> consumer Google+
What is our relationship to Google? Are we really consumers of Google? Content creators? Ad targetees? Impressionees? Folks? Lemmings?
Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
211–220 of 733 posts
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is rather different from Google Reader. Reader was a popular service that was going strong, the discontinuation really was a hassle to a lot of people. Google+ was essentially not used at all, so this should affect very few people.
What’s the evidence that Google Reader was “a popular service that was going strong”? I don’t doubt there were a bunch of people in tech and media who were and still are vocally angry, but I don’t recall data showing that Reader was anything but a niche product.
It wasn’t expanding at Twitter/Facebook rates but it was apparently growing on a continuing basis. More importantly, however, it was popular with communities with outsize influence – journalists, writers, bloggers, academics, librarians, etc. who used it to follow and share — so when they launched a really half-assed replacement (i.e. it didn’t even work on mobile) most of the people writing reviews and answering questions were starting from a position of something which was useful to them being replaced with a mess, and Google+ never recovered from that bad reputation.
Years later, I was at a museum/gallery/archive/library tech conference and the Google Cultural Institute folks were running their sales pitch. Multiple people asked them where their institution would be “when you cancel this like Google Reader”, a sentiment I’ve heard in enough other contexts that I doubt is fully appreciated by Google management even if it has been good for getting users to think about lock-in.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#213Where will Linus Torvalds blog now?
He has left the Linux project, at least temporarily[0], so presumably he will not be blogging, or alternatively he will have more time to host his own blog.
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-a-break-f...
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like. It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see o…
Mastodon and Diaspora are both horrible names for anything aspiring to be socially popular. The former conveys something lumbering, slow, and now extinct. The latter sounds like a gastrointestinal disease if you don't know what it means, and conjures up images of a group of people being expelled or fleeing if you do.
While it sounds shallow I have to agree. I think your product name is part of the UI and should be as friendly and memorable as possible.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#215The damage control we're seeing is almost as blatantly immoral as a quasi-government monopoly appointing itself as the internet police and then neglecting to disclose its own breeches to the public.
Google is evil.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#216I am so done with Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
I deleted my Facebook and Instagram three weeks ago and haven't looked back. I removed Chrome and Chromium from all my computers. No, I don't want to sync using your servers. If you let me host the sync servers myself like Mozilla does I'd consider it.
If my friends want to talk to me they can make an account on my privately hosted Matrix.org chat server and use the open-source Riot.im client.
It works flawlessly and I don't have to worry about being spied on.
Next is Gmail. I find the new UI atrocious. I'm keeping my eye on Maps alternatives as well.
The faster I can get rid of all this crap the better off I will be.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#217Earlier 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…
The milk is always at the back of the store.
That is where the loading bays are, so they keep the fridges nearby so cold items have less chance to heat up. Plus milk is often stocked from behind, which can only be done where they have the extra space at the back of the store.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it exists because it's a concise way to communicate "this is ending, and will end in a predetermined amount of time, but it has not yet ended" in the same manner that sunset indicates that a day is ending but has not ended yet.
I'm a non-native speaker and sunsetting is not clear to me. I guessed what it means because I know Google and how popular Google+ is (in relative terms, I'm sure there's still hundreds of thousands of people who will lose contacts over this), but if someone had said Cloudflare is sunsetting, I'd just not have known what it meant. And even knowing what it means, as I do now, I wouldn't say that sunsetting is any clear…
There you have it, you've learned a new word!
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not relevant, but "the fish rots from the head" is relevant to Chinese? I cannot find any explanation of that connection. Just curious.
When I search Google for [fish rots from head], the top 3 results each mention some Chinese connection – one calls it a "Chinese proverb", others say it's been variously attributed to many traditions, often Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. (So: maybe that's an origin. Or perhaps there's something vaguely similar in some Chinese traditions. Or perhaps it's just a common mal-attribution, as there's a tendency in the west to…
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#220wow the censors got to this one quick