231–240 of 733 posts
The use of the word "sunset" as a verb in posts like this is fucking infuriating. Yes, software types know what it means, but this is a consumer product with tens of millions of users, who have no familiarity with that term. It's a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We're closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.
> Action 1: We are _shutting down_ Google+ for consumers.
I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts . That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty su…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question, is anybody going to be outraged by sunsetting G+?
Not outraged. I'm not that kind of guy. But I'm gonna miss it. I haven't been too active the last few months so I guess I might be to blame too (but then again I've not been active anywhere else either lately except here). Where else do you go to meet people who share interests in a more general sense? HN doesn't care about photography. Twitter doesn't allow me to chose to see someones photos but not their crazy post…
https://news.google.com/search?q=google%2B&hl=en-US&gl=US&ce...
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…
This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.
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.
Reader was an active product for 8 years. What more do you want?
Yep: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-says-it-found-...
"As many as 438 applications might have used the API. Google maintains that it didn’t uncover evidence developers were aware of or abused the security flaw, or that profile data was misused. However, it acknowledged that it has no way of knowing for sure because it doesn’t have “audit rights” over its developers and because it keeps a limited set of activity logs." (https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/08/google-security-breach/)
Google wrote: “Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.”
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From 2016: "The search engine company publicised a critical Windows bug 10 days after informing the software firm about it" (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/01/google-mi...)
From February: "Microsoft misses Google's 90-day deadline, so Google has published details of an exploit mitigation bypass" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-security-google-exp...)
And then: "For the second time in a week, Google reveals another unpatched Windows 10 vulnerability" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-bug-google-again-re...)
In August: "Google discloses vulnerability in Fortnite launcher that allowed possible malware installation" (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-08-27-google-dis...)
Again in August, reporting Samsung bugs: (https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-project-zero-heres-the-...):
"Two terms irked her and simply clashed with Project Zero's practices. "You MUST hold off disclosing the vulnerability in reasonable time, and you MUST get Samsung's consent or inform Samsung about the date before disclosing the vulnerability," said Samsung. "In some cases, Samsung may request not to disclose the vulnerability at all." Again, this clashes with Project Zero's insistence on disclosure."
Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. Currently on Facebook the news feed is…
I was excited about the "circles" idea on day one, but on day two I realized it was basically useless because it didn't let you create ad-hoc circle-groups based on venn diagram unions and intersections and differences, and their APIs were read-only so you couldn't hack this on top. I haven't cared about Google+ since.
packets to packets, bits to bits. I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well. I…
I think they were attempting to encourage new connections, but that's not how to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When I was at google, the one thing I took away was that most of the terrible decisions such as described above were very widely panned before being released inside the company. Everyone one of them. That doesn't mean the group of engineers was always right, but they were very good at pointing out bad, controversial ideas.