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Why Google+ Failed

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#211

Post by pdpi »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #171
trevize1138 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Facebook had what turned out to be an accidentally brilliant way of bootstrapping networks and trust. Fundamental problem: social networks with no-one on them are not fun and not sticky. Fundamental problem 2: if anyone can read what you're writing, it's not a social network, it's a blog. So you can't just let anyone see what people are writing. The way FB handled that in the early days was that by default, people in…

Crucially, they had a strategy that worked for that time. Same strategy applied today would simply fail.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#212

Post by marssaxman »

ablation wrote: post #138
GarrisonPrime wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in school or training? And/or do you work with members of your social circle? And/or does family live close? If any of these are true, I can see how Facebook offers little value. But the older you get, the fewer people you tend to have around. My social life is easily 30 times harder to maintain now than it was when I was in college. Work was also an easy place to find friends and kindred spirits. At first. B…

I don't have Facebook, and all of these needs for connectivity are taken care of by WhatsApp group chats, essentially. It feels far more intimate and immediate than Facebook ever did too.

How does one discover such WhatsApp group chats? In my very limited experience, it is just like other messaging apps; I can't quite imagine how you would use it as a social network. Am I missing something?

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#213

Post by zippergz »

oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends because of it, aside from the small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority, and I don't think we should mistake their volume level as an indicator of quantity.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#214

Post by damnyou »

zippergz wrote: post #213
oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends b…

What about as an indicator of impact?

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#215

Post by unreal37 »

SamBam wrote: post #111
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…

> Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are. I restarted my Twitter, and just started following people who post things in interested in that are not politics -- for me, that's maker spaces, education, STEM, etc -- and it's night and day. A much smaller group of people who post interesting things, ask questions, interact, and are generally friendly.

And then this person you like and respect starts a political rant, and you just wish they'd keep talking about the thing you are actually interested in... til eventually you unfollow him or her.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#216

Post by moultano »

reallydude wrote: post #207
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it completely implausible. I disagree and think it's 100% the reason it failed. > A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal. But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't. And since a social network is only useful if all your friends are on it, people never got into the habit o…

> The excitement was gone. Most people didn't hear about it. You can ask people on the street. They sure know facebook. Excitement is not a good way to motivate people to move platforms, in general (despite the niche cases like Fyre Festival which are relatively small). Maybe they should have gotten some celebrity support? Otherwise the excitement wasn't mainstream. G+ needed mainstream users. > But people did want t…

> Most people didn't hear about it.

Lots of people did. But then they couldn't get an account. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-05-20%202...

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#217

Post by unreal37 »

aflag wrote: post #76
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…

Why is Facebook dead? I use it quite often.

Facebook is not dead. It may be evil. But to hear someone who liked Google+ call Facebook dead is kinda funny.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#218

Post by pjc50 »

unreal37 wrote: post #197
oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball. Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#219

Post by unsignedint »

Actually, I still miss Google+. It was one of the few places I could have meaningful conversation about topics.

Google+ enticed extended circle of group to interact with my posts. I feel Facebook is really about getting confined to their own bubble; even when such posts are marked 'pubilc' I rarely see anyone outside of my group interacting with me.

I guess the closest major one right now is Twitter. Google+ was certainly hitting some sweetspot between Twitter and Facebook for me.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#220

Post by the-rc »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #169
the-rc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not static content. It would have been expensive to keep the services running. Not just in terms of computing and storage, but also for the headcount. Speaking of the latter, who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project frozen in time? (The enterprise version will evolve, etc.) I am not even going into the legal implications.

As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?). Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publis…

What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to litigation from random users, etc.

Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.

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