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Google+ broke our trust

zdnet.com

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Re: Google+ broke our trust

#181

Post by tedks »

bane wrote: post #132
IgorPartola wrote: post #29

I don't get it. So Brin announces to the world that Google+ is the new sliced bread in 2011. Then he tells a small group of people that he thinks he personally should not have been involved with G+. Also the leader of the G+ project leaves (one month after the project started? One month after Brin had his candid talk recently?) Where in this is the broken trust? What is the author actually upset about? Seems to me li…

The problem was the G+ was pitched as a social network. It grew, like a cancer, into some weird meta-project that defies description, and along the way fucked over lots of people who worked very hard to maintain different identities and roles in the various on-line milieus they frequented. Sometimes it was as simple as revealing their real name to their model plane group. Other times it involved just shutting down re…

>The problem was the G+ was pitched as a social network. It grew, like a cancer, into some weird meta-project that defies description

Really?

It was a single sign-on system to Google properties, tied to a social networking thing. accounts.google.com came not far after plus.google.com.

Google wanted to avoid becoming MySpace and wanted to mimic Facebook, and miscalculated slightly.

Personally, I really like being able to sign in once to Google properties. I like that YouTube comments now have real names on them. It makes them much less toxic.

How is it that Google+ shut down youtube channels? Changing the display name is all I've seen it do.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#182

Post by derefr »

3rd3 wrote: post #170
varelse wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, I was at Google at the time and many of us complained mightily on our internal forums. That said, there were a disturbing number of middle-level management types that would high five every move Google made, good or bad. And I think they turn into the echo chamber that gives idiocy like this its momentum.

The huge success of Facebook and Twitter, the Social Network movie (October 2010) and the introduction of Apple’s iTunes Ping (September 2010) probably added a lot to this momentum.

Now that's a funny image: I'm imagining a time-traveller coming back from the future where Google has created Skynet, and telling Apple "if you create a social network in 2010—don't worry, you can shut it down a year later—you'll scare Google into pushing their own social network out the door, it'll infect their tech culture utterly, and you'll gain a five-year lead on anything you want to put out from them on. (Also, the timeline will be saved.)"

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#183

Post by pichai »

bane wrote: post #129

> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…

Look, most of those decisions are very hard and driven by the ecosystem's momentum.

I'll give you a more recent example: Google is currently working on Timely, the next generation calendar system. We decided to focus on the mobile version and cancel the web interface, which was almost finished and that will never be released.

So we told all those engineers to shift there efforts to the mobile version and we'll have to find someone willing to keep the old messy calendar codebase in shape. All those bug reports from enterprise customers that were closed because those issues were fixed in Timely? Who cares?

Sounds like a terrible decision, right? That's how we do things at Google these days.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#184

Post by DanBC »

IgorPartola wrote: post #31
jwheeler79 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point of the article is that google has lost trust, and google+ along with strange, self-serving behavior of executives is how. that much is undeniable.

What was the underhanded thing that it did? If you put your real name AND sensitive info into a public system, especially one you do not understand, what do you trust will happen? What does Brin's confession of not being the best person to create a social network have to do with it?

Bob, a transgender person, has a Youtube account under his transgender name of "Bob". He also has a Gmail account under his birth name of Becky.

Youtube gets bought by Google. G+ happens. Suddenly Bob is being forced to use his birth name on his Youtube account. If Bob is unlucky his current name or his birth name are outed. While it shouldn't matter if people know that Bob is transgender we live in a world where people are beaten or killed for this.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#185

Post by dang »

We changed the title from "Thanks for nothing, jerkface" to the first subtitle of the article, which (a) isn't linkbait and (b) is more or less what the article seems to be about.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#186

Post by drdaeman »

asdfologist wrote: post #99
spodek wrote: post #87

A suggestion for Google to save itself regarding G+: Donate some of its engineers' time to fix and revitalize Diaspora -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29 -- or one of its peers or something along its original vision. It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing…

I agree that would be cool, but I don't think Diaspora offers anything compelling to the general public. What fraction of FB users actually care that much about privacy?

Care? Most of them. Care enough to the extent they'd (figurally) vote with their wallets? Almost none.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#187

Post by _random_ »

"Brin told ... that ... he was “kind of a weirdo” and "It was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with." - I respect him more now. Being late to market was probably a bigger mistake though.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#188

Post by bane »

Silhouette wrote: post #136
bane wrote: post #129

> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…

I think there was a more thought-provoking part than the "broke everything it touched" line: Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products. Google, particul…

I think one thing that's now well appreciated is the network effects of the other bits of Google's product offering.

- Search - try searching for something on Bing with somebody else in the room and get the "why don't you just Google it?"

- Youtube, absolutely a strong network effect. I follow a bunch of retrogaming channels, and earlier this year Google's copyright monitoring processes and software lost its fool mind and drove a bunch of people (representing millions of views) off of the site because they had a half second clip of some background sound from a 30 year old video game in a video. After a while they all returned because they couldn't get traffic anywhere near the volume they were previously seeing.

- gmail - should be self explanatory

- maps - nothing else really is quite as good and definitely isn't as well integrated where you need it, your phone

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#189

Post by fzltrp »

ben0x539 wrote: post #151
fzltrp wrote: post #98

I don't think that G+ was a mistake. The only real issue is the real name policy, though I fail to see how they'd be able to enforce it. People could create alternate email addresses with fake names (and some did), and use it when they want to participate social "i-events" without giving up their id. It's been like that before G+, and it would only take a small move from them to correct it. Of course, the downside of…

The problem with "people could just create fake identities" is that they'd basically be permanently living with the fear of being caught by google and having their entire identity erased, and all the comments would just be "duh, what did they expect creating an alternate email address with a fake name?" That a bad policy is inconsistently enforced doesn't really make it any less harmful. Selective enforcement is more…

Well sure, as long as the real name policy is actively enforcable by G (which I doubt, but someone else apparently had to go through their enforcment practice), there's a risk. Then maybe it means that G isn't the right medium to express oneself anonymously and have an official virtual life. As I said, the only real problem is that policy.

> It's much less offensive than the G+ real name policy, so that's a weird focus. ;)

I don't think we have the same definition of offensive (please correct me if my second language english is wrong). That policy was harmful, but I wouldn't qualify it as offensive. I think the article provides good examples where it was harmful.

That said, if you don't think it's inappropriate for someone to use anonymity (or is it her real name?) to insult someone else, you won't mind if I finish this comment by the same sentence? I won't, because I know that it's not necessary, and it would undermine the message I'm trying to convey, as it does in her case.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#190

Post by drdaeman »

higherpurpose wrote: post #3

I wish both Google and Microsoft would understand that you can't force change down users' throats. It needs to come naturally. They need to want it, and have it grow organically . Sure, forcing them will definitely bring you bigger "adoption" (for lack of a better word) faster, but it will also build up a lot of resentment, potentially negating any advantage you might have from ramming the change through, in the long…

> understand that you can't force change down users' throats

Actually, they can. When you are Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc-grade oligopolist it requires quite extraordinary changes to ward off your users who are already hooked to your services. I.e. the changes that actually prevent them from further using the service, or make transition to another one (if there's any) less painful than managing to live within the new environment.

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