-statement, seems to shift focus off of the surveillance capitalism. For a bit.
Eventually, though, if you make your living sniffing other peoples' panties, eventually they notice and they take measures to limit your access to their laundry. FB and Google are both blocked entirely by IP at my gateway (along with a bunch of other surveillance shops), and the internet at home is so much nicer than what I see other people putting up with.
>I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts.
Really? Especially a FB PM you mean? Because PMs otherwise have been known to use exactly such techniques and worse:
Easy, launder it through abstract metrics like “engagement” and “ad relevance” and the talks are about what make those numbers go up, not about holding pictures of your friends hostage behind more ads.
Agreed, pathogenic designs can come out of poor success metrics.
Some low level PM was tasked with optimizing time-on-site. They had some negative user feedback, but it didn't show up in their low sample UR and segmented rollout. Since they had good results in their primary success metrics and the secondary metrics did not tell a consistent story, they rolled it out to 100%. Any negative feedback from there was chalked up to change aversion among a small segment of users.
That's still too optimistic. You're assuming that they weren't fully aware of the problem, and would have fixed it if they could. The truth is that they only care about problems that could impact their bottom line.
> I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts.
Increasing "time spent" means spreading out relevant posts. I'm sure that Facebook is tuned to optimize for some combination of "time spent without drop-off in engagement". This is a "Good" version of the algorithm because it nets them the most revenue, while still fulfilling the need for the larger user base.
It's milkshake marketing[0]. People don't want the most efficient method of content consumption. That's why most "feeds" are no longer chronological. People on Facebook want to scroll around, look at posts, comment on articles, like a few things, etc. for X minutes/day without seeing things they've seen before, and without seeing things that are boring.
The job-to-be-done isn't to consume a certain relevant piece of content, it's to waste time and not get too bored.
They are optimizing for posts that generate revenue. Since users don’t pay, the news feed is optimized for advertisers and the user posts that lead to more advertiser engagement.
True, no one goes around thinking "how can I make my product as obtuse as possible," presumably while twirling their mustache and saying "bwahahaha" occasionally.
The thing to realize is that there's not actually a functional difference between that and the "numbers-driven" guy you describe. Evil isn't just the sadistic maniac; it's the affable businessman who doesn't care, doesn't even consider, whether his product helps people or hurts them, so long as it maximizes profit.
That is where the loading bays are, so they keep the fridges nearby so cold items have less chance to heat up. Plus milk is often stocked from behind, which can only be done where they have the extra space at the back of the store.
I could buy this on smaller or older grocery stores, but the Safeways near me have 2 full aisles of frozen goods (and one additional one of refrigerated goods). These aisles extend all the way from the back to the front of the store, and are located in the center of the floor plan.
The milk is still in the back, along with perishable juices. The difference between them and the aisles is that processed foods (frozen dinners, vegetables, snacks, brand name yogurt & cheese, ice cream, breakfasts) are all located near the front of the store, while fresh ones (milk, meat, fish) are located at the back, and perishable-but-non-refrigerated goods (fresh fruits & vegetables) are off to the back & side. So it really seems like a deliberate attempt to put the items you would buy frequently as far away from the door as possible, and make you walk through the goods that you might stock up on on impulse.
Still doesn't explain why the cheese/yogurt/eggs aisle is stocked from the front, why the fresh produce displays are stocked from the top, or why cashew/soy/almond milk (which doesn't need to be refrigerated at all, and is in fact stored unrefrigerated in another part of the store if you buy smaller containers) is in with the milk case.
I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.
> why the cheese/yogurt/eggs aisle is stocked from the front
Logistics: because then you don't need rear access to the cooler shelves. That's square footage that you can better use in other ways. (In school I worked in a supermarket that put dairy in the beer/soda cooler, and we stocked it from the back.)
Some groceries -- every Whole Foods I've ever shopped at, for example -- have the eggs & dairy at the back with the milk, and stock those shelves from the back, too. Non-dairy "milks" only don't require refrigeration if they're ultra-pasteurized tetrapaks, which (in my experience) are only in 1Lt/Qt containers.
Milk is heavy. It's stocked onto shelves slightly angled forward so the remaining stock slides to the front for ease of reach. This need isn't generally applicable, or desireable, for other refrigerated/frozen foods.
Not to mention you probably want to pick it up last, so it stays colder longer. This way you don't have to carry milk around the store while you look for all the other items you need.
Although, maybe that's an argument for putting it by the checkout lines instead, which I suppose are by the entrance. Hm.
I'm not sure that's a compelling reason. Why aren't frozen goods at the back of the store then?
And are you sure milk needs to be stocked from behind? Is it at the back of the store because it needs to be stocked from behind - or is it stocked from behind simply because its at the back of the store?
If you stock it from the front, then there could be a couple gallons in the back that never get bought. Unless they let the stock run out completely before restocking.
Plus with thing like milk, it is a real pain to push several gallons uphill to put something else in front (ever try to put a milk container back on the sloped shelf? Takes a couple hands and some fidgeting to do it).
Not from what I've seen in the UK. It heavily depends on the store where the products are placed, and the milk could be anywhere from near the door to the back.
For example, in Aldi stores, the milk is usually kept quite near the entrance, along with the kind of things you'd keep in the fridge (butter, cheese, etc) and the bread. In the likes of MS and Waitrose, it's usually somewhere near the side of the store, not too far from the entrance but past the fruit and vegetables. Same sort of deal with Tesco, Sainsburys, etc. Smaller convenience stores are usually just kind of random.
Nah, if you want real exploitative design, note how many shops are designed to draw out your shopping time as much as possible, by having a nice Z pattern that 'encourages' you to trudge through the whole store before ending up at the checkout. I think in that sense, most over here seem to have taken inspiration from the likes of Ikea or Costco more than anything else.
There's also the obvious 'fake sale' dark pattern, as well as the 'move everything round every few weeks to disorientate regular customers' one.
Which shops have a Z pattern? Which shops move products around? I've never seen that.
Costco certainly doesn't Costco has aisles, and sections for each major product category. IKEA has a "tour the store" design which is nice for a store you browse because you want something for every section (room in your house). You can go directly where you want if you know what you want.
Except I distinctly remember Facebook having customizable feeds in 2013. I was able to separate friends by groups to their own specific feeds and block them from my main feed. I havent been able to figure out how to get that feature back since I forgot about it. My best guess is I either deleted those lists or Facebook pulled back the feature due to lack of use.
Edit:
Here's a link to someone asking for help when I guess they started to pull the plug on custom friend feeds:
They specifically added mediocre, hidden filter options and labels in order to kill migration to G+. Once they were sure G+ was not a real threat, they stopped caring about those features they never wanted in the first place.
I'm pretty sure this is implemented on Facebook though it just isn't called 'circles' - I remember blog posts about the same functionality when Google+ launched, but I don't remember the details.
Before Google+ came out Facebook had "lists" where you could group friends to "lists" and make posts only visible to certain "lists". I used the feature heavily but come ~2013 I stopped using Facebook completely so I don't know if they have the same feature.
It was nice for keeping my World of Warcraft friends separate from "Family" and "College" and "Highschool" etc. As there were things I'd maybe want 1 group to see, but things I'd rather others didn't.
After ~4 years I just started unfriending people as it was easier then bothering to curate posts for specifics lists, and soon after I just deleted the account as I could SMS-text the people I wanted to chat with easier then bothering with facebook.
"The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit"
You know, I read this, and I thought "gee, Facebook is behaving a bit differently at the moment for me", because the last time I checked it, it showed maybe six posts and a message at the bottom that basically said I need more friends to see more posts.
And then I realized...I installed uBlock Origin the other day and promptly forgot about it, so of course Facebook hates me. It's like the Soup Nazi - no dopamine for you!
I was creeped out recently by how Facebook recommends people I've never met as friends; I've read some things that suggest it may be utilizing GPS data to try to match people in physical proximity, so I have to wonder if the recommendations are from the apartment building I live in.
That's a really interesting perspective. In a sense, the only differences between clickbait listicle sites and Facebook are the infinite scrolling, the personalization, and who "owns" the ad network.
I unfollow (in contrast to unfriending) people who post things that I'm not interested in. I "hard follow" friends that post really cool stuff. By "hard following" I mean "See First" functionality of the the Newsfeed algorithm. It helps to keep my newsfeed more or less under control. I also try to teach the newsfeed to only show relevant ads by hiding those that I don't care about and clicking the ones I find interesting.
That's the feature for viewing a separate feed per friend list. The basic functionality of creating friend lists and assigning them different privacy settings isn't going anywhere.
hmmm, I've been using it since it came out and still use it. Yes the UI is a little crap but basically every time you post there's a tiny drop down you can set which groups can see and which groups can't. It will stay on whatever you last chose.
Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list.
It's not heavily promoted but it is there. You can view feeds of your Facebook friend lists, just like Google+. Bookmark those feeds and you are good to go.
> Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups.
IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful.
It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.
They were easy and intuitive. Facebook didn't promote them for the same reason the circles in Google+ lacked traction: The majority of users didn't care and didn't want it.
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
I think the real solution to this turned out to be using different apps.
Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.
That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it.
So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. I feel like something that took that model and made it into a social network would be popular. (No, not like Reddit. Picture, say, Tumblr, but you can't reblog something if it's not from your community, instead only being able to create your own original link-post to it that doesn't propagate its interactions back to the community of the post it links to. So you have one shared piece of Original Content, but each community has its own sandboxed graph of likes and shares and comments and other interactions built around that Original Content.)
Not the same posters, but yes, that is what it is esentially. People are starting to notice that they don't actually want "social networks". Most people are not interested in constantly curating an optimal public image of themselves. What people want is communicating with people they like and share interests with. Slack and Discord are basically efforts to make more user friendly IRC. There is nothing wrong with that. (Except of issues with centralization and non-standards based communication)
One thing the younger kids are doing is making separate accounts altogether. I know for certain I follow my younger brother on his "family approved" account and not his "you're my close friend" account.
I always wondered why Facebook didn't just syndicate its site, i.e. allow people to congregate on differently-themed sites as they wish, while using the same infrastructure underneath.
This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people.
We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.
Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.
And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.
Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
That also allowed Google+ to be used for virtual relationship with virtual identify far better than Facebook, although that is something Google dislike and constantly trying to crack down.
Apparently my brother's college roommate is a UX designer who worked on Google+ and he told my brother that he was directly inspired by the way I used AIM at the time. I had different screen names for different groups of friends and I would sign into AIM at different times of night with different screen names to chat with all these different groups.
Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
Didn't the circles work in the opposite direction of how Facebook works?
That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.
Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.
The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.
Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
Imho, with Google's raft of products, I think they used it wrong. Google didn't really need a Facebook. However, it did have room for a Disqus. They shouldve started with an improved system for comment pages on Blogger and YouTube (and heck, other products like Google News) and built out a social network from there, not the other way around.
I was excited about the "circles" idea on day one, but on day two I realized it was basically useless because it didn't let you create ad-hoc circle-groups based on venn diagram unions and intersections and differences, and their APIs were read-only so you couldn't hack this on top. I haven't cared about Google+ since.
On Day 2 I realized I was going to spend more time managing my circles than ever posting something to Google+. That was the moment I stopped logging in. (I like your idea of circle management. If they had adopted some sort of algorithmic approach where it "guessed" groups based on mutual interests/connections/etc then that would have worked too. "We've automatically created a group based on your University, when we add someone we will let you know!")
I can't imagine how I would spend very much time managing circles had I used Google+ more. The day I add somebody is the day I determine what circle(s) they would go into. For most people I know they would stay in those initial circles permanently. Moving contacts between, say, friends and work acquaintances would be pretty infrequent.
How do you imagine you would spend that much time managing them?
ML suggesting or guessing groups automatically would lessen the requirements of the user, but it was already pretty easy I thought.
Yeah, good points. I haven't used G+ in so long that I've forgotten the process. I think it was because I had way too many groups that I thought I was going to use, so each new connection required more though than necessary. You are right though, once you put someone in a group there isn't much more management necessary.
> Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.
While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.
I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.
This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.
This is exactly why the vast majority of my friends/family/contacts/whatever didn't use it.
Facebook was the first of this type of social network to get just about everyone to join. MySpace and Friendster and the like got the kids and the heavy web users but Facebook got your mom and your grandma. They got your boss, your barber, and your barista. They got the people who designed websites and the people who never did anything more complex than pointing at a picture on their iphone to launch an app.
It didn't matter if you or I liked some feature or other on G+ (or another competitor) because you can't just switch platforms like you can switch webmail providers. In order to work, you all have to be on the same platform and a good chunk of the potential userbase will simply never deal with switching platforms. How many people in your family or friend/acquaintance group still use their old hotmail (or AOL) email account? Probably not zero.
So even if they did "build a better Facebook" (which I think they did in many ways) it doesn't matter. A nicer layout and some improved features aren't enough to move the entire user base away from the default option. As long as it's a winner-take-all system, it will take a lot more to replace Facebook. It's more likely to become irrelevant than replaced.
I don't think you can put it down to "terrible marketing and release." Even a crappy release from Google still gave G÷ access and exposure to Google's enourmous user base. G+ got to feature in results whenever you Googled a name... it's 100 times the exposure any upstart social network could hope to achieve, even with genius marketing.
At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.
Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.
Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.
Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.
Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.
Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
I dearly miss the concept of circles in Twitter, both in incoming direction (filtering by what kind of stuff you'd want to read right now) and more important in outgoing direction (so I don't offend my fragile dev-o-sphere snowflake followers with manosphere or alt-right retweets).
Requires 2 things:
- feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them)
- feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle).
AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
You can do that already, with lists.
Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
It's a nice idea in theory but I prefer the current solution of completely separating your circles into different apps.
Work/Career - LinkedIn, topics of interest - Twitter/Reddit, personal stuff - FB, etc.
If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
I think one of the main mistakes which every big company makes, when introducing a new service or product that's different from their usual space/expertise, is to put the company's name on it.
Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name.
Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence.
But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it.
In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.)
Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them.
I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services.
Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.
FB has been slowly making friend lists even less accessible than before, so no wonder nobody's using them. Currently just making a status update visible only to a given list requires a ridiculous exertion: Open privacy dropdown -> select "More" -> select "See all" (the fuck?) -> click "Custom" -> TYPE a prefix of the friend list name in the combobox -> select the list you want from the dropdown.
I found Google+ circles time-consuming to maintain. Facebook actually had a better idea with Graph Search, which would have let me direct a post to “my friends from Boston”, or “friends of my friends who like hiking”. Sadly it probably was too “power-user” a feature for Facebook.
I unfollowed everyone except close family and a few local communities, buisnesses I actually care about. Now Facebook is great, now when I check it is has content I actually care about. FYI, there are tools to help you unfollow your 1000 friends...
Network effect is always going to be a problem. But beyond that, Diaspora is pretty functional. And pretty easy to use - the docs make it look a lot more complicated than it is. It isn't as featureful (no galleries, no events/calendars). If all you want to do is post and share, and have the privacy of Google+'s circles, Diaspora will do it for you.
You can create lists in Facebook and classify people into close friends, acquaintances, and restricted classes. You can view the feed from those lists if you want. It's more cumbersome than Google+ but you can do something similar on Facebook. I even have a list of all friends to actually see each and every update from all of them if I have the time and not the fraction of them that Facebook usually serves me.
The release was definitely terrible, but ironically not for the typical reasons of the time...namely servers falling over.
From my POV, the release was terrible because it let people in too fast. Social networks need to go through a period where only the "cool kids" are there. It creates a network effect. It was kind of impossible to go through that, so being on Google+ conveyed no status...in fact, it kind of did the opposite.
Agreed. I remember the first person I knew with a gmail account, back in 2003. I remember when I first heard of facebook. Being stuck with a "What is this?" thought for months was my problem and their lucky strike.
Sadly it seems they've hidden this to push their more tailored feed so they can push whatever ads and things through there aka filter (censor?) your friends posts better.
I wrote a report in my freshman year of college on Google+ and how it was going to be "the next big thing in social media" due to Circles and how easy they were to use (I even got A!).
I still wish these had caught on more, or at least that Facebook hadn't implemented Friend Lists as an answer to this that they all but bury in their UI. It would be a much more tolerable place if they made it easier to use this, but similarly, if you have to categorize people in such a way that you rarely see their posts, what is the point of "keeping in touch" via Facebook in the first place? At least for me, if I don't care enough to see your updates (or at least the memes you like) on my news feed I may not think to look at your profile.
MySpace had one clever thing going for it, and that was your "Top 8". People had to choose who would be in their "Top 8" friends listed on their profile page, and being selected by a friend was considered a badge of honor in the friendship.
Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.
I agree that the "circles" idea is good, and that's why I'm implementing it in my social network. However the idea of circles by itself is not good enough for people to make the move.You need something else too..
My problem with Google is how terrible they've proven to be at building consumer software. The Google + news today just set me off even more than usual. All this search ad revenue has them drunk on power with zero concern for providing the end user with actually useful software.
I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing.
Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is.
So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY.
Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful.
Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.
I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air.
However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate their contacts.
It could be argued that by focusing on the wide release, they inherently doomed the product. Hard to build a cohesive community of 300M when the stickiness factor doesn't exist yet. Arguably would have been better to focus on limited releases on niche communities to create that stickiness/increase retention.
I liked the idea of circles when posting, not just consuming. I know my work and university friends would appreciate techy stuff, but not my regular social circle. Same is true of my communities of which I'm a part.
On the other hand, this can enforce echo chambers, but as long as one is aware of that effect (and sadly, most wouldn't care), I really like broadly selecting my audience.
Take a look at what we're up to with https://textile.photos. Threads are private groups you can create and share with (currently photos, later any content). Very circle like.
Circles is/was awesome, but it lacks the virality and oversharing present in the Facebook ecosystem. With FB, it was essentially (yes, one can fine-grain it, but it isn't straightforward) all or nothing, and people preferred all to nothing.
I'm working on something that, to this day, is inspired on circles -- I just think the execution was really poor, the UX of having to always decide who sees what is just too heavy and there are better ways to approach this lovely idea.
Facebook had this feature from the beginning until August 8th, 2018. They were called Friend Lists and you could filter your feed using them. They also can be used for restricting access to content and that feature still exists.
I found the circle pitch amazing, but in practice meh. That said G+ attracted a bunch of guys who gave me very nice streams of informations of all kinds. Some circles weren't as good in other network like twitter or reddit.
Very much agree. I've ended up using Instagram as a de facto circle of people I actually care about, and rarely use up facebook proper, except to connect with more distant acquaintances.
There's no amount of marketing and assurances that would make me believe circles would keep my private life private.
It's the reason why I never used Google Plus. And it's the reason why when I had a facebook account I never friended coworkers or professional contacts.
I cannot track down any screenshots of how Path worked in the early days, only some media buzz around Path declining Google's buyout offer shortly before they launched +
So many old apps and services are just forgotten now, it's hard to prove any claim about who stole what idea. Kind of a shame really, so much of our digital history is effectively unknowable and lost forever.
The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user.
For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.
>For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
How low have we got, capacity wise, when this is even considered "a hurdle"?
At one time, people had to walk to the TV to change the channels...
And before that, they had to have candles and be good with finger shadows to entertain themselves...
It's because it forces you to pick. Outside of the discrete friendship groups online, there's an ever-shifting on-the-spot calculation about who's around you and how much you want to say. One day you might feel like telling friend X while you're in the coffee shop together with just one other friend, the next day you might not feel so open in the bar for a variety of reasons. Add in all the variables about who else is around, how much beer you've drunk, whether you've just been paid, if the relationship with a partner is going well etc. and every situation is different in a very nuanced way. I'm not on Facebook now, but when I was I rapidly gave up on the idea of administering my friendship groups because it felt like I was bureacratising my friendships in a very unnatural way.
Livejournal had this long before G+ or Facebook existed, and people sure did regularly lock their posts to one group of friends or another.
The choice of how to restrict your audience was placed below the 'new post' entry box, and was something you'd usually think about after writing your post. Which was more likely to be a multi-paragraph thing than the short fragments we're so used to tossing off on all the commercial social networks now.
Sorting feeds into algorithmically informed circles would be helpful. The current algorithm is a nightmare if it is data starved, ie you get fed a bunch a irrelevant info from people you just interacted with. There is no process to say, hey Facebook show me what my old college friends are up to. Or hey Facebook show me what my family is up to or hey Facebook show me political news. It's just a bunch of random grasping at straws.
I don't know why circles was so difficult for some. As soon as it launched I dropped FB because I would always get concerned about different groups of people seeing what I posted. On G+ I immediately had a Family circle, a circle of people I knew from work, close friends and then people I met on the service. In fact it didn't seem like people had a problem with the system until TechCrunch gave them talking points. The same thing happened with them integrating it across the properties and the "ramming it down our throats" flap.
> users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post
I'm not sure why this is harder than choosing an email address to send an email to. Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.
Seems like the easiest thing in the world.
Also seems weird to say that even selecting a group to share to is a massive hurdle, but the fact that facebook buries the same functionality behind 5-6 clicks for each post is convenient. Seems more like it was too easy, and had to be made harder.
Facebook's implementation is only behind two clicks. When you go to add a post, there's a drop-down to select who you want to see it. Opening the drop-down is one click. Selecting the list is the other one.
The problem is in managing the people in these lists. I haven't found a place where it shows all users I have in a single list. Adding or removing a single user is easy though, as the available lists are available for selection/deselection anywhere you're allowed to change your friend status with that person.
> Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.
But if you're truly disciplined about this, you never learn that your second cousin is interested in quilting too.
And in many scenarios, there is little reward to being disciplined; unless you're into rather transgressive quilting, you'll probably share your quilting projects with everyone.
There is nothing stopping you from sharing things you are proud of with you family circle. But technical discussions about quilting don't need to eventually end up on a random friends feed.
Google+ also implemented the opposite: you share to your Quilting collection, and everybody who follows you can choose whether to follow that collection or not.
The combination of circles and collections is very powerful, though the way G+ implemented it, they do overlap a bit, and don't entirely play well together. Slightly more flexible collections would help a lot.
I can see the argument regard engagement, but honestly you probably should take at least as long to think about your intended audience as you should posting your birthday picture.
Heck I wish Facebook forced you to provide at least one tag with each post, just so that we could unfollow e.g baby posts/political posts and then maybe get something useful out of Facebook (my current solution is to unfollow the annoying person, but that is a bit too crude).
You are spot on. However you have groups in Whatsapp. If somehow you could use instant message groups as "circles" for publishing posts too... that's what I intend to do in my social network btw.
Yeah, but they're not perfect. You quickly end up with groups containing mostly the same friends, but different configurations of them depending on the event and exactly who you want to include in each discussion. It's a headache, really
RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle.
Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.
This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.
Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.
>RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle.
Absolutely this.
It is, however, not the marketing strategy that failed them. G+ was hyped for some time before release and it became a hit since day one.
With the level of attention any Google product gained at that time, there was no need to focus on a niche. The issue were their horrendous decisions in UI and product design as well as feature integration. In short, it was a product for the tech savy user, yet aimed at the mainstream. It wasn't satisfying anyone.
I still can't understand why they would not cap the most valuable resource they had, GMail, GDocs, GCalendar, GReader, etc. Zero integration.
I don’t remember many particularly egregious failures in UI and product design. In my experience it was well designed, but served no purpose whatsoever given that it was almost a complete clone of Facebook features, thus no reason for any of my facebook addicted friends to start using it, thus no reason for me to use it, thus dead in the water due to marketing fail and not product. Maybe I missed some specific UX or design issues that you are referring to?
I do agree that there was a missed opportunity to integrate their other awesome products you mentioned. But to me even with those integrated Google+ would have needed a raison d’etre that was substantially different than facebook.
G+'s interface may have been clean and minimalist, but its features were known for being too confusing to navigated and manage, especially the circles - its core function. Finding, linking to, mentioning other people, the +1 button; you had to experiment for a good amount of time to get G+. That isn't attractive to normal people.
At the same time, the minimalism pervaded the rest of the platform. Instead of giving its users reason to spend time on G+, the site seemed to expect for people to entertain themselves. As such, there was little that drove more activity, connected people, and gave reason to spend time to understand all the features.
One thing I misremembered. There was a serious issue with marketing. They didn't open up to the public for several months. By that time a lot of the hype died down.
The "Real Name" policy at the start was a huge mistake that hurt them. Early adopters were overwhelmingly digital natives who immediately felt the product wasn't for them.
See, that's an interesting angle. Facebook had to stick with real names because they were trying to become the default source of personal identity online. (and basically succeeded) But with real identity comes a whole host of problems.
If Google had pivoted 180 degrees and offered up a full featured social network with pseudonyms and, like, one other twist so that it wasn't just Myspace, then there's a reason to care about Google+. LinkedIn is facebook for professional identity... There have to be other identities not shown on Facebook that google could have gone after.
They made a complete farce of marketing it as it wasn't initially like Facebook. Facebook connects to people you know or are connected to. Google+ seemed more a Usenet 2.0 in connecting based on interests, especially with things like circles, whether you knew people or not. A few friends joined really early in beta and thought it was great.
So when I got to joining what did it present? Welcome - connect to some famous people. Now add your friends. Not one mention of interests, and I'm not sure they even mentioned circles. So everyone joining was being presented a picture of Facebook.
When it launched I had several friends on g+ that were not on Facebook. Facebook already had a bad rep, but Google was still cool. The circles were a great idea. I didn't see any problems with the ui either.
But there was simply not much to do, contrary to what you'd expect with all the other Google services available.
“Friends on G+ that weren’t on Facebook” <== this was an opportunity
I was still very high on Facebook kool aid at that time. It may have had a bad rep to some people, but this sentiment was years away from reaching people like me.
Note that I am about as much of a Facebook insider as possible without actually having worked there. I personally know most of their top execs, Zuck interviewed me in 2007, turned down a PM offer to join Bebo but stayed close with a number of them for years. I would have loved to be filthy rich with those options, but if I had joined I would feel guilty for the destruction I contributed to.
i haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but google+ made it difficult to join in the beginning. it was invite only or something else limiting like that where you couldn't join even if you wanted to unless you had an invite. i remember it being quite a long time after their initial buzz before they opened it up. it made me lose interest.
the feature is basically replicated on android phones that have the google now launcher page that shows you customised results based on how you search.
Big companies typically don't go after small niches. There are so many of them available they can't possibly pursue them all, because ultimately you don't know which one will take off. The book The Innovator's Dilemma focuses on this.
Exactly. My point is that going after small niches until one works would have been a better strategy to come up with a viable Facebook competitor. This could probably only happen with a “startup within big company” model where they had the freedom to test out a bunch of crazy stuff for a long time without pressure from management.
Big companies typically don't go after small niches.
Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries. Huge drug companies chase niches every day. Giant food companies release ethic niche foods every month.
Whomever told you that there isn’t big money in niches or that they’re not worth going after is someone you should stop taking advice from.
> "Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries."
AB Inbev, et al isn't targeting a niche by buying microbrews, they're building a portfolio that gives them access to growing and profitable craft brew market that's 1/4th of the total US beer market.
Retail dollar sales of craft increased 8%, up to $26.0 billion,
and now account for more than 23% of the $111.4 billion U.S. beer market.
It very much depends on the market. This is the reason why Seagate and Western Digital aren’t big names in the SSD market. They dominated the mechanical drive market for years (and still do!) but by the time SSDs were worth pursuing, other companies were light years ahead of them.
Google isn’t really in the business of filling small niches. That’s why they kill so many products that have small but passionate user bases. It’s just not worth their time and money so they shut the products down. This is why I can’t see them trying to start with a small social media niche and slowly expand to a bigger market. It’s a great idea; but seems to go against everything they do.
That's because HDDs and SSDs are actually very different on the inside. They do roughly the same, but just because a company is good at manufacturing HDDs does not mean that it can also produce good SSDs.
I still miss Wave... In my opinion, Googles biggest failure was the missing real-world federation. They promised us, that there will be a server to run on your own hardware and yet it took them years to release anything that was usable. Even years after the open source release the software was quite unstable.
Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.
Personally, visual clutter and poor performance were two major factors why Wave didn't work for me. Visually they were cramming too much stuff on the page, with loads of avatars / icons for participants and the like - IMO unnecessary information to have on the landing page. And performance wise it was just not good enough, maybe if they made it an optimized native app instead of a webapp.
At least they could incorporate the tech they developed and used for Wave in other products, notably Docs and G+.
> Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there.
Great advice for a YC startup, but not how big companies that already have large user bases operate. Big companies have a metric they want to drive, then look for big opportunities, simply because dominating a “niche” is too small an opportunity to make a dent in a big-company metric like DAU, time spent, etc. If you do want to start with a niche, it can be super hard to justify continued investment from management, given that there are so many other bets that can drive larger near-term changes to metrics.
Right. But the reason big companies fail at this is because they don’t have the balls to pursue optimal longterm strategy in the face of quicker near term wins. There’s nothing preventing a big company from thinking like a nimble startup, other than fear/lack of vision coming from the top. If the CEO stuck to his or her guns, they could outcompete startups for these opportunities.
Actually, Google+ never aimed at feature parity with Facebook. At least not in the way of having the same set of features and accessible as easily as they were/are on Facebook. Having used both platforms for a long time, this was a huge barrier to doing anything on Google+ even if one didn't mind many people not being on it.
If it had copied Facebook shamelessly, it would've given an alternative for all those people fed up with Facebook for the last decade or so, and thus increased usage too.
Uh, they kinda did copy Facebook shamelessly on the core features and basic UI, with the exception of Circles. I log in, I see a feed, I have a way to add “friends”, I can share text/photos/videos/links and comment. It basically looked and felt like logging in to Facebook with no friends on there, less features, and a few interesting UI differences.
If they had done something different, like say restricted you to X number of friends, for any small X, or focused on groups, or done something anonymous like Secret - now that at least would have been different. It may have still failed but at least it would have been trying to scratch a different itch on the social spectrum.
Google Docs predates Wave and has since been rebranded as Google Drive. Various blogs have pointed out how certain aspects of Wave have been integrated into Docs/Sheets/Drive. The big concept with wave was that you did operations. "Go to row 12 and bold characters 15 through 38" as an operation within a document, as opposed to synchronizing an entire object. So when you set your cursor on a word in the document, it sent that as an operation, and any other clients editing the document could see where your cursor was at. Operations at the individual character level would sync to all attached clients and you can see edits in realtime. It's really interesting when a team at work is all looking at and modifying the same spreadsheet. The box they are editing is highlighted so you naturally stay away from it. If you are "idle", you might click your cursor away from all the activity as a common courtesy.
Good Docs had this to a degree before Wave, but it was unpolished. Two people could definitely edit a sheet together, but editing a document was more cumbersome (whole blocks of text would update at once). After Wave, they took the concepts and you could then see everyone editing the document as they typed or simply moved around the document.
I believe Docs has always been an entirely separate product. They may have had a version of it inside Wave. Not 100% sure on this but that’s what I remember.
Not so much defeat , but more avoiding future liability. They sure could afford to run it , but under the current circumstances, a data leak like the one they claim they didn't have would be very damaging to their image and their moneymakers.
defeat happened a decade ago, i don't think it was the hope of "victory" that was keeping it alive. Rather, it was not enough of a trouble/liability (until april), and a small number of people/communities still used it.
Not to beat a dead horse on this defeat thing, but it's defeat from the perspective of trying and failing to have a competing social network. I like your optimism and I wish Google's reasons were that noble. But it's hopelessly naive to say that they are shutting it down as part of a trend of selling services rather than info.
#1, they're shutting it down to avoid a massive backlash after being hacked, because otherwise they might steal the crown of "most disreputable Big Tech co" from Facebook, which could begin to affect their stock price much like it has Facebook's.
#2, they are making inroads in every other part of their business sacrificing user privacy for nebulous features/benefits. See the recent debacle over Chrome auto-sign in. They basically tried to change the definition of Chrome from "it's a browser" to "it's Google" without anybody noticing.
Not particularly consistent with a company ostensibly moving away from a business model relying on targeted advertising.
> But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding.
The median Googler works there for something like 1.1 years, and gets recruited straight out of college. Combine this with the fact that Larry Page almost immediately abdicated after being handed back the reins from Eric Schmidt around this time, and a lot of other influential old timers like Marissa Mayer are long gone, it's no small wonder, I guess, that the sensibilities and follow-through of early Google are dead.
I'm pretty sure Google would have more luck in making and keeping these technologies if they found some middle-ground on spying, tracking and profiling. I almost bought Google Glass, but after reading review that it makes picture every few seconds and each time you blink and uploads it to Google, I decided not to ever buy something like this. It's not only harmful for my privacy, but literally everyone else around me.
Because social is/was such a fundamental aspect of the human experience. As proven by facebook’s continued explosive growth in the years since Google tried to compete. Not to mention FB’s ability to affect markets, attitudes, and politics at global scale.
It would have been better if they had competitors to keep them honest.
Sure. But I never said Google should try to compete in all of them. Just social, given that it is up there as a fundamental human need, hardwired into our brains like the need for food or sex. Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful.” You really can’t fault them for trying to organize the world’s social information when it became clear to everyone that social was powerful enough to become one of the dominant computing paradigms.
My take is, they were justified in going for it, but it’s simply not in their DNA. Social information is different from the non-human information where Google dominates (eg search, maps, etc).
I do share your admiration for Apple vs Google. But I wonder how long they will be able to keep it up without a Jobsian product visionary to define their identity. Tim Cook is doing a good job so far but there is only so long they can coast on iPhone dominance and strong operations. Apple’s identity revolves around defining the future, and I’m not sure they still have that ability.
This was, in fact, the dominant narrative at the time. Niche search products like Amazon (products), Facebook (social), and Twitter (news) were going to be the end of Google if they didn't get their act together. It's the same reason they're so obsessed with becoming the destination or broker (ads) for search queries instead of sending people on to organic results.
Facebook is the only other company that has meaningful market share in online ads - the stats are always something like "Google + Facebook have 90-something %". Had Google managed to build a product that replaced Facebook, maybe they'd have that 90+% to themselves.
All large enough corporations expand until they can read email; those that don't are subsumed by ad-hoc implementations of 50% of Common Lisp. - Paul McCarthy (1956)
>say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users
Kind of describes Google Wave in a sense - private collaboration and passionate users. But it couldn't expand out of that niche set of users/use-cases.
Yes. But still a non player in the much more important consumer market. Arguably Google still has a stake in consumer glasses via their massive investment in Magic Leap. But whether that has any chance of succeeding is a whole other story.
The important market is when smartglasses replace smartphones as the dominant form of human computer interaction. Which will happen in the next 10 years.
There’s a lot of market research readily available, admittedly of questionable quality. But the more reliable weather vane is estimating when Apple will launch their smartglasses. Add 5 years to that for when glasses disrupt smartphones. At the rate Apple is buying up AR and VR companies you can expect them to launch in late 2019 or 2020.
But I can't turn my smartglasses around and show someone the memes I'm looking at. I don't see how it could replace my phone. Compliment perhaps, but having used Google Glass Enterprise I don't think it's as big of a game changer as you might think.
This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company's culture.
Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so often much closer to the truth. In G+'s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn't want everyone named "Dog fart", which was a pretty ridiculous argument).
And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility.
Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would've been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone's throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash.
The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it's very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google).
It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great.
Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head.
Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don't speak for this or any other company.
As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure.
This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
Very good insight. If you think about it, Google benefits from proliferation of third party websites, thus cloud business is synergetic with Google search. Facebook and Google+ are competitive with Google search since they centralize the web.
For many, Google search reduced to a search engine for Wikipedia and StackOverflow and a couple of other big sites. This poses a long-term threat for search.
When I was at google, the one thing I took away was that most of the terrible decisions such as described above were very widely panned before being released inside the company. Everyone one of them. That doesn't mean the group of engineers was always right, but they were very good at pointing out bad, controversial ideas.
The acquisition of YouTube is one that comes to mind. While it wasn't universally panned, there were a lot of engineers (myself included) who felt it was wildly excessive.
I can't reply to that YouTube message, too much nesting? Anyway, I'll agree that YouTube was a good one. My office was doing Google video, so that project lost out.
The funny thing is that while it's obviously synergetic, up to 2012 it was a Urs' toy project on the back-burner. It was mostly run from SEA/KIR with MTV leadership largely oblivious. There were gems like this, for example: once they forgot to cover cloud organization in the company OKR meetings broadcasted to all employees :) Only when they realized that external clouds grow so fast that Big G can loose it's preferential access to volume discounts GCP suddenly became the priority (to detriment of TI, which now largely is after-thought).
I'm convinced that Google going to cloud too late is going to be seen in history books in the same light as Microsoft/IE fiasco.
I get SEA only because I know the city. MTV makes me thing of that channel that use to have music videos in the 90s, before it became the shitty reality TV network, OKR makes it sound like you misspelled Chicago's airport and TI makes calculators.
SEA/KIR is Seattle/Kirkland, a main Google headquarters, MTV is Mountain View, the Google headquarters. OKR is Objectives and Key Results, a measurement system for company/individual goals. Not sure about TI, but GCP is Google Cloud Platform.
TI is Technical Infrastructure, organization responsible for management/storage/database/analytics/scheduling, etc. software in datacenters. TI and Cloud used to be different branches in the same PA (product area), but TI consumed Cloud Org once cloud became a priority and now it's a single organization (itself a part of PA which also includes G Suite).
Since external-facing cloud projects have very simple and transparent metrics (unlike internal TI projects), Cloud/TI organization mostly concentrates on cloud projects nowadays.
If memory serves this was the PA (Product Area) originally responsible for GCP before Cloud became its own PA. But TI was headed by Urs and is responsible for the internal Google infrastructure (Colossus, BigTable, Spanner, etc).
cloud, not hosting. hosting is just part of cloud. Well, the first reason is that if Google misses this growth opportunity, they will be punished badly in the market, which will affect their ability to complete long-term against Amazon and MSFT. Growth in cloud is what growth in mobile was 10 years ago: critically important to remain relevant in a market. When cloud switches to "profitable mode" some time in the future, if Google isn't in a position to benefit from that, they'll have huge revenue and ultimately profit issues compared to Amazon (which has already surpassed Google on the basis of its cloud growth). So it's an existential thing.
Everybody thought social growth was critical (5 years ago, everybody thought Facebook would eat Google due to growth in mobile ads), but it turned out that social growth was not necessary, instead maximizing watch time on youtube and maximizing app installs in Play both turned out to be far more important. Google isn't worried about Facebook like they used to be- they're worried about Amazon and Apple.
But Facebook is and did take a huge bite out of the total ad market. Facebook has roughly 1/3rd as much ad revenue as Google on a far smaller investment of infrastructure and a narrower range of products.
That's true but the market grew, rather than staying constant size, and nobody considers Facebook an existential threat to Google any more (which helps Google in the market).
> It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great.
The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt.
But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.
The rank-and-file are extremely well compensated, with cash, with stock, with on-the-job perks. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? A lot of people will put up with incredible violations of their principles before they'll risk losing a comfortable position.
Googlers will and have on multiple occassions revolted. Many have resigned when their personal red lines were crossed, usually over things the external world would not have noticed. Various top-down decisions have been reverted due to this, up to walking back an announcement that already went public.
Big part of the reason is that finding the next job after Google is nowhere near a hard problem. Chances are you might even get paid more by the next place.
Source: I'm a Googler that has signed some of these petitions, never got his red lines crossed and is still happy to work here.
>Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was trying to unify the account model.
Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products.
But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user.
If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.
I lost my original youtube account due to the merger. The idea of social mirror of society using a single point of identity is (in hindsight) totally ridiculous. We liked so much having pseudos and different personas depending on the context.
That's a very important point, IMHO, and an underrated one.
The next big social network -- the one that turns Facebook into MySpace 2.0 -- will be one that lets users maintain not just multiple 'circles' but multiple identities. I don't just want to separate what my parents see from what my coworkers see, or separate what my (hypothetical) friends from church see from what my (hypothetical) fellow members at the local underground S&M club see. I want to be different people as far as they're all concerned.
This will scale in interesting ways. For one thing, advertisers will actively benefit from this model because it will let them target individual personae.
The notion of keeping the name you were born with and using it forever, everywhere, is the original "single sign-on" paradigm. To the extent single sign-on, single identity is suboptimal in cyberspace, it will eventually be seen as such in real life. The use of real names online already ranges from a useless practice to a hazardous one, depending on how common or how obscure your name is.
I kinda doubt that. It's not in those networks best interests. They need as complete a picture of _you_ as possible to sell you shit.
You can have semi-multiple identities based on the pages you manage/control, but most sites don't want to make it easy to switch accounts because it could lead to ambiguity to their data.
For example, to use multiple accounts on Reddit, you need either The Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) plugin or some type of cookie isolator like container tabs in Firefox or multiple browsers. I think you need to do something similar for Twitter (or use a desktop client).
Federated Social networks that use either ActivityPub or OStatus (like Mastodon, Pleroma and GNUSocial) are interesting because you can have independent accounts on multiple instances, and be logged into all of them without browser tricks (since they're all on different domains).
> The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.
Google "hate" is a product of their success. IBM, MS, Apple, they all get it or have had it too.
What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.
except when they did throw their weight behind it they did it in weird ways - requiring google+ for youtube but then keeping all youtube tools on youtube and google+ as an abstracted login entity that had some old version of your data(google+ profile didn't pull your youtube banner or details in any way nor did it facilitate creator growth by automatically suggesting contacts based on the type of content you create - which is very much in the realm of possibility for google)
> Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision
I think a lot of this is because of Steve Jobs. He did this but was for the most part successful at it. Everyone wants to think they are the next Jobs.
When I search Google for [fish rots from head], the top 3 results each mention some Chinese connection – one calls it a "Chinese proverb", others say it's been variously attributed to many traditions, often Turkish, Greek, or Chinese.
(So: maybe that's an origin. Or perhaps there's something vaguely similar in some Chinese traditions. Or perhaps it's just a common mal-attribution, as there's a tendency in the west to ascribe various highly-figurative or riddle-like pearls of wisdom to "the Chinese", or "the Arabs", or "the Buddhists", etc.)
It's also very much used in Romania, so I suspect we either got it from the Turkish (the source mentioned by someone above) or it comes from our Slavic roots (from where it might have originated in modern Russian, too). Living at the crossroads of different civilizations and migration routes can be fun like that.
I can't really think of a Chinese proverb out of my instincts that linked to this translation, the closest one being "上梁不正下梁歪", literal translation "When the upper beam (of a house) is not in the right place, the lower beam follows"
I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts.
That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty sure that like me, everyone else stopped.
Now, I have to figure out a way of re-importing all that content to something else, probably homebrewed this time.
> I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts.
I left Google Plus after Google Search kept turning up private posts that I had opted to remove from search.
They keep moving the functionality, but I can still get to it on desktop. Search for something, "Posts" tab, change "From Everyone" dropdown to "From just you".
This works very well. My download was huge (~50something GB I think), but it recovered all the emails that Gmail couldn't find anymore. Now I just use repgrip to search my old emails.
I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.
I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to "copy" or "follow" AWS in the early years.
Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be "amazing" and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, "More ads, more ads, more ads..." continues on relentlessly.
[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.
It seems like Google could have successfully built a "shadow social network" by incrementally integrating their popular services like Gmail, Inbox, Reader, YouTube, Hangouts, and chat into one portal. OTOH, Buzz tried to inject social sharing into Gmail and there was a big user backlash.
I think this is exactly right. It would have been a lot better to organically build a social network across all their products that people actually like to use and comment on. Instead we force them to do things they didn't want to do like real names, but also constantly having to make decisions about what was public or not. It was doomed to failure. I even worked on a project that was a tiny part of Google Plus.
For a long time in Hangouts, you could hit the big green "+" to start a new conversation, and instead of searching your contacts, it would put everyone elses name EVERYWHERE in the list. So basically you had to find your contact another way.
I think they were attempting to encourage new connections, but that's not how to do it.
What's really striking about this to me is that Google didn't disclose the security vulnerability. Google is trying to cover it up by moving the ball from 'there was a breach' to 'we're shutting down G+'. This is why I'm super hesitant to be a Google fanboy. Facebook may have my social media info, but Google has my emails, all of my mobile data, access to a bunch of my assets through Google Domains, GCE etc. Scary stuff.
Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs:
Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API.
The bug meant that apps also had access to Profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public.
This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age. (See the full list on our developer site.) It does not include any other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers or G Suite content.
We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018. We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change.
We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.
We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.
Because breaches come from public vulnerabilities, unless you can prove there was no breach, you should treat it as a breach. This is common information security practice.
Google are unable to prove there was no breach because they didn't keep sufficient logs, which is also not acceptable in modern security practice.
I must have skimmed over it in the article, I only know because it's in the comments. That should have been the headline, imo. Own up to it like other vendors do. I thought Google was good with security, this is a good way to get one of the few positive points about this monolith changed.
LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google.
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like.
It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one succeed, and who knows, maybe Mastodon will overtake Facebook one day, but I don't see any evidence in the Google+ shutdown that suggests that this is the case.
Mastodon and Diaspora are both horrible names for anything aspiring to be socially popular. The former conveys something lumbering, slow, and now extinct. The latter sounds like a gastrointestinal disease if you don't know what it means, and conjures up images of a group of people being expelled or fleeing if you do.
Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like.
I didn't say "it failed because it didn't do X". They said "... failed to gain developer adoption ....". To that specific point, I contend there is a clear and direct causal link between the decisions they made, and that lack of adoption. Of course I can't prove that in the strictest sense, but it's not hard to see that a lot of (potential) G+ developers kept asking and asking and asking for usable APIs and never got them. Speaking only for myself, as somebody who was initially a G+ fan and might have been inclined to build things on top of G+, I never did so for exactly this reason. Yes,"n=1" and all that, but a lot of other devs were very public with their position on this as well.
Obviously their decision to close it down involved multiple factors, but the lack of developer adoption was specifically called out by Google as one of those factors.
You're missing (or ignoring) a lot of historical context in your analysis. Google spent many years trying to compete with Facebook assuming that open standards were the thing that would win. ActivityStreams and PubSubHubHub are just two examples of federated standards that they built to compete, and that failed.
Google+ came out, if you'll remember, at the time that Page became CEO again and pivoted the company's direction away from standards and more towards product. In the case of social that clearly failed. In the case of Android it did not.
Yeah, I remember that, and I didn't intend my post here to be a detailed "analysis" of the entirety of what happened with G+. I just wanted to respond to one particular point that the author of the Google post made, vis-a-vis "developer adoption".
It would be fun to spend some time doing a more detailed analysis of the whole thing, including all of that historical context, but I don't have the time right now.
Before those two, more than a decade ago, Google also had OpenSocial, with MySpace and others. It was an interesting period of time, if you were there. The project was one of the "failures" that soured Google on having open standards at all costs.
It doesn't help that half of HN and I guess other communities as well decided to blame Google+ the social network for everything that was bad:
- linking their accounts (yep, bad)
- shuttering Reader (didn't care personally but I really doubt they calculated how much it would cost them in goodwill)
- etc
... and decided to use Google+ the social network as a target for all that frustration.
Google+ was really nice. And I'm gonna miss it.
Twitter? The place where I need to have 5 accounts to avoid spamming someone with things they don't care about?
Facebook? The place that 1.) Tries to make everything everyone puts into it public and 2.) makes large scale data harvesting possible and then say "didn't see that coming" after CA.
I've since been on Whatsapp (until Facebook bought it and destroyed the single reason why I was a walking billboard for it,) and later Telegran (don't like it either and I won't write anything there I cannot comfortably send on a postcard, but at least it is not proven yet that they will mine every ounce of metadata out of my connections and then try to kill me with spam, (including on my 2-factor address like Facebook will).
Mastodon? I don't know. Haven't tried yet. It might be brilliant but when I first heard about it it was presented as a twitter thingy and twitter is one of the more useless services I have a relationship with (of course, this is personal, for everyone who likes twitter that is more power to them I guess.)
People blame Google+ for that because Google branded all of that as Google+. At the time, Google+ invaded and occupied almost all Google properties, including YouTube (which was independent enough to resist part), Blogger (which resisted some), Reader (destroyed solely to remove Google+ competition), Hangouts, even Google OAuth
That doesn't make prevent the social network with the same name from being good though, although ironically the fact that it never became as popular as Facebook might have been part of why it stayed so nice for so long.
Them: "We're shutting down X because too few people use it. Also, announcing Y!"
Users: "I'm not using Y. You'll probably shut it down."
[months pass]
Them: "We're shutting down Y because too few people use it."
The brand recognition that they hope will make Y successful might actually work against it.
They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?
It did have users. I have no idea the exact number, and clearly it wasn't as many as Facebook, but it wasn't the ghost town people always made it out to be. Some of the Communities were actually quite active.
There are a lot of RPG communities, and a lot of roleplayers and RPG designers who don't even use Communities because G+ already is a community. Communities are a later addition, and G+ works fine without them.
That's the tragedy. It's a business that became one of the richest companies in the world in a few years, obtaining massive capital looking for investments along the way. It then holds all those investments (of money or time or intelligence) to the same standard of success and failure.
No. We use a small part of the people API in production and will have to make changes in our code to avoid breakage. IIRC various points in Google's documentation pointed us to the more modern people API for our desired use case, away from "older" APIs which we will now have to revert back to...
Loads of people are depending on it, in spite of all Google's constant attempts to kill it. It started out as the best social network, and I've gotten to know tons of great people, projects and products there. It has really enriched my life in a way I don't see Facebook or Twitter doing. My Google+ friends and I will definitely miss it.
G+ has been a laughingstock in terms of actual usage numbers for years. Nobody is using it. The fact that it was still supported is amazing. Is Google supposed to support failing products until the end of time?
For a definition of nobody that includes hundreds of millions of active users. Ie, more people than you will ever meet in your lifetime, possibly more than all the people those people will meet in their lifetimes.
No doubt this is a failure for Google.
For comparison, Bing turns over only a twentieth of Google's 60B per year.
Point and laugh if you like, but I'd be happy with considerably less than three billion a year.
I think that was by design. Trying to sweep it under the covers to avoid outrage. I share that article with friends and they're likely to read the first half of the headline and not bother reading it.
I guess this is a good time if anyone wants to create something similar:
- contextual ads OK with me, particularly if they are inline and not third party
- or a small yearly fee for no ads
- same features as Google+
- create the API that Google+ always lacked
- I and a lot of others don't really care about E2E for that kind of conversations so just don't data mine us, don't follow us around the web and don't sell out to Facebook and we should be fine.
But I'm gonna miss it. I haven't been too active the last few months so I guess I might be to blame too (but then again I've not been active anywhere else either lately except here).
Where else do you go to meet people who share interests in a more general sense? HN doesn't care about photography. Twitter doesn't allow me to chose to see someones photos but not their crazy posts about politics. Facebook... well, don't even mention it. It's less than a week since last time they let hackers access theirs users accounts, and even if they had a perfect security record wrt hacking, it seems they just can't stand the temptation to abuse data: change settings, do experiments on users to make them depressed, abuse 2-fator phone numbers for spamming, ask people to upload nudes - many of us couldn't make this up even if we tried..!
there's a decent sized group of people who are outraged when google shuts down any product, regardless of if they used it or had even heard about it before.
I'm not particularly outraged, but the stereotype that Google shuts down projects too frequently to depend upon them is not going to go away when it keeps happening.
I use their mail, as a backup, their maps, and search engine. But I'd think long and hard before I developed against one of their services, or came to rely upon any future-project they released.
just out of curiosity, when was the last time google shut down a product that you were actively using?
For me it was Reader, and that was the only time. and yeah, i'm still a little salty about it. But every company shuts things down - google can't keep all their dead and unused failures running forever, and Google+ was obviously deserving of a shutdown.
"i don't trust google because they shut down things nobody uses" isn't really a rational complaint.
Reader, Orkut (yeah!), and Wave were the three I can remember off-hand. I suspect there were more.
I know that I had to cope with some changes to their map-pricing recently too - so I moved to an alternative (easy to manage since I was using leaflet.js as a wrapper).
Rightly or wrongly though I now have the impression that their APIs/Services are not likely to remain.
I know a lot of people in various Open Simulator related communities who are extremely unhappy about it, and are desperately searching for a replacement. Is that close enough?
I just realized this means plenty of long-form posts will poof into non-existence. Currently, the sole benefit from G+ to me is occasionally coming upon a solution to a problem, or at least a discussion, in someone's G+ blog. It so happens that the G+ crowd seems to consist of especially stubborn and strong-willed people with firm opinions, which lets the rest of us mooch off them.
Common "business as usual" technique. In a previous small company I used to work at, often when a senior engineer was leaving, the departure announcement email was mentioned as a last thing after a couple of "good news" announcements.
I think they are trying to spin it as a privacy-protecting move. This gains them two things:
1. They save face a little by not publicly confessing it was a failure.
2. Big tech (Facebook, Google, etc.) is facing privacy-related criticism right now. They can say, hey, this is yet one more step we're taking to improve the situation for everyone.
And they might even be partially right about both. Maybe they would have shut it down eventually but privacy challenges caused them to do it sooner than they otherwise would have.
Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. This is at the time FB is bleeding heavily, is losing trust and people are willing to try something new. Google is one case where it looks like outside traditional CEO Eric Schmidt did much much better not only in operational excellence but also long term big bets including maps, gmail, YouTube, Android etc. Larry Page has nothing comparable to show for in his 7 years of leadership. This might be one reason: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-13/larry-pag...
> This is at the time FB is bleeding heavily, is losing trust and people are willing to try something new.
This is, I think, a really key point. It’s debatable to what extent people are willing to try something new (it may be that they’ve soured on social media in general), but it’s certainly true that Facebook has lost a huge amount of trust, and that a company with vision might be able to take advantage of that weakness.
I really liked G+; I even left Facebook for awhile in favour of it. But the great masses didn’t follow, and eventually G+ turned into a wasteland. There was a lot of potential there, IMHO, but it was never really exploited and was ultimately squandered. Very sad.
After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social.
What? They spent a decade on G+, launched it with much fanfare, annnd it just didn't pan out. Sure, they didn't drive it down Google users' throats as aggressively as they could have (via e.g. Search, Chrome or Gmail) but that really wouldn't have helped them - Facebook didn't grow like that either. Social networks need to grow via organic growth, via word of mouth.
Anyway they're cutting their losses finally instead of indulging in the sunk cost fallacy, I say good riddance. You also mention Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Android but these are all highly popular - and profitable - services and have been since the start.
No, they left it to rott. No innovations, no new strategy, no new leadership, no new bold moves. Nothing. If G+ was startup outside Google we would have ripped it off for not even pretending to compete.
Social is absolutely the most important space for Google, even more so than cloud. FB is eating up large chunk of their ad money and putting biggest chunk of content out of their reach. For a company out to organize world's information, this is unthinkable. And this is a company with $100B in bank, accumulation of largest talent pool, ability to attract the best. And it's not that FB is perfect and strongest at this point.
There is no "cutting losses" in tech when product category is this important. It takes years of struggle, experimentation, patience and competition to win. They gave up within an year after G+ release, left it on "maintenance mode" and now finally kissing good bye.
To me, Google has lost its charm as company that makes big bets and goes all-in until they win. Now they are company which does half-assed product and if they don't see traction right away, they cut off the oxygen and then just kill it. There is little or no reflections, learning and applying it to do course corrections.
After Larry Page arrived at the scene and flew out to his Caribbean island on extra-extended vacations, the company has failed to produce any big new product category. Eric Schmidt was able to start new product category virtually every year and become undisputed leader in it. That wasn't coincidence or luck but sheer drive to win. For example, in maps they had to invest huge amount of money with multi-year milestones and constant innovations to displace existing players.
This is not a news article, though - it's a one-sided PR piece that greatly minimizes important points about the story and completely ignores other points (e.g. the regulation angle). You should have let another news story take its spot; there are plenty others that are not paywalled.
In my opinion the entire privacy breach is a non-issue. Here is what I think happened:
Some engineer at Google found a bug in Google Plus that could be used to access private data. The issue was investigated by the security team. They find that no harm was done. Incidents like this happen somewhat regularly at any tech company. Normally nobody thinks twice about it or even thinks about disclosing it to the public.
However, Google wanted to shut down Google Plus and wanted to avoid a backslash like with Google Reader. They used this bug as a pretext. Before Google releases this blog post, the post gets leaked the WSJ. The WSJ then puts a spin on it that Google didn't expect, because the narrative fits well into the current news cycle.
By Google's own admission, there is no way for them to know if the issue was abused because they only keep two weeks of log data. If there was a way for them to have found that "no harm was done", they would be emphatically making that point, not the opposite.
All the existing articles are just parroting what's already in Google's blog post. IMO unless there's some new information being added by third parties, it's always better to link the original source.
I guess we'll leave both stories up for now since at a minimum they emphasize different aspects (the data breach in one, the Google+ shutdown in the other).
Sure thing, if there's a news article that provides additional information from its own sources and supersedes the Google post, we can update the link.
Many articles fit such a description but were “duped”. Wouldn’t it benefit the site if at least one of those were allowed to exist alongside what is essentially Google’s response? The title of this article doesn’t even convey the most important point here, which is that hundreds of thousands of users had personal data leaked; instead, it conveys the idea that Google is doing something to “Protect data” which is something that people might not care to read if they didn’t know it was related to a breach.
Yes that's a good point, and it seems like the WSJ article has gone further into the story so we've un-duped it. There's a workaround for the paywall in the thread.
came here to say just that. the gall of google, claiming at the release of g+, that '+' was never an official qualifier and quotes were always the standard.
> Google is shutting down its long-neglected Facebook competitor Google+ following the disclosure of a vulnerability that could have resulted in third-party developers accessing private data from around 500,000 users, the company announced Monday.
Funny how they low-key slip through, the fact that they had an open security vulnerability for 3 years. Like "Hey, we are shutting down Google+ ... Btw, your data may have or may have not been exposed..."
I think that's the bigger issue here. For 3 years there was a vulnerability. And when they did find out about it, they chose not to disclose the information. Why? B/c there wasn't that many people using it. And so because of that, let's shut down G+, rather than be scrutinized about how they chose not to let it be know, that users information were available through this vulnerability.
this is the same company that threatens other companies that if they don’t patch a vulnerability fast enough, the time will release it to the public. class act
This sucks. The vibrant RPG community on Google+ is in uproar about this and looking for a suitable alternative. (MeWe looks like the most likely candidate at the moment.)
Google+ started out as the best social network. Unfortunately Google has taken every opportunity to ruin it, remove popular features, force ill-considered integration, remove that integration once people are used to it. Lately the spam filtering has been utterly broken, alternating between leaving painfully obvious spam, and marking and hiding comments from people you were following. It seemed like it was an experimental testbed for them where they didn't care if people were using it.
Despite all of that, we hung on because of the great communities, the people we got to know, and because frankly there's no good alternative.
It really seems to me it shouldn't be too hard at this point to design a sane social network. Google+ had all the elements, but refused to apply them correctly.
Facebook is a horrible mess of privacy violations with no control over your feed (though G+'s control often doesn't work as intended either), and besides, there's family and co-workers there. Twitter seems designed for screaming into the void. Tumbler and Instagram don't seem to be my thing.
Besides MeWe, there's also a big push towards Diaspora. Diaspora seems much closer to the Google+ experience, and some people have expressed doubts about MeWe's alt-right ties.
Real life is a very different use case. Better, but also a lot harder. I've never actually tried reddit, but my impression is that it's more of a traditional forum, but lots of them.
At the moment, G+ers seem to be gravitating towards MeWe.
One can have a private, invite only subreddit and one can choose all the moderators of the subreddit. I think that if you use reddit's native mobile or web page css they push ads on you so I don't use either of those.
The reports of Google avoiding making a security disclosure about the potential data breach out of concern for negative PR and regulatory response are very concerning and should be getting more attention
It's just ridiculous that they had it open for 3 years, didn't have proper metrics so don't know exactly how many were breached, but there estimate was 500,000 and they didn't disclose???
C'mon Google, why'd you have to try and hide this...
Google+ was a top-down, scrambling response to Facebook's meteoric rise. I think it ultimately failed because it didn't naturally mesh with or arise from Google's natural strengths.
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
It failed in my case because it polluted every other Google property - search, YouTube suggestions, etc. I'd prefer that suggestions and search results be based on my preferences and not those of an idiot cousin or a foaming-at-the-mouth prepper I happen to work with.
When it launched it was terribly incomplete.
It didn't even have events, which for a lot of people is a mayor reason to use Facebook and they could have even integrated it into Google calendar.
Events were eventually added much later (like a year after launch?), but at that point interest had already died down.
Why they did not delay the launch until it had parity with Facebook's core features is beyond me.
I didn't mean that particular ordinal literally... personally, I'm impressed by how they're able to achieve such a high level of uptime, data integrity, and near-realtime communication.
Lots of people here talking about the good bits of Google+ or how they could have made it succeed. But from my POV it was just the wrong idea from the start. From what I saw Google panicked about the growth of Facebook and Twitter and tried to build a competitor. But no one wanted more social networks. And Google didn’t have a compelling story about how they were better. Instead it was just a bunch of user hostile changes—forced linking of accounts, elimination of stuff like Reader—and Google seemed to be forcing itself into parts of your digital life where it wasn’t welcome. I’m glad they’re able to admit it’s a failure now even though it took several years too long and this silly excuse about a privacy review.
Google+ sunsetting is sad news, as I've actually used it fairly actively. (and I have a few dozens of people I interact regularly who I wouldn't have known if not from G+!)
It somewhat acted like a better version of Twitter for me, where I can write a lot more on the post, and actually engage a meaningful discussion with people.
I don't know, even with relaxed character counts on Twitter that it will accommodate same use cases, and I don't like to use Facebook for this purpose as I really don't want introduce a total stranger as my friend...
Exactly the same here. I made friends there (not like on most other networks where you 99% add people you already know anyway) and used it for a while, and it indeed feels like a better Twitter.
I'm fine with it shutting down, though. At least I no longer have to feel like I'm missing out on anything for not using a Google product (for various reasons, one of them being that it might be cancelled any minute).
It's going to be very interesting to see where all the tabletop gaming people land. G+ got a lot of pickup in that hobby because the early API blended tools, like Hangouts with overlays and easily segmented discussion groups, that worked well with online tabletop gaming. Roll20 integrated well with G+ (at least until Google killed the Hangouts API in April 2017).
The early adopters reached enough of a critical mass that others used it solely because of who was already there, making it an actual social network for at least that purpose.
Much like when Reader folded, G+'s critical mass is going to spread out to a half-dozen other places and refragment. And like Reader's exit, there's a vacuum right now for someone to jump in with something better and charge a nominal amount for it.
From my perspective, the one thing Google got _really_ wrong with G+ was their APIs. When G+ was launched, tools like TweetDeck were heavily used for interacting with Twitter, Facebook and the like. All of a sudden along came a service that had no APIs by which you could post to it. Something you needed to specifically go and open a separate application for.
If they'd made public read & write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You've got to either:
1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you
2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.
G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren't _that_ compelling.
Yep, people keep rewriting the history, but I remember it exactly: there was enormous enthusiasm and hype around G+. Developers, tech enthusiasts everywhere were "queuing around the block" to get on board with it and to stick it to Facebook. Then Google did two things:
- announced no API access
- real names policy debacle
Between those two things they completely destroyed all good will and within months it was essentially dead. I actually think it was a larger turning point that made developers significantly more cynical about Google overall.
I especially found it interesting how supporters portrayed it as an issue that people would get over, but in the end G+ never took off and YouTube users nearly revolted over it and they also found it did nothing to improve discourse on YouTube even when many users relented.
Agreed. At one point I looked up their APIs, planning to do something pretty simple... and it just wan't even possible.
They also blew a lot of time tinkering with minutae / fringe features while fairly basic functionality was sub-par.
Still, on balance I've found G+ both useful and fun, and I'm annoyed it's shutting down. I'm growing more + more wary of relying on any Google services to be around in N years' time.
The post says they don't have evidence of anyone using the api that leaked all that personal info - let's not ignore that: name, picture, birthdate, email was just open to the world for a friend lookup! Second, they don't clarify if this is "evidence of absence" of a leak. Do they not monitor that api call but they don't have any reason to expect a problem? Or is it that they monitor it and no one used it in the "bad way"? I'm afraid it must be the first - if they had evidence no one ever use the api, they'd be explicit about it.
People are finally becoming dis-enchanted with Facebook. Quick, kill Google+!
As opposed to trying to take advantage of the opportunity and improve it -- fixing the bork-headed management design shoved onto it prior to external launch.
Facebook has shown how it's failing its users. Google has the opportunity to make a big show and potentially market share gain by doing the opposite. But, nope.
Instead, 'our market share is corporate'.
Which is fine. But, it tells you a lot about where Google has been going.
(And, if I were corporate Worldmerica, I'd be hesitant about investing too much good will in and dependence upon +.)
As an individual Google user, unfortunately I have little hope that this unwinding will also back out other changes co-morbid with the + deployment, such as the account "unification" that allows a single "mistake" to lock you out of everything. And a single Google "mistake" in execution to haunt you across all their properties.
I'm in the process of exiting Facebook, except for a mostly placeholder presence. A lot of my friends don't have the wherewithal to set up and maintain privately implemented social presences. But, we won't be switching to +, I guess.
Maybe an old-fashioned bulletin board -- with otherwise unlinked pseudonyms -- will do. Back to the Future...
As I think about this, maybe there is a strongly implied message in this. Assuming parts of Google still emit good will. Namely, that, these days, NO commercial network can escape the pressures -- governmental as well as commercial -- to compromise their users.
We aren't making it, because we can no longer do so honestly and securely.
An interesting alternative perspective.
(And, we're even less inclined than Mark and Co., to try to ride herd on all the nut jobs out there.)
What exactly does "sunsetting consumer Google+" mean? The blog post wasn't particularly enlightening. Are they shutting down Google+ as a social network?
Probably, but the key point made in the article is that it will continue as an enterprise product, not just an internal one (though presumably Google is one of the enterprises that will continue using it.)
They are shutting down the consumer version, which is the public edition. They are going to continue to develop and market Google+ for Businesses (like Facebook for Work).
What exactly does "sunsetting consumer Google+" mean? The blog post wasn't particularly enlightening. Are they shutting down Google+ as a social network?
FTA: Action 1: We are shutting down Google+ for consumers. seems pretty obvious that's the case.
I mean, I get the term "sunsetting" - that isn't the problem. I don't know what "consumer Google+" means. I can guess that it might refer to the use of Google+ by ordinary people as a social network, but I'm far from certain of that interpretation.
I like that there are also some privacy improvements in Android permissions mentioned in this post: "We are limiting apps’ ability to receive Call Log and SMS permissions on Android devices, and are no longer making contact interaction data available via the Android Contacts API."
"it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption"
I bet G+ has more active users than your average indie developer could ever dream about. But Google is not that kind of company. It's all or nothing. World domination or shut it down and try again (or buy a company that succeeded).
I'm not sure that article is saying there were 500k users. It reads more like there 500k users had granted access to an app that had these permissions. It seems hard to imagine that a bug like this would be affected by whether a user is currently active or not.
Shutting down consumer Google+ is the least important part of this post. Hardly anyone used that. The privacy changes they are making for everything else are much more important. More granular control of app permissions is a big deal.
Overall I'm not sure how to feel because I didn't realize how bad it was. How many apps have required access to my contacts for legitimate reasons, and I wasn't aware I was providing access to our interaction data?
> Finding 4: When users grant SMS, Contacts and Phone permissions to Android apps, they do so with certain use cases in mind.
> Action 4: We are limiting apps’ ability to receive Call Log and SMS permissions on Android devices, and are no longer making contact interaction data available via the Android Contacts API.
I wonder what G+ could have done to pivot after its terrible release. They had some good ideas, and usually Google takes those good ideas of a failed product and rolls it into successful products. Remember Google Wave, where you could work on a document _at the same time_?
Something like the automatic generation of circles in Google Mail, and integrate some kind of generalized wall posts for Google Mail users.
Put a UX team on it with firing authority up to the management level. I deleted my account due to the “<rando on one gmail message> is following you” push & web notification spam which could not be disabled for the first year or so – I heard so many people complaining about that. They had similar problems with sharing where a popular story would be all you saw as it was one entry per person sharing it.
Google+ always reminds me of my favorite management quote: "The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems." [1]
A Google+ private community allows social, collaborative photo sharing photos with friends with login required. This is not supported in Google Photos! With Photos shared albums you can select people with whom to share, but those people just get an email with a secret token embedded in a URL -- aside from trusting your non-technical friends not to accidentally leak this URL, there is no way to know who is viewing the photos or remove access from specific individuals. I really hope the Photos team upgrades their shared album permission model now that the alternative in Google+ has been sunsetted.
I didn't see this sentiment expressed elsewhere in this comment section, so I'll express it : G+ was overrun by vapid, spam-crazy self-promoters and for me, it quickly got too annoying to use [say, in 2012 or so]. Every time I logged in, I had to winnow them out of the list of connection requests, which was a time-eater especially if I'd been to a large gathering or something lately. "Lessee... Dave Stevens... did I meet him at that thing last week or something?... no, just another 'rock star' to delete..."
He has left the Linux project, at least temporarily[0], so presumably he will not be blogging, or alternatively he will have more time to host his own blog.
The more infuriating part is that it doesn't even work on mobile FF. So the few times I accidentally click on a G+ link from my Google assistant feed, I don't even get the benefit of seeing a post with just a link to the real content.
even when i don't arrive there by mistake, i typically leave after less than five seconds - people would link to posts on G+ and before reading them i'd have to click through full-screen interstitials introducing me to the "new" G+ redesign. and i just didn't care, so i'd leave.
....did Google just admit to patching a security hole and not announcing it for months? Isn't this what they continuously harangue other organizations for on Google's Project Zero blog?
"As many as 438 applications might have used the API. Google maintains that it didn’t uncover evidence developers were aware of or abused the security flaw, or that profile data was misused. However, it acknowledged that it has no way of knowing for sure because it doesn’t have “audit rights” over its developers and because it keeps a limited set of activity logs." (https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/08/google-security-breach/)
Google wrote: “Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.”
"Two terms irked her and simply clashed with Project Zero's practices. "You MUST hold off disclosing the vulnerability in reasonable time, and you MUST get Samsung's consent or inform Samsung about the date before disclosing the vulnerability," said Samsung. "In some cases, Samsung may request not to disclose the vulnerability at all." Again, this clashes with Project Zero's insistence on disclosure."
It's more than that - the Wall Street Journal article says Pichai signed off on not disclosing it to the public. It feels a bit like Google only published this blog post today because they knew WSJ was about to go public:
A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.
Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was briefed on the plan not to notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision, the people said.
.... The document shows Google officials knew that disclosure could have serious ramifications. Revealing the incident would likely result “in us coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” the memo said. It “almost guarantees Sundar will testify before Congress.”
They found it internally with no evidence of compromise. If a 3rd party had disclosed it, it would be very different. It's actually a very, very simple distinction and it's hard to believe anyone is confused by it but here we are.
The use of the word "sunset" as a verb in posts like this is fucking infuriating. Yes, software types know what it means, but this is a consumer product with tens of millions of users, who have no familiarity with that term.
It's a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We're closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.
What? Sunsetting something is used outside of software. Hell, it's even used to describe temporary laws ("sunset law"). It's also used for brands and business policies.
And, sure, it might not make the top list of 1000 words you might hear on the street on any given day, but it's also very easy to search for. That doesn't make it a weasel word.
It's absolutely a weasel word, because there are plenty of common and clear ways to say this. The only reason it exists is so companies don't have to use words that connote a lack of success.
I think it exists because it's a concise way to communicate "this is ending, and will end in a predetermined amount of time, but it has not yet ended" in the same manner that sunset indicates that a day is ending but has not ended yet.
I think this reply actually captures one of the problems with the term. It's super passive.
I realize this usage is becoming an official usage, but the original meaning was something that would end by design and automatically unless it was renewed. Like a law had a sunset provision if it already had an ending named at the time it was created. So the ending is built into the original plan from the beginning, it's bound to happen unless something changes.
Like... a sunset.
It's not something passive that's happened at Google though. They're saying we are going to close a service that is open, and has been expected to stay open indefinitely. It's not a thing that is just kind of happening, it's a decision that was just made and is being newly announced.
I'm a non-native speaker and sunsetting is not clear to me. I guessed what it means because I know Google and how popular Google+ is (in relative terms, I'm sure there's still hundreds of thousands of people who will lose contacts over this), but if someone had said Cloudflare is sunsetting, I'd just not have known what it meant.
And even knowing what it means, as I do now, I wouldn't say that sunsetting is any clearer in communicating that it's "going to" end than "shutting down" or "stopping" Google+. It's not as if the proposal said "ended" or "shut down" Google+, the "are" in something like "We're shutting down Google+" signals continuation to me.
That's not true. Sunset years - to mean "a period of decline, especially the last years of a person's life" - is pretty well known. Irrespective of my background that's the first thought that pop into my head.
I wonder if we'll get the + operator back in search now. Google broke a lot of things across their ecosystem with the release of Google+. I feel that the effect on search kickstarted the trend of taking away search control from the user and isolating us in bubbles (circles).
So it's remaining as a product for enterprise customers. Does this mean every enterprise instance will have it's own instance of g+, or will they be able to interact with other enterprises? And will I be able to move my profile from domain to domain if I move companies?
We gave up the idea of pseudonymity on social networks just so Google could lose money on a product that it aggressively attempted to force the pseudonymous users of its other products to use. Actually pretty sad.
Google + was one of those ideas that probably would have done significantly better had Google not been so forceful at getting people to use it. Yes, I get that it's hard to overcome the network effect thing and that fighting Facebook/Twitter/whatever head on would have been tough, but giving people the option to sign in/link accounts probably would have done a lot more for adoption and caused less of a backlash than Google's actual methods did.
'Use this service/product because you now have to in order to access something you like' is not a good way to endear your company/service/product to users, and usually has the exact opposite effect to whatever you were intending.
If it wasn't for this I think they could of had a healthier community, and maybe if they had named it better. Google Plus is such a terrible name, I can't help but think to whoever named YouTube Red (which is now Premium, could of been Plus...) but I guess Google as a whole is fragmented just like Microsoft and their Windows team are. It's a pain to manage so many diverse teams with differing directions. I loved the idea of Google Plus, but it died when they were trying to normalize all my data into one giant blob of cash.
Until recently Google+ suffered from being a virtual black hole of information due to a lackluster search interface (oh the irony). In addition it had poor anti-spam and limited moderation controls, leading to almost daily NSFW images in my stream.
Then recently they tried to make it better by redesigning it, and apparently gave some graphic designers free reign. This lead to a significantly worse user experience, so much so that I and many others who were still clinging on stopped using it almost entirely.
That said it had some good ideas, and the signal-to-noise ratio was much better than on Facebook. I'm guessing the active communities I visited will migrate to Facebook or similar, but it won't be quite the same.
This is rather different from Google Reader. Reader was a popular service that was going strong, the discontinuation really was a hassle to a lot of people. Google+ was essentially not used at all, so this should affect very few people.
Ironically, google reader was discontinued because they wanted people to use g+ exclusively for "sharing", and reader's ability to share/surface articles to friends was seen as unnecessary competition.
What’s the evidence that Google Reader was “a popular service that was going strong”? I don’t doubt there were a bunch of people in tech and media who were and still are vocally angry, but I don’t recall data showing that Reader was anything but a niche product.
It wasn’t expanding at Twitter/Facebook rates but it was apparently growing on a continuing basis. More importantly, however, it was popular with communities with outsize influence – journalists, writers, bloggers, academics, librarians, etc. who used it to follow and share — so when they launched a really half-assed replacement (i.e. it didn’t even work on mobile) most of the people writing reviews and answering questions were starting from a position of something which was useful to them being replaced with a mess, and Google+ never recovered from that bad reputation.
Years later, I was at a museum/gallery/archive/library tech conference and the Google Cultural Institute folks were running their sales pitch. Multiple people asked them where their institution would be “when you cancel this like Google Reader”, a sentiment I’ve heard in enough other contexts that I doubt is fully appreciated by Google management even if it has been good for getting users to think about lock-in.
Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using? Where's the sadness over the death of Apple Ping, or MobileMe?
>> They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don't think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.
> Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using?
You misunderstand. He's not necessarily saying Google should maintain Google Reader or Google+ forever; he's saying that users can't trust Google to keep all but its most popular services online. If you like some new/niche Google service so much that you'll be unhappy when it's shut down, you should seriously consider not using it in the first place.
I'm not sad to see Google+ go, but the aggressive rate of metrics-driven product shutdowns by modern SaaS companies is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Users learn not get used to new services and hold of using them heavily, because they'll probably get shut down; that dampens adoption so services inevitably get shut down.
IMHO, SaaS companies need to embrace niche products, otherwise they're eventually going to kill off a lot of consumer appetite for innovation.
> Where's the sadness over the death of Apple Ping, or MobileMe?
What useful features does MobileMe have, that iCloud doesn't? I just looked up the list of features and the only thing missing seems to be publishing a personal website with iWeb.
I don't know a single person using iTunes Ping, or heh, Game Center's social features.
Or Chrome, or Android, or YouTube, or Maps, or News, or Docs, or Translate or anything else that has a large number of users. Google Reader had some big fans, but never a large number of users. They don't get rid of stuff with lots of eyeballs.
They now have five of the top ten apps used on all smartphones so would expect those to not going anywhere. So things like YouTube, maps, etc.
Plus Chrome not going anywhere as well as the Google home. But would still
expect them to iterate. So even though Android has over 80% share still would not be surprised to see them move to Fuchsia.
I wonder if Project Strobe is also behind Google's recent effort to limit the permissions of Chrome extensions. So far I'm really liking the direction they're taking with this; making permissions optional and more fine-grained.
I still don't understand why G+ never caught on. For me FB is wayyyy too busy with panes and club, and groups, and businesses, and news, and election interference, and the bird site at 140, and now at 280 was just not enough. I always found G+ to be the perfect balance between the two. It really does boggle my mind that no one likes it. The only thing I can think, is Google didn't find a way to appeal to peoples' egos enough, since that's what social media seems to be about for most people.
As much as I hate the Facebook hegemony; I can only say "Good Riddance". Me and my circle of friends tried it out on release and to this day it still a UX nightmare in how it presents/displays posts.
It's a classic case of google dipping their toes in a service and if they don't reach critical mass in 3 months just ignore it until it becomes a liability and shut it down quietly. I would love to hear if they ever pushed updates for it or just had some intern maintaining the code up until now.
To me, the worst part about Google+ has been the fact that Google services started forcing you to use it. Like I'd click on some sort of account settings tab on YouTube, and suddenly I'd be redirected to a different website and my first reaction is always "what the hell is this crap?" Worse yet, there was always an irritatingly huge delay between changes I made to my Google+ "shadow profile" and my profile on YouTube.
But it's because I've also been a long-time user of the service, signing on in July of 2011, and continuing to use it, often through gritted teeth, and desperately hoping something better would come along, and yet ... nothing really has, at least not that I've been aware.
There's a long litany of mistakes and errors (and many successes) in the service, and I might eventually sit down and write my own post mortem of what I thought went right and wrong -- I've written a few, most of which still stand, though the cooption of media, social and otherwise, for propaganda and disinformation purposes could be expanded on.
There are several groups formed to look at exodus options, presuming people want to go to any one platform (something I'd actually somewhat discourage). It may be that the age of centralised social networks is over, though self-hosting and federation also have considerable challenges. Or, maybe, we go back to other models. Hacker News is an exemplar I've referenced more than a few times. It's not a personal network the way G+, FB, Twitter, or a personal blog are, but it has a (usually) high level of discussion of an interesting array of topics. Thanks in large part to active moderation and flying slightly under the radar.
If you're on G+ and want to discuss next steps, stop by Google+ Mass Migration:
Not that this will (or should) surprise anyone at all, but I noticed (perhaps more so than normal) that many of the top headlines about this more than subtly imply that the shutdown was a result of the potential data exposure, rather than the lack of popularity.
I consider myself lucky to know enough to avoid putting personal information with Google and its properties. But Google is the main platform for many people for many things of a personal nature, and they also end up giving it a lot of information through Android. So any breach has a huge damage surface.
Google+, with all its missteps, was one of those products that even a company with Google's money, resources and people (like Luke Wroblewski) that couldn't get better at all. I liked the concept of "circles" as opposed to the concept of "lists" on Facebook that most people don't know about or use. The only mistake that Google+ did was not copying Facebook on its features. That increased the barriers to adoption and made the product almost worthless. Even something as useful as creating an event was buried in a classic G+ interface, and in the new interface it's buried under profile. Treating vanity URLs as very scarce commodities and letting people live with long unspeakable links, not implementing a groups like functionality well (called "Communities"), and many other things could've been handled if they just copied what Facebook did and took the good lessons from those.
It's sad that Google+ would be gone soon, though it could've been a viable competitor for Facebook as far as centralized, ad supported platforms are concerned. But it's good that an abandoned product gets a quicker death, and that's exactly what Google+ was — an abandoned zombie product trying to figure out whether it was alive or dead.
I'd take this as one less commercial social network to worry about, and await the adoption of a decentralized social network.
> Instead of seeing all requested permissions in a single screen, apps will have to show you each requested permission, one at a time, within its own dialog box....you will be able to choose to share one but not the other.
I really felt the need for Android like permission model for my Google account, where you can reject a permission request and still use the app.
Much appreciated change, that allows more refined control over account privacy.
I didn't use the social aspect much, but the ability to +1 a URL was awesome. With the browser plugin installed, I could immediately tell what kind of traction a site was getting and, in the case of technical information, if the contents were considered valid and useful by a large number of developers. They silently killed this feature about a year ago, and it showed [1] in the reviews for the Chrome plugin. I went a little crazy when the feature went away because I didn't realize how much I had relied on it. Not having it has made the web less useful for me.
The only surprise is that it takes them such long time to shut it down. It is clearly failed project; it is an internet ghost town; very very few care about it. It almost felt like the only reason it last to date is to protect some high profile executives' self-esteem, while being the living relics of Google's strategic mistake tapping into the social land.
I want to applaud Google's general philosophy of "try stuff, shut it down if it doesn't work" but I do wonder if this isn't bad for the brand. They've been pretty "ruthless" when it comes to shutting down things that some people still use (or at least that's the image).
I think in the back of their minds, possibly subconsciously, people like me probably make decisions against other technology they provide even if it is in a completely different category and pretty much never going to shut down.
For example, I'm not sure I haven't decided against their cloud services because my subconscious remembered the reader being shut down and thought "they better not shut down some part of the infrastructure I rely on".
I liked Google+, but this is one of the reasons why I stopped using it. I think it was around the time they cancelled Google Reader. By randomly cancelling products that are still used by lots of people, they're dooming other products before they even launched.
I see a lot of rationalization here about why Google+ didn't take off, related to feature set, Facebook, etc.
Let me throw wood on fire ... the reason Google+ is a failure has nothing to do with any of its features:
1. they killed Google Reader for it, which was more successful than Google+ ever hoped to be, forever tarnishing Google's reputation
2. they had the Real Name Policy ... by the time they reversed and apologized for it, the damage was already done
3. they shoved Google+ down on everybody's throats, like YouTube users, exposing their real identities in the process
There are no other reasons that matter. Google+ could have been at least at Twitter's scale. Twitter still understands their audience, but Google never did.
If only Google had integrated Wave into YouTube, they would have ruled the world.
In YT they already had a massive user-based; (for a time, not sure if it's still true) the second most searched search engine in the world.
In Wave they had threaded conversations. That is a communications UX that was closer (than Slack et al) to natural / traditional human conversations.
Toss in some of the better G+ features (e.g., Circles) and they likely could have been a contender. The problem (I suspect) was they saw FB as "competition" instead of stepping over and beyond FB, as FB had done to MySpace and Friendster.
Further proof that Google isn't a product company, but an algorithm company (per Thiel, trying to hide from regulators)?
I don't know that I am going to trust google's consumer product offerings anymore. Inbox became central to my life, now this. I am now going to operate under the presupposition that a google product is not a reliable product.
I posted this on the other discussion related to this, but would love to get feedback here.
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I can understand this position, but I'd be curious what your thoughts are on how to best (I realize there is no perfect) keep your data private from snooping employees, hackers, or law enforcement.
I've thought about this over and over, and it's hard to come to a solid conclusion about keeping personal data safe (in this context I mean emails and files you may store in the cloud, not browsing history, social media posts, etc.). There are so many options with downfalls for each, and I'm not a security expert. So every time I get excited about trying a new service geared towards privacy, or setting up my own instances, inevitably somebody points out the terrible pitfall in it and I get discouraged.
1. Don't use the internet or internet services, period. <- Not tenable for most of us.
2. Use services who market themselves as geared towards privacy. <- Can't actually trust those services, even with E2E encryption because they could be running different code from what you think they're running.
3. Use regular cloud options, but stack stuff on top - VeraCrypt volumes or Cryptomator with Google drive, GPG for email, etc. <- Really difficult to setup and have a nice reliable way of accessing data on mobile/desktop/etc. No security audits on a lot of the open source software.
4. Host your own services - i.e. a Nextcloud 14 instance on EC2 with an S3 backend, then use client-side E2E <- Difficult to make sure you set the service up in a safe way, and not even a fraction of as much resources in auditing code as, say, a giant corporation.
5. Spread what you do out over multiple services - FastMail for email, DropBox for cloud storage, Standard Notes for notes, etc. <- A real pain.
I know there will never be a consensus on this, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the best way to keep my personal files and notes personal to me. Let's assume I'm not a target of any spy agencies or whatnot, but I want to make it very, very difficult for anyone to read my person notes and files but me.
Encryption, to be done right, always has to ultimately be the end user's responsibility. So there is one solid conclusion but it requires work and discipline and is therefore unpopular.
Encrypt before you send/upload, decrypt after you receive/download. If you transmit or receive unencrypted data you are placing trust in someone else and there is no way to really avoid that unless you created and control the chain end-to-end.
So you can use Google Drive, etc., just encrypt your data before uploading if it needs to be secured. A 7-zip file protected with AES256 is decently convenient (from a PC) and secure.
Makes you wonder - if not the first comer advantage would have google made a name for itself?
Every product google puts out is an arguable failure and their search engine and email client aren't particularily amazing either - just they were there first.
Maybe they should start getting back to the roots - try to secure that first comer advantage by launching experimental products. Oh wait google glass, inbox...
For a company that is praised for biggest software talent they sure fail to deliver anything of value to the medium time and time again.
They kinda were first decent ones and the competition wasn't really there. Gmail offered hundreds of megabytes of space when other providers offered 5.
IMHO Google+ failed for one reason. At least it's the reason it failed for me. There was no way to post something on someone else's feed. When I used Facebook, this may have been the #1 thing that I used it for (and events).
If I saw something I thought a friend would enjoy or made me think of them, I'd post it on their wall. This is drastically different than sending a message or e-mailing in that my friend's friends will also see it.
In Google+ (at least when I tried it), there was no way to perform this action. So I never used it again.
I'm surprised that google keeps blogger.com for this long. it doesn't appear to be a commercial success and its features fall behind newer platforms like medium.
Why can't they just let the software run on a spare set of servers with minimal maintenance for those who still want to use it or publish it as open source?
Serious question: you build your own social network based on what people really want it too work like, and won’t track them or allow advertising, instead you invite just a handful of “promoters” every year to show same ad to everyone (to pay your bills) and build in tools that will accept facebook export format - how do you crank-start such network to beat an obvious chicken-and-egg problem?
Serious answer: I would allow connections to current social networks. Maybe even bill it as an aggregator of sorts, so you can pull in (just for display purposes) as much data from linked social networks as possible. Give people a real reason to use your app without making them sacrifice the connections they've already made.
The problem with Google+ was the same problem as Facebook and Twitter have, except they were late to the party and didn't get a lot of free press and novelty-related attraction to help them gain traction.
They built a platform designed with no sharper focus than "for everyone", because that's what will supposedly generate the DAUs. But you have to try to bolt community on top of it and that's what generates the actual stickiness.
There are a galaxy of far stronger communities out there-- ones that were there long before Google+ and will be there long after. It's because they're clearly focused, themed communities-- newsgroups and forums.
If you provide some thread to bind the membership-- whether it's "People who Maintain Vintage Sansui Stereo Equipment", "People Who Really Liked The Animated Series 'Gargoyles'" or "Class of 1977 at Francisco Franco High School", it means people will generate content compelling to future users, and come onboard with attainable expectations.
These communities solved a lot of the problems that stymie many hypothetical Facebook killers:
* Selling new users. Just post the archives-- you can sell what you have, rather than promising "if we get aggressive enough and steer people into inviting enough loose acquaintances, somehow magic will happen and real community appears."
* Since they're more-or-less decentralized, you get very nice data partition models. On the outgoing side, you know that your messages are clearly restricted to one circle of potential viewers by default. On the incoming side, you're either viewing one community at a time, or aggregating yourself via RSS or the like under rules you know and understand. You're not going to be worried about a NSFW moment if you pop open "N-Scale Model Railway Enthusiasts Forum".
* The psychographic mix. You started with a clear message of value for participation, a give and take. In contrast, the classic social media feed appeals, by default, to a very specific type of self-promoter/narcissist type who just wants to bellow into the void "Look at me eating a burrito by the Eiffel Tower" and wait for validation. Think of all the people who never got on FB/Twitter/etc. because they saw no value in this type of interaction, or joined but have just a vacant profile after realizing it wasn't offering anything for them.
What the "community first" model doesn't do is scale to infinity. There are only so many people with any given interest. I think this is why Reddit is a success-- it's got a feel like a constellation of independent forums, that happen to use the same tech backend and SSO.
My family is using Google+ to coordinate and share internal news (because do you really want to friend your parents on Facebook?).
Given that they are going to close this down for us as consumers, what is our best alternative? I would rather not have to have the headache of running and maintaining software myself, but what options do you recommend?
Or do we just have to bite the bullet and set up the Shaftoe e-mail list?
Google+ was not at all a bad product. It had some functionality that other networks didn't have at the time. I used to browse through Google+ because of Linus Torvalds and the Linux community.
I think that if Google had decoupled it from the Google platform and developed G+ as an independent entity within the umbrella, things would have been different.
I wonder what this will affect SEO practices. I remember one of the things google had made as a small factor for search, it's the integration of Google Plus in your website. Like using the plus button.
Like what happens if I remove all google plus code related from my sites right now? My guess it's that in the short term will have some kind of negative impact, but I don't know.
I survived the 4 years they blasted Google+ signups at me without signing up once with my account. Luckily that dissipated after a while and things got less annoying every time I signed in. I imagine most people clicked "I agree" and created their public page. But it was really awful for the rest of us that didn't want that.
Let me guess - everyone's old posts will disappear?
I can imagine Google doing it that way. "The majority never used our platform, so we'll abuse the few that did (and really liked it) by only giving them X amount of time to notice and save their data."
If Google+ becomes archived my jaw will hit the floor - and I'll be very appreciative.
No other platform had as much clickspam / clickfraud stuff as G+. Every time I looked at my feed there were 10+ pictures of fake hot girl videos that clicked off to random sites.
That G+ itself was such a player in click fraud, I'm surprised there wasn't more hay made about this before.
Another one bites the dust... I can easily imagine that in 100 years Alphabet would have been rebranded as Google, and only one single service will be generating ~100% of revenues.
There will also be a software graveyard with the 1,000+ dead projects that google launched and then shut down years later.
Perhaps one of the reasons that it was difficult to engage with Google+ is because of this outcome: that Google/tech corporations are known to kill products that are not completely successful, even if there are engaged users who will be affected by this shutdown.
oh no. My family have used G+ to share stuff. I don't want to have my mother-in-law on facebook, what else can we use?
I really like the idea of circles, some stuff I would share only with my close family, other stuff would be shared with wider family and friends, etc.
Several of the communities I belong to are moving to MeWe as a replacement. Several of us had never heard of it before, but the privacy controls and business model surprised the hell out of me. I'm impressed so far.
This does make me sad as I am one of the few that still uses G+ fairly regularly. There are still a lot of quality feeds and I've enjoyed seeing that content without all the crap Facebook wraps its content in.
Phew, hopefully all the developers working on Google+ enjoy their new project working on a currently unnamed chat program. We haven't had a new one of those in checks calendar 172 days.
They killed it when they decided it would be a good idea to inflate user numbers with YouTube and Gmail users. It's better to have less but active users than a ghost town.
So glad my Google+ was deleted long ago and subsequently deleted all my Google products. Not sure why people give these crappy ad companies (Google, FB, etc) all their data.
How (if at all) does this impact "Login with your Gmail" and those APIs? They started off separate but were subsequently combined into one common package.
> Finding 2: People want fine-grained controls over the data they share with apps.
While I personally 100% agree, I would have guessed that the vast majority of Google users (i.e., non-HN crowd) wouldn't care about fine-grained controls. I wonder if they found that some people passionately care and most didn't care one way or another. In other words, perhaps the people that click/tap through permissions prompts are going to continue clicking through, but the change could win back some privacy conscious consumers.
No wonder! Google with their notorious interviews false to test one fundamental software engineer trait - common sense! Most of their products are short-sighted and much neglected. I won't ever invest a second looking into another Google offering! Keep off! They have zero respect for your time invested in their toy products!
People are burying the lede. They massively covered up a data breach. The same company that forces other companies to release info about their breaches or else releases the vulnerabilities themselves. Google deserves the same backlash as fb but maybe too many google employees here?
does anyone have a clue how much money they spent building g+ and how many developers have to find new jobs (presumably within google) because of this?
Dear god google is going to make me accept each permission individually? That sounds awful as a user. I think it's a dark UX pattern to get developers to ask for less shit.
It sounds to me like it'll be more like what they did on Android. The dark pattern is not giving the option to deny a permission: "Accept everything, or you can't use it". This is the opposite of a dark pattern.
The blog post explains that, and gives their reasoning:
> Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.
So basically, they decided that because:
1. The data exposed wasn't very sensitive (name, email address, occupation, gender, age, etc)
2. They couldn't identify any specific users whose data was leaked
3. They couldn't find any evidence that the bug was actually exploited
4. There were no actions you could take to remedy the problem (no software to update, no passwords to change, no CC numbers to revoke)
that they weren't going to notify users about the bug.
Still, I would have appreciated at least a blog post or something so if I started suddenly getting more spam emails or something I could at least identify the source.
I'm starting to think "security flaw", "bug", and "data breach" has become a cover for giving data to people you are not supposed to. Facebook had a "data breach" on September 28th that compromised 50 Million people.
Interesting how this is all happening right before midterms. Could these companies be trying to impact the elections and they need plausible deniability? Announcing an exploit seems like an easy way to cover ones ass.
I am so done with Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
I deleted my Facebook and Instagram three weeks ago and haven't looked back. I removed Chrome and Chromium from all my computers. No, I don't want to sync using your servers. If you let me host the sync servers myself like Mozilla does I'd consider it.
If my friends want to talk to me they can make an account on my privately hosted Matrix.org chat server and use the open-source Riot.im client.
It works flawlessly and I don't have to worry about being spied on.
Next is Gmail. I find the new UI atrocious. I'm keeping my eye on Maps alternatives as well.
The faster I can get rid of all this crap the better off I will be.
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but you don't have to state "IMHO" or any variation of that in your posts. You are the one posting it; we know it's your opinion. It just adds grammatical clutter and noise to an otherwise well thought-out post.
In many cultures, voicing equivocation, doubt, or similar provisos is a social norm when expressing your opinion. It certainly is in British English, for example. Don’t assume everyone on HN has US social norms.
Poorly managed? They have now grown over 20% the last ten quarters and now over 26% the last two. Since the beginning never declined for a quarter YoY. Even though the great recession.
Yes but not following how that relates to "poorly managed"?
I mean they are in all of history the fastest to a $100B market cap and since started in 1998 it was right at the .com bust. Then the fastest to $200B.
They have this immense cash-generating engine that is AdWords and that means management can make alot of mistakes without it even mattering. If that revenue went away, what would they do?
Conversely, if Bing was shut down at the same time, Microsoft would shrug and keep on rolling.
How many FTEs do they have running G+? There are a bunch of OSS people that use it because Facebook sucks and Twitter is toxic.
The good will from the OSS community in maintaining G+ can be easily paid for in the 250% growth you referenced. And please, save me from the 'we need to double down and focus on products that matter' - no, you need to maintain some credibility for your product ownership.
That's why I don't spend a single dollar with GCE.
The damage control we're seeing is almost as blatantly immoral as a quasi-government monopoly appointing itself as the internet police and then neglecting to disclose its own breeches to the public.
The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.