That they are shutting themselves down.
What did Google+ get right?
141–150 of 152 posts
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#142Instead of a seperate UI, Google+ should have been integrated into Gmail. Then more people would naturally use it everyday. The integration would not center around a separate UI but features would be enhanced to gradually bring circles and the like into the core email experience. AOL managed to expand in this way with email and chat as core features.
I think that would have made many people close their accounts, since such an integration wouldn't be welcomed by all.
I only use social networking for professional relations. Sharing anything beyond that with Google would be a nightmare, even if that is a minority opinion.
To the topic at hand: I think their failure was mainly a timing problem. Facebooks largest argument has always been that it is the largest network with the most users.
Many people didn't have an interest to change the network.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#143It's only now that I use Twitter on a daily basis that I realize the problem of having a single feed for your private life, work, hobbies, etc. It just doesn't work and is one of the main reasons why I unfollow people. I think the underlying functionality of circles and collections are a must but maybe they can be implemented in a better and easier to use way.
I think of the underlying problem as "the metadata delusion." We programmers look at difficulties users have dealing with large volumes of data and think, aha! I can solve this by giving them ways to add metadata to those data, so it can be more easily browsed/filtered/faceted/whatever. (We think that because programmers have an analytical cast of mind, which we then extrapolate from -- this would be useful for me ,…
Is that not something many people do all the time with hashtags? Those are a form of metadata...
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean that they canned Google+ because it was making no money? Surely at any time they could add ads. They knew how many people were going there and how often. Therefore they then could make a good guess, from their other apps, at how much money it would make them if they were to add ads. It must have been that after doing the math they thought it was not worth it. Or maybe they never meant it to make money dir…
For quite a long while, Google+ was the third largest social network. It's hard to imagine it could not have made a significant amount of money on ads. It's definitely true that initially Google intended G+ to feed into the overall Google thing, and that many integrations of combining disparate Google properties together was actually done under the banner of G+. But I do wonder with Ruth Porat's more "must be profita…
>Google+ was the third largest social network.
I suspect the metrics were heavily cooked at the time when this was reported. At some point it was really easily to accidentally end up on G+ just by using other Google products, and Youtube comments counted as G+ posts, which no doubt made for incredible activity numbers.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#145Lack of basic boolean logic to define interaction of a post into circles and groups and people.
The "how do I tell all my friends, except John, about a secret birthday party" problem. I complained about this near the launch.
I have a circle of friends in g+ I will miss, if they do not migrate to pluspora or a like service, which is inferior to g+ if not grossly inferior.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#146The website felt slow and bloated performance-wise, despite the design being simple. YouTube feels like that now too.
And Google Cloud console. And Gsuite Admin. And Gmail. Well, maybe the latter isn't simple anymore
Google wants your website to load fast or they'll de-rank you but they need all that javascript on their websites (it doesn't matter if it slows things down).
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#147It had some great features, but the UI/UX was IMO wrong and I'm sure it's what turned people off about it.
So for example instead of having one stream of info, there were multiple columns. This goes against the scrolling list behavior that everyone seems addicted to.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Semi-related, my big hack in my instance's custom CSS was to substantially enlarge the Show More/Show Less buttons to make it a much easier target to tap/click, which makes it much easier to expand or recollapse a post.
This sounds handy. Out of curiosity, does Mastodon have any form of extension/plugin system yet, to allow you to manage these through upgrades and/or distribute them easily, or are you modifying the stylesheets directly?
So far I've been sticking to things I can do purely in CSS (I wanted to move the CW subject lines into the buttons, for instance, but couldn't find a way with the current markup). For that, the Administrator section of Mastodon does keep and store a custom CSS section that it will output as a block on page renders. I've been sharing my CSS changes on my account as I make them, and other admins could just copy and paste them.
(Probably the most major other change was I fought the CSS to make the background 100% black for OLED power savings.)
I'm told there also is a deeper theming system and some shared themes as Ruby gems. I haven't explored that personally because I'm using a shared host and so far I've been happy with the simple custom CSS overrides.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#149Increasingly seems that what Google got right was getting the heck out of the social networking arms race before the 2016 election season .
They still have YouTube.
Re: What did Google+ get right?
#150Instead of a seperate UI, Google+ should have been integrated into Gmail. Then more people would naturally use it everyday. The integration would not center around a separate UI but features would be enhanced to gradually bring circles and the like into the core email experience. AOL managed to expand in this way with email and chat as core features.
Being integrated into Gmail didn't save Google Buzz. (That was also one of Buzz's early critical privacy missteps was being integrated into Gmail and showing up barely announced as opt-out rather than opt-in.)
If they were really smart, G+ should have better bootstrapped out of Google Reader. Google Reader at the time had a very interesting and active social community. (Instead they killed Reader as if it were a competitor to G+ and just hoped the now incredibly inconvenienced community would just move to G+.)