21–30 of 45 posts
The point about Facebook is well made. I'm glad that Facebook have taken the decision (thus far at least) not to overload their core UX with JS effects. This means that it is nearly always very easy to use FB. By contrast, it always feels like it takes twice as long as it should to tweet and use G+, because the UX has been designed to be "beautiful." And I'm in Europe - I can only imagine it is an order of magnitude…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is actually about Zimbabwe, not South Africa. I think what he means is that the title is excessively general "Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa". It's a bit like writing about the trouble you are having getting a fast Internet connection in Guatemala and then saying "North America" has connectivity issues. Different countries in Africa are very different from each other. It's like generalizing a…
Fair enough, I agree that the author was guilty of the kind of continent-wide generalisations that's always misleading. I was just a bit confused by the parent post's reference to South Africa, which was a bit off-topic as the author is from Zimbabwe. My assumption was that there were two possible explanations, that the post's author confused South Africa with Southern Africa, or that they considered South Africa to…
Indeed Zimbabwe is not representative of all Africa. However, Zimbabwe actually has better internet that most African countries. At least it's in the top 10 of 54 countries on the continent according to Ookla (http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/)
If Zimbabwe's internet is bad enough to cause users problems loading Google+, It's likely worse in the majority of the countries on the continent.
Generalising therefore was not meant to paint the picture that all Africa is the same, but that Google (if they read this) need to have a strategy that takes into account the poor internet quality the bulk of Africa has.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough, I agree that the author was guilty of the kind of continent-wide generalisations that's always misleading. I was just a bit confused by the parent post's reference to South Africa, which was a bit off-topic as the author is from Zimbabwe. My assumption was that there were two possible explanations, that the post's author confused South Africa with Southern Africa, or that they considered South Africa to…
I'm the author. Indeed Zimbabwe is not representative of all Africa. However, Zimbabwe actually has better internet that most African countries. At least it's in the top 10 of 54 countries on the continent according to Ookla ( http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/ ) If Zimbabwe's internet is bad enough to cause users problems loading Google+, It's likely worse in the majority of the countries on the continen…
I do understand the point you were making, but unfortunately it does create the potential for your point to be forgotten as the discussion gets derailed into what is and what isn't representative of Africa. It may have been better to make that part of your title the 'Developing World' or something similar.
In any case I agree with the point you were making, which is that too many sites, especially social networking sites, are paying too little attention to optimising the experience for those on slower connections with high latency. So kudos for raising it and pointing to a specific example (Google+).
In Rwanda here - can't say I notice much difference between Google+ and Facebook. The Facebook website is significantly more usable than the Facebook Android app which doesn't work at all... but I think that applies the world over.
The point about Facebook is well made. I'm glad that Facebook have taken the decision (thus far at least) not to overload their core UX with JS effects. This means that it is nearly always very easy to use FB. By contrast, it always feels like it takes twice as long as it should to tweet and use G+, because the UX has been designed to be "beautiful." And I'm in Europe - I can only imagine it is an order of magnitude…
clearly you don't have timeline yet...
For those living in large US and European cities we take our internet speed for granted. I am assuming that it's not google to blame but rather local infrastructure?
Depends what you mean by "local infrastructure". Up until recently east Africa dint have a fiber link to the rest of the internet, it was all satilite. Forget last miles, this is the last 1000 miles.
I'm from South Africa. I'm not sure if they cache Google+ here (I know they cache YouTube) or use a CDN, but I've found Google+ to do exactly this. It's slow, and sometimes stuff just doesn't load (especially images). It's strange, because Google+ is the first social network I've seen that actually promotes itself on my campus (large installs with lifesize Angry Birds).
and again SouthAfrica != Africa
The post is from Zimbabwe so do you mean Southern Africa?
fb loads fast, works perfectly - and after i resized my pictures to 480 to 360 i can even upload them.
my personal opinion is, that any website/app that implements it's scrollbars via JS has to much JS.
