271–280 of 375 posts
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…
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I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled down into poor product decisions.
I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love Hacker News!
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.
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Gmail's invite only approach made sense because in 2004 it was absurd for anybody to offer 1GB of free storage. Hotmail offered 200MB I think. Compared to that, nobody cared about a Facebook ripoff with a different UI and none of the network effects.
I think it was way less than that. Wasn't it like ... 2MB?
I 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
Similarly these kind-of-friends can follow me because they find me interesting and I'll feel no pressure to follow them back. Half of the time I get a friend request in Facebook, I don't really know the person (but I have reasons to expect that the person thinks they "know" me) so it feels awkward either to accept or decline.
Just my two cents.
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.
This isn't so much Google+'s failure as a product as it was the astounding success of FB at keeping it's users. Google+ definitely had some cool and interesting features, but people just didn't care. I think a great case study would be to see why MySpace failed to keep it's users and FB got them, and why Google+ couldn't achieve the same critical mass.
I think the eventual fracturing of the features of Google+ and migration into other products was a smart move.
Here's an example conversation I had at the time with someone about why we should switch over to Google+:
Me: It's better! Cool features
Friend: Ya but w/e FB already has everyone there...plus those features are meh
Me: Ya but privacy!
Friend: Let's be real, Google and FB make money the same way...ain't no one's privacy gonna get in the way of that
Me: True...