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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#621

Post by eksemplar »

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…

Are they admitting defeat, or are they simply removing another bit of their business that can’t be profitable without exploiting privacy?

To me it seems like google is forcing more and more on selling services rather than user information.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#622

Post by deftnerd »

_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…

MySpace had one clever thing going for it, and that was your "Top 8". People had to choose who would be in their "Top 8" friends listed on their profile page, and being selected by a friend was considered a badge of honor in the friendship.

Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#623

Post by djsumdog »

andybak wrote: post #432
vl wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I get SEA only because I know the city. MTV makes me thing of that channel that use to have music videos in the 90s, before it became the shitty reality TV network, OKR makes it sound like you misspelled Chicago's airport and TI makes calculators.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#624

Post by learnstats2 »

Perhaps one of the reasons that it was difficult to engage with Google+ is because of this outcome: that Google/tech corporations are known to kill products that are not completely successful, even if there are engaged users who will be affected by this shutdown.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#625

Post by djsumdog »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #608
agumonkey wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loca…

I kinda doubt that. It's not in those networks best interests. They need as complete a picture of _you_ as possible to sell you shit.

You can have semi-multiple identities based on the pages you manage/control, but most sites don't want to make it easy to switch accounts because it could lead to ambiguity to their data.

For example, to use multiple accounts on Reddit, you need either The Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) plugin or some type of cookie isolator like container tabs in Firefox or multiple browsers. I think you need to do something similar for Twitter (or use a desktop client).

Federated Social networks that use either ActivityPub or OStatus (like Mastodon, Pleroma and GNUSocial) are interesting because you can have independent accounts on multiple instances, and be logged into all of them without browser tricks (since they're all on different domains).

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#626

Post by mliker »

evgen wrote: post #45
_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…

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…

"There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this."

Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#627

Post by mindgam3 »

eksemplar wrote: post #621
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…

Are they admitting defeat, or are they simply removing another bit of their business that can’t be profitable without exploiting privacy? To me it seems like google is forcing more and more on selling services rather than user information.

Not to beat a dead horse on this defeat thing, but it's defeat from the perspective of trying and failing to have a competing social network. I like your optimism and I wish Google's reasons were that noble. But it's hopelessly naive to say that they are shutting it down as part of a trend of selling services rather than info.

#1, they're shutting it down to avoid a massive backlash after being hacked, because otherwise they might steal the crown of "most disreputable Big Tech co" from Facebook, which could begin to affect their stock price much like it has Facebook's.

#2, they are making inroads in every other part of their business sacrificing user privacy for nebulous features/benefits. See the recent debacle over Chrome auto-sign in. They basically tried to change the definition of Chrome from "it's a browser" to "it's Google" without anybody noticing.

Not particularly consistent with a company ostensibly moving away from a business model relying on targeted advertising.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#628

Post by isoprophlex »

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…

My god this abbreviated office gossip makes it sound like you're discussing some alternate version of the church of scientology

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#629

Post by gcatalfamo »

mliker wrote: post #626
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…

"There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this." Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.

Yes but it is so hidden and “ancient” that I would be surprised if more than 1% of users actively uses it.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#630

Post by stevekemp »

notatoad wrote: post #543
stevekemp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not particularly outraged, but the stereotype that Google shuts down projects too frequently to depend upon them is not going to go away when it keeps happening. I use their mail, as a backup, their maps, and search engine. But I'd think long and hard before I developed against one of their services, or came to rely upon any future-project they released.

just out of curiosity, when was the last time google shut down a product that you were actively using? For me it was Reader, and that was the only time. and yeah, i'm still a little salty about it. But every company shuts things down - google can't keep all their dead and unused failures running forever, and Google+ was obviously deserving of a shutdown. "i don't trust google because they shut down things nobody uses…

Reader, Orkut (yeah!), and Wave were the three I can remember off-hand. I suspect there were more.

I know that I had to cope with some changes to their map-pricing recently too - so I moved to an alternative (easy to manage since I was using leaflet.js as a wrapper).

Rightly or wrongly though I now have the impression that their APIs/Services are not likely to remain.

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