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Why Google+ Failed

onezero.medium.com

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#51

Post by tannhaeuser »

jrockway wrote: post #35

The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google, and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had 300 +1s. But I could never see i…

I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won't let them down); certainly not a generic group chat/mail site.

We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#52

Post by pishpash »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #47
sbr464 wrote: post #41

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.

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.

So now our key internet services last about as long as the average team tenure. We really need open standards so we can rely on the internet as the infrastructure, not some cloud provider. Google will die one day like other services. One has to wonder about the fate of all the artifacts people entrust to it: they will be erased just like every time before.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#53

Post by wtmt »

mekoka wrote: post #14
gzimhelshani wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any article there does not deserve to be read. You are not missing anything

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.

One easy way to communicate to said community that Medium provides a terrible experience for readers is by reducing page visits so that they start wondering about it and look for alternatives.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#55

Post by taejo »

busymom0 wrote: post #9

I 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?

I use the Firefox extension "Hide fixed elements", which is not only useful for hiding these kinds of modals but also overlarge headers and cookie warnings.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#57

Post by ninedays »

It failed because the point was to unify the privacy policy of all Google services (which means data collection would be less spreaded out across the different Google services). The Google+ front (the product users used) was more an excuse for people to sign up and agree to the terms. It had some interesting ideas but was never on the path of success after the initial goal was completed.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#58

Post by whenchamenia »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #51
jrockway wrote: post #35

The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google, and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had 300 +1s. But I could never see i…

I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won'…

There is still access, just not public access. This is google, not a nonprofit.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#59

Post by paulryanrogers »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #19
f055 wrote: post #10

Turns 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…

It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference.

Really? How does one distinguish being from doing in that sense? Scoring actions on an evilness scale and taking an average?

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#60

Post by jjoonathan »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #59
cycrutchfield wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference.

Really? How does one distinguish being from doing in that sense? Scoring actions on an evilness scale and taking an average?

Do as much evil as you want, just remember to rationalize it somehow!
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