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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#321

Post by HillaryBriss »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #249
_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+!" post…

Totally agree. FB's massive user base + user inertia = FB's killer feature.

Which, IMHO, means Google didn't understand what it was doing when it started G+.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#322

Post by pkulak »

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.

It doesn't even have to be intentional. Imagine endless ABX testing to increase ad views and session time, cycling through countless feed algorithms. The winners could very well end up being the ones that are most frustrating for the user, but with product and engineering just thinking they are running some tests and reaching goals.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#323

Post by Jaruzel »

sangnoir wrote: post #272
adrianmonk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. It's also why Twitter wants to 'curate' your timeline, instead of simply displaying tweets from people you follow in temporal order.

Twitter have recently re-introduced a chronological timeline as an option.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#324

Post by throwaway2016a »

_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…

They actually borrowed[0] the circles idea from a Lycos product from 10 years earlier that was actually called Circles.[1]

[0] No idea if anyone on the Google team had actually used Lycos Circles but it's not unreasonable to think they might of.

[1] https://info.lycos.com/about/press/?pressReleaseId=1550

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#325

Post by PaulHoule »

_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…

Didn't the circles work in the opposite direction of how Facebook works?

That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.

Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.

The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.

Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#326

Post by spunker540 »

"...the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API"

"This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age."

It is also including a lot more than what they said above:

The json per profile is as follows:

{ "kind": "plus#person", "etag": etag, "nickname": string, "occupation": string, "skills": string, "birthday": string, "gender": string, "emails": [ { "value": string, "type": string } ], "urls": [ { "value": string, "type": string, "label": string } ], "objectType": string, "id": string, "displayName": string, "name": { "formatted": string, "familyName": string, "givenName": string, "middleName": string, "honorificPrefix": string, "honorificSuffix": string }, "tagline": string, "braggingRights": string, "aboutMe": string, "relationshipStatus": string, "url": string, "image": { "url": string,

  },
  "organizations": [
    {
      "name": string,
      "department": string,
      "title": string,
      "type": string,
      "startDate": string,
      "endDate": string,
      "location": string,
      "description": string,
      "primary": boolean
    }
  ],
  "placesLived": [
    {
      "value": string,
      "primary": boolean
    }
  ],
  "isPlusUser": boolean,
  "language": string,
  "ageRange": {
    "min": integer,
    "max": integer
  },
  "plusOneCount": integer,
  "circledByCount": integer,
  "verified": boolean,
  "cover": {
    "layout": string,
    "coverPhoto": {
      "url": string,
      "height": integer,
      "width": integer
    },
    "coverInfo": {
      "topImageOffset": integer,
      "leftImageOffset": integer
    }
  },
  "domain": string
}

(from https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people)

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#327

Post by bootlooped »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #238
Jach wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On Day 2 I realized I was going to spend more time managing my circles than ever posting something to Google+. That was the moment I stopped logging in. (I like your idea of circle management. If they had adopted some sort of algorithmic approach where it "guessed" groups based on mutual interests/connections/etc then that would have worked too. "We've automatically created a group based on your University, when we a…

I can't imagine how I would spend very much time managing circles had I used Google+ more. The day I add somebody is the day I determine what circle(s) they would go into. For most people I know they would stay in those initial circles permanently. Moving contacts between, say, friends and work acquaintances would be pretty infrequent.

How do you imagine you would spend that much time managing them?

ML suggesting or guessing groups automatically would lessen the requirements of the user, but it was already pretty easy I thought.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#328

Post by jacquesm »

oculusthrift wrote: post #179
ilovecaching wrote: post #149

What's really striking about this to me is that Google didn't disclose the security vulnerability. Google is trying to cover it up by moving the ball from 'there was a breach' to 'we're shutting down G+'. This is why I'm super hesitant to be a Google fanboy. Facebook may have my social media info, but Google has my emails, all of my mobile data, access to a bunch of my assets through Google Domains, GCE etc. Scary st…

Sadly the strategy is working. not seeing much mention of breach on HN

Nice they spent so much time on keeping Microsoft honest. Would have been better if they aimed their sights on their own products a bit longer.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#329

Post by Jaruzel »

chrisweekly wrote: post #306
ma2rten wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air. However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate th…

"... out of thin air" I'd say, rather, "out of Gmail account users"

And even then it was 'invite only' for a fairly long time, creating an artificial desire.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#330

Post by ReverseCold »

ssijak wrote: post #232
buserror wrote: post #166

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…

Try google takeout for g+ and see if your posts are there

This works very well. My download was huge (~50something GB I think), but it recovered all the emails that Gmail couldn't find anymore. Now I just use repgrip to search my old emails.
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