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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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.
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