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What did Google+ get right?
121–130 of 152 posts
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#122Since they killed Google Reader because of G+, my question is now that G+ is officially dead, can they bring back Google Reader?
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, namel…
Yes, and indeed they tried this (especially on Plus, around photography).
The problem was that the product was working as designed - it was the importing of external feed that was both the key feature and the problem.
It might have worked if two-way-comment feeds were a thing. But there is no reason why Twitter would want to implement that.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mind CWs as much since they finally added a global "show all" setting you can set in your profile. There's definitely some nice uses beyond "trigger warnings", like keeping a long post from dominating your feed view, or as a spoiler tag for discussing movies.
Semi-related, my big hack in my instance's custom CSS was to substantially enlarge the Show More/Show Less buttons to make it a much easier target to tap/click, which makes it much easier to expand or recollapse a post.
This sounds handy. Out of curiosity, does Mastodon have any form of extension/plugin system yet, to allow you to manage these through upgrades and/or distribute them easily, or are you modifying the stylesheets directly?
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#125Circles 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…
In my opinion, circles got it wrong because it got the arrow of direction wrong.
Look at Instagram. Many people have multiple accounts, which is a feature built into Instagram itself. It's easy to switch accounts. An individual might have one account (possibly private) for their personal feed meant for friends and family, another account for their instafluencer persona who travels the word taking selfies, and perhaps they have another one for their instafluencer merch shop or whatever.
For everyone using IG, these appear as distinct profiles. The consumer chooses which one to follow. Google Plus gave you one profile, and then made it so that you, the producer of content, chose which followers to target.
Obviously, the technical difference is very slim; for the "producer" there's less difference. And the circle feature isn't without merit. But Google didn't realize that just routing stuff to different places isn't what people want.
Putting a filter (which is what the circles feature could be seen as) on your own stuff is actually the last thing most people want. That's as exciting as doing laundry.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#126Since they killed Google Reader because of G+, my question is now that G+ is officially dead, can they bring back Google Reader?
I'm sure they won't bring something back based on one of many the rumors of why they closed it.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#127I 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 ... 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. They did. It was called OpenSocial, which originally released in late 2007, and was implemented by MySpace and others to compete against the Facebook platform (also released in 2007). I remember when I first looked at its co…
OpenSocial was a standard for "widget" which could be hosted on a site. I don't think it was ever used on Plus, but it was available on iGoogle.
That was more for games than for the type of links the OP was talking about though.
OTOH Google did a lot of work around things like PubSubHubbub to get cross site links working.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#128Earlier 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.
Buzz had some horrible privacy problems and was too smart for its own good if I remember correctly.
The Buzz privacy problem were almost exclusively at launch, the way they seeded the network.
Not sure what "too smart for its own good" means exactly. It was a pretty vanilla feed, with no fancy features.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#129The 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 transpa…
Google plus had a huge data breach that prompted its early closure. People just like to concentrate on every single minor issue fb has.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#130I liked Google buzz more. It required very less user interaction. Since both services were unwanted, I'd rather have something that requires less attention of mine.