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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#241

Post by reitanqild »

tonfa wrote: post #233
reitanqild wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would instagram work? (I have some photographer friends and they seem fairly active there).

For photography maybe.

But it is too limited (Google+ lets you write and cite text posts etc.)

Also while I originally liked it I think it is too heavily tied into Facebook now.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#242

Post by Twirrim »

From my perspective, the one thing Google got _really_ wrong with G+ was their APIs. When G+ was launched, tools like TweetDeck were heavily used for interacting with Twitter, Facebook and the like. All of a sudden along came a service that had no APIs by which you could post to it. Something you needed to specifically go and open a separate application for.

If they'd made public read & write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You've got to either:

1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you

2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.

G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren't _that_ compelling.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#243

Post by at-fates-hands »

adrianmonk wrote: post #98
evgen wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

I'd like to think that's not true, but it wouldn't be the first time such a technique has been used, apparently successfully. Witness the local TV news which is always teasing that some story is coming up next, only to put it at the very end of the broadcast so that you have to watch the whole 30 minute program (including commercials) to hear the 1 minute you care about.

Our local station started doing this where they would list the stories coming up on the right hand side of the screen. They held to it for about two weeks. Then they kept it, but then continually shifted the stories during commercial breaks. After many, many complaints, they finally got rid of it.

Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).

It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#244

Post by JoblessWonder »

bliblah wrote: post #223
mindcrime wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users? It did have users. I have no idea the exact number, and clearly it wasn't as many as Facebook, but it wasn't the ghost town people always made it out to be. Some of the Communities were actually quite active.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45792349 > "The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90% of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds." While i'm sure power law applies, 5 seconds is a hilariously low amount of engagement for the 90%

5 seconds is literally "I clicked the wrong link from Gmail."

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#245

Post by xd1936 »

konschubert wrote: post #132
ChuckMcM wrote: post #102

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…

Btw, is anyone building a google inbox clone yet?

Seriously. I'd argue that Inbox was _very_ good at what it did... Re-bundle email into logical groups, automatically. It's fantastic on mobile.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#246

Post by mattnewton »

8ytecoder wrote: post #65
evgen wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

This is a very cynical view of things. I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts. I can, however, perfectly imagine a PM who is "extremely numbers driven" to look a bad version of the algorithm that increases the time users spend shifting through shit and assume that the algorithm is a huge success b…

Easy, launder it through abstract metrics like “engagement” and “ad relevance” and the talks are about what make those numbers go up, not about holding pictures of your friends hostage behind more ads.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#247

Post by gaius »

cletus wrote: post #99

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…

Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model.

This was a half-arsed attempt at inflating user numbers by counting every user of YouTube as a login to Google+.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#248

Post by eslaught »

amaccuish wrote: post #169
stedaniels wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, the concept was never fleshed out and is all but buried and featureless.

Nope. They're shutting it down https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...

That's the feature for viewing a separate feed per friend list. The basic functionality of creating friend lists and assigning them different privacy settings isn't going anywhere.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#249

Post by at-fates-hands »

_uhtu wrote: post #6

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…

> Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.

While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.

I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.

This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.

Insanely, insanely hard.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#250

Post by softawre »

eslaught wrote: post #248
amaccuish wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. They're shutting it down https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...

That's the feature for viewing a separate feed per friend list. The basic functionality of creating friend lists and assigning them different privacy settings isn't going anywhere.

Okay, but we're specifically talking about only viewing a feed of certain folks here..
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