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Why Google+ Failed
251–260 of 375 posts
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don't discover new ones, unless I'm invited to one or I create one. All the people I know who I used to communicate with and share content on Facebook are on WhatsApp. If I'm interested in wider discussions with people I don't "know" in the traditional sense, there's forums, etc. Nothing I got from the Facebook experience I can't get anywhere else, I'm finding. Maybe I was using Facebook wrong, but I didn't add anyone on there as a friend that I didn't know offline.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
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Re: Why Google+ Failed
#254I think most of the damage from the "real names" policy came from the their sudden and draconian enforcement of it at exactly the wrong time. Just when the service was starting to build momentum, they initiated an effort to find and punish anyone who'd previously signed up with anything that didn't look like a "real name", in many cases locking them out of their entire Google account. And then shortly after that, hav…
I remember when Youtube comments were tanks and stickmen.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was an IC6 at Google IC6 meaning... ?
Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority. Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.
A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy.
In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#256Google+ implementation was also particularly bad. With plenty of bugs in the frontend. Like it was a pain to use and wasn't pleasant to look at. And no one understood what a circle is.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#257I think most of the damage from the "real names" policy came from the their sudden and draconian enforcement of it at exactly the wrong time. Just when the service was starting to build momentum, they initiated an effort to find and punish anyone who'd previously signed up with anything that didn't look like a "real name", in many cases locking them out of their entire Google account. And then shortly after that, hav…
Maybe the + doesn't mean what we thought it meant.
Google + Evil
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was an IC6 at Google IC6 meaning... ?
Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority. Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.
I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context.
There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#259This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful.
I've seen this in mobile games over and over again - people who were successful in AAA games would start a company and raise a bunch of money and say "We're going to FIX mobile gaming!" And then they would fail spectacularly because their mental model of the problem didn't accurately reflect reality.
Google has repeatedly blown chances to build social platforms because they seem to believe that every problem can be solved via scale. OpenSocial is another prime example: They built a platform, brought in social networks, were able to say that they had X many millions of users and thus had achieved massive success... but it was a terrible API that was difficult to work with and offered far less functionality than the Facebook platform it was meant to compete with. I'd love to see some commentary from someone who worked on that, but my impression was that they didn't understand that the FB platform's extreme ease of use and developer-friendliness was what made it work well, and that the platform's scale was a value-add on top of that.
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#260I 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…
The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space. I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+. I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitte…
If only Google could invent a discussion site with rich text and threaded discussions … they could call it "Google Wave" …