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Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

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Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#201

Post by dredmorbius »

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 for incoming content are fundamentally broken as they don't allow topical categorization of content.

If I can subscribe to feeds, and set a preference for specific individuals on those feeds, I get a vastly superior information product. You can roughly approximate this via search in G+, but only roughly.

The lack of ability to follow people's topical posts (that is: show me +JohnDoe's post to SomeCommunity) was simply idiotic.

Reddit, subreddits, friends, RES dashboard, and RSS feeds give me much of what I was hoping for from G+. And a hell of a lot more utility.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#202

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Circles always seemed to me like something someone dreamed up while way too high, and nobody ever said "dude, this just isn't going to work."

Put down the crack pipe and step away from from the whiteboard.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#203

Post by dragonwriter »

dredmorbius wrote: post #201
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 for incoming content are fundamentally broken as they don't allow topical categorization of content. If I can subscribe to feeds , and set a preference for specific individuals on those feeds, I get a vastly superior information product. You can roughly approximate this via search in G+, but only roughly. The lack of ability to follow people's topical posts (that is: show me +JohnDoe's post to SomeCommunity)…

> If I can subscribe to feeds

You can, if people create them -- Google+ calls named feeds "Pages". You add the Page (originators categorization) to the circle (receivers categorization) you want, and that's how G+ supports classification from both ends of the communication.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#204

Post by deelowe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #200
deelowe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Names didn't come from Eric. He was gone by the time G+ rolled out. Vic had a large hand in the real names decision.

Schmidt was selling G+ as "an identity platform".

Maybe, but by the time it rolled out, Schmidt was gone. G+ is pretty much all Vic.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#205

Post by AllenKids »

ericras wrote: post #160
chime wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to real names is not necessarily Youtube or 4chan. Reddit, HN, Fark, Mefi, Slashdot, and tons of other lard communities work fine with just usernames. The alternative to real names is moderation, policies, flagging/reporting etc. Abuse is always a problem in large communities regardless of real name or username policy and many different solutions exist for each type of abuse. Forcing real name usage w…

It is possible, I agree, but Reddit, HN and others have much more active moderation than Google was probably interested in creating.

Well,that's a problem for Google,not the users.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#206

Post by billnguyen »

dredmorbius wrote: post #200
deelowe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Names didn't come from Eric. He was gone by the time G+ rolled out. Vic had a large hand in the real names decision.

Schmidt was selling G+ as "an identity platform".

Schmidt, like any good CEO, will always always sell anything his company outputs. You'll never find him criticising anything Google does, maybe in retrospect but never upon launch.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#207

Post by [deleted] »

guelo wrote: post #113
aasarava wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#208

Post by dredmorbius »

dragonwriter wrote: post #203
dredmorbius wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circles for incoming content are fundamentally broken as they don't allow topical categorization of content. If I can subscribe to feeds , and set a preference for specific individuals on those feeds, I get a vastly superior information product. You can roughly approximate this via search in G+, but only roughly. The lack of ability to follow people's topical posts (that is: show me +JohnDoe's post to SomeCommunity)…

> If I can subscribe to feeds You can, if people create them -- Google+ calls named feeds "Pages". You add the Page (originators categorization) to the circle (receivers categorization) you want, and that's how G+ supports classification from both ends of the communication.

What I can't do is create a topic or keyword, and subscribe to that, with a preference for posts from specific individuals.

Nor can I subscribe to a Community, but only highly ranked posts (useless without downvotes), and/or of people I find compelling.

The Pages route is too many levels of indirection to be successful. Google and Silicon Valley understand that one click can be too much friction, let alone multiple, among several individuals.

I've never subscribed to a page. Hell, what a "page" is is utterly opaque to me (with 25+ years of tech experience).

G+ had a number of useful tools, probably Hangouts at the top of the list, but "Hangouts" UTTERLY FAILS TO COMMUNICATE TO ME what this is. "Group Video Chat" does. And that's what it is.

I've said before and I'll say it again: that should be spun out as its own product, and ultimately be geared to take on WebMeeting and related products.

Edit: Additionally: reddit has ubiquitous RSS. You can tag '.rss' to virtually any URL that's a valid Reddit page (front, subreddit, user, search, URL search etc.) and get a feed based on that. You can also subscribe to specific posts, which is pretty awesome -- through reddit's own notifications system (which blows Google's out of the water).

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#209

Post by dredmorbius »

billnguyen wrote: post #206
dredmorbius wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schmidt was selling G+ as "an identity platform".

Schmidt, like any good CEO, will always always sell anything his company outputs. You'll never find him criticising anything Google does, maybe in retrospect but never upon launch.

My point isn't that he wasn't criticising, but that he was explicitly endorsing the "identity service" angle.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#210

Post by hrktb »

daeken wrote: post #74
ericras wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all honesty I probably would have pursued the same real names policy if I had been running Google+. They were trying to avoid having it immediately devolve into the YouTube comments section - aka the scourge of the Internet. 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 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 think pseudonym policy depend heavily on what we set as 'average'. My parents and their work relations use their real name everytime, for everything, I never saw them use a pseudonym and they scorn me for using silly or unscrutable names.

On the other end my siblings, cousins, school friends and some more all kept their AOL/hotmail/yahoo mail or other chat service nickname, which for a reason or another was a nickname.

I think it really depends on how, when and for what someone first came to the internet. If it was for fart jokes, or activism, real name policy is a bummer.

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