Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

Post by junto » Thu, Apr 24, 2014, 9:39 PM UTC

bradbeattie wrote: post #103

cookiecaper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, circles mandate additional cognitive load. They should've been implemented such that each user had 2-3 circles max, like "Work", "Friends", and "Family", and it was almost always invisible (meaning you'd almost always share with all). Prompting the user each time they want to post something and making them choose from their 8-10 circles greatly increases the friction of posting.

That, and the decision is one-sided. Say I want to post something publicly about some new technology. Do I post it publicly and have it go into my family's feeds where it will be considered akin to spam? What if one of my friends actually _is_ interested in new tech but I don't know it? I get that it would be an added layer of indirection, but to allow each user to have multiple subject personas for posting and let o…

Post by gwillen » Thu, Apr 24, 2014, 9:51 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #100

yid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And _all_ of that interest was shot dead due to attempts to own identity by enforcing the use of real names[1]. It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time. Facebook's commercial power was widely attributed to the fact that for the first time, wide swaths of people were using their real identity online. With the investment that Google put into +, the risk of having another sea of MetalHead444s wa…

In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place? The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.

Post by scrame » Thu, Apr 24, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #98

zippergz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it. Social networks have a lot of inertia…

> I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't > reading sites like HN. Anecdote: a decidedly non-technical friend of mine with the last name of "Star" had his Google+ profile disabled after having his name falsely classified as a pseudonym. The only Google+ service that he actually cared about using was Hangouts (a sentiment universal among my friends, it seems... despite its faults, Hangouts really is b…

Post by magicalist » Thu, Apr 24, 2014, 9:59 PM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #141

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #110

I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone. In fact, that seems to be the killer feature. I wonder what will happen to G+ if Facebook adds a similar feature. The stream is interesting if you add enough people and organizations, but I find I can go for days or weeks without checking it. I know some people spend all day on G+, but it's unclear to me why. Between FB, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a host of other…

> I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone. See, I don't use any of Google's 'let us manage your plaintext data' services except for mail (because email travels in the clear anyway, I'm not too bothered by that). If they would enable me to store my phone, tablet & app settings, Chrome passwords and backed-up data on their servers, encrypted on the client with a key known only to clients I control, then i…

Post by magicalist » Thu, Apr 24, 2014, 10:00 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #150

rjf1990 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really do. Anybody who's been at a big company sees it all the time. Most don't make news stories because they aren't at a sexy company like Google, leading up a division that's well-known among consumers. You wouldn't hear about something like the head of fraud detection at American Express leaving his job. I've seen it before (not at Amex, but other large companies).

That's only because you don't read creditnews.com. When a major exec leaves in my industry, everyone is talking about it on Monday, and lawsuits often ensue if they end up at a competitor.