Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers • Hacker News Board

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#601

Post by mindgam3 » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #573

mindgam3 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But still a non player in the much more important consumer market. Arguably Google still has a stake in consumer glasses via their massive investment in Magic Leap. But whether that has any chance of succeeding is a whole other story.

What "important" market is there? It's far from certain that VR/AR hardware is going to amount to anything for the next 10 years.

The important market is when smartglasses replace smartphones as the dominant form of human computer interaction. Which will happen in the next 10 years.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#602

Post by irrational » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

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.

I don't watch the news, but if that is true, why don't you just tune in for the last 5 minutes?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#603

Post by mindgam3 » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:07 AM UTC

buboard wrote: post #537

mindgam3 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If shuttering a consumer product and relegating it to enterprise isn’t admitting defeat, then I don’t know what you mean by defeat.

defeat happened a decade ago, i don't think it was the hope of "victory" that was keeping it alive. Rather, it was not enough of a trouble/liability (until april), and a small number of people/communities still used it.

“defeat happened a decade ago“

...right. Hence, them finally “admitting defeat” which you objected to for some reason in your previous comment.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#604

Post by DCoder » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

ZainRiz wrote: post #529

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…

Uh...it's right there in the blog: Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs: Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API. The bug meant that apps also had access to Profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public. This data is limited to static…

> We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018.

I do believe the problem here is that they didn't disclose it in March or April. Disclosing it six months after the fact does not help trust.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#605

Post by why_only_15 » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #425

fulafel wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the hosting business more important?

cloud, not hosting. hosting is just part of cloud. Well, the first reason is that if Google misses this growth opportunity, they will be punished badly in the market, which will affect their ability to complete long-term against Amazon and MSFT. Growth in cloud is what growth in mobile was 10 years ago: critically important to remain relevant in a market. When cloud switches to "profitable mode" some time in the futu…

The cloud is already in profitable mode - AWS has 25% profit margins.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#606

Post by mindgam3 » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

newscracker wrote: post #589

mindgam3 wrote: post #373

RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they…

Actually, Google+ never aimed at feature parity with Facebook. At least not in the way of having the same set of features and accessible as easily as they were/are on Facebook. Having used both platforms for a long time, this was a huge barrier to doing anything on Google+ even if one didn't mind many people not being on it. If it had copied Facebook shamelessly, it would've given an alternative for all those people…

Uh, they kinda did copy Facebook shamelessly on the core features and basic UI, with the exception of Circles. I log in, I see a feed, I have a way to add “friends”, I can share text/photos/videos/links and comment. It basically looked and felt like logging in to Facebook with no friends on there, less features, and a few interesting UI differences.

If they had done something different, like say restricted you to X number of friends, for any small X, or focused on groups, or done something anonymous like Secret - now that at least would have been different. It may have still failed but at least it would have been trying to scratch a different itch on the social spectrum.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#607

Post by kabacha » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:19 AM UTC

daveguy wrote: post #585

kabacha wrote: post #583

Makes you wonder - if not the first comer advantage would have google made a name for itself? Every product google puts out is an arguable failure and their search engine and email client aren't particularily amazing either - just they were there first. Maybe they should start getting back to the roots - try to secure that first comer advantage by launching experimental products. Oh wait google glass, inbox... For a…

They weren't first in email or search. There had been decades of email clients and at least 5 years of web search engines.

They kinda were first decent ones and the competition wasn't really there. Gmail offered hundreds of megabytes of space when other providers offered 5.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#608

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:19 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #390

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…

I lost my original youtube account due to the merger. The idea of social mirror of society using a single point of identity is (in hindsight) totally ridiculous. We liked so much having pseudos and different personas depending on the context.

That's a very important point, IMHO, and an underrated one.

The next big social network -- the one that turns Facebook into MySpace 2.0 -- will be one that lets users maintain not just multiple 'circles' but multiple identities. I don't just want to separate what my parents see from what my coworkers see, or separate what my (hypothetical) friends from church see from what my (hypothetical) fellow members at the local underground S&M club see. I want to be different people as far as they're all concerned.

This will scale in interesting ways. For one thing, advertisers will actively benefit from this model because it will let them target individual personae.

The notion of keeping the name you were born with and using it forever, everywhere, is the original "single sign-on" paradigm. To the extent single sign-on, single identity is suboptimal in cyberspace, it will eventually be seen as such in real life. The use of real names online already ranges from a useless practice to a hazardous one, depending on how common or how obscure your name is.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#609

Post by crunchiebones » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #475

smelendez wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real solution to this turned out to be using different apps. Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.

That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it. So far, I'm pretty ha…

how do you prevent people from reblogging?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#610

Post by eitally » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #483

fipple wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frozen food doesn’t need to be stocked from the back because they don’t need to make sure the stock turns over very quickly.

Still doesn't explain why the cheese/yogurt/eggs aisle is stocked from the front, why the fresh produce displays are stocked from the top, or why cashew/soy/almond milk (which doesn't need to be refrigerated at all , and is in fact stored unrefrigerated in another part of the store if you buy smaller containers) is in with the milk case. I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.

Some groceries -- every Whole Foods I've ever shopped at, for example -- have the eggs & dairy at the back with the milk, and stock those shelves from the back, too. Non-dairy "milks" only don't require refrigeration if they're ultra-pasteurized tetrapaks, which (in my experience) are only in 1Lt/Qt containers.

Milk is heavy. It's stocked onto shelves slightly angled forward so the remaining stock slides to the front for ease of reach. This need isn't generally applicable, or desireable, for other refrigerated/frozen foods.