Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 733 posts

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#341

Post by microtherion »

pessimizer wrote: post #136
cronz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user. For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural. Facebook on the other hand offers the same fun…

> users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post I'm not sure why this is harder than choosing an email address to send an email to. Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP. Seems like the easiest thing in the world. Also seems weird to say that even selecting a group to share to i…

> Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.

But if you're truly disciplined about this, you never learn that your second cousin is interested in quilting too.

And in many scenarios, there is little reward to being disciplined; unless you're into rather transgressive quilting, you'll probably share your quilting projects with everyone.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#343

Post by vl »

cft wrote: post #115
dekhn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure. This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.

Very good insight. If you think about it, Google benefits from proliferation of third party websites, thus cloud business is synergetic with Google search. Facebook and Google+ are competitive with Google search since they centralize the web. For many, Google search reduced to a search engine for Wikipedia and StackOverflow and a couple of other big sites. This poses a long-term threat for search.

> cloud business is synergetic with Google search

The funny thing is that while it's obviously synergetic, up to 2012 it was a Urs' toy project on the back-burner. It was mostly run from SEA/KIR with MTV leadership largely oblivious. There were gems like this, for example: once they forgot to cover cloud organization in the company OKR meetings broadcasted to all employees :) Only when they realized that external clouds grow so fast that Big G can loose it's preferential access to volume discounts GCP suddenly became the priority (to detriment of TI, which now largely is after-thought).

I'm convinced that Google going to cloud too late is going to be seen in history books in the same light as Microsoft/IE fiasco.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#344

Post by spunker540 »

notahappycamper wrote: post #217
kwillets wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The milk is always at the back of the store.

That is where the loading bays are, so they keep the fridges nearby so cold items have less chance to heat up. Plus milk is often stocked from behind, which can only be done where they have the extra space at the back of the store.

I'm not sure that's a compelling reason. Why aren't frozen goods at the back of the store then?

And are you sure milk needs to be stocked from behind? Is it at the back of the store because it needs to be stocked from behind - or is it stocked from behind simply because its at the back of the store?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#345

Post by fulafel »

dekhn wrote: post #105
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…

As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure. This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.

Why is the hosting business more important?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#346

Post by p49k »

sctb wrote: post #310
p49k wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many articles fit such a description but were “duped”. Wouldn’t it benefit the site if at least one of those were allowed to exist alongside what is essentially Google’s response? The title of this article doesn’t even convey the most important point here, which is that hundreds of thousands of users had personal data leaked; instead, it conveys the idea that Google is doing something to “Protect data” which is somet…

Yes that's a good point, and it seems like the WSJ article has gone further into the story so we've un-duped it. There's a workaround for the paywall in the thread.

Thank you.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#347

Post by storm14k »

cronz wrote: post #41
_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…

The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user. For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural. Facebook on the other hand offers the same fun…

I don't know why circles was so difficult for some. As soon as it launched I dropped FB because I would always get concerned about different groups of people seeing what I posted. On G+ I immediately had a Family circle, a circle of people I knew from work, close friends and then people I met on the service. In fact it didn't seem like people had a problem with the system until TechCrunch gave them talking points. The same thing happened with them integrating it across the properties and the "ramming it down our throats" flap.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#348

Post by zmmmmm »

Twirrim wrote: post #242

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, the…

Yep, people keep rewriting the history, but I remember it exactly: there was enormous enthusiasm and hype around G+. Developers, tech enthusiasts everywhere were "queuing around the block" to get on board with it and to stick it to Facebook. Then Google did two things:

- announced no API access - real names policy debacle

Between those two things they completely destroyed all good will and within months it was essentially dead. I actually think it was a larger turning point that made developers significantly more cynical about Google overall.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#349

Post by usr1106 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #304
_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…

> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook I don't think Facebook will add them, but Diaspora has them.

>But Diaspora has them.

Oh is diaspora still alive? I would use it, but I'd guess I'd have even fewer friends there than on Google+

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#350

Post by Twirrim »

zmmmmm wrote: post #348
Twirrim wrote: post #242

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, the…

Yep, people keep rewriting the history, but I remember it exactly: there was enormous enthusiasm and hype around G+. Developers, tech enthusiasts everywhere were "queuing around the block" to get on board with it and to stick it to Facebook. Then Google did two things: - announced no API access - real names policy debacle Between those two things they completely destroyed all good will and within months it was essent…

They could have survived the real names policy debate, if the API had been there. But that was one hell of a double-whammy.
Post reply on HN