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Why You Shouldn't Write Off Google+ Just Yet
TheNextCorner writes "Cmdr Taco writes for The Washington Post on why you shouldn't write off Google+ just yet: "Google+ is technically better than its rivals in a number of key ways. The user interface is comfortable and friendly. It's easy to maintain circles of contacts, and to segregate what you share with each group. Discussions of small-to-medium sizes are manageable and readable — even in real time. Facebook wins when it comes to the open graph and app ecosystem, but a lot of people don't care about that stuff.""
I wrote off all social media long ago, I don't even keep track. No thanks, spy on someone else.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
We're waiting for something that's not Facebook, not something that's not Facebook, but is basically Facebook.
Oh, and if you work in advertising: kill yourself.
Plus you don't want that big bad Google to have even more information about you.
Google Plus's chat feature has rudimentary desktop screening, and is just more convenient than Skype for small group projects. Select a circle, call 'em all up, and get to work. Facebook chat is better for showing the chat history. Although, I still think I prefer good old fashioned BBS systems for regular communication. Keeping conversations locked into tidy (or not so tidy) threads appeals to my OCD side.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
This has all been true since it came onto the scene, but it has still made no big splash. The title of this article implies that there is something significantly new now. There's not.
... as it's FB I wrote off long ago - as G+ will surely one day join it - in the land of fad induced mass market websites. Anyone still using GeoCities or MySpace?
Let's face it, FaceBook can't provide every shred of information about me. Sure they know who my friends are, but Google will be able to layer on top of that things from the location of my cellphone (android), my search history (google.com), what books and movies I've bought (google play), websites I've visited (adwords), and even the contents of my e-mail (gmail) and files (Google drive). Since my primary goal is to only see relevant ads I'm going with Google+ and I assume advertisers will push me in that direction anyway once they realize how effective Google ads can be.
Then it must be doomed.
To be honest, I'm completely baffled by the google+ feed. It's very difficult to make "seen" things go away. Other than that, it's pretty cool. I've only been using it to attend a couple hangouts. Hangouts are really great, especially if you know ahead of time to comb your hair. It was a bit of a shocker to see my ugly mug on the list of attendees.
OK, I won't defend Facebook as a shining example of good UI design, but Google? How do I write on someone's wall? That is, how do I say something directed to someone, but in a public way?
Also, for whatever reason, I get things in my Google+ feed that seem so random. Like today, I got something from "Mike Elgan." Who is he? I have no idea, I definitely never added him. And his post is useless, I am not interested in it at all (If you are Mike Elgan reading this I soo apologize).
I am not anti-google+, I want it to succeed. But I recognize that Google+ isn't going to win because it has a better UI. And basically everyone, even grandmas have figured out how to use Google+.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sort of like how the Nomad was technically superior to the iPod?
Yesterday on reddit somebody posted a onion video but when I played it I got an advertisment from the Australian government promoting a google hangout featuring the Prime Minister. I got this because I have a G+ account with all that tasty meta data about myself, and this allows youtube to pick adverts to show me. So its all about the meta data. Its very valuable to google, even if their market penetration is still quite small in comparison to facebook.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What killed MySpace was allowing the level of customization to a profile page such that the result was GeoCities. I stopped going to MySpace because I valued my eyesight.
Until Facebook makes me not want to look the main page or other people's profiles, it's not going anywhere.
Features aren't going to win people to Google+ because Facebook has a perfectly solid team of developers that will happily spend their days copying the things that make the user experience better.
Work Safe Porn
I'd say give it five years and let history replay itself again. Facebook will be lame and a has been while either Google+ or something like it will be the new cool. It's obvious that G+ is much more advanced plus they have a company that actually makes money behind them. Facebook just wreaks of the Jershey shore showoffs and wannabes.
I use facebook,g+ and twitter, mostly for maintaining a presence rather than posting personal stuf. But I've discovered that google+ is quite good for sharing images with family and closer friends. The fact that you can can share things with people that doesn't have a g+ account just by their e-mail address means that I can show them whats happening in my life from a single place.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
Google doesn't do any of that stuff. Google wants to present you with little ads, that google hopes you will click. And that's it.
IMO: Google's record on privacy is vastly better than facebook's record. MS's smear campaign not withstanding.
Facebook wins when it comes to the open graph and app ecosystem, but a lot of people don't care about that stuff.
Well, thing is, it's quite obvious most people don't care at all about "maintaining circles of contacts" or "segregating what you share" - they just want to throw stuff up on Facebook where all their friends will see it. If they wanted to share with a small group... they actually could do that too.
Actually "throw stuff up" is a pretty accurate metaphor for a lot of what I've seen on pretty much every social network...
#DeleteChrome
Seeing Taco shill for Google raises a question: Is Slashdot's shilling for Google an official policy or an unofficial one?
..K-I-S-S-I-N...errr, fighting like cats and dogs....Google+ is great and all, except for the fact that simply having one prevents me from being able to reply to users on my Youtube channel...really?? Why is that even possible?!? Get rid of Google+, my friend the Reply button, works like it should...allowing me to tell everyone else how wrong their opinion is.
If it's not run by some kind of not for profit organization, do you really think it's wise to give up your data freedom? What did you thini these billion dollar mega-corps were paying so much for? If they can know us intimately, they can really get into our heads and trick us into buying more junk. Think about it
Betamax was technically better than VHS. Brunel's wide gauge railway system was technically better than the standard gauge. We all know what became of them. It's the scale of adoption that counts. A squillion people are now in the habit of living their lives through Facebook. They're not going to simultaneously migrate to G+ because of a few bells and whistles no matter how good they are. Sorry Google, you missed the boat on this one.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Why the heck do you insert "CmdrTaco" in your byline on the Washington Post? I really doubt anyone there cares about your old Slashdot persona, and it works against any impression of professionalism I'd think you'd want to cultivate now that you're in that world.
#DeleteChrome
Does it bother
anyone else
how google+
puts all its
content on the
left two thirds
of the display
and doesnt
use thr right
side of the
display ?
I guess they
care more
about mobile
users than us
old fashioned
desktop users.
HATE THE MOBILE !
Instead of thinking G+ as a Facebook clone/competition, I like to think of it as a replacement of iGoogle, Google's attempt at a personalized home page and portal to all Google's services, now the "social" element. Considering how bad iGoogle used to be, I would say G+ is a great success at replacing it. The interface is so much cleaner now.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
I've used at least a dozen video conferencing solutions, and Google+ Hangouts seems to work across the most platforms, with some of the highest quality video, and it's free. I can communicate with folks inside and outside of the company without any special clients or problems. It really is a killer video conferencing solution.
But it's buried inside Google+, and I am amazed how many people I meet have no idea it exists, have never tried it, and so on. Everyone I make use it the first time instantly falls in love. Google could easily sell Hangouts as a stand alone video conferencing product.
Which is why I think Google+ may make it yet. There's some really cool stuff buried in it. Not enough to unseat Facebook on its own, but if Facebook stumbles, Google+ could pick up the market. Much like when myspace fell behind Facebook moved in.
The only thing I know people to use G+ for is the hangouts/youtube stream. It makes it easy to do a video podcast with multiple people and not have to deal with the crap livestream/ustream/justin.tv makes you do.
Facebook wins because that's where all my friends and acquaintances are. That Google+ is technically superior doesn't mean much so long as it lacks a critical mass of users. It's also foreign. People have been on Facebook long enough that they're comfortable with it. In order for people to defect Google+ has to be not just "better" but "way better".
hate to say it, but if you've ever seen a post from Facebook on a phone, it uses GPS or AGPS to post your location (or near to). Of course it also tries to do that when you're on a desktop as well
Google and gmail in particular are all about searching -- why organize when you can just search!? From what I've seen from Google emperically and with telemetry (Microsoft blogs etc.) is that using folders for Mail is really really low for some reason that absolutely escapes me.
So I find this odd. Odd that people tend to organize here instead of other aspects in their life. For example, spending 1minute to setup some sane shortcuts and pinned items on the Windows 7 taskbar for example (why isn't that done more often with normal folk)
One way to read that passage is that he got his dates horribly wrong (theFacebook started in 2004). I'm inclined to think it's a hint to another (anti)social networking site.
that is why you don't care about them
The latest version is 2 star at best. It took a step back with the latest release. It is last in the list of social apps I use because of the layout and the way it handles notifications.
> Google has deep pockets, and the company is reaching deep into them
> not to make their social network explode, but rather to make it creep up on you.
Yeah, I want shit creeping up on me because they have deep pockets. Only not.
Shill.
It’s not dead yet!
weren't tons of sites "technically" better than myspace, yet none could even come close to matching myspace's popularity in the day? I don't find anything google does comfortable or friendly, rather creepy and overbearing. I'll bet against google+ anyday. They've already failed several times before at social media attempts.
If you have to call something "technically better", it isn't. Facebook is still king.
I've already written off Google!
Don't need no stinkin' panty waste copier.
My G+ account has also been handicapped since I've changed my name a couple of weeks ago. Can't log in using smartphone since then either so it's practically useless to me.
Facebook wins when it comes to the open graph
I fucking hate that graph piece of shit. It's one of the main reasons I haven't logged on in months...
The user interface is comfortable and friendly.
made me pee all over myself laughing. This is idiotic. Have you used it on Android? The 1st version was good. But after the blow-up-even-the-tiny-pictures-and-make-them-the-whole-experience-while-hiding-most-of-the-text upgrade it not only made g+ garabage, it made the whole point of having an android phone questionable. The last time I hated an upgrade this much was when Verizon switched form static IP to dynamic IP in the 90's and called it an "upgrade".
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Google+ and FB are aiming at very different groups of users. In the same way Twitter is not competing with FB either.
Twitter is not even really social media. It is more of an RSS alternative.
FB is pretty much the definitive social media. People keep track of their friends families etc. There is meaningful content there but it is not really what it is there for.
G+ is primarily aimed at finding information and discussing it with people. It is much more geared to linking people with complete strangers. That is why the linking is asymetric. X may wish to find out about someone but that someone does not need to know about X. Someone could do a survey. "What % of your contacts have you actually physically met?"
I suspect that Twitter will be very low, FB will be higher - much higher for people over 20. G+ will be lower.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
This is why it's become necessary to use separate browsers or profiles for social networking.
I use Firefox with NoScript for common web-browsing and e-commerce.
I use Safari (picked mostly arbitrarily, not for any merits or defects of the browser) for "unsafe" browsing on Facebook. I don't use that browser for anything else. I don't use Facebook on my phone. They can try to guess an amazing amount of stuff about me from who I'm friends with and from links I click off of Facebook, but they jack shit about my usual habits and about my purchases. They may be able to tie some stuff by IP address and some shared info in the user agent, but as far as they know, I'm two different users in the same household.
If I had it to do over again, I'd use separate Firefox profiles for convenience, but it works.
Some facebook app for their search engine?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And i do not think of the diaspora stuff. I tested it a while ago, and noticed the awful coding very soon (wrong login goes to stacktrace-page, WTF), further i think their data model gives advantage to the node owners, which patch their nodes to store everything they can get, which is worse for my privacy in respect to my digital friends than the centralistic models.
maybe BuddyCloud?
To be honest: no, it saves me having to resize the browser to a slimmer shape.
There's a good reason why newspapers have, after some decades, figured out that slim columns are much easier and faster to read.
And once you get used to diagonal reading, it's simply more efficient to take the time and resize the browser (I'm reading Slashdot right now on a 1024px width browser, on a 1920px width monitor, and it's a shame they have fixed the min-width)...
To get back to Google+: yes, they certainly could use the right "third" (for me it's about 60% empty width with a maximised browser) for something meaningful, like widgets or a second column, but personally I wouldn't really care about that, as long as they don't make the main text any wider.
Going with the charity principle, one could say that the current layout gives the benefits of slim columns and a cleaned up interface that focuses on the content.
..I still wouldn't use it.
sorry dont use either of these things
back to breakfast
Face it, today most corporations think at longest in quarter years. Remember how HP threw their WebOS away because it failed to start within a month? Or how Microsoft is scraping every major "strategic" produkt within half a year, be it Mono, Silverlight, Zune, Zune Shop and many more?
Google is different. When they come up with an idea they put work into it and then, big surprise, they stay true to it until it takes off. Android? Needed two year to take off. Google Search? Took two years to take off. This is true for nearly every Google product, instead of rushing and hyping their are creeping and assimilating. Yes, there was Google wave. Big hype, many early adopters. And in the end it died with a death rattle. It was rushed and not creeping.
Btw, Apple does it the same. Even if it doesn't take of they stay true to their product for some years before scraping it.
Think about it all you corporated bigheads, it is not about quarters. It is all about two to three years.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
When Google stops abruptly deleting services simply because users didn't use them the way the think thought they would, maybe... if it doesn't suck and it fulfills the roles I need.
Google has a long and sordid history of shutting shit down that's just perfect because they want to steer people into something else. Sometimes years and years after releasing it. Hell, do we know for sure Gmail is out of "beta" yet? What's to stop them from shutting that off arbitrarily?
Furthermore, they've fucked with usenet and the online forum replacement repeatedly, Google video, they are shutting down IG (one of the FEW useful things they made in the last 5 years) etc etc.
People don't like having all their stuff connected together. Sometimes they want to say shit that not everybody will see, be able to track, or dig up later. At least Facebook doesn't follow people around and then repost and archive everything, they just follow people around to do ad tracking. (Which is what the "like" button on all the news and many other sites is doing. It's a web bug they trick site owners into installing.)
NO FUCKING WAY am I going to spend the time to build a profile and seek out relationships with existing people or those I haven't met yet on Google's temporary fly-by-night more-invasive-than-it's-worth crap-ass product.
Google+ was never intended as a social network. It is primarily a social graph mapping tool. When Google finally realized the value of the social graph, knowing who knows who and in what capacity, Google decided to map it themselves. Google+ was born. This enables Google to map the graph with the richness of information and accuracy they want for targeting ads without relying on Facebook. This relates Google+ to their primary revenue stream, ad placement. The more accurately you know who a person's personal influencers are, the more accurately you can target an ad for that person, so the theory goes.
here's why.
I see how quick google is to kill products when then under-perform. I use iGoogle and they recently announced that they were ending it. I understand, it's a business decision but there's no fucking way I'd put the kind of time into Google+ as I've put into FB with the knowledge that at some people Google was going to pull the plug. No thank you.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I haven't written off Google+ yet... I actually quite like it...
Sure, there is less people there, but it's nice seeing only a couple posts from a few good friends as opposed to posts every couple of minutes about what some acquaintance of mine ate.
Circles was an awesome feature, I always quite enjoyed the control I had over views and who viewed what. The simple markdown interpreter worked for simple markup on posts, hangouts were awesome, that and chat completely replaced Skype for me.
I also quite like the interface better.
And recently, I have noticed a lot of people joining.
The arch foe.
I love Google+. Who's writing it off. Its way better then facebook and twitter. I'd rather use it then facebook any day of the week. I just have too many people on facebook to cancel my account thats all.
Whoever wrote that, and most of the people commenting here, just don't seem to understand how the social networking market works. This is a market like computer OSes, with very strong network effect (Facebook is valuable because everyone you know is on it) and lock-in (if you've posted a lot of content to Facebook, you can't move it to Google+ or some other network easily). Back in the early days of social media, when Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, and god knows what else were all small and in competition to get the handful of geeky early-adopter types, you could win over your competitors by having superior features and site design. Those effects weren't there yet because no site had a critical mass yet - nobody had enough content set up that they would find it annoying to switch to a new site, and the only people on it were probably a few of your geeky early-adopter friends who you could also get to switch easily.
It isn't like that anymore. Facebook has that critical mass, most importantly in the form of hundreds of millions of non-tech-savvy people on it. It's a virtuous cycle - people go to Facebook because it has the people and the content, which tends to give it even more people and more content to draw in yet more users. Competitors have no chance to break that. Doesn't matter how much money you throw at promoting it or how many cool features you have, you'll never break their lock. I'm not saying that Facebook will be around and dominant forever, but it'll require the fundamental market that they're in becoming irrelevant for some reason to dethrone them. Kind of like Microsoft dominates the desktop OS market - you'll never beat them for desktop OS dominance, but you have a shot at making them irrelevant by changing the market - switch everything people want to do to the web and the cloud, where the device OS doesn't matter, and/or get people to switch to a whole new class of devices where Microsoft's strengths don't apply, like phones and tablets.
I don't reply to ACs