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 automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
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 opportunities more visible.
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people.
We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.
Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.
And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.
Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
Apparently my brother's college roommate is a UX designer who worked on Google+ and he told my brother that he was directly inspired by the way I used AIM at the time. I had different screen names for different groups of friends and I would sign into AIM at different times of night with different screen names to chat with all these different groups.
Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
Didn't the circles work in the opposite direction of how Facebook works?
That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.
Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.
The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.
Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
Imho, with Google's raft of products, I think they used it wrong. Google didn't really need a Facebook. However, it did have room for a Disqus. They shouldve started with an improved system for comment pages on Blogger and YouTube (and heck, other products like Google News) and built out a social network from there, not the other way around.
I was excited about the "circles" idea on day one, but on day two I realized it was basically useless because it didn't let you create ad-hoc circle-groups based on venn diagram unions and intersections and differences, and their APIs were read-only so you couldn't hack this on top. I haven't cared about Google+ since.
> Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.
While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.
I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.
This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.
I don't think you can put it down to "terrible marketing and release." Even a crappy release from Google still gave G÷ access and exposure to Google's enourmous user base. G+ got to feature in results whenever you Googled a name... it's 100 times the exposure any upstart social network could hope to achieve, even with genius marketing.
At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.
Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.
Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.
Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.
Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.
Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
I dearly miss the concept of circles in Twitter, both in incoming direction (filtering by what kind of stuff you'd want to read right now) and more important in outgoing direction (so I don't offend my fragile dev-o-sphere snowflake followers with manosphere or alt-right retweets).
Requires 2 things:
- feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them)
- feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle).
AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
> 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.
You can do that already, with lists.
Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
It's a nice idea in theory but I prefer the current solution of completely separating your circles into different apps.
Work/Career - LinkedIn, topics of interest - Twitter/Reddit, personal stuff - FB, etc.
If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
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 should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.
This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.
Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.
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 often much closer to the truth. In G+'s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn't want everyone named "Dog fart", which was a pretty ridiculous argument).
And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility.
Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would've been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone's throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash.
The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it's very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google).
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.
Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head.
Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don't speak for this or any other company.
As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure.
This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
> 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 Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt.
But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.
>Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was trying to unify the account model.
Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products.
But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user.
If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.
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.
> The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.
Google "hate" is a product of their success. IBM, MS, Apple, they all get it or have had it too.
What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.
> Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision
I think a lot of this is because of Steve Jobs. He did this but was for the most part successful at it. Everyone wants to think they are the next Jobs.
I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts.
That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty sure that like me, everyone else stopped.
Now, I have to figure out a way of re-importing all that content to something else, probably homebrewed this time.
> I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts.
I left Google Plus after Google Search kept turning up private posts that I had opted to remove from search.
They keep moving the functionality, but I can still get to it on desktop. Search for something, "Posts" tab, change "From Everyone" dropdown to "From just you".
I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.
I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to "copy" or "follow" AWS in the early years.
Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be "amazing" and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, "More ads, more ads, more ads..." continues on relentlessly.
[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.
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 stuff.
LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google.
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. This is at the time FB is bleeding heavily, is losing trust and people are willing to try something new. Google is one case where it looks like outside traditional CEO Eric Schmidt did much much better not only in operational excellence but also long term big bets including maps, gmail, YouTube, Android etc. Larry Page has nothing comparable to show for in his 7 years of leadership. This might be one reason: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-13/larry-pag...
> Google is shutting down its long-neglected Facebook competitor Google+ following the disclosure of a vulnerability that could have resulted in third-party developers accessing private data from around 500,000 users, the company announced Monday.
Funny how they low-key slip through, the fact that they had an open security vulnerability for 3 years. Like "Hey, we are shutting down Google+ ... Btw, your data may have or may have not been exposed..."
This sucks. The vibrant RPG community on Google+ is in uproar about this and looking for a suitable alternative. (MeWe looks like the most likely candidate at the moment.)
Google+ started out as the best social network. Unfortunately Google has taken every opportunity to ruin it, remove popular features, force ill-considered integration, remove that integration once people are used to it. Lately the spam filtering has been utterly broken, alternating between leaving painfully obvious spam, and marking and hiding comments from people you were following. It seemed like it was an experimental testbed for them where they didn't care if people were using it.
Despite all of that, we hung on because of the great communities, the people we got to know, and because frankly there's no good alternative.
It really seems to me it shouldn't be too hard at this point to design a sane social network. Google+ had all the elements, but refused to apply them correctly.
Facebook is a horrible mess of privacy violations with no control over your feed (though G+'s control often doesn't work as intended either), and besides, there's family and co-workers there. Twitter seems designed for screaming into the void. Tumbler and Instagram don't seem to be my thing.
The reports of Google avoiding making a security disclosure about the potential data breach out of concern for negative PR and regulatory response are very concerning and should be getting more attention
It's just ridiculous that they had it open for 3 years, didn't have proper metrics so don't know exactly how many were breached, but there estimate was 500,000 and they didn't disclose???
C'mon Google, why'd you have to try and hide this...
Google+ was a top-down, scrambling response to Facebook's meteoric rise. I think it ultimately failed because it didn't naturally mesh with or arise from Google's natural strengths.
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
Lots of people here talking about the good bits of Google+ or how they could have made it succeed. But from my POV it was just the wrong idea from the start. From what I saw Google panicked about the growth of Facebook and Twitter and tried to build a competitor. But no one wanted more social networks. And Google didn’t have a compelling story about how they were better. Instead it was just a bunch of user hostile changes—forced linking of accounts, elimination of stuff like Reader—and Google seemed to be forcing itself into parts of your digital life where it wasn’t welcome. I’m glad they’re able to admit it’s a failure now even though it took several years too long and this silly excuse about a privacy review.
Google+ sunsetting is sad news, as I've actually used it fairly actively. (and I have a few dozens of people I interact regularly who I wouldn't have known if not from G+!)
It somewhat acted like a better version of Twitter for me, where I can write a lot more on the post, and actually engage a meaningful discussion with people.
I don't know, even with relaxed character counts on Twitter that it will accommodate same use cases, and I don't like to use Facebook for this purpose as I really don't want introduce a total stranger as my friend...
It's going to be very interesting to see where all the tabletop gaming people land. G+ got a lot of pickup in that hobby because the early API blended tools, like Hangouts with overlays and easily segmented discussion groups, that worked well with online tabletop gaming. Roll20 integrated well with G+ (at least until Google killed the Hangouts API in April 2017).
The early adopters reached enough of a critical mass that others used it solely because of who was already there, making it an actual social network for at least that purpose.
Much like when Reader folded, G+'s critical mass is going to spread out to a half-dozen other places and refragment. And like Reader's exit, there's a vacuum right now for someone to jump in with something better and charge a nominal amount for it.
From my perspective, the one thing Google got _really_ wrong with G+ was their APIs. When G+ was launched, tools like TweetDeck were heavily used for interacting with Twitter, Facebook and the like. All of a sudden along came a service that had no APIs by which you could post to it. Something you needed to specifically go and open a separate application for.
If they'd made public read & write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You've got to either:
1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you
2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.
G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren't _that_ compelling.
[+] [-] _uhtu|7 years ago|reply
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 automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
[+] [-] evgen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|7 years ago|reply
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
[+] [-] vidarh|7 years ago|reply
We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.
Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.
And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.
Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
[+] [-] Gokenstein|7 years ago|reply
Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
[+] [-] PaulHoule|7 years ago|reply
That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.
Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.
The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.
Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
[+] [-] Pxtl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jach|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|7 years ago|reply
While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.
I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.
This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.
Insanely, insanely hard.
[+] [-] netcan|7 years ago|reply
At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.
Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.
Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.
Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.
Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.
Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
[+] [-] _pmf_|7 years ago|reply
Requires 2 things: - feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them) - feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle).
AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
[+] [-] amyjess|7 years ago|reply
You can do that already, with lists.
Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
[+] [-] tinyhouse|7 years ago|reply
If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
[+] [-] mindgam3|7 years ago|reply
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 should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.
This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.
Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.
[+] [-] cletus|7 years ago|reply
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 often much closer to the truth. In G+'s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn't want everyone named "Dog fart", which was a pretty ridiculous argument).
And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility.
Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would've been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone's throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash.
The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it's very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google).
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.
Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head.
Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don't speak for this or any other company.
EDIT: TIL the origin of "a fish rots from the head" is disputed and possibly Turkish not Chinese: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...
[+] [-] dekhn|7 years ago|reply
This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
[+] [-] dwc|7 years ago|reply
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 Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt.
But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.
[+] [-] jklinger410|7 years ago|reply
Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products.
But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user.
If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
This was a half-arsed attempt at inflating user numbers by counting every user of YouTube as a login to Google+.
[+] [-] 394549|7 years ago|reply
This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.
[+] [-] Nelson69|7 years ago|reply
What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.
[+] [-] jedberg|7 years ago|reply
I think a lot of this is because of Steve Jobs. He did this but was for the most part successful at it. Everyone wants to think they are the next Jobs.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justicezyx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|7 years ago|reply
Funny, that YCs motto is "make something people want".
[+] [-] buserror|7 years ago|reply
That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty sure that like me, everyone else stopped.
Now, I have to figure out a way of re-importing all that content to something else, probably homebrewed this time.
IN FACT I've just checked, and G+ seems to have forgotten every single post I've made, but one. https://plus.google.com/+MichelPollet
EDIT: Now the posts are back. I must have been archived on CDs or something ;-)
[+] [-] inferiorhuman|7 years ago|reply
I left Google Plus after Google Search kept turning up private posts that I had opted to remove from search.
[+] [-] omoikane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splonk|7 years ago|reply
They keep moving the functionality, but I can still get to it on desktop. Search for something, "Posts" tab, change "From Everyone" dropdown to "From just you".
[+] [-] jefftk|7 years ago|reply
(Disclosure: I work at Google, on other things)
[+] [-] ssijak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.
I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to "copy" or "follow" AWS in the early years.
Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be "amazing" and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, "More ads, more ads, more ads..." continues on relentlessly.
[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.
[+] [-] ilovecaching|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|7 years ago|reply
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
[+] [-] jrrrr|7 years ago|reply
Poor G+.
[+] [-] tinkerteller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
Edit: here are some other articles providing coverage:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/17951914/google-plus-data...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/08/google-reportedly-exposed-pr...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-plus-hack/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45792349
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/google-plus-shut-down-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-says-it-found-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-shutters-google-socia...
[+] [-] kirykl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xmohit|7 years ago|reply
Source: https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/google-plus-shut-down-...
[+] [-] whoisjuan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|7 years ago|reply
Google+ started out as the best social network. Unfortunately Google has taken every opportunity to ruin it, remove popular features, force ill-considered integration, remove that integration once people are used to it. Lately the spam filtering has been utterly broken, alternating between leaving painfully obvious spam, and marking and hiding comments from people you were following. It seemed like it was an experimental testbed for them where they didn't care if people were using it.
Despite all of that, we hung on because of the great communities, the people we got to know, and because frankly there's no good alternative.
It really seems to me it shouldn't be too hard at this point to design a sane social network. Google+ had all the elements, but refused to apply them correctly.
Facebook is a horrible mess of privacy violations with no control over your feed (though G+'s control often doesn't work as intended either), and besides, there's family and co-workers there. Twitter seems designed for screaming into the void. Tumbler and Instagram don't seem to be my thing.
[+] [-] bearcobra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joethebro|7 years ago|reply
C'mon Google, why'd you have to try and hide this...
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|7 years ago|reply
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
[+] [-] skywhopper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsignedint|7 years ago|reply
It somewhat acted like a better version of Twitter for me, where I can write a lot more on the post, and actually engage a meaningful discussion with people.
I don't know, even with relaxed character counts on Twitter that it will accommodate same use cases, and I don't like to use Facebook for this purpose as I really don't want introduce a total stranger as my friend...
[+] [-] trynewideas|7 years ago|reply
The early adopters reached enough of a critical mass that others used it solely because of who was already there, making it an actual social network for at least that purpose.
Much like when Reader folded, G+'s critical mass is going to spread out to a half-dozen other places and refragment. And like Reader's exit, there's a vacuum right now for someone to jump in with something better and charge a nominal amount for it.
[+] [-] Twirrim|7 years ago|reply
If they'd made public read & write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You've got to either:
1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you
2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.
G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren't _that_ compelling.