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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#431

Post by p49k »

ma2rten wrote: post #362
p49k wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a news article, though - it's a one-sided PR piece that greatly minimizes important points about the story and completely ignores other points (e.g. the regulation angle). You should have let another news story take its spot; there are plenty others that are not paywalled.

In my opinion the entire privacy breach is a non-issue. Here is what I think happened: Some engineer at Google found a bug in Google Plus that could be used to access private data. The issue was investigated by the security team. They find that no harm was done. Incidents like this happen somewhat regularly at any tech company. Normally nobody thinks twice about it or even thinks about disclosing it to the public. Ho…

By Google's own admission, there is no way for them to know if the issue was abused because they only keep two weeks of log data. If there was a way for them to have found that "no harm was done", they would be emphatically making that point, not the opposite.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#432

Post by andybak »

vl wrote: post #343
cft wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clo…

> SEA/KIR, MTV, OKR, and TI

Please don't do this. It's alienating for people not in your gang.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#433

Post by dleslie »

ubernostrum wrote: post #384
dwc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great. The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Goo…

lest the rank-and-file revolt The rank-and-file are extremely well compensated, with cash, with stock, with on-the-job perks. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? A lot of people will put up with incredible violations of their principles before they'll risk losing a comfortable position.

This is one of many reasons why it is worthwhile to compensate well, at all levels: loyalty can be purchased.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#434

Post by CM30 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #426
CM30 wrote: post #423

Google + was one of those ideas that probably would have done significantly better had Google not been so forceful at getting people to use it. Yes, I get that it's hard to overcome the network effect thing and that fighting Facebook/Twitter/whatever head on would have been tough, but giving people the option to sign in/link accounts probably would have done a lot more for adoption and caused less of a backlash than…

If it wasn't for this I think they could of had a healthier community, and maybe if they had named it better. Google Plus is such a terrible name, I can't help but think to whoever named YouTube Red (which is now Premium, could of been Plus...) but I guess Google as a whole is fragmented just like Microsoft and their Windows team are. It's a pain to manage so many diverse teams with differing directions. I loved the…

Yeah, the name probably didn't help much either. Google reminds me of Nintendo in how bad they are at coming up with catchy names for things.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#435

Post by andybak »

village-idiot wrote: post #334
dougb5 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acquisition of YouTube is one that comes to mind. While it wasn't universally panned, there were a lot of engineers (myself included) who felt it was wildly excessive.

The acquisition of YouTube might’ve not been bad for Google, but I could make the argument that it’s been bad for the rest of us.

I generally still think of YouTube as a global good. Obviously it's a mixed bag but I'd be really sad if it ever vanished.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#436

Post by JepZ »

_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…

Nextcloud [1] (Federated Groupware) has the concept of circles [2], but yes, that's probably not what you meant with social network ;-)

[1]: https://nextcloud.com

[2]: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#437

Post by lifeisstillgood »

_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…

I'm surprised there is not a third party facebook app that can do that for you?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#438

Post by andybak »

panopticon wrote: post #397
ReverseCold wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they move most of the inbox features into Gmail?

Email bundling was one of the biggest reasons I used Inbox and that feature didn't make it over to Gmail.

I heard rumour that it will before the shutdown.

My entire life workflow is screwed if it doesn't.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#439

Post by darpa_escapee »

Jaruzel wrote: post #323
sangnoir wrote: post #272

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. 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.

Does it work like it did in the past?

I've given up every platform that forwent the chronological timeline because other feed algorithms are just frustrating, and Twitter is the only one I miss.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#440

Post by jethro_tell »

jpindar wrote: post #291
UncleMeat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke? G+ has been a laughingstock in terms of actual usage numbers for years. Nobody is using it. The fact that it was still supported is amazing. Is Google supposed to support failing products until the end of time?

By that standard, nobody uses Hacker News.

And, I would expect the uptime, and upkeep to match that, which it does. It's a little forum on a box or two.

If hacker news had 100 people working on it, it would need to do some tricks to stay alive.

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