Honest question, how much would it really cost to just keep it going? Vs killing the service, even if not investing in growing it? It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.
Why Google+ Failed
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Re: Why Google+ Failed
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not fair. Medium's content is community contributed. There's a lot of value in there. Let's not throw the baby with the water.
if the author cares so little about their readers that they choose to distribute their content on medium, there's a good chance that content isn't worth reading.
An author may care so much about readership that they value reaching 50 million people, over a few dozens, if the price to pay is some inconvenience with the medium (see what I did there?)
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#43Worst part is they refused to keep and improve the parts that actually worked well. I wrote about this a while ago and submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515513
> Google plus had circles
The problem was it relied on people self-categorizing their own content.
So just some person in the reddit web design circle thinks sharing their dogs or kids photos is fine and at that point G+ was worthless to me. IT's just subreddits without the moderation.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#44The non-organic growth was more than 'just creating me an account' - there seemed to be a fair amount of "stick" to help me move.
My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit 'if you want this feature use Google+'
When I turned up at Google+ for the first time I was in a foul mood and was just there for my missing features - which were now missing/worse.
The idea of being able to create 'groups' was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can't remember the exact details as it's gone - but my impression was being forced to use a poxy UI widget, for something better suited to a spreadsheet. My learning though, was that maybe I didn't 'trust' the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don't consider each post and choose the audience.
Point above was exacerbated by the god-awful way information was displayed back to you. Seemed to vary between ghost-town bleakness and semi-random information-vomit, sprayed over your screen.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#45I am sorry for the off topic comment but I can't even read this article because medium now shows me a "Sign up for an extra read" popup without any way of closing it. Medium is going so down the tubes, it's become impossible for me to read anything there. Does anyone have a way to bypass the sign up pop up?
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#46Honest question, how much would it really cost to just keep it going? Vs killing the service, even if not investing in growing it? It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.
It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.
I think that sort of thinking is partly why it failed. Google+ was a great idea for Google but presented very little benefit to the user over what they'd get on any other social platform. Unless there's compelling reason why then users aren't going to invest time and effort in using a product, and they're going to be annoyed if they're forced to.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#47Honest question, how much would it really cost to just keep it going? Vs killing the service, even if not investing in growing it? It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.
You can't fire and forget a service at Google, promo-driven churn in the tech stack will break it sooner or later. So you have to staff every service for indefinite maintenance, or kill it in an orderly way. This is also what happened to Reader.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#48Turns out "engineered social interactions" is indeed an oxymoron. Also, Google's work structure where most product leads don't have dedicated tech teams but instead have to win over tech groups to work on their projects result in too much technocracy and too little empathy in projects like this. Can't say I feels sorry for them though. Google masqueraded itself as an idealistic company and a champion of the internet…
Google is 'famously bottom up' as you mention. Problem I see here is that they tried to combine bottom-up, with the top-down edict of "We want to kill Facebook"
From Google Search onwards, I find/try the product, I like it, it evolves and improves (I presume after some A/B testing somewhere). e.g. gMail is 'web based email client', but was first I know of to let you tag, import from other accounts - and now has the tabs, unsubscribe buttons etc. When some changes (such as the tabs) first arrive, I feel a bit uncomfortable, but you get used to them.. then appreciate them.. and I build up a buffer of trust for the next change that might come.
G+ didn't spring into existence because of customer demand. It appeared because google decided google needed it. We didn't create accounts because they looked useful, they were created to try to get google's network running quickly. We had features pulled on other google products, to push us towards using the damn thing. e.g. I suspect removing latitude from maps wasn't a decision from the maps team to improve their product.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#49I have to disagree with the author. Google+ did not fail. Had it been a startup rather than a Google project, it would have been considered an amazing success. The problem was that the goal of being a Facebook killer was just too ambitious. Had it instead been a social feature amongst Google products it might have served valuable purpose for both Google and its users. Sadly, in a large corporation, every project has to meet some IRR hurdle, even if not explicitly. And at Google that hurdle was artificially high and Google+ could not meet it. This is why Alphabet makes so much sense, as it allows risk levels to be segregated.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#50The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments.
The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release.
They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people.
If it didn't work there (IE. See sustained growth till it had most of the market share), they should have changed the product, tested in a new town, etc.
As OP points out, without data, you can't make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can't be retroactively changed. Even Facebook did staged school-by-school rollouts to refine their model before going fully public. Doing anything else is doomed to fail.