Why Google+ Failed • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#331

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

SamBam wrote: post #111

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…

> Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are. I restarted my Twitter, and just started following people who post things in interested in that are not politics -- for me, that's maker spaces, education, STEM, etc -- and it's night and day. A much smaller group of people who post interesting things, ask questions, interact, and are generally friendly.

I'm all over the map on twitter... I have a heavy interest in politics, though I do have to take breaks now and then. I also follow techies and a few other areas on interest.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#332

Post by skinnymuch » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

cannonedhamster wrote: post #316

Marazan wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realnames stopped influencers who didn't use their Realnames from signing up. If you didn't have contact with either marginalised groups who as a matter of survival didn't use their real name or ancient extremely online people who for the entirety of their internet experience had been known as a handle it wouldn't have crossed your radar. But it was a huge thing.

The irony here is that no one in this comment chain is using their real name, which proves the point that there are indeed chilling effects on speech when you could be punished for a simple difference of opinion. Real names is what made me drop g+. If I want to publish something as me, I don't want another platform controlling that for me. I absolutely concur with your comment that for the people this was big for, it…

That’s because HN culture isn’t to use real names or post too much in your description. Hell thats the only public thing you get. One description box. HN not using real names means nothing. They essentially and culturally have pushed that through.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#333

Post by skinnymuch » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

drivebyubnt wrote: post #304

imgabe wrote: post #117

I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said "screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+. By the time it open…

The main reason Google launches popular products by invitation only is to manage server load. Otherwise you get situations like the Pokemon Go launch, where the service was unreliable for the first few months.

Pokémon Go was mostly fine. I didn’t play it beyond a few months. Nor did most people I know.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#334

Post by Balgair » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #206

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…

Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door. Something about this rings true. it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die…

Tahrir Square in 2011 was the high water mark for a lot of tech. It was the time when we all thought that SV really really was going to change the world for the better this time, no for real reals.

After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#335

Post by mrisoli » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

hunter23 wrote: post #300

I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+ failed when they themselves admit they don't use any social media. While I didn't work on the Google plus team (I was on a different team), the biggest reason in my mind why Google+ failed was motivation. Not a single Google executive on the team had a strong reason for why they should build Google+ besides "we can make a better version of…

Very cliché, but reminds me a lot of Simon Sinek's famous TED talk about "Start with the why", Facebook was driven by its mission, Google was driven by market share.

OTOH same can't be said about Snap vs Facebook, Facebook simply copying many of Snapchat's features is working out pretty well for them.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#336

Post by ramses0 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

nobrains wrote: post #144

Google Plus failed because of the following reasons: 1) Invite Only It makes sense for gmail to be invite only, as you can still connect to non gmail users. Its email. It doesn't make sense to make Google Plus invite only. You are just limiting the growth of your product. It was dumb. 2) Circles Circles were good and bad. Circle are groups. Groups are what everyone now uses on WhatsApp, but WhatsApp is optimized for…

As an outside observer: Real Name was a play at true identity management. There are two true identity managers currently out there: LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for personal.

No other sites have a larger penetration of "socially validated" / "web of trust" connected with real names, pictures, and some kinds of "social/semi-public" activity.

Twitter, Yahoo, etc. have tons of "CoolPerson5583" but correspondingly fewer "true identities" with mutual friends, interaction between members, etc (counter-examples welcome!).

This correspondingly increases the value of "true identity" accounts. 100 twitter accounts could be 100 robots all following each other. 100 facebook accounts tied to pretty much any "real-ish" person pretty regularly will get you ~100 real people on the back-end.

I'm aware of certain people who may have 2-3 semi-active "alternate" facebook accounts (ie: friends-only v. semi-professional, friends-only v. business-related, friends-only v. alternate-group/identity), but facebook accounts are "more important" than twitter accounts because of the _value_ of the social proof/social connections between "real people" vs. "anonymous speech" or "anonymous acquaintances".

A facebook account with very few people in your social circle "vouching for it" would rightfully be greeted with suspicion. A facebook account is very difficult to "take over", as with a sufficient number of connections, your identity in facebook is directly related to who you're connected to in your social network. (these statement also apply to LinkedIn).

You simply _cannot_ create/recreate a new facebook or linkedin account in the same way you can create a new twitter account or spotify account. People _KNOW_ you on linkedin/facebook, and even if you "rotate" your account, you'd just end up in the same "slot" in the social network.

However on twitter, if I were to make "userfoo123" and "userbar456", those two users could have wildly different personalities/actions/social-circles, etc much more easily than having two accounts on facebook or to accounts on linkedin.

GMail/email accounts are sometimes another proxy for "real identity" b/c they are often associated with a particular individual, contain materially sensitive information, and are kindof rough to re-create in case you wanted to change your identity (logins/password resets, etc.).

However, gmail/email accounts are much more prone to personal identity management and not _social_ identity management (ie: you log into your bank account w/ your gmail address, but you don't usually directly post cat-memes with your gmail address).

Identity management is a tricky thing. They didn't want to be what twitter turned in to... they wanted to be "the white pages / phone book" and steal that job from Facebook/LinkedIn.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#337

Post by acqq » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

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?

No. It was 1 GB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail

"after considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, a figure that was preposterous compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.[3]"

"On 1 April 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB, advertising it as 2GB plus"

The sample of the news from these times:

https://betanews.com/2005/04/01/gmail-storage-to-reach-2gb-a...

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#338

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

moultano wrote: post #216

reallydude wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The excitement was gone. Most people didn't hear about it. You can ask people on the street. They sure know facebook. Excitement is not a good way to motivate people to move platforms, in general (despite the niche cases like Fyre Festival which are relatively small). Maybe they should have gotten some celebrity support? Otherwise the excitement wasn't mainstream. G+ needed mainstream users. > But people did want t…

> Most people didn't hear about it. Lots of people did. But then they couldn't get an account. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-05-20%202...

I'd argue the problem was more one of the marketing / promotion than the closed beta.

The second spike in the trends graph corresponds with the open access public announcement. Interest spiked, but did not sustain.

It's the lack of sustain that hurt G+ in the end. And much of that was due to a very raw early release -- no search, little content, and very muddled concepts, many never really fixed.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#339

Post by panda88888 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:51 PM UTC

fyoving wrote: post #66

I always thought the name had something to do with it, "google plus" doesn't sound right specially for a social network, also "Hangouts" is a terrible name, it doesn't internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise setting, and "keep" is a good app but it should be called "google notes" nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product. Google has been worse at naming products than they have a…

Agreed. TBH Google+ should be named Hangout, lol. And Hangout should be Google Chat (or similar).

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#340

Post by conductr » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 10:58 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #324

conductr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I never used it but assumed that was their way of trying to be Facebook LinkedIn and Twitter all at once. Problem being the world already had those services and by being separated the circle management is done for you.

The fact that they already existed separately is not a compelling argument by itself. As a counterexample, many people owned both mobile phones and music players in 2007, but the iPhone was a huge success anyway.

I agree with your statement. But counter example is weak. It combined a backpack worth of physical devices, some of which you may have already owned or not. Phone, gps, camera, music, laptop, game console, etc. oh and btw now all those devices were internet connected automatically with no wires/WiFi. The value add was compelling.

I never saw any value add at all for g+ much less a compelling one. My main point was, circles actually seemed like more work which is kind of the opposite of compelling.

The outcomes of these 2 products tells me so. After all Things like Snapchat and instagram popped up due to compelling features. Newer iPhones are struggling due to uncompelling features and would be my counter counter example.