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Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

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Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#111

Post by dgregd »

saidajigumi wrote: post #34

> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011 that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet. > “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.” I think Eric screwed up in a deeper way that this quote admits. Google+ came up at a time of broader dissatisfaction with other social networks, pa…

> There are very real reasons why "average" people need alternate identities online.

However alternate identities also allow for click fraud things and so on.

We don't know exactly why Google guys wanted so much to eliminate faked identities.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#112

Post by MichaelGG »

ww520 wrote: post #94
inthewoods wrote: post #69

Vic did a pretty great job getting Google+ in decent shape, but am I the only one that finds the overall strategy among these properties confusing? I know that whenever I talk with a normal, non-tech civilian they are always confused by the service. They have Youtube (where you can upload videos), Google+ Photos (where you can upload videos and stream as well), Google Drive (where you can also upload pictures and vid…

Google+ became just like .Net of Microsoft. It's a umbrella for a number of confusing services forced together. Depending on whom to talk to and the favorite of the month, it can be different things. It was social connect before. Now it's unified login. Next it's going to be whatever. Sounds awfully like .Net in the old days.

Microsoft dropped branding everything ".Net" like a decade ago. .Net nowadays only refers to the .NET Framework.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#113

Post by guelo »

aasarava wrote: post #85
inthewoods wrote: post #69

Vic did a pretty great job getting Google+ in decent shape, but am I the only one that finds the overall strategy among these properties confusing? I know that whenever I talk with a normal, non-tech civilian they are always confused by the service. They have Youtube (where you can upload videos), Google+ Photos (where you can upload videos and stream as well), Google Drive (where you can also upload pictures and vid…

You're definitely not the only one. Trying to understand the interaction between the various Google properties makes me feel like an idiot -- and yet I'm a Web developer with a CS degree who has been using the Web just about every day since 1994. For example, have you ever tried to schedule a Google Hangout chat? As far as I can tell, there's no way to do it from Google Hangouts. You need to first sign in to Google+,…

I feel that Google made better, more usable interfaces before they were taken over by designers. Modern designers are obsessed with removing features because that's the Apple religion. The new Maps is ruined because of this. Larry should fire all their designers and let engineers take over the interfaces again.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#114

Post by yuhong »

teawithcarl wrote: post #105

Gundotra sucked anyway. So does Google+. That's what happens when you "copy" technology, rather than rethinking/innovating. A new player to the space, and they just "copy" - that sucks. (apologize for my negativity.) Try Google searching on Vic Gundotra "licking the cookie". (a metaphor for making a project "his" before others can lay claim.) "Gundotra, we’re told, would “lick the cookie” at Google by putting future…

Yea, I have mentioned this before too and I think this article was submitted to HN.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#115

Post by bradleyjg »

cookiecaper wrote: post #86
qq66 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real-name policy itself was only known by a small group of people. However, the idea that G+ would be a place for a your One True Identity was directly attacking Facebook, which is not the way in which Facebook was vulnerable. If they had built the entire product (not just the real-name policy) around the idea of pseudonyms or ephemeral identities or multiple identities like Reddit, they may have found more succe…

Google doesn't want to be reddit.

Youtube is video reddit (or maybe reddit is text and image youtube). It's my understanding that youtube makes a great deal of money.

More generally, reddit is lots of user generated content that gets page views. What makes facebook's user generated content so much more attractive? The user graph? Have they figured out any good way to monetize that?

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#116

Post by wtbob »

npizzolato wrote: post #96
daeken wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it. I don't think that anyone will argue that pseudonyms are important to the average user. However, they are important to a small but influential group of users. The type of early adopter that otherwise could've driven G+ upward.

I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.

> I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential.

Or worth being influenced by…

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#117

Post by dang »

huhtenberg wrote: post #90
dang wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your wording suggests that maybe you didn't see sama's announcement about the change we made to count more downvotes [1] or any of my recent comments about it. People can reasonably differ, of course, but I don't agree that barely any negatively scored comments deserve to be there. I look at all the negatively scored comments, and the vast majority are either not substantive, not civil, or both. It's true, though, th…

> highly toxic comments I really don't see any of grayed out comments in this thread as toxic, leave alone as highly toxic. There are some lame jokes and one-liners, but they could simply be put at the bottom of the page without a slap on the face that is the gray color. Comment authors can see their negative scores and that's a signal enough for them to mend their ways, don't you think?

Oh, I didn't mean that any of the comments in this thread were toxic. I meant that HN had a systemic problem with toxic comments that badly needed addressing, and this downvote change is one of the ways we addressed it.

As for this thread, the faded-out comments I'm currently seeing are not toxic, but they also don't seem like good HN comments (defined as: substantive and civil) to me either. People can reasonably disagree in these cases—that's why we're encouraging the corrective upvote as a community practice.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#118

Post by dang »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #73
dang wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your wording suggests that maybe you didn't see sama's announcement about the change we made to count more downvotes [1] or any of my recent comments about it. People can reasonably differ, of course, but I don't agree that barely any negatively scored comments deserve to be there. I look at all the negatively scored comments, and the vast majority are either not substantive, not civil, or both. It's true, though, th…

I won't complain about downvotes, but I would like to request a feature. In a manner similar to 'showdead', I'd like to be able to disable graying. Here's why: when you gray out a comment to the point of illegibility, as is happening more and more, that only makes me want to read it more. So I end up paying more attention to downmodded comments, not less. Somehow, I don't think that's what you were going for. I would…

That's a reasonable request. I've added it to our list.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#119

Post by haakon »

inthewoods wrote: post #76
bane wrote: post #56

IMHO Google+'s principle problem is that it's multiple efforts all under the same name umbrella. This is confusing to users and seems to have been confusing to Google. It's a longer-than-twitter public broadcast messaging system/social network/photo sharing/single sign-on/half a dozen other things. There's some great ideas in there. Having a subscription style feed of people I want to follow, and their long-form post…

Circles seems like a good idea - but I find I don't use them.

Personally I never saw what the big deal was. They allow you to put people into lists, which you could already do on Facebook and Twitter at the time. But because they called them "circles" and visualised them as such, suddenly it was a radical new idea or something.
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