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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#111

Post by magicalhippo »

Until recently Google+ suffered from being a virtual black hole of information due to a lackluster search interface (oh the irony). In addition it had poor anti-spam and limited moderation controls, leading to almost daily NSFW images in my stream.

Then recently they tried to make it better by redesigning it, and apparently gave some graphic designers free reign. This lead to a significantly worse user experience, so much so that I and many others who were still clinging on stopped using it almost entirely.

That said it had some good ideas, and the signal-to-noise ratio was much better than on Facebook. I'm guessing the active communities I visited will migrate to Facebook or similar, but it won't be quite the same.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#112

Post by daledavies »

azhenley wrote: post #79
TimothyBJacobs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has had friend requests and private messaging for a long time. At least 2008, maybe earlier.

Even now, I can't figure out how to send someone a friend request. All I see is a Subscribe button when I visit someone's profile.

I just spent 20 mins searching for this and on the Android app at least I can't figure it out either!

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#113

Post by mcjiggerlog »

jonknee wrote: post #58
sys_64738 wrote: post #3

They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don't think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.

Or Chrome, or Android, or YouTube, or Maps, or News, or Docs, or Translate or anything else that has a large number of users. Google Reader had some big fans, but never a large number of users. They don't get rid of stuff with lots of eyeballs.

Inbox? Google Talk?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#114

Post by ihuman »

pc86 wrote: post #100
robotrout wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not me. But it reinforces my commitment to never get attached to any Google service. The new GMail is also helping me with that.

I really like Inbox and am dreading the day that inevitably gets canned.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Inbox is getting shut down

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17848500/google-inbox-shu...

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#115

Post by cft »

dekhn wrote: post #105
cletus wrote: post #99

This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company's culture. Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so…

As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure. This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.

Very good insight. If you think about it, Google benefits from proliferation of third party websites, thus cloud business is synergetic with Google search. Facebook and Google+ are competitive with Google search since they centralize the web.

For many, Google search reduced to a search engine for Wikipedia and StackOverflow and a couple of other big sites. This poses a long-term threat for search.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#116

Post by mindcrime »

Touche wrote: post #110
mindcrime wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like. I didn't say "it failed because it didn't do X". They said "... failed to gain developer adoption ....". To that specific point, I contend there is a clear and direct causal link between the decisions they made, and that lack of adoption. Of course I can't prove that in the strictest sense, but it's not hard to see that a…

You're missing (or ignoring) a lot of historical context in your analysis. Google spent many years trying to compete with Facebook assuming that open standards were the thing that would win. ActivityStreams and PubSubHubHub are just two examples of federated standards that they built to compete, and that failed. Google+ came out, if you'll remember, at the time that Page became CEO again and pivoted the company's dir…

Yeah, I remember that, and I didn't intend my post here to be a detailed "analysis" of the entirety of what happened with G+. I just wanted to respond to one particular point that the author of the Google post made, vis-a-vis "developer adoption".

It would be fun to spend some time doing a more detailed analysis of the whole thing, including all of that historical context, but I don't have the time right now.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#118

Post by adrianmonk »

jrrrr wrote: post #22

G+ didn't even get its own sunset announcement post; it was mentioned in passing from a post about _something else_. Poor G+.

I think they are trying to spin it as a privacy-protecting move. This gains them two things:

1. They save face a little by not publicly confessing it was a failure.

2. Big tech (Facebook, Google, etc.) is facing privacy-related criticism right now. They can say, hey, this is yet one more step we're taking to improve the situation for everyone.

And they might even be partially right about both. Maybe they would have shut it down eventually but privacy challenges caused them to do it sooner than they otherwise would have.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#119

Post by coldtea »

8ytecoder wrote: post #65
evgen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunitie…

This is a very cynical view of things. I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts. I can, however, perfectly imagine a PM who is "extremely numbers driven" to look a bad version of the algorithm that increases the time users spend shifting through shit and assume that the algorithm is a huge success b…

>I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts.

Really? Especially a FB PM you mean? Because PMs otherwise have been known to use exactly such techniques and worse:

https://darkpatterns.org/

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