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Why Google+ Failed

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#281

Post by Andrex »

hateful wrote: post #61

While I do (mostly) agree with this article, it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it. I couldn't post something on someone else's page. I could post something to my "feed" and they could happen to see it. But I couldn't post something into their "feed" (wall, timeline) where all their friends could see it and then comment on it. It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong, but too me they we…

> it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it

In fact, that was mentioned:

> Of course, Facebook’s news feed has many of the same design elements that I have described here, including ranking. However, important messages sent directly from one person to another have their own dedicated channel that works more like email, with strictly chronological ordering rather than ranking and with an explicit “mark as read” function. Ranking and algorithms are only used for nonessential postings.

Though I suppose it's ambiguous whether he means someone's Wall/Activity Log or Messenger, I suppose, but I read it as the former.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#282

Post by dman »

pjc50 wrote: post #218
unreal37 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball. Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.

Saw the same thing happen.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#283

Post by Andrex »

asdf21 wrote: post #268

It's legit just not caring about customers. - Want to keep using RSS? Fuck you. - Want to keep using Google Wave? Fuck you. - Want support on your adsense account? Lol, nope. - Account got banned or limited inappropriately? Fuck you. - Want to keep your YouTube and Google accounts separate? Fuck you. - Want to get your domain whitelisted in Gmail? Fuck you. I could go on and on.. They simply do not care about their c…

A customer is someone who pays for a service, and I'm not sure the listed examples qualify.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#284

Post by tigershark »

mongol wrote: post #185
rchaud wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail's invite only approach made sense because in 2004 it was absurd for anybody to offer 1GB of free storage. Hotmail offered 200MB I think. Compared to that, nobody cared about a Facebook ripoff with a different UI and none of the network effects.

I think it was way less than that. Wasn't it like ... 2MB?

I kind of remember that was something like 10 or 20MB, but yes, was about 2 order of magnitude less.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#285

Post by lnanek2 »

unreal37 wrote: post #197
oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball. Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

That's how they treated developers too, though. For Facebook, they give you an API where you can post generic things. For updating my apps to Google Plus, I found they forced you to only use certain verbs, and ignored requests to add more. So they just felt they knew better than the third party developers and ended up making their platform difficult to post from apps (games, tools, etc.).

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#286

Post by joe_the_user »

G+ failed by not understanding Facebook and by not having any intention of giving disgruntled Facebook users what they wanted.

My sense is Facebook in particular brought as many people "online" as did all the previous Internet innovations combined.

Essentially, it did this by giving the functionality of previous online communication approaches while minimizing the noise and merging these together into a "real" relationship called "friend". (Facebook didn't do more than email, blogs and chat, it did less but in a way that people wanted).

Online data can easily form a stream of bits and bytes each person puts together into a different form. This stream only becomes "a thing", a "document", etc when some group of people all perceive it the same way. Facebook made "friends", "posts" and so-forth into "things".

Just as much, human relationships have always had a tension between social-contextual identities and universal identities, between "real" identities and assumed identities. Facebook did a decent job of balancing all of these in that worked for a given individual and that worked for the-person-relating-to-the-given individual. Facebook's privacy model was broken and inherently broken but it still was key to Facebook's success because it's what people want, what human social interactions assume - ie, you can tell your friends things and they'll remain "secret". It's not true in the real world and it's not true on Facebook but it's what people to believe.

And yeah, G+ failed by not understanding any of this. I don't know exactly how many people understood this then aside from Facebook.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#287

Post by mcguire »

dman wrote: post #282
pjc50 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.

Saw the same thing happen.

Ditto, more or less. In a university computer science department.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#288

Post by aerovistae »

marssaxman wrote: post #212
ablation wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have Facebook, and all of these needs for connectivity are taken care of by WhatsApp group chats, essentially. It feels far more intimate and immediate than Facebook ever did too.

How does one discover such WhatsApp group chats? In my very limited experience, it is just like other messaging apps; I can't quite imagine how you would use it as a social network. Am I missing something?

I use WhatsApp this way. It's not a matter of discovery-- it's a matter of creating a group with your existing friends and then keeping in touch with them day-to-day through sharing things in the group chat.

It's identical to a facebook feed....except it's a tiny one with only the people YOU chose to include, and doesn't get polluted with any external content.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#289

Post by makecheck »

Restricting the launch to an arbitrary subset of people made no sense. I wasn’t going to create “circles” if only 4% of the people I wanted in the circle had accounts. I wasn’t going to create events that could only invite 1/3 of the people. I wasn’t going to “share” things if I thought only one person would see the post.

Then there was the bridging. They ruined every service owned by Google by shoehorning direct links to Google+.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#290

Post by mcguire »

jrockway wrote: post #35

The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google, and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had 300 +1s. But I could never see i…

"A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link."

This is why I quickly quit using Facebook after only starting recently. Well, this and the way I cannot repeatably re-find a post after seeing it once.

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