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Why Google+ Failed

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#361

Post by abrugsch »

mcguire wrote: post #290
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…

" 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. " This is why I quickly quit using Facebook after only starting recently. Well, this and the way I cannot repeatably re-find a post after seeing it once.

This a thousand times. It's not just facebook though. Anything that has an algorithmically generated feed does it... "oh look there's two posts I'm interested in following. Which do i want to see more because the other won't be there ever again when I come back because the algorithm has to re-calculate based on the link i just followed." And yet the link I have no interest in following somehow stays lurking for days. /shrug

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#362

Post by smitop »

hartator wrote: post #253

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#363

Post by CondensedBrain »

Corrado wrote: post #310
CommieBobDole wrote: post #240

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…

One of the worst things to come from this Google+ thing was the removal of the "+" for searching on Google itself. You used to be able to use " +go +lang " and get results that were guaranteed to have those two terms on the page. Now you have to use double quotes and other tricks. sigh

On the plus side, Google at least tells you when it omits words and offers to put them back in now. Not that it does much good. Something about Google the search engine changed and now it's impossible to get good results for anything but the most obvious queries. I tried looking up why every commercial pot pie says to let it sit for 5 minutes.

I looked this up years ago and got blog posts explaining it. All I get now is page after page of recipes for homemade pot pies. You'd think after a while some logic would spin up to say "I bet this isn't what they're looking for! Let's try something else." It used to do that.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#364

Post by devit »

unreal37 wrote: post #231
devit wrote: post #158

I think what they should have done is add functionality into Chrome that would allow and encourage you to automatically import all the data in your Facebook account into Google+ and then post to both accounts. At the time, Google had much more goodwill than today and there's a chance people would have used it just so they could use Google instead of Facebook.

Trying to use your dominance in one space (search, or browsers, say) to actively steal data from a competitor (scrape Facebook!) with the intention to destroy that competitor is something lawyers have wet dreams about. I mean, Facebook would have destroyed them in court.

I think it would have been important enough for Google to be worth fighting no matter the cost, since it would have been the only viable way of replacing Facebook.

The user would be consenting, initiating and running the procedure on his own machine, so there's a plausible argument that it's fine.

Regarding the antitrust argument, you could also argue that Facebook is a monopoly in social networks and that preventing such a data transfer is anticompetitive.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#365

Post by Izkata »

aerovistae wrote: post #72
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…

Completely agreed. It's because the name sounds like it's referring to the company instead of a product. I'm happy to use Gmail, which comes across as its own thing, but I might be a little bit more reluctant to use Google mail. I'm happy to use YouTube, but Google YouTube? I don't know. Internet companies' names tend to refer to their flagship product, and become synonymous with it. But when they release other thing…

> I'm happy to use YouTube, but Google YouTube? I don't know.

Sure we do: Google Video was a competitor to YouTube that few used. Then they bought YouTube, and eventually killed Google Video.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#366

Post by Izkata »

mavelikara wrote: post #342
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 had to look up what the "Kennedy" initiative was. It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h... [2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-p…

On 3, are you sure? The blue-shaded image search results is what it looked like a long time ago.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#367

Post by mavelikara »

Izkata wrote: post #366
mavelikara wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look up what the "Kennedy" initiative was. It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h... [2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-p…

On 3, are you sure? The blue-shaded image search results is what it looked like a long time ago.

Kennedy Initiative was done in 2013.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#368

Post by netwanderer3 »

Eug894 wrote: post #359
dorgo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They don't even have to wait for shipping I don't mind to wait for shipping. In the next two weeks is ok. I don't even search on Google. I search on Amazon. Btw, what is Yelp?

Amazon don't work in all countries. And the ability to walk in a retail nearby to look at the product you want is valuable too.

Indeed. Unlike many developed countries which have those big box retail stores available in almost every neighborhood, local commerce activities in developing countries are dominated by smaller businesses, and their stores are often distributed randomly across a city.

In the U.S, you kind of know ahead what brands of retail stores you will be able to find a product, as opposed to some other countries where it's a lot more difficult to locate them due to the lack of specialized retail stores.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#370

Post by irrational »

Karunamon wrote: post #277
irrational wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the + doesn't mean what we thought it meant. Google + Evil

I’d prefer we reserve evil for things that actually hurt people out of malice, not poor product design. Otherwise that term becomes useless.

This is in reference to the fact that the motto of Google used to be: Don't Be Evil.
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