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What did Google+ get right?

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Re: What did Google+ get right?

#111

Post by 0815test »

nl wrote: post #105
0815test wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was being used just as a republishing tool So, like Google Plus. Except that an "open" publishing tool is at least more useful than an entirely proprietary one! Let's face it, Google dropped the ball here.

No. Google Plus never had an API for incoming content. Buzz allowed one-click connection to Twitter. Great idea, but people would use it to publish straight from Twitter, and wouldn't engage on the Buzz platform. This was a terrible experience - you'd miss the conversational aspect of Twitter, and be ignored if you tried to have conversations on Buzz. Google dropped the ball here. Maybe, but it isn't clear to me what…

> you'd miss the conversational aspect of Twitter, and be ignored if you tried to have conversations on Buzz.

This comes with the territory of having a fledging social network - it's not "terrible" if it's good enough for users. You grow from there by encouraging some niche communities to congregate using your system, that's how true "engagement" can start. Even Facebook itself grew from a very small community, namely students at a particular college, then college students more generally.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#113

Post by egypturnash »

notatoad wrote: post #68
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 al…

Shit, back before G+ called this “circles”, we had “friends groups” on Livejournal, and I sure do remember my friends making a good number of posts that they notes were locked to one group or another. And these were not programmers for the most part, they were artists and writers and other non-technical types.

You’d decide to start following someone and you’d get a screen with checkboxes for all your friends groups, so you could add them to whichever ones you felt appropriate. It was super easy. Or do it later if your feelings on who you wanted to share particular things with changed.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#114

Post by rhizome »

notatoad wrote: post #68
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 al…

Think of it less as categorizing your friends as tagging them.

Facebook is the zenith of "explicitly categorizing friends" into friend groups, and as you surmise it's a pretty bad way to go. That, and their group-visibility settings on posts is clunky enough to make me think it's designed so that people stop trying and just post everything to everybody.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#115

Post by ninkendo »

gipp wrote: post #25
40dslf wrote: post #4

The website felt slow and bloated performance-wise, despite the design being simple. YouTube feels like that now too.

What feels slow in YT for you? I've never noticed myself being bothered by it.

I use desktop Safari.

When I watch a video from the main youtube page, then hit the back button, the video keeps playing for several seconds while a javascript progress bar at the top of the screen loads to take me to the main page.

I hate it so. much. Usually I'm hitting the back button precisely because the video became annoying to me, or something else is happening where I don't want to hear it any more, and having to wait several seconds while the video still plays is awful.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#118

Post by judge2020 »

The only thing I give to Google is its security. Search HN for just Google[0] and the threads are all things regarding the company's decisions/politics: shutting down products, abusing their Chrome monopoly, Google Play, etc. Meanwhile, you can search for Facebook [1] and all of the top stories are related to infosec/data breaches, actual crimes like the research VPN (although Google also did this, be it more transparently), etc.

I'm not saying Google is perfect, they did have the Google+ API leak. You can hate Google for their decisions all the same as being able to hate FB for their infosec (or, better yet, hate both of them for the ad targeting) but I'd rather have my data stored by Google instead of FB.

0: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#119

Post by mattkrause »

naravara wrote: post #89
CodeCube wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couldn’t you have the same person in multiple circles?
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