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What did Google+ get right?

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Re: What did Google+ get right?

#81

Post by notatoad »

jyrkesh wrote: post #74
notatoad wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town. I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news…

The obvious solution to me is an intelligent algorithm that decides which of the content in your feed you'll be most interested in and surfaces that for you. And this is exactly what facebook is trying to do. It's obviously a difficult problem though, and they make the wrong call a lot of the time.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#82

Post by johnchristopher »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #70

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 usef…

Pretty sure some googlers can chime in or someone will dig a post from that time but I seem to recall the inability for Google to crawl facebook private profiles, where juicy profiling bits live, was one of the incentives for google to get into the game. And the fact that someone at Google freaked out over the sn revolution but don't quote me on that.

I am pretty sure I read the demise of google reader was because it's hard to make money off of RSS/Atom and harder to bolt adtech on top of it.

Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed edit: they failed with g+ I mean

I am more amazed at how microsoft had the messenger brand and how it's now facebook's. It's mind boggling. And ms had a blogging strategy at some point.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#83

Post by mikelward »

I thought it was a great idea as a social network graph, so you could share things on various Google properties (e.g. ACLs for photos). It also had a lot of potential as a contact sync method.

Too bad Google kept promoting it like it was just another Facebook news feed.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#84

Post by rbinv »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #70

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 usef…

> 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.

So, Blogger? Feels kind of abandoned as a product, though.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#85

Post by smacktoward »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #70

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 usef…

> 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

Back in the heyday of blogging, there were people working on building exactly this. See for instance FOAF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

Of course, then along came the walled gardens and that was the end of that. (Sigh.)

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#86

Post by vannevar »

jyrkesh wrote: post #74
notatoad wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town. I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news…

I agree, I think Circles was great. Between family and actual friends, most people have probably less than 100 contacts to manage. The rest could be lumped into Followers. Even for those, over time, machine learning models could suggest circles to put them in, or even assign them automatically with a manual override if you didn't like the placement. But the basic idea of Circles is sound, and the biggest thing wrong with Facebook (from a user perspective, anyway), is that it doesn't provide something comparable.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#87

Post by naravara »

notatoad wrote: post #81
jyrkesh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town. I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news…

The obvious solution to me is an intelligent algorithm that decides which of the content in your feed you'll be most interested in and surfaces that for you. And this is exactly what facebook is trying to do. It's obviously a difficult problem though, and they make the wrong call a lot of the time.

They make the wrong call because they aren't focused on surfacing content you're interested in, they're focused on surfacing content that gets a rise out of you.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#88

Post by ghaff »

rbinv wrote: post #84
AndrewStephens wrote: post #70

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 usef…

> 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. So, Blogger? Feels kind of abandoned as a product, though.

Sort of abandoned but still works well enough.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#89

Post by naravara »

CodeCube wrote: post #40
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.

I 100% agree, however I really didn't like manually curating those circles ... I share a relatively diverse set of things/interests, so would have loved to leave it up to the other party which facet of my "feed" they could have subscribed to. This isn't my use case, but a perfect example is people with kids. They're gonna share pictures and stuff of their kids, but as I'm sure you've seen, tons of people make comment…

The formality around making a discrete group of "Circles" was the problem. If they just let you have multiple feeds and you can add and remove people from those feeds it would have been fine. In those circumstances, the issue isn't you sitting there categorizing how close you are with each of your friends. You're just deciding who you want to share things with, it's not unlike a group chat you might have with a bunch of friends.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#90

Post by zeroxfe »

johnchristopher wrote: post #82
AndrewStephens wrote: post #70

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 usef…

Pretty sure some googlers can chime in or someone will dig a post from that time but I seem to recall the inability for Google to crawl facebook private profiles, where juicy profiling bits live, was one of the incentives for google to get into the game. And the fact that someone at Google freaked out over the sn revolution but don't quote me on that. I am pretty sure I read the demise of google reader was because it…

Yep, I recall that the FB like buttons proliferating the web was perceived as a huge threat (and drove the +1 buttons.)

> Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed.

Wave failed, but was a fantastic experiment, and the learnings went into Google Docs/Sheets for collaborative editing.

Blogger and Orkut didn't fail. They were hugely successful -- Blogger worldwide, and Orkut primarily in Brazil (and India, I think.) Both had great rides, and withered away as everything does.

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