I don't get it. So Brin announces to the world that Google+ is the new sliced bread in 2011. Then he tells a small group of people that he thinks he personally should not have been involved with G+. Also the leader of the G+ project leaves (one month after the project started? One month after Brin had his candid talk recently?)
Where in this is the broken trust? What is the author actually upset about? Seems to me like in 2011 Brin and co. thought Google+ was the future. Now Brin simply is admitting that he personally might not have been the right person to take this on and perhaps it was a bad idea (not clear from the poorly written article). On top of that the author is trying to make a story out of the project leader leaving precisely because there was no story there.
I think this piece is terribly written and there is no story behind it. G+ is not my favorite product but I think this is just an outburst of anger that does not deserve our attention.
I wish both Google and Microsoft would understand that you can't force change down users' throats. It needs to come naturally. They need to want it, and have it grow organically.
Sure, forcing them will definitely bring you bigger "adoption" (for lack of a better word) faster, but it will also build up a lot of resentment, potentially negating any advantage you might have from ramming the change through, in the long run.
A lot of people didn't understand Twitter in the first 3+ years, but it still managed to grow organically, because people wanted to join it over the years. Google tried to push Google+ to its 1 billion users within 2 years, with seemingly very little advantage for the users. What did they expect?
Same for Microsoft when it comes to pushing Metro to PC users who have been perfectly happy with their PC interface, but Microsoft wanted to force them to use a tablet interface on a PC. Why? Because Microsoft said so, and because they would get to flash "bigger numbers" to developers for "Metro users". The actual experience of the user on a desktop was barely a distant concern.
If you're a big corporation, and you can't grow a new business organically, then tough luck. Maybe you shouldn't be in that market then.
> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched
I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous.
It's one of those many weird cases where you sit there, hands on your desk, mouth agape looking at some Google property that was fucked over by the G+ project and just ask yourself "doesn't anybody at Google use this garbage?". Because the issues are so immediate and so obvious, it's impossible that nobody raised some red flags.
Which leaves two possibilities:
- Google is composed of such inept socially awkward people that no red flags were raised and they all just proceeded on course doo dee doo doo dee (a scenario I find very hard to believe)
- Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.
The first scenario is hard to believe because it presumes mass and gross incompetence on behalf of most of the employees at Google. But I know googlers, I've been interviews by Google, I've had various interactions with people from Google, and most of them just seem like normal folks from a variety of backgrounds.
As more and more leaks out it sounds like the second scenario is where it's at, and the question is why? Was it just some dumb headed attempt to extract any money possible for the major shareholders by turning the brand into garbage? Or was it just an honest attempt at unifying the properties, just managed at an absolutely amateurish level?
It's all so senseless and stupid and now everything is broken.
The sad thing is, this is something I see all the time, one hopelessly broken pet project is carried by the good idea fairy to some senior manager, and they being a cascade of failures across the rest of the company on something they probably have convinced themselves is just a big gamble with lots of upside. By the time the damage is done and widely recognized, the exec is out the door on their golden parachute leaving the remaining veterans to pick up the pieces and unfuck things. Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas. The only remediation is a long unfucking process and some possible minor impact on share price, meaning he can only buy 2 300' yachts instead of 2 350' yachts.
One of the things that struck me when I worked at Google was that its early rejection of anything that smelled of management or process directly led to the emergence of "Just get things done" sort of mantra, but the scale of early screw-ups limited the ability to get things done only to 'trusted' (generally low employee # folks with a track record) people. I managed to push a project through, in spite of the fact that I wasn't a low numbered employee, but it took 6x longer than it should have and required a crap ton more politicing than it would have if a different person had pushed it. (One person I knew there, given the combination of their history and reputation, could have probably gotten it done in 3 or 4 months)
What that does is greatly magnify the influence of a small number of people and completely nullify the influence of a large number of people. At the time I left, there was some institutional awareness of this issue (heaven knows I had shared it enough with the leadership) but the 'fix' (random injection of 'management' was itself not going well).
And all of that to say, that it takes both good people and good structure to make this happen. I realized I wasn't plugged into the organization at a place where I could make that level of change occur. So when I read the article I recognized a bit of self awareness in Sergi at his over sized influence in a negative way on the product, and a dysfunctional organization which could not guide, or if necessary prevent that influence.
The irony is that if Google was as well managed as a place like NetApp under Warmhoven or GE was under Welch, it would mega-corp scary. (Granted it still can be to an extent, but quite extremely so)
I think there was a more thought-provoking part than the "broke everything it touched" line:
Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products.
Google, particularly its senior executives, have been utterly unrepentant as they've systematically trashed their once hallowed "do no evil" philosophy. The thing I find disappointing is that more people didn't take Schmidt's advice and stop using Google's services.
There are plenty of alternative search engines, e-mail services, video hosting sites, mobile operating systems and browsers. Outside these five, Google have relatively few big success stories anyway. Their track record in recent years has mostly been one failure after another, even sometimes damaging their established brands like YouTube and Google Maps.
And yet despite all the complaining, a lot of users seem to stick by them. I can understand that behaviour with Facebook (and Google+ itself) because of the inherent network effect, but the longevity of Google's brand loyalty is remarkable.
- Google is composed of such inept socially awkward people that no red flags were raised and they all just proceeded on course doo dee doo doo dee (a scenario I find very hard to believe)
The other possibility is that Facebook evolved from a relatively small idea to a very large one, attending to users along the way (Peter Thiel discusses this issue in one of his lectures; G+ launched as a huge product that had to succeed right away, based on what Google engineers thought users want and based on the need to be something Facebook isn't.
People working at Google are smart (and majority that I know are smarter than me). Smart people are going to point that something is wrong. But they will not bitch too much because that will be "career-limiting move".
I jumped on board early when I received an invite. I despised FB and was looking for for something that might actually resemble the tribe.net model of freedom and anonymity.
Unfortunately, I was told that I had to use my real name and signed up accordingly.
Everything was going along fine for about the first 9 months until I got into a small flame war with a woman in Canada about Scientologists (I used to work for some). That turned out to be the end of G+ for me.
It seems that the woman reported me for using a pseudonym, which to me and a few of my friends I obviously wasn't. I was livid! I immediately protested loud and clear in my timeline. One of my "hooped" IRL friends works at Yahoo! and told me that he had good connections at Google and could probably fix it for me. And that if he couldn't do that that he could at least vouch for me.
As he was trying to work his magic the pressure from Google was getting stronger. I had a big notice across my profile telling me that if I didn't provide legal proof of who I was that my account would be suspended in a week. I received the same threats in my gmail. So I started trying to work with them on this matter only to find that I was dealing with bots. I was beyond frustrated!
A few days later my friend came back to me and told me that there didn't seem to be much that he could do. I sure as hell didn't want to send them my my ID or birth certificate! So I caved in, scanned a court document with my full name on it and a judge's signature, and gmail'd it it.
I should mention that by this point Google had decided to lock my profile and place a huge notice across it demanding documents.
It took almost a full 2 weeks for them to get back to me and say that my document was legit. Well, duh!!
With my new found "legal" status I continued to use G+ for about another year or so. But as time marched on I became more and more disillusioned with Google and their products and interacted less and less with G+.
Then June 5th 2013 happened and I was introduced to the world of Edward Snowden. I immediately went and deleted everything from my profile and timeline (no small chore!). I then put a notice on my "about" page stating that due to privacy issues with Google and the NSA that this account is no longer active.
I now only use my gmail account, have been a happy DDG and IXquick user since before this all went down, and haven't been back to G+ since.
I can understand not wanting the NSA to snoop your correspondence. I can't understand letting Google do that for years, analyze it, profile you and sell that information to just about anyone, but then thinking that the NSA is the final straw.
"Only" gmail? But isn't email the most important part of your online life? I moved away completely from Google. Fastmail.fm instead of gmail was one of my first moves. And I never looked back...
What made Google special in the past was having principles and walking the talk.
Those days when Altavista wanted to force people into watching noisy pop up advertisements with annoying colors before you could search anything, and this small company decided to just display text.
The days when everybody was onto portals to make the web enclosed inside gatekeepers hand and Google brought freedom.
Those days are over. Just the other day I had them trying to change my name in gmail and complete the information I gave them when gmail was invite only like my birthday or a picture of me.
When I refused I had them INSULTING ME!! Something alike "it seems you are so alone". Wow, if you don't use their "social private web", or any other social site you are alone, even if you have a blog with thousands of people visiting, and real friends you can talk, kiss or hug.
As I say until people get sick of hearing it, google had:
1) principles and respect for its users,
2) great mathematical chops, and
3) clean UI.
1) is gone, and everybody has 2) and 3) now. Other than a moral center Google has never offered me anything that I couldn't get somewhere else. At least then, before alternate providers were driven out of business.
Right now, I have DDG as my moral search engine. Hopefully, one day, there will be a place for moral email or social.
I downloaded the new Firefox and made DuckDuckGo my default search engine in it, and it's actually working great. I figure I'll keep chrome going as well, but I'm starting the weaning process. The new Firefox is much better than the one out a couple years ago. Actually, it's very good. The google+ nagging freaked me out, as well as the fact that I somehow have thought it's been ok for them to scan.
>What made Google special in the past was having principles and walking the talk.
Principles? BS. What made Google special in the past was it started as an underdog (back in the day) and wanted to get people to get to using it (not just for search, but for several products it unveilled, to expand their fall-back options).
After it got people by the balls with Search, Gmail and Android, it's "so long, suckers".
As an intensive user, everywhere on Google products, I feel the Microsoftization. This includes documentation with corporate jargon, the bloated and confusing Hangout fiasco, the frustrating way to connect multiple identities together.
Did they hire any corporate UX/UI/branding/marketing/documentation guys from Redmond recently, after Larry Page's CEOship?
It's an inescapable reality: companies grow and grow bloated and complacent. It happened to IBM and Microsoft, it happened to Google and it's happening now for Facebook. Once corporate mentality sets in the company's soul is gone.
I recently had to use YouTube for a project, and it's marketers and "audience engagement" all the way down. Their Playbook is probably the best example of the inmates running the asylum: https://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/.
If you ask old people, they will tell you the same story, but about IBM. Every generation has its great, innovative tech company turned evil mastermind story. It seems to be hard to avoid. I wonder who will be next.
exactly. Larry Page reminds me of Steve Ballmer's remark on iPhone. I think Steve Ballmer is an excellent man, except having no idea about design: "... windows phone can DO email...". Larry Page thought Google can DO social, and he gets G+.
Microsoft was the admirable company of the 90's for me, and more recently it's Apple and Google. I really hope Google doesn't continue on this path, though it seems to be unavoidable in some ways.
Don't be evil was a good start, it's too bad the motto is inversely proportional to capitalistic gains.
My problem with Google+ isn't the unification of Google's social platform. That makes absolute sense. The problem with Google+ is that it's way too opinionated.
It's a platform, not a product. A platform has to bend to the needs of its users, and those "users" aren't necessarily the people posting the comments - it's also the people hosting the comments on their YouTube pages and whatnot.
I appreciate wanting Plus to be backed by a "real" ID, but pseudonym support that fully anonymizes the user (and controls over whether pseudonymous users are allowed to post to your pages) should have been a day 1 feature, for example.
It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing the community.
It could declare victory and move on, leaving its users more satisfied than they are now.
If history is any guide, major players will end up doing precisely that, eventually: setting up an industry-backed open consortium promoting some kind of application-layer protocol/stack built around Diaspora or any its peers [1,2,3,4,5,6]. That plus another round of 2011-like Facebook fatigue could very well induce the required phase transition. Who knows though: perhaps newer, leaner companies like Dropbox or GitHub would be more likely to take the lead instead.
The Facebook (as a product) ship has sailed. Even Facebook knows this, which is why it's offering and paying billions to any products/services that can and/or have stolen its eyeballs.
Perhaps the worst mistake Google made in all of this was strategic: rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook with a competing product (and nearly destroying their own ecosystem in the process), Google should have focused on using their considerable resources to snap up companies that were indirectly taking mindshare and audience from Facebook.
In so doing, they could have left Facebook's core product to Facebook and virtually surrounded it with other products/services for that inevitable time when people were ready for anything but Facebook.
In other words, they should have pre-empted Facebook's current strategy vs. it's prior one. As it is, Google is one step behind.
I agree that would be cool, but I don't think Diaspora offers anything compelling to the general public. What fraction of FB users actually care that much about privacy?
I can imagine this push resulted in some positive refactoring of Google's internal systems, which they would like to retain.
However I can also imagine it resulted in some layers of duct tape (very much like the rush job after a merger or acquisition), which they'd love to rip off.
It would be interesting to hear a Google insider talk about this. Meanwhile, my guess would be it's a mix of the above, and they'll be stuck with that mix for years to come.
Do you realize how much more advertisers are willing to pay for targeted campaigns? That real identity G+ policy wasnt to stop trolls or some other bullshit, it was to build better database.
To change status quo you need to provide enough value to motivate that change:
Google Search: Search experience was completely disrupted. Since that moment people could focus on what they needed (no disturbing ads) and be more efficient.
Gmail: Google innovated and simplified a lot email experience. You can easily measure the importance of Gmail to people by the importance of Gmail to the Google brand.
Chrome: As an early adopter, I could feel specially the speed difference. I always knew that would be a matter of time till Chrome control the market.
Google+: I never understood what value Google was adding to social networks. Facebook at the time didn't need to be disrupted also. After some time G+ went in the direction of Linkedin but couldn't add enough value to make people to change also. IMHO Google+ weakens Google brand. As simple as that. Should be closed? That is a good question.
Facebook needed to be disrupted, but unfortunately the main way Facebook needed (and needs) to be disrupted is in compartmentalising sharing better, and while Circles accomplishes some of that, Googles real name policy pisses all over it.
> OPINION: One month after creator and leader of Google+, Vic Gundotra, quietly quit, Google chief Sergey Brin told a conference audience last week that involvement in Google+ was "a mistake." He made the exact opposite statement in 2011.
Whose involvement are we talking about here ? Brin, Gundotra or Google ?
> If only someone could have stepped in and course-corrected Google+.
>
> Oh, right. Someone could have.
>
> The same someone that just told the world, "heh, oops" and walked away to go retreat back into himself, and play with his cars.
Is that someone Brin (who could have and has plenty of money to buy cars) or Gundotra (who could have and left the company a month ago - with enough money to play with cars I suppose) ?
(sorry for hand walking me but the style is confusing me)
Google+ is just the most high profile symptom. The problem started when Google started using strategies against the fundamental nature of the internet.
We always assumed that Google was "good" because they understood and embraced the open and interconnected nature of the internet. They even stated so explicitly.
Google+, but also many other Google strategies follow the same pattern: trying to build walls instead of connecting, making things closed instead of more open.
For some reason, my email address is now linked to a name that is not mine. I've not yet bothered to figure out how to change it, but I wish for the sake of trans people that this error had been more common.
Gmail insists on respelling the name of one of my contacts; it's only one letter different, but it's slightly embarrassing that I seem not to know his name after eight years of working together.
Google+ was the beginning of the end where using Google service was concerned for me. These days, I use Google only as a search engine and nothing more.
If you like e.g. "single sign-on", it should be your choice to set it up and participate. Not coercion. Not coercion holding your existing investment in various products (of which Google was and is acquiring ever more) hostage.
If what you are offering is of benefit to your users (should I use the word "customers"? -- a whole other discussion), you should be able to sell it to them -- on an "opt-in", "I'd like to use this feature" basis.
As Google+ rolled out, it became evident that it was anything but this.
True names. Then the stories -- accurate or not -- of account deletions.
I was damned if I was going to risk my longstanding Gmail account for the sake of trying out Plus. Fortunately, the integration was not so quick and thorough that I was at that time compelled to participate in Plus in order to keep that account. (Sign up for Gmail now, and you get a Plus profile, like it or not.)
Plus has some nice technical features, and some of the conversation I intersect (under a separate Google identity that I can afford to lose) during my limited interaction with it, consist of more thoughtful and interesting content.
But I'll never trust it -- Plus, that is.
Google showed us all, with Plus, the limits of their advocacy for us, the users.
I think it is pretty refreshing for an executive to be self critical and admit big mistakes. Sergey sounded authentic in that interview.
Scott Forestall was axed for Apple Maps, but seriously, you rewrite a Maps service from the ground up from scratch and race to release it in iOS6, of course it's going to be beta quality for a long time, since these things take time to mature. I highly doubt the decision to include it in that state was solely Scotts.
I like to see companies admit major strategic mistakes as opposed to pretending everything is awesome for all time. (and no, Tim Cook's letter was a kind of non-apology, only a single sentence really admitted any mistake 'We fell short of our commitment')
Agreed on the admitting mistakes part but mentioning Scott Forstall as an example doesn't follow.
From what I've read, Scott Forestall was fired less for the issues in the Maps application and more for his refusal to sign any sort of apology afterwards for its shortcomings. I'm sure there were other internal factors for his firing but his refusal to publicly admit a mistake was a significant part.
To be fair the SMS+Hangouts integration seems to be what users want. Everybody and their dog is using Whatsapp by now, which is basically the same thing (I think - haven't used it).
I'd love to see Google+ turn into a LinkedIn and Facebook killer. I just have no use for Google+ at the moment. I don't really like the tiles display and would prefer a list.
The YouTube integration doesn't bother me at all because 1) I don't post YouTube comments, and 2) it's easy enough to just create a separate account for using with services that you don't want associated with your main Google account.
IMO the silently majority is tired of a panopticon of "look it me now" social services who's main use case is massaging users egos.
Google should start over, Android-first (instead of web -first) and make the phone Addressbook / Google Contacts the focal point for everything social. Look at WhatsApp - it does exactly this - your phone number is your ID and your contacts is your social graph; how you interact with them - who you call, message etc and when / where you do it - these are your circles
Meanwhile if you look at the direction Apple is going, eg new APIs for iCloud eg fingerprint authentication, new APIs for foto management / sharing etc etc. they look about ready to pounce on the whole of social...
It sounds like Sergey is saying that his involvement in Google+ was a mistake, not that that the company going down that path was a mistake. I think the author is taking the word "mistake" out of context:
"It was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."
[+] [-] IgorPartola|11 years ago|reply
Where in this is the broken trust? What is the author actually upset about? Seems to me like in 2011 Brin and co. thought Google+ was the future. Now Brin simply is admitting that he personally might not have been the right person to take this on and perhaps it was a bad idea (not clear from the poorly written article). On top of that the author is trying to make a story out of the project leader leaving precisely because there was no story there.
I think this piece is terribly written and there is no story behind it. G+ is not my favorite product but I think this is just an outburst of anger that does not deserve our attention.
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
Sure, forcing them will definitely bring you bigger "adoption" (for lack of a better word) faster, but it will also build up a lot of resentment, potentially negating any advantage you might have from ramming the change through, in the long run.
A lot of people didn't understand Twitter in the first 3+ years, but it still managed to grow organically, because people wanted to join it over the years. Google tried to push Google+ to its 1 billion users within 2 years, with seemingly very little advantage for the users. What did they expect?
Same for Microsoft when it comes to pushing Metro to PC users who have been perfectly happy with their PC interface, but Microsoft wanted to force them to use a tablet interface on a PC. Why? Because Microsoft said so, and because they would get to flash "bigger numbers" to developers for "Metro users". The actual experience of the user on a desktop was barely a distant concern.
If you're a big corporation, and you can't grow a new business organically, then tough luck. Maybe you shouldn't be in that market then.
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous.
It's one of those many weird cases where you sit there, hands on your desk, mouth agape looking at some Google property that was fucked over by the G+ project and just ask yourself "doesn't anybody at Google use this garbage?". Because the issues are so immediate and so obvious, it's impossible that nobody raised some red flags.
Which leaves two possibilities:
- Google is composed of such inept socially awkward people that no red flags were raised and they all just proceeded on course doo dee doo doo dee (a scenario I find very hard to believe)
- Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.
The first scenario is hard to believe because it presumes mass and gross incompetence on behalf of most of the employees at Google. But I know googlers, I've been interviews by Google, I've had various interactions with people from Google, and most of them just seem like normal folks from a variety of backgrounds.
As more and more leaks out it sounds like the second scenario is where it's at, and the question is why? Was it just some dumb headed attempt to extract any money possible for the major shareholders by turning the brand into garbage? Or was it just an honest attempt at unifying the properties, just managed at an absolutely amateurish level?
It's all so senseless and stupid and now everything is broken.
The sad thing is, this is something I see all the time, one hopelessly broken pet project is carried by the good idea fairy to some senior manager, and they being a cascade of failures across the rest of the company on something they probably have convinced themselves is just a big gamble with lots of upside. By the time the damage is done and widely recognized, the exec is out the door on their golden parachute leaving the remaining veterans to pick up the pieces and unfuck things. Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas. The only remediation is a long unfucking process and some possible minor impact on share price, meaning he can only buy 2 300' yachts instead of 2 350' yachts.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
What that does is greatly magnify the influence of a small number of people and completely nullify the influence of a large number of people. At the time I left, there was some institutional awareness of this issue (heaven knows I had shared it enough with the leadership) but the 'fix' (random injection of 'management' was itself not going well).
And all of that to say, that it takes both good people and good structure to make this happen. I realized I wasn't plugged into the organization at a place where I could make that level of change occur. So when I read the article I recognized a bit of self awareness in Sergi at his over sized influence in a negative way on the product, and a dysfunctional organization which could not guide, or if necessary prevent that influence.
The irony is that if Google was as well managed as a place like NetApp under Warmhoven or GE was under Welch, it would mega-corp scary. (Granted it still can be to an extent, but quite extremely so)
[+] [-] Silhouette|11 years ago|reply
Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products.
Google, particularly its senior executives, have been utterly unrepentant as they've systematically trashed their once hallowed "do no evil" philosophy. The thing I find disappointing is that more people didn't take Schmidt's advice and stop using Google's services.
There are plenty of alternative search engines, e-mail services, video hosting sites, mobile operating systems and browsers. Outside these five, Google have relatively few big success stories anyway. Their track record in recent years has mostly been one failure after another, even sometimes damaging their established brands like YouTube and Google Maps.
And yet despite all the complaining, a lot of users seem to stick by them. I can understand that behaviour with Facebook (and Google+ itself) because of the inherent network effect, but the longevity of Google's brand loyalty is remarkable.
[+] [-] jseliger|11 years ago|reply
The other possibility is that Facebook evolved from a relatively small idea to a very large one, attending to users along the way (Peter Thiel discusses this issue in one of his lectures; G+ launched as a huge product that had to succeed right away, based on what Google engineers thought users want and based on the need to be something Facebook isn't.
[+] [-] tlogan|11 years ago|reply
People working at Google are smart (and majority that I know are smarter than me). Smart people are going to point that something is wrong. But they will not bitch too much because that will be "career-limiting move".
[+] [-] clsec|11 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, I was told that I had to use my real name and signed up accordingly.
Everything was going along fine for about the first 9 months until I got into a small flame war with a woman in Canada about Scientologists (I used to work for some). That turned out to be the end of G+ for me.
It seems that the woman reported me for using a pseudonym, which to me and a few of my friends I obviously wasn't. I was livid! I immediately protested loud and clear in my timeline. One of my "hooped" IRL friends works at Yahoo! and told me that he had good connections at Google and could probably fix it for me. And that if he couldn't do that that he could at least vouch for me.
As he was trying to work his magic the pressure from Google was getting stronger. I had a big notice across my profile telling me that if I didn't provide legal proof of who I was that my account would be suspended in a week. I received the same threats in my gmail. So I started trying to work with them on this matter only to find that I was dealing with bots. I was beyond frustrated!
A few days later my friend came back to me and told me that there didn't seem to be much that he could do. I sure as hell didn't want to send them my my ID or birth certificate! So I caved in, scanned a court document with my full name on it and a judge's signature, and gmail'd it it.
I should mention that by this point Google had decided to lock my profile and place a huge notice across it demanding documents.
It took almost a full 2 weeks for them to get back to me and say that my document was legit. Well, duh!!
With my new found "legal" status I continued to use G+ for about another year or so. But as time marched on I became more and more disillusioned with Google and their products and interacted less and less with G+.
Then June 5th 2013 happened and I was introduced to the world of Edward Snowden. I immediately went and deleted everything from my profile and timeline (no small chore!). I then put a notice on my "about" page stating that due to privacy issues with Google and the NSA that this account is no longer active.
I now only use my gmail account, have been a happy DDG and IXquick user since before this all went down, and haven't been back to G+ since.
[+] [-] pron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikusalic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneweekwonder|11 years ago|reply
I understand you deleting the data does not remove it from Google but only publicly, but I just wonder.
[+] [-] rlu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
Those days when Altavista wanted to force people into watching noisy pop up advertisements with annoying colors before you could search anything, and this small company decided to just display text.
The days when everybody was onto portals to make the web enclosed inside gatekeepers hand and Google brought freedom.
Those days are over. Just the other day I had them trying to change my name in gmail and complete the information I gave them when gmail was invite only like my birthday or a picture of me.
When I refused I had them INSULTING ME!! Something alike "it seems you are so alone". Wow, if you don't use their "social private web", or any other social site you are alone, even if you have a blog with thousands of people visiting, and real friends you can talk, kiss or hug.
I am looking for Google alternatives right now.
[+] [-] pessimizer|11 years ago|reply
1) principles and respect for its users, 2) great mathematical chops, and 3) clean UI.
1) is gone, and everybody has 2) and 3) now. Other than a moral center Google has never offered me anything that I couldn't get somewhere else. At least then, before alternate providers were driven out of business.
Right now, I have DDG as my moral search engine. Hopefully, one day, there will be a place for moral email or social.
[+] [-] joeevans1000|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
Principles? BS. What made Google special in the past was it started as an underdog (back in the day) and wanted to get people to get to using it (not just for search, but for several products it unveilled, to expand their fall-back options).
After it got people by the balls with Search, Gmail and Android, it's "so long, suckers".
[+] [-] diminish|11 years ago|reply
Did they hire any corporate UX/UI/branding/marketing/documentation guys from Redmond recently, after Larry Page's CEOship?
[+] [-] frostmatthew|11 years ago|reply
Vic Gundotra was at Microsoft prior to joining Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra
[+] [-] cliveowen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rumbler|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazychrome|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktran03|11 years ago|reply
Microsoft was the admirable company of the 90's for me, and more recently it's Apple and Google. I really hope Google doesn't continue on this path, though it seems to be unavoidable in some ways.
Don't be evil was a good start, it's too bad the motto is inversely proportional to capitalistic gains.
[+] [-] Pxtl|11 years ago|reply
It's a platform, not a product. A platform has to bend to the needs of its users, and those "users" aren't necessarily the people posting the comments - it's also the people hosting the comments on their YouTube pages and whatnot.
I appreciate wanting Plus to be backed by a "real" ID, but pseudonym support that fully anonymizes the user (and controls over whether pseudonymous users are allowed to post to your pages) should have been a day 1 feature, for example.
[+] [-] spodek|11 years ago|reply
Donate some of its engineers' time to fix and revitalize Diaspora -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29 -- or one of its peers or something along its original vision.
It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing the community.
It could declare victory and move on, leaving its users more satisfied than they are now.
[+] [-] gone35|11 years ago|reply
If history is any guide, major players will end up doing precisely that, eventually: setting up an industry-backed open consortium promoting some kind of application-layer protocol/stack built around Diaspora or any its peers [1,2,3,4,5,6]. That plus another round of 2011-like Facebook fatigue could very well induce the required phase transition. Who knows though: perhaps newer, leaner companies like Dropbox or GitHub would be more likely to take the lead instead.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Social_Networking_... (Defunct, apparently)
[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ (!)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial (This MySpace-era protocol is interesting because it was initially supported by Google)
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|11 years ago|reply
The Facebook (as a product) ship has sailed. Even Facebook knows this, which is why it's offering and paying billions to any products/services that can and/or have stolen its eyeballs.
Perhaps the worst mistake Google made in all of this was strategic: rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook with a competing product (and nearly destroying their own ecosystem in the process), Google should have focused on using their considerable resources to snap up companies that were indirectly taking mindshare and audience from Facebook.
In so doing, they could have left Facebook's core product to Facebook and virtually surrounded it with other products/services for that inevitable time when people were ready for anything but Facebook.
In other words, they should have pre-empted Facebook's current strategy vs. it's prior one. As it is, Google is one step behind.
[+] [-] asdfologist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbarre|11 years ago|reply
Would Google even want to, even if everyone agreed it was a bad idea in the first place?
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|11 years ago|reply
I can imagine this push resulted in some positive refactoring of Google's internal systems, which they would like to retain.
However I can also imagine it resulted in some layers of duct tape (very much like the rush job after a merger or acquisition), which they'd love to rip off.
It would be interesting to hear a Google insider talk about this. Meanwhile, my guess would be it's a mix of the above, and they'll be stuck with that mix for years to come.
[+] [-] rasz_pl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galfarragem|11 years ago|reply
Google Search: Search experience was completely disrupted. Since that moment people could focus on what they needed (no disturbing ads) and be more efficient.
Gmail: Google innovated and simplified a lot email experience. You can easily measure the importance of Gmail to people by the importance of Gmail to the Google brand.
Chrome: As an early adopter, I could feel specially the speed difference. I always knew that would be a matter of time till Chrome control the market.
Google+: I never understood what value Google was adding to social networks. Facebook at the time didn't need to be disrupted also. After some time G+ went in the direction of Linkedin but couldn't add enough value to make people to change also. IMHO Google+ weakens Google brand. As simple as that. Should be closed? That is a good question.
[+] [-] vidarh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|11 years ago|reply
For me, the value was "intelligent conversation". It basically replaced HN for me until they changed the UI to be photo-centric and carded.
Ironically, it was when I added an HN circle that my signal-to-noise ratio dropped.
> Facebook at the time didn't need to be disrupted also.
Facebook has needed disruption since 2008.
[+] [-] sumedh|11 years ago|reply
Its like Google is trying everything and hoping something would stick.
[+] [-] adam74|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|11 years ago|reply
> OPINION: One month after creator and leader of Google+, Vic Gundotra, quietly quit, Google chief Sergey Brin told a conference audience last week that involvement in Google+ was "a mistake." He made the exact opposite statement in 2011.
Whose involvement are we talking about here ? Brin, Gundotra or Google ?
> If only someone could have stepped in and course-corrected Google+.
>
> Oh, right. Someone could have.
>
> The same someone that just told the world, "heh, oops" and walked away to go retreat back into himself, and play with his cars.
Is that someone Brin (who could have and has plenty of money to buy cars) or Gundotra (who could have and left the company a month ago - with enough money to play with cars I suppose) ?
(sorry for hand walking me but the style is confusing me)
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|11 years ago|reply
We always assumed that Google was "good" because they understood and embraced the open and interconnected nature of the internet. They even stated so explicitly.
Google+, but also many other Google strategies follow the same pattern: trying to build walls instead of connecting, making things closed instead of more open.
[+] [-] afarrell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taejo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RexRollman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|11 years ago|reply
If you like e.g. "single sign-on", it should be your choice to set it up and participate. Not coercion. Not coercion holding your existing investment in various products (of which Google was and is acquiring ever more) hostage.
If what you are offering is of benefit to your users (should I use the word "customers"? -- a whole other discussion), you should be able to sell it to them -- on an "opt-in", "I'd like to use this feature" basis.
As Google+ rolled out, it became evident that it was anything but this.
True names. Then the stories -- accurate or not -- of account deletions.
I was damned if I was going to risk my longstanding Gmail account for the sake of trying out Plus. Fortunately, the integration was not so quick and thorough that I was at that time compelled to participate in Plus in order to keep that account. (Sign up for Gmail now, and you get a Plus profile, like it or not.)
Plus has some nice technical features, and some of the conversation I intersect (under a separate Google identity that I can afford to lose) during my limited interaction with it, consist of more thoughtful and interesting content.
But I'll never trust it -- Plus, that is.
Google showed us all, with Plus, the limits of their advocacy for us, the users.
[+] [-] cromwellian|11 years ago|reply
Scott Forestall was axed for Apple Maps, but seriously, you rewrite a Maps service from the ground up from scratch and race to release it in iOS6, of course it's going to be beta quality for a long time, since these things take time to mature. I highly doubt the decision to include it in that state was solely Scotts.
I like to see companies admit major strategic mistakes as opposed to pretending everything is awesome for all time. (and no, Tim Cook's letter was a kind of non-apology, only a single sentence really admitted any mistake 'We fell short of our commitment')
[+] [-] nacs|11 years ago|reply
From what I've read, Scott Forestall was fired less for the issues in the Maps application and more for his refusal to sign any sort of apology afterwards for its shortcomings. I'm sure there were other internal factors for his firing but his refusal to publicly admit a mistake was a significant part.
[+] [-] facepalm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dm2|11 years ago|reply
The YouTube integration doesn't bother me at all because 1) I don't post YouTube comments, and 2) it's easy enough to just create a separate account for using with services that you don't want associated with your main Google account.
[+] [-] nobbyclark|11 years ago|reply
Google should start over, Android-first (instead of web -first) and make the phone Addressbook / Google Contacts the focal point for everything social. Look at WhatsApp - it does exactly this - your phone number is your ID and your contacts is your social graph; how you interact with them - who you call, message etc and when / where you do it - these are your circles
Meanwhile if you look at the direction Apple is going, eg new APIs for iCloud eg fingerprint authentication, new APIs for foto management / sharing etc etc. they look about ready to pounce on the whole of social...
[+] [-] oneweekwonder|11 years ago|reply
Backend, frontend, etc?
Even if you can just point me to the source it would be appreciated.
[+] [-] muzz|11 years ago|reply
"It was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."