Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company • Hacker News Board

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#251

Post by Tyrannosaurs » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 4:06 PM UTC

cmelbye wrote: post #143

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…

Safe? It threw the Internet into uproar, which continues today as they force YouTube users to either use their real names or create a Google+ brand page for their YouTube username. That doesn't sound like a safe decision to me.

Realistically:

(a) It threw a small but vocal corner of the internet into an uproar. Now many, many of those people were smart and had really thought about the issue and the problems it would cause, but the sad truth is that a vast majority of people really didn't care.

(b) Pretty much anything throws a small but vocal corner of the internet into an uproar.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#252

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #208

dragonwriter wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I can subscribe to feeds You can, if people create them -- Google+ calls named feeds "Pages". You add the Page (originators categorization) to the circle (receivers categorization) you want, and that's how G+ supports classification from both ends of the communication.

What I can't do is create a topic or keyword, and subscribe to that, with a preference for posts from specific individuals. Nor can I subscribe to a Community, but only highly ranked posts (useless without downvotes), and/or of people I find compelling. The Pages route is too many levels of indirection to be successful. Google and Silicon Valley understand that one click can be too much friction, let alone multiple,…

> G+ had a number of useful tools, probably Hangouts at the top of the list, but "Hangouts" UTTERLY FAILS TO COMMUNICATE TO ME what this is. "Group Video Chat" does. And that's what it is.

Group Video Chat is a function of Hangouts, but its not all what Hangouts is -- in fact, its the second key feature noted in most Hangouts marketing. (Hangouts integrates iMessage-style individual and group messaging and group video chat and live broadcast video, "Hangouts on Air").

> I've said before and I'll say it again: that should be spun out as its own product

It pretty much has been for a while -- its got its own mobile app; its directly linked for actions from Gmail, etc. You can get to it through the G+ interface, but its not really tied to G+ as a product (vs. platform) now.

> and ultimately be geared to take on WebMeeting and related products.

That's actually one of the many marketing angles Google and its partenrs (Vidyo, etc.) are already taking with Hangouts and offerings integrating with Hangouts.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#253

Post by frik » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

qq66 wrote: post #78

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…

The real-name policy itself was only known by a small group of people. However, the idea that G+ would be a place for a your One True Identity was directly attacking Facebook, which is not the way in which Facebook was vulnerable. If they had built the entire product (not just the real-name policy) around the idea of pseudonyms or ephemeral identities or multiple identities like Reddit, they may have found more succe…

Google+ could have been the new MySpace. They choose the Facebook way and directly attack them.

Btw. there is even a new MySpace. Is someone using it?

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#254

Post by yuhong » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #218

dredmorbius wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more had protested more strongly or simply walked. I know it's easy to project actions on others, but really, that was a BAD decision.

Unfortunately, not everyone had that sort of mobility. Mortgage holders, people on visas who needed to find another sponsor (and couldn't just go anywhere) and the rest have a harder time moving on. That has to suck: knowing something is rotten but having to stick with it due to external constraints.

Can you write an article on Vic Gundotra's resignation and the problems at Google that needs to be fixed?

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#255

Post by Angostura » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 7:59 PM UTC

ericras wrote: post #160

chime wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to real names is not necessarily Youtube or 4chan. Reddit, HN, Fark, Mefi, Slashdot, and tons of other lard communities work fine with just usernames. The alternative to real names is moderation, policies, flagging/reporting etc. Abuse is always a problem in large communities regardless of real name or username policy and many different solutions exist for each type of abuse. Forcing real name usage w…

It is possible, I agree, but Reddit, HN and others have much more active moderation than Google was probably interested in creating.

The slashdot model is the one to look at then.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#256

Post by pessimizer » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #159

pessimizer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

non-competes are void in California.

Not based necessarily on a non-compete, but based on similar and concurrent projects, "trade secrets" and "proprietary architectures."

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#257

Post by npizzolato » Fri, Apr 25, 2014, 10:53 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #214

npizzolato wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that like it's a short amount of time. Three months is more than enough time for hype to build, peek, and wither, which can -- and did, I would agrue -- kill a social network.

A slow and phased community development worked really, really well for Facebook. Remember: it was deployed into a world already dominated by MySpace and with multiple rivals. Slower, with a solid core community, would have been far better for G+ IMO. It opened up too fast. Not only didn't it have a gelled community, but there were far too many UI / feature glitches and omissions. Many of which persist to this day.

But Facebook had a rather ingenious strategy for their slow rollout. They rolled out an entire college at the same time, so once Facebook was available for you, it was also available to a significant part of your friend group (the lifeblood of a social network). Google+ however just released slowly to a random set of people, so some people could get on, but none of their friends were there.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#258

Post by judk » Sat, Apr 26, 2014, 3:44 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #186

cookiecaper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't want to be reddit.

Ironically, Google inherited the precursor of Reddit, in the form of Google Groups, the interface to what's left of Usenet. It's also done much to kill that -- the interface is abysmal (actually, so is G+, but that's another story). Even some early G+ support channels which were mediated through Google Groups got killed off. I'd posted some detailed feedback early on (2011) which, so far as I can tell, has been nuked…

Reddit doesn't have photo albums or event organization or realtime video chat or a celebrity/Brand platform or product reviews or search engine integration or any sort of privacy controls or a (first-party) Android app with all these features or (for better or worse) a rich visual UI.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#259

Post by superuser2 » Sat, Apr 26, 2014, 9:58 AM 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.

100% of Facebook's value is real names.

That is it. There are hundreds of other services for instant/asynchronous messaging, photo sharing, etc. but only Facebook knows everyone in my life by the same names I do.

I can discover and communicate with anyone I might have heard about in my real life on Facebook because (and only because) they use their real name on Facebook.

Discoverability by real name is the point of Facebook. There are certainly other social networks (i.e. Tumblr, instagram, HN) that people use as online personas separate from their real identities, but Google pretty clearly wanted a piece of Facebook's pie. Pseudonymous Google+ would have been an entirely different community. Maybe a more successful one, but not in the same space as Facebook at all, and not what Google was trying to do.

Interestingly, people use Tumblr as a much more intimate venue, in part because you just can't hold that many people's pseudonyms in your head - at my school, only fairly close friends got to know each other's Tumblr URLs.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#260

Post by superuser2 » Sat, Apr 26, 2014, 9:59 AM UTC

chime wrote: post #75

ericras wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all honesty I probably would have pursued the same real names policy if I had been running Google+. They were trying to avoid having it immediately devolve into the YouTube comments section - aka the scourge of the Internet. I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it.

The alternative to real names is not necessarily Youtube or 4chan. Reddit, HN, Fark, Mefi, Slashdot, and tons of other lard communities work fine with just usernames. The alternative to real names is moderation, policies, flagging/reporting etc. Abuse is always a problem in large communities regardless of real name or username policy and many different solutions exist for each type of abuse. Forcing real name usage w…

Yes, but Google+ was supposed to be Facebook. Those communities are just that - online communities - not venues for real-world friends/acquaintances to interact.