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Why Google+ Failed

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#91

Post by duxup »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #89
duxup wrote: post #73

I feel dumb for saying it, but I didn't understand "circles". I think I actually did but I found it a bit confusing and assumed I didn't understand. Actually generally I didn't understand what Google thought the workflow for Google+ was "supposed to be." This actually is something I find hard to understand about a lot of their products. There will be a heartwarming video, or some announcment showing a gee wiz feature…

I understood circles. I spent two hours carefully categorizing everyone I added into the perfect Venn diagram. And then I realized that this was bonkers, and that I never wanted to do it again.

Yeah it seemed like you could put a lot of work into managing your circles ... and it wasn't apparent that you would get get nothing out of it until you did it.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#92

Post by luisdfp »

Causality1 wrote: post #2

>Project Hancock was the internal code name of the project designed to do this. It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. This is actually much more complicated than it sounds; it took a team of engineers somewhere around three months to accomplish it. What this bit glosses over is the PR disaster that was Google forcing Google+ down the throats of its unwilling users. For example, for years…

>It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user.

Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably.

I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off.

Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some videos Barney the Dinosaur because I let my sister use my PC, Google.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#94

Post by mattkevan »

The problem with Google+ is that using it felt like work.

It had some nice ideas, and was in many ways better than Facebook. But it wasn't fun, and it wasn't somewhere that was pleasant to hang out for long.

It also felt like it was solving a problem for Google, but not for its users. I could see how it would be strategic for Google to counter Facebook, and how tying searches into my social graph would result in much better data for advertisers. But I couldn't see how exactly that benefited me.

Also the launch strategy of making it invite-only was daft. I was really excited to get an invite just after launch, until I realised that no-one I knew had an account and there was hardly anyone else to talk to. Never really went back.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#95

Post by iamtheworstdev »

ajross wrote: post #88
aerovistae wrote: post #71

> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot. Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.

My whole extended family all use Facebook to post notes and pictures of kids and cousins, ask questions, say hi, and plan events. I have a clear feeling I would miss out on something if I refused to use the product. What, you say? They don't have to use Facebook to do that? Of course they don't. But they do, and I can't fix that. Your cohort seemingly doesn't, or the members that do aren't members you care about. Tha…

I have this same problem. I solve it by calling them or texting them and asking for updates.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#96

Post by smudgymcscmudge »

aerovistae wrote: post #71

> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot. Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.

As a parent, one kid is involved with a theater group that organizes shows through facebook. School parents tend to communicate through facebook too. Of smaller significance, my regular poker game organizes games over facebook too.

All that added up to me begrudgingly returning to facebook.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#97

Post by ghaff »

duxup wrote: post #91
pavel_lishin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood circles. I spent two hours carefully categorizing everyone I added into the perfect Venn diagram. And then I realized that this was bonkers, and that I never wanted to do it again.

Yeah it seemed like you could put a lot of work into managing your circles ... and it wasn't apparent that you would get get nothing out of it until you did it.

Like anything else you can overdo it. But, at a minimum, you will often want (somewhat overlapping) professional and personal groups. They made sense especially at a time when many people were realizing they didn't want all their social media to be one undifferentiated bucket.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#98

Post by ggambetta »

skybrian wrote: post #65
londons_explore wrote: post #50

The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments. The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release. They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people. If it didn't work there (IE. See sustained growth till it had most of the market share), they should have changed the product, tested in a new town, etc. As OP points…

They tested it on Googlers. However, that's an atypical audience and more testing with a different group would have helped.

They tested it on Googlers, and we were extremely vocal about the things we didn't like, but were ignored by the higher ups (read: Vic), using the argument you mention - "oh, but you're not the typical users".

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#99

Post by GarrisonPrime »

aerovistae wrote: post #71

> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot. Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.

Are you in school or training? And/or do you work with members of your social circle? And/or does family live close? If any of these are true, I can see how Facebook offers little value.

But the older you get, the fewer people you tend to have around. My social life is easily 30 times harder to maintain now than it was when I was in college. Work was also an easy place to find friends and kindred spirits. At first. But now, more and more, my coworkers are younger than me and even if we enjoy each other’s company there is simply less and less we have in common.

Family starts dying off, or gradually moves over time to where everyone is scattered across the globe. Same with friends. Or they get married, have kids, get busy with careers, etc.

New friends and family enter ones life of course, but they come fewer and farther between, and never feel quite as deep as those early life relationships.

Many other platforms offer a way to stay connected, of course. But many of them are either too superficial to feel worthwhile, or have too few people on them, or have too much friction to be consistently used.

I agree most of what is on Facebook is rather irrelevant, and I basically ignore 99% of what people post. But for those of us whose social lives have been scattered to the wind, nothing else out there comes close to Facebook’s utility.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#100

Post by fyoving »

mattkevan wrote: post #83
fyoving wrote: post #66

I always thought the name had something to do with it, "google plus" doesn't sound right specially for a social network, also "Hangouts" is a terrible name, it doesn't internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise setting, and "keep" is a good app but it should be called "google notes" nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product. Google has been worse at naming products than they have a…

Feels like the same people responsible for Mircrosoft's product decisions in the 2000s have now all moved to Google, with a slight twist in strategy. When a Microsoft product didn't do well they called it something different and relaunched, hoping no-one realised it was the same old thing – e.g. Zune Music/Xbox Music/MSN Music/Groove Music/Microsoft Store etc. Google now* just kills it and launches something else, so…

I don't mind the killing off of stuff that doesn't catches on it's a mark of dynamism.
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