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A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

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Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#41

Post by CaRDiaK »

oelmekki wrote: post #11

That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decide…

You can totally post to circles though, and then only people in that circle of yours would see it.

G+ is great for passions, Twitter for perceptions and FB for people. Check out Guy Kawasaki's Book, "What The Plus". It's short read and really helped me get the most out of it.

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#42

Post by tiziano88 »

oelmekki wrote: post #11

That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decide…

You can easily create Google+ "pages" to solve exactly this problem. They have the added bonus of not requiring "real names", so you could be using a pseudonym or something if you wanted

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#43

Post by captainmuon »

They should have given up trying to be the number one and building a walled garden. Rather, they should have opened up Google+.

* Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface *

* Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream

* Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora)

* Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature.

* Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users.

----

*) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#44

Post by amirmc »

levosmetalo wrote: post #34
hosay123 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it there - some internal hubris led to them assuming the tech crowd were no longer the driver of their business, and so they ignored us. Now I don't have any reason to have Google Account, and so I don't have one†. Of the users I introduced to Gmail, some have since moved back to live.com (e.g. family) because they saw me complaining so much, even though they had no real reason to move. I no longer recomme…

Just curious, what have you migrated to from Google apps? I don't use much of apps except for mail, calendar, contacts and docs. I could live without online docs, but couldn't find slick email, calendar and contacts available seamlessly on any computer and phone I use anywhere else.

Do you normally use email, calendars etc via the browser? Just curious as you say you've not found slick versions elsewhere and I'm not sure what that means to you. For example, I hardly ever access these things via the browser so 'slick' for me is just fast sync between devices.

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#45

Post by m_mueller »

oelmekki wrote: post #11

That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decide…

So, what's wrong with using circles for option 1? You'd rather like to have the posts public, but only to people with french browser settings? IMO that's asking a bit much, it's a functionality I'd expect from a good blogger platform but not a general purpose social media platform.

Note that I often feel G+ to be off as well, but for other reasons. One issue that sprung into my eye lately: There's absolutely no notification about new messages if you don't have any G+ apps or extensions installed. The logged in google page shows me notifications, which do not include messages, but rather useless clutter I don't care about. Is this Google's way of forcing people into installing their browser extension? It seems a rather big oversight to me.

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#48

Post by onion2k »

adwn wrote: post #28
onion2k wrote: post #17

It was actually a really good product, but the thing has had zero traction with real people. If no one uses a product then it's clearly providing no value. That's pretty much the definition of a bad product.

In the real world, the quality of a product isn't the only criterion influencing adoption/market share: There's also - price and cost (doesn't really apply here, though) - marketing and image - critical mass and network effects Therefore, your conclusion is invalid.

Price and cost matter a great deal here. Although the price of G+ was zero, the cost quite high - the user's time. G+ was hard to understand for most people. Google tried to give it a language of it's own that took people effort to learn - groups were "Circles", chat was "Hangout", and so on. It didn't instantly click in the way that Facebook or Twitter does for most people. Given that, the value proposition for G+ wasn't good enough - the benefit from actually using it returned less value than the cost of the time to spend learning how. That's the number one thing for free products - the cost is never zero. Everything costs something, just not necessarily money.

The image of the product was equally bad. Google rarely gave a clear picture of what G+ was actually for - it looked a lot like a social network, but Google's messaging was always "It's not a social network! We're not competing with Facebook!" They always told people what they weren't, rarely what they were. Frankly, I still don't know. That's ignoring the forced "G+ is your Google account" thing because many Google products could actually be used without G+; G+ was never your Google account.

As for critical mass, if you haven't got that when you have 500 million users, you're obviously getting something very wrong.

tl;dr G+ didn't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile spending time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't spend time with.

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#49

Post by oelmekki »

m_mueller wrote: post #45
oelmekki wrote: post #11

That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decide…

So, what's wrong with using circles for option 1? You'd rather like to have the posts public, but only to people with french browser settings? IMO that's asking a bit much, it's a functionality I'd expect from a good blogger platform but not a general purpose social media platform. Note that I often feel G+ to be off as well, but for other reasons. One issue that sprung into my eye lately: There's absolutely no notif…

> You'd rather like to have the posts public, but only to people with french browser settings?

No, what I want is to give people I don't know a mean to choose in what topics I cover they are interested in.

"French" is just a topic, here, it could have been "politics", "funny pictures" or "food".

Re: A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

#50

Post by Lerc »

oelmekki wrote: post #11

That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decide…

You could even implement that with a metaphor that is used to address a similar problem in the real world.

People will say something "I'm wearing my Engineers hat now" to make it clear that they are communicating from a particular viewpoint.

Hats, and indeed Masks(where you see only the headgear and not the identity behind it), would be a great addition to Google+.

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