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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#471

Post by solumos »

evgen wrote: post #45
_uhtu wrote: post #6

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…

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 opportunitie…

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.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#472

Post by cryptonector »

evgen wrote: post #45
_uhtu wrote: post #6

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…

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 opportunitie…

It would also reduce the amount of time users spend on FB, which would be the biggest hit on advertising opportunities, really.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#473

Post by mindgam3 »

class4behavior wrote: post #466
mindgam3 wrote: post #373

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…

>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 gai…

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.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#474

Post by mcv »

magicalhippo wrote: post #451
russdpale wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Mastodon. You can create your own instances.

The 500 char limit rules it out as a Google+ replacement, at least for the communities I'm interested in.

I've heard Mastodon is more like Twitter than Google+. Doesn't seem like my thing.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#475

Post by derefr »

smelendez wrote: post #402
dekhn wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an entire presentation made by a product manager at Google on circles: https://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-netwo... 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…

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.)

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#476

Post by mcv »

stevenwoo wrote: post #392
mcv wrote: post #332

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 ha…

Meet in real life to RPG or online somehow? How about a private subreddit?

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.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#477

Post by rapind »

Yhippa wrote: post #364
adrianmonk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like grocery stores putting milk and bread way in the back so you have to walk by all those high margin items.

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.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#478

Post by jpindar »

qznc wrote: post #281
tomjen3 wrote: post #173

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 l…

You can pick any of the open source clones and probably find managed hosting for that. Your family Twitter? https://masto.host/ Your family Facebook? https://www.oxwall.com

Do you recommend any of those clones in particular? I might have a good use for that.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#479

Post by gonehome »

evgen wrote: post #45
_uhtu wrote: post #6

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…

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 opportunitie…

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.
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