What did Google+ get right? • Hacker News Board

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#61

Post by Twirrim » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #44

Each of the individual features of Google+ sounded great on paper. I never used it so I can't comment on the implementation. What killed it for me is that it came from Google. They'd already showed they're terrible at customer service, and terrible at service longevity/continuity, and it just seems creepy for the same company to want to do my web browser, my phone, my search engine, my social media, my web hosting, m…

Back when Google+ launched, we weren't yet at the "Google is evil" stage. Social Media was just taking off.

What really killed it was no public API. It launched in the era of Tweetdeck and the like being major tools for consolidating social media interaction. There was no API. So to send a message to Google+, one had to specifically go across to the only application capable of talking to it, theirs. When you're already in/using Tweetdeck to post messages to Twitter, Facebook etc, why would you want to go to a whole new client to post a message?

While it seems like mostly people have moved away from using such catch-all clients for interacting (in no small part because Twitter have made it hard by their various API antics), this missed the zeitgeist at the time, and never got that critical mass going to sustain it.

If you're moving late in the market, you've really got to go where people are and bring them to you, or you've got to fundamentally solve problems to a mind blowing degree that other platforms have and can't. It did neither, even though the features like circle were really good.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#62

Post by electriclove » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

Reverse chronological list of all posts that I am interested in with no 'helpful' filtering/automated curation/suggested content.

Oh wait, I don't think Google+ had that..

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#63

Post by saurik » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

rst wrote: post #56

erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

Unfortunately, when last I looked, there was no way to add yourself to a particular circle of some other user -- so if you wanted, say, Jennifer 8 Lee's articles, but didn't want your feed cluttered up with her pictures of dishes from restaurants, you had to ask her to do something individually. For people with diverse interests and large follower counts, this really doesn't scale.

Yeah: this aspect--where the circles were essentially backwards--made the feature essentially useless. I post stuff about Android, and I post stuff about iOS, and I post stuff about abstract programming languages. Great! So I make three circles, and then... wait, users don't add themselves to my circles, they just follow my entire account and then I have to add people to the right circles somehow? ?!?

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#64

Post by dgzl » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

I too was excited about the idea of circles for managing viability. It seemed really simple and intuitive for a problem most social media platforms botch.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#65

Post by ghaff » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #58

LanceH wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I have family, military friends and recruiters and I don't want those conversations crossing over. With facebook, I have no idea what will leak across various groups of friends.

Actually to be honest, Circles wouldn't always preventing them from learning that they were both connected to you. After messing up badly in the nymwars, forcibly joining together YouTube accounts with Gmail accounts they actually made a heavyweight but working solution: It was given the name Pages which was more or less meaningless IMO (in this context). What it felt like at the time however was a powerful solution…

If something is public (and often even if it isn't), it's public. I never viewed Circles so much about hiding information from other Circles. Rather, it was about acknowledging that my friends from school and other non-professional, well, circles mostly aren't interested in reading about my latest tech article. And at least some people who follow me professionally probably aren't interested in whether I think some movie is good or not.

I really tried to be on team Google+ for a while but it was too little too late.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#66

Post by degenerate » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #35

bilalq wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm pretty sure the parent poster was referring to Google+, not the site you wrote on.

Thanks, good to know, but it still doesn't make sense to me :-)

"Google+ felt slow and bloated performance-wise, despite the design being simple" is what he means.

And yes I agree. Due to the sliding/fading animations and other nonsense, it felt slow and sluggish. By today's standards it would probably feel fast. But for the time, it was the slowest thing Google had created.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#67

Post by ok_coo » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

LanceH wrote: post #37

erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

This. I have family, military friends and recruiters and I don't want those conversations crossing over. With facebook, I have no idea what will leak across various groups of friends.

For me, this was the biggest fail of Facebook and the main reason why I stopped using it about a year ago. Conversations are meant to be had with a certain group of people, not a random number of unknown people in your list. We need more control and that's why I think G+ circles was a really good idea.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#68

Post by notatoad » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

I think Circles was a great example of what Google+ got wrong. If you are an alien species observing human interaction, you'll notice that it really is how people interact, they have different circles of friends or contacts that they might want to share things with, and a "circles" feature is a great way to organize your social network.

What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. Our social circles are not hard-edged and fixed, they're fuzzy and context-dependent.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#69

Post by eitland » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

rst wrote: post #56

erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

Unfortunately, when last I looked, there was no way to add yourself to a particular circle of some other user -- so if you wanted, say, Jennifer 8 Lee's articles, but didn't want your feed cluttered up with her pictures of dishes from restaurants, you had to ask her to do something individually. For people with diverse interests and large follower counts, this really doesn't scale.

Agree. They later (?) introduced collections which solved this (and I've written about it in my post) but at that time I guess tve famage was done.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#70

Post by AndrewStephens » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

I was an early proponent of G+ when it first opened. I loved the idea of Circles and their implementation of Groups was really good. I didn't love the UI, which I found bland, but the functionality was well thought out. For a while I used it as my primary social media site but Facebook was entrenched even back then and nobody I knew used G+.

I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing useful features for the web at large - walled sites like Facebook should be considered the enemy, not something to emulate. If I was Google I would be providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate.

Instead they killed Google Reader and made G+ and youtube just as much as a walled garden as Facebook.