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Why Google+ Failed

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#121

Post by at-fates-hands »

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…

> Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles.

This is an interesting point.

At the time G+ came out a lot of people were complaining about how you really didn't have control of your content on FB and G+ really tried to create an ecosystem where you had some control of your own content, which ironically what people wanted, but it never really took off.

I also remember some other social media platforms like Diaspora doing the same thing. Even now, I know of a few platforms that are taking a blockchain (decentralized) approach to social media. I think its still way too early to tell if people will use those in great numbers, but I think its the next natural step.

Maybe G+ was ahead of its time??

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#123

Post by ericabiz »

aerovistae wrote: post #71

> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot. Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.

I've been out of high school for 20 years now, but a high school friend reached out to me on Facebook and let me know he and his wife were going to be in town for the weekend. We went out with them a few times and had a blast!

He then let me know that another high school friend of mine had just moved a few miles away from me (I live thousands of miles away from where I went to high school, so this was news to me.) I went to her housewarming party--invited through Facebook--and now she and I have reconnected too.

I am in several Facebook groups for our industry (cell phone repair) and it's how I've made friends, learned about new developments in our industry, and found vendors who are awesome.

I am by no means a huge Facebook fan; the article yesterday about how they treat their outsourced content moderation teams was appalling. However, I acknowledge its utility for both business and personal uses.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#124

Post by the-rc »

Talin! I was always a bit amused that people like him, who wrote The Faery Tale Adventure, Music-X or the Amiga Installer, would work on a social network. Same with Andy Hertzfeld.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#126

Post by Redoubts »

trevize1138 wrote: post #119
imgabe wrote: post #117

I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said "screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+. By the time it open…

Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the…

> Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up.

It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#127

Post by lagg »

asah wrote: post #80
mkoryak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my 30s and have kids and no time, I don't see my friends very often because they are also in the same boat. So yeah, Facebook is a good place for me to keep up with people.

Can confirm

I like how this thread is at least partly confirming that Facebook has been taken over by parents sharing minion memes and shit, and this explains why.

I mean no judgement here. If you can get your social jollies co-existing with dumb kids (the only ones that haven't migrated from Mom & Dad's new Minion meme deposit that facebook has become) and dumber parents pushing each other anti-vax propaganda- well all the more power to you I suppose.

Really though I think people are too cowardly to just ask each other to hang out in real life. I'm that way myself and miss social cues when people are asking me to hang out constantly. I guess I can see it working for that kind of mindset. Really though, easier to delete all that social media and shit. I'd recommend it. Not that I used facebook, but did use twitter and a few others for a while.

I'm on a continual mission to try to delete my HN account. But I don't think the Hacker News admins have the technical knowledge to understand what I mean by "add a delete button". It is a high level UX concept I know.

P.S. I assume this is the part where the offended parents will be all like "WELL IT MUST BE NICE TO HAVE ALL THAT TIME TO HANG OUT" and then I laugh at their facebook-idling asses.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#128

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

imgabe wrote: post #117

I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said "screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+. By the time it open…

I think they did that because of how well it worked for GMail. And Facebook was restricted too in the beginning. Obviously, Google+ didn't benefit from following the precedents set by other successful launches.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#129

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

mattkevan wrote: post #83
fyoving wrote: post #66

I always thought the name had something to do with it, "google plus" doesn't sound right specially for a social network, also "Hangouts" is a terrible name, it doesn't internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise setting, and "keep" is a good app but it should be called "google notes" nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product. Google has been worse at naming products than they have a…

Feels like the same people responsible for Mircrosoft's product decisions in the 2000s have now all moved to Google, with a slight twist in strategy. When a Microsoft product didn't do well they called it something different and relaunched, hoping no-one realised it was the same old thing – e.g. Zune Music/Xbox Music/MSN Music/Groove Music/Microsoft Store etc. Google now* just kills it and launches something else, so…

Is there a list of Google services somewhere? I'm always astonished at how I only hear of SOO many of their services only in their obituary.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#130

Post by [deleted] »

luisdfp wrote: post #92
Causality1 wrote: post #2

>Project Hancock was the internal code name of the project designed to do this. It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. This is actually much more complicated than it sounds; it took a team of engineers somewhere around three months to accomplish it. What this bit glosses over is the PR disaster that was Google forcing Google+ down the throats of its unwilling users. For example, for years…

>It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably. I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off. Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some vi…

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