That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use.
I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off.
I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.
Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
As for now, here are my options :
- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing
- not publishing anything
Sadly, it often comes to that last option.
Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying.
Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.
May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
Yup, that's a killer. I have people who follow me for personal stuff, a few people who follow me for kayaking stuff, a couple hundred people who apparently follow me for tech/entrepreneurial stuff and some people who follow me for interesting links to French content.
But the tech people have only a limited interest in kayaking, none of the kayaking people care weird French TV series, and so on. So anything I say is going to bore someone. At least Google+ circles make it easy to restrict 99% of the "adorable child" photos to my immediate family. But that only works for those followers I know personally, not the couple hundred strangers who follow me for one reason or another.
How not to be boring, rule 101: Thou shalt not obsess about one's hobbies to people who are not interested.
Twitter works a bit better, because I can have several independent Twitter accounts: one per language that I write in, or one per enthusiasm, or whatever works for me.
But Google+ forces me to publish only that subset of content which is interesting to almost all my followers. And that's very nearly the null set.
What is lacking is 'channel negotiation' between the sender and the receiver. The sender knows what he sends - the receiver knows what he wants to receive - neither of them has the full information and they need to collaborate on defining the channel connecting them.
For example the sender can sort their messages into out-channels (as it is partially implemented in Google+ via circles) and the receiver can chose what out-channels he subscribes to (which is not present in Google+) - this is the classical publish-subscribe design pattern.
What I would like to see is a bit more - I would like the receiver to be able to also apply some additional sorting logic to the subscribed channels, and he could choose the results depending on the mood - or he could some of it also copy directly to his out-channels. In short what I would like to see is a 'social routing' - but that would probably require that the user has full control over his node.
Yeah. For precisely this reason, I maintain two Twitter accounts: business me and personal me. It kills me that Google+'s Circles were only about privacy control, not targeted sharing.
You can easily create Google+ "pages" to solve exactly this problem. They have the added bonus of not requiring "real names", so you could be using a pseudonym or something if you wanted
You can totally post to circles though, and then only people in that circle of yours would see it.
G+ is great for passions, Twitter for perceptions and FB for people. Check out Guy Kawasaki's Book, "What The Plus". It's short read and really helped me get the most out of it.
This has always been the top problem with Google+ for me.
Maybe I want to hear about your code or your religion but I really really don't have the time and energy to wade through your cats, politics, etc.
So, what's wrong with using circles for option 1? You'd rather like to have the posts public, but only to people with french browser settings? IMO that's asking a bit much, it's a functionality I'd expect from a good blogger platform but not a general purpose social media platform.
Note that I often feel G+ to be off as well, but for other reasons. One issue that sprung into my eye lately: There's absolutely no notification about new messages if you don't have any G+ apps or extensions installed. The logged in google page shows me notifications, which do not include messages, but rather useless clutter I don't care about. Is this Google's way of forcing people into installing their browser extension? It seems a rather big oversight to me.
I apologize for the shameless plug, but we're at the early stages of solving some of the problems you mentioned at http://NowVia.com
It lets you create topic-based "channels" that people can follow. So you could have one for 3-D printing, and when you add to it, you know everyone following it is specifically interested in 3-D printing. I'd love your feedback if you decide to have a play :-)
They should have given up trying to be the number one and building a walled garden. Rather, they should have opened up Google+.
* Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface *
* Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream
* Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora)
* Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature.
* Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users.
----
*) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)
People don't seem to understand that Google+ was used internally before launch as though it were Facebook; people only shared with their friends and family. But when the product was launched to the public, it was given a limited release, biasing it to the tech crowd, and they gave the ability to give posts "public" visibility. Well these two things quickly turned Google+ into Twitter rather than Facebook.
Then they spent the next few years trying to fix the disaster they had caused. It would have been a great product if they thought through the launch. But they didn't.
I was just thinking this. Google+ is much more like twitter, where you can follow people to see what they're saying, and there's not necessarily a reciprocal relationship. I also post publicly to Google+, like Twitter, and unlike Facebook where everything I post is private (and generally aimed towards family and RL friends).
I think Google+ in general is totally fine. In general it's better than Facebook or Twitter.... I'm not sure why so many people seem to dislike it. The integration with other Google products doesn't bother me at all. I don't comment on youtube pretty much ever, and I don't mind the auto-cross posting when I post to my blogger blog.
I really wish they had just rolled with it and allowed it to grow as a new Twitter-like product. It still is from what I can see. The majority of people I follow are people I don't know outside of G+ who share publicly or to interest-based circles.
If 100% of Google Reader users enthusiastically adopted Google+, would that have even come close to what they were hoping to ultimately get? That's probably a rounding error by Facebook's usage numbers.
I disagree. People who used Reader were early adopters and influencers. Perhaps it was only 8 million users from Reader, but they would have had a multiplier effect.
There were other things that google could have done, but I agree not enabling RSS was a poor decision on Google's part.
To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability.
So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base.
I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews.
Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.
It's good to have an opinion. Also I like short, focussed blog posts. But the assumption made is too simple to gain anything, neither for Google nor for the HN community. For instance, integrating product A into product B is a lot of work, additionally to maintaining each of the products separately. And to me it seems as if Google simply didn't want to maintain the software behind Reader anymore. This also means integrating it (more costs than just keeping it as it is) is not a valid option. Then it might not even have a positive influence, because there are likely many people who used G+ but not Reader (like me) and many users who used Reader and not G+. For those people the integration of a completely new tool is not different from adding X new features. And we all know that adding X new features does not improve any product, right?
This is the way I've been using Facebook for years. Most of the publications I follow have FB pages to which they submit their most pertinent content (for small publications and individual authors this usually ends up being every story or post). I can skim what's new and get other recommendations from people that I know. With a little bit of work I can also filter down what I see to just the people whose opinions I care about. At least that's the way it worked for several years.
Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.
I totally agree that Facebook is shooting themselves in the foot. Already we see publishers and brands moving away from Facebook to platforms (e.g. Twitter, Instagram) where all their content will be seen.
Google never needed Google+ to be successful, it was just a means to complete their analytics and ad platforms with more data about the users by awkwardly signing them up.
As Wave, it might also have led to the development of new internal processes (providing a band aid for things like youtube comments) and finally on Google's look and feel rebranding.
Now Google has new ideas on how to feed the analytics and ad platforms with a line of futuristic projects that may or may not improve your daily life.
Taking this with a grain of salt it might make sense. For Google to do what they do they need to know everything about their users and their environment, which closes the circle feeding the products that are giving the company value.
I don't really think this would have helped much, but I do think that it highlights a part of why G+ has not been a very big success. It just lacks a compelling use case to make you come back to it after you discover that it doesn't have Facebook's network effect. There's nothing it does that Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook don't do better, aside from look kind of googly and force you to pick which one of your 5 gmail/apps account identities you want to really use.
If I had been able to selectively subscribe to technical content of posters rather than also hearing about their cats, there is no reason I would not be using it over Twitter and Facebook to catch up on people's microblogging/thoughts.
I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument.
Reader and Blogger integration weren't the biggest failings of G+, but tying those particular products into the service could have helped it along. In particular, giving easier ways to follow specific items or topics of interest (via Reader) and allowing for more expressive and focused content (via Blogger).
Truth is, G+ was mis-architected from the ground up, starting with Circles. Numerous abortive directions were taken (anyone remember "sparks"?).
The real blunders, though, were in utterly mismanaging and misunderstanding what real community is, and how it is formed and fostered. Real Names, Nymwars, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all massive (and entirely avoidable) blunders.
A large part of it was that Google had a very clear idea of what it wanted, but didn't much care for what its users' interests were. And when the users told them, they basically said "la la la la la, I can't hear you!".
The underlying technology is solid. I wish the sites I use instead of G+ had the clusters, search depth, breadth, and speed, the reliability, and the performance of Google. They don't. But what they've got are much better UI, often other features which exceed G+, and above and beyond all else, VASTLY healthier communities and relations between the sites and those communities.
The biggest problem for me is all the FAKE ACTIVITY you can find in the platform. I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.
I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive.
I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile.
All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too.
We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.
I was looking forward to G+ revamping the core functionality of Google Reader. But it didn't really do anything after it reached "Facebook wall with circles" stage.
I used to be a Google fan for many things. but that was conditional on execution. They just seem to start things and then abortively stop them short of completion, over and over again. Then revamp the appearance or something a couple of times and let it rot until it's deprecated, or they crank up the prices. I don't understand how so much money and talent can help so many visionary ideas just stall and get clubbed to death.
Lack of product improvement hurt Google+ the most. Too many important things, like organizing pictures, work badly. Some things, like managing events, are just terrible and full of bugs. Neither have improved. There is no reason to hope.
Contrast with Maps: Maps made Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every release.
YouTubers got really pissed off with Google+ comments, but that has calmed down now because really it's still just comments below a video. What that did though was it made people (who may never have even tried +) really annoyed with it. But for RSS, imagine if they forced people to read it on +, there would be uproar.
Having to open a new tab with an auto-playing video to see the comment someone replied to is not okay. Having to do it for every comment in a long thread is not okay. The only reason people have stopped talking about it is that talking about it accomplishes nothing; Google just wants their site to be shit.
The thing that made me barely use Google+ is the lack of a posting API.
With FB, Twitter, etc. I can use one app to fill all of them with content. Can't do that with Google+ and only recently it started working for pages (which I have no need of).
I don't think anything needs to be integrated into Google+. They need to integrate Google+ with the rest of the web. I have a photo on Google+ that I want to send to a friend on a dumb chat client or email. How do I do that using a single URL? I don't want to send someone an interactive sharing experience, just a URL. If they decide to use the platform for further communication that's great but you shouldn't have to.
I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google!
But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.
> ... Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google!
So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.
This is just specualtion. There is no hard evidence that they are shifting a thousand talent to other things at once. In fact, in a previous discussion it was said that people were moving to a new building on the campus. Did the author just ASSUME that it was a sign of the changing.
I do think Google is thinking about a new strategy, but when he says "Google is getting away from Google+" is just pure speculation.
The real deal is that we have gap. There is a distance in using so many tools. I post it on Twitter but i want that to appear on FB but not G+. Or whatever. I have RSS feed. I have photos I want to share but not indexed or shared on Google Plus. This is sure something a startup can take on. But this is where social network companies are failing to do well BECAUSE they all want everyone to join their platform and ONLY their platform.
As soon as Google+ insisted on real names, they made me realize it was only a vehicle for selling my privacy (pretty much my only motive for leaving Facebook). Now interested in neither.
[+] [-] oelmekki|12 years ago|reply
I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off.
I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.
Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
As for now, here are my options :
- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing
- not publishing anything
Sadly, it often comes to that last option.
Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying.
Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.
[+] [-] ekidd|12 years ago|reply
Yup, that's a killer. I have people who follow me for personal stuff, a few people who follow me for kayaking stuff, a couple hundred people who apparently follow me for tech/entrepreneurial stuff and some people who follow me for interesting links to French content.
But the tech people have only a limited interest in kayaking, none of the kayaking people care weird French TV series, and so on. So anything I say is going to bore someone. At least Google+ circles make it easy to restrict 99% of the "adorable child" photos to my immediate family. But that only works for those followers I know personally, not the couple hundred strangers who follow me for one reason or another.
How not to be boring, rule 101: Thou shalt not obsess about one's hobbies to people who are not interested.
Twitter works a bit better, because I can have several independent Twitter accounts: one per language that I write in, or one per enthusiasm, or whatever works for me.
But Google+ forces me to publish only that subset of content which is interesting to almost all my followers. And that's very nearly the null set.
[+] [-] zby|12 years ago|reply
For example the sender can sort their messages into out-channels (as it is partially implemented in Google+ via circles) and the receiver can chose what out-channels he subscribes to (which is not present in Google+) - this is the classical publish-subscribe design pattern.
What I would like to see is a bit more - I would like the receiver to be able to also apply some additional sorting logic to the subscribed channels, and he could choose the results depending on the mood - or he could some of it also copy directly to his out-channels. In short what I would like to see is a 'social routing' - but that would probably require that the user has full control over his node.
[+] [-] Lerc|12 years ago|reply
People will say something "I'm wearing my Engineers hat now" to make it clear that they are communicating from a particular viewpoint.
Hats, and indeed Masks(where you see only the headgear and not the identity behind it), would be a great addition to Google+.
[+] [-] wpietri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiziano88|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaRDiaK|12 years ago|reply
G+ is great for passions, Twitter for perceptions and FB for people. Check out Guy Kawasaki's Book, "What The Plus". It's short read and really helped me get the most out of it.
[+] [-] pekk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_mueller|12 years ago|reply
Note that I often feel G+ to be off as well, but for other reasons. One issue that sprung into my eye lately: There's absolutely no notification about new messages if you don't have any G+ apps or extensions installed. The logged in google page shows me notifications, which do not include messages, but rather useless clutter I don't care about. Is this Google's way of forcing people into installing their browser extension? It seems a rather big oversight to me.
[+] [-] ramykhuffash|12 years ago|reply
It lets you create topic-based "channels" that people can follow. So you could have one for 3-D printing, and when you add to it, you know everyone following it is specifically interested in 3-D printing. I'd love your feedback if you decide to have a play :-)
[+] [-] lighthazard|12 years ago|reply
Doesn't Google+ have "circles" which lets you decide who you want to share with? Couldn't that take care of the above issue?
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
The FB way of solving this is having a "fan page" for each topic
Pages exist in G+ but they're not as popular and not as integrated to the thing
[+] [-] captainmuon|12 years ago|reply
* Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface *
* Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream
* Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora)
* Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature.
* Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users.
----
*) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)
[+] [-] fudged71|12 years ago|reply
Then they spent the next few years trying to fix the disaster they had caused. It would have been a great product if they thought through the launch. But they didn't.
[+] [-] NateDad|12 years ago|reply
I think Google+ in general is totally fine. In general it's better than Facebook or Twitter.... I'm not sure why so many people seem to dislike it. The integration with other Google products doesn't bother me at all. I don't comment on youtube pretty much ever, and I don't mind the auto-cross posting when I post to my blogger blog.
[+] [-] Leynos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bratsche|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottporad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nashashmi|12 years ago|reply
To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability.
So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base.
I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews.
Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.
[+] [-] erikb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plorg|12 years ago|reply
Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.
[+] [-] scottporad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kh_hk|12 years ago|reply
Google never needed Google+ to be successful, it was just a means to complete their analytics and ad platforms with more data about the users by awkwardly signing them up.
As Wave, it might also have led to the development of new internal processes (providing a band aid for things like youtube comments) and finally on Google's look and feel rebranding.
Now Google has new ideas on how to feed the analytics and ad platforms with a line of futuristic projects that may or may not improve your daily life.
Taking this with a grain of salt it might make sense. For Google to do what they do they need to know everything about their users and their environment, which closes the circle feeding the products that are giving the company value.
[+] [-] stormbrew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|12 years ago|reply
I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument.
But Plus is ultimately still a failure
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
Truth is, G+ was mis-architected from the ground up, starting with Circles. Numerous abortive directions were taken (anyone remember "sparks"?).
The real blunders, though, were in utterly mismanaging and misunderstanding what real community is, and how it is formed and fostered. Real Names, Nymwars, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all massive (and entirely avoidable) blunders.
A large part of it was that Google had a very clear idea of what it wanted, but didn't much care for what its users' interests were. And when the users told them, they basically said "la la la la la, I can't hear you!".
The underlying technology is solid. I wish the sites I use instead of G+ had the clusters, search depth, breadth, and speed, the reliability, and the performance of Google. They don't. But what they've got are much better UI, often other features which exceed G+, and above and beyond all else, VASTLY healthier communities and relations between the sites and those communities.
[+] [-] soci|12 years ago|reply
I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive.
I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile.
All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too.
We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.
[+] [-] Kequc|12 years ago|reply
I can explain this quote with this quote.
> I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.
[+] [-] grkvlt|12 years ago|reply
If you have any proof to this, please let us know - otherwise I'd suggest this is pure conspiracy-theorist idiocy.
[+] [-] rurounijones|12 years ago|reply
A lot of people would have just been pissed off that "G+ is borging google reader just like it is everything else".
[+] [-] gfodor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|12 years ago|reply
I used to be a Google fan for many things. but that was conditional on execution. They just seem to start things and then abortively stop them short of completion, over and over again. Then revamp the appearance or something a couple of times and let it rot until it's deprecated, or they crank up the prices. I don't understand how so much money and talent can help so many visionary ideas just stall and get clubbed to death.
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-o...
There seems to be cognitive dissonance on people's aversion to strategic opportunism.
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
Contrast with Maps: Maps made Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every release.
It is an execution failure.
[+] [-] roryhughes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymoushn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|12 years ago|reply
With FB, Twitter, etc. I can use one app to fill all of them with content. Can't do that with Google+ and only recently it started working for pages (which I have no need of).
[+] [-] 7952|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elleferrer|12 years ago|reply
But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
I do think Google is thinking about a new strategy, but when he says "Google is getting away from Google+" is just pure speculation.
The real deal is that we have gap. There is a distance in using so many tools. I post it on Twitter but i want that to appear on FB but not G+. Or whatever. I have RSS feed. I have photos I want to share but not indexed or shared on Google Plus. This is sure something a startup can take on. But this is where social network companies are failing to do well BECAUSE they all want everyone to join their platform and ONLY their platform.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eye_of_Mordor|12 years ago|reply