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What did Google+ get right?

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Re: What did Google+ get right?

#91

Post by eitland »

ghaff wrote: post #88
rbinv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I was Google I would be providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate. So, Blogger? Feels kind of abandoned as a product, though.

Sort of abandoned but still works well enough.

Hasn't worked well enough IMO since the day they started changing the domain name of my blog depending on where it was accessed from.

At some point it became too ugly and too hard.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#92

Post by WorldMaker »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #39
WorldMaker wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Mastodon's Content Warnings an interesting/useful model for mixing such content, and it's interesting the number of folks I follow that are falling into a "CW everything" philosophy for this sort of reason. The "Show More" to expand a subject/topic is an interesting "pull" mechanic, as contrasted to Circles' larger focus on "push".

I don't mind CWs as much since they finally added a global "show all" setting you can set in your profile. There's definitely some nice uses beyond "trigger warnings", like keeping a long post from dominating your feed view, or as a spoiler tag for discussing movies.

Semi-related, my big hack in my instance's custom CSS was to substantially enlarge the Show More/Show Less buttons to make it a much easier target to tap/click, which makes it much easier to expand or recollapse a post.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#93

Post by Defcon6 »

A nice post about a really well built social community that got lost because most social media users crave Likes/attention. I can tell you that all your points are good points and I don’t have a BUT neither :) Facebook, insta and Whatsapp make it way too easy for people to use their platforms. Most people take the easiest root and all their friends are there too. For 5 years I’m trying to get people to stop using Whatsapp and step over to Signal. Everyone tells me, that they don’t know anyone on Signal. The same goes for G+ On G+ I had like 20,000 followers on just one type of collection of photos. The people followed it because they where interested in the subject.

Facebook connects people and people are nosy, they want attention and want to see what others are doing. G+ didn’t have that.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#94

Post by vannevar »

notatoad wrote: post #81
jyrkesh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town. I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news…

The obvious solution to me is an intelligent algorithm that decides which of the content in your feed you'll be most interested in and surfaces that for you. And this is exactly what facebook is trying to do. It's obviously a difficult problem though, and they make the wrong call a lot of the time.

A really key piece of information missing from that algorithm is your relationship with the people posting. Sure, an algorithm could infer that, but right now they're terrible at it. Why not just let people specify their relationship and how often they want to see content from someone? Facebook's problem from a user perspective is that the ideal social network for users looks nothing like the ideal social network for maximum profitability, which is what they're trying to build. FB's only hope for the future is to use marketing to convince people that they actually want its brand of dystopia.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#95

Post by INTPenis »

In my view there are two things FB achieved; they got people to come, and they got people to stay.

G+ got people to come, had an amazing position to abuse their monopoly just like with Chrome, but failed to hold them there.

And I believe the interface might have scared some away but I also believe there was nothing fun to occupy your time with while you're waiting for the next notification high.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#96

Post by Terr_ »

erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

Good: Circles as a way to separate social groups

Bad: Forced to share a single "publicly linked identity" across all those groups. John Doe Public Accountant might not want people to know they also exist as John Doe Death Rocker, and vice-versa.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#97

Post by carl8 »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #70

I was an early proponent of G+ when it first opened. I loved the idea of Circles and their implementation of Groups was really good. I didn't love the UI, which I found bland, but the functionality was well thought out. For a while I used it as my primary social media site but Facebook was entrenched even back then and nobody I knew used G+. I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing usef…

> If I was Google I would be providing ... a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate.

They did. It was called OpenSocial, which originally released in late 2007, and was implemented by MySpace and others to compete against the Facebook platform (also released in 2007). I remember when I first looked at its complex XML documentation, that it was much easier just to use the Facebook API.

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

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#98

Post by ghaff »

eitland wrote: post #91
ghaff wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of abandoned but still works well enough.

Hasn't worked well enough IMO since the day they started changing the domain name of my blog depending on where it was accessed from. At some point it became too ugly and too hard.

I've thought about switching to wordpress but I mostly publish on other sites these days and blogger still basically works for me and it's free.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

#100

Post by robotbikes »

Terr_ wrote: post #96
erikig wrote: post #30

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

Good: Circles as a way to separate social groups Bad: Forced to share a single "publicly linked identity" across all those groups. John Doe Public Accountant might not want people to know they also exist as John Doe Death Rocker, and vice-versa.

Yeah I think Google really screwed up when they forced YouTube into the G+ framework and started enforcing a sort of real ID with small exceptions (allowing single letter initials). I think the exceptions can after an uproar. The biggest challenge was people didn't see a reason to use it since the market was already saturated. Also they didn't provide any good tools for automating content creation which helped them avoid spam but also made it less than trivial for content creators to implement a G+ presence.
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