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A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

scottporad.com

51–60 of 116 posts

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

#51
I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google!

But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.

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

#52

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

You're right, that's something I didn't explored enough, thinking of pages like intended for brands.

I'll play a bit with this to see if it's well integrated enough, since when you click on someone name, you reach post list rather than about section (I would not have people think I don't publish anything, not realizing there are many pages).

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

#53

I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.

> ... Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google!

So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.

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

#54
post #50

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+.

Indeed. By the way, I think this has a lot to say about the "real identity policy" of google+. Do people really have a single "real" identity ?

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

#55

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…

I apologize for the shameless plug, but we're at the early stages of solving some of the problems you mentioned at http://NowVia.com

It lets you create topic-based "channels" that people can follow. So you could have one for 3-D printing, and when you add to it, you know everyone following it is specifically interested in 3-D printing. I'd love your feedback if you decide to have a play :-)

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

#56
post #53

I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.

> ... Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.

Can't agree with that, Google Reader was great but I'm very happy with what I'm getting from Feedly, I don't feel worse off

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Oh I see, 'subscriptions' as a counterpart to 'circles'. That's not a bad idea, it would also translate pretty well to Youtube channels. I guess they didn't introduce it since it would confuse many users 'what's the difference between circles and channels?'. They could have made it as an optional feature for publishers, i.e. only shown to users who enable it in preferences.

edit: Users who subscribe to a feed would always see the feature if the publisher has enabled it of course

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

#59
The biggest problem for me is all the FAKE ACTIVITY you can find in the platform. I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.

I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive.

I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile.

All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too.

We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.

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