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Google+ Divided Into Photos and Streams, With New Boss
An anonymous reader writes It seems Google+ will see some significant changes under new boss Bradley Horowitz. Google+ will be separated into different products: Photos and Hangouts will be split out, and the social part is now called "the stream". From the article: "Google+ has taken a lot of criticism — notably the infamous 'ghost town' knock that it's devoid of users and concerns about Google's attempts to force its relevance by tying it in with functions like search results and YouTube comments. But Google executives have denied the 'ghost town criticism over and over. In part that's because the company used Google+ to describe more than just its Facebook-esque service for posting and commenting — the part now called Streams. For Google, Google+ also has been the "social spine" that unifies Google users' activities under a single unified identity."
i recently made a yt acct for first time in yrs. you cant do anything as far as looks/design without that g+ trash. i gave up after fighting with it and trying to figure it out, it is such a godawful piece of garbage now i dont even want to use it.
YAY!
It would be nice to post my vacation Photospheres without all of the Google+ overhead.
(I'm a pretty avid G+ user, but it's an utterly shit platform for sharing photos with friends that aren't G+ users. I wish I could just put Photospheres on SmugMug.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I thought these witchcraft machines had ubiquitous spell checking nowadays..
The sole purpose I would want to use it for would be to comment on YouTube (To comment people who make content, like howto's, not to troll) but the way they do the comments now it is impossible to follow who posted what and replied to what. So no.
Google+ is not the first time Google messed up big time. Anybody remember how they raped Dejanews? Anybody remember how the censored inages (and other search results) because of the evil of porn?
It is scary that they both know what we want AND decide what we get.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The ghost town state actually makes it easier to follow a few things and keep up. My Facebook feed is long and Facebook's most-recent sorting likes to pick random dates out of the comments of the postings to "refresh" it. With what I follow on G+, a quick browse will catch me up on all of what I am following. It is a feature to me.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
It's like google, for cougars.
Accept it, too little, too late, y'all missed the party.
Google Chat is still vastly superior to Facebook Messenger, but I'm using GC less. The killer is GMail; without it, I'd be almost migrated out of the Google ecosystem.
Rock, hard place. I won't even start on Apple.
What to think different? Open up your APIs again, the cool ones, make it easy to use Google for the infrastructure on third party apps, don't screw over the small guys who join in. ..and stop forcing the damn tie in, all that does is make people ANGRY.
..don't panic
Hardly anyone says, "I don't use Google+". I know people who say, "I don't use Facebook", or "I dumped facebook." but with G+ it is just sort of assumed. Sort of like it is assumed that people don't use MySpace.
The only time anyone I know mentions G+ is when they blah blah about how G is being an ass about linking it to other things. Google tried to make it relevant but offered nothing that was really new. I found the whole circles thing a confused mess.
In fact the only people who I find tend to have a google plus presence also seem to have something to do with Google. Either they work for google or do something with Stanford and thus probably are surrounded by googly people.
I would be curious to know how much money has been spent trying to prop up G+?
Sorry - Google was just too late to this game. There is no way I'm mapping my list of friends a second time, or maintaining it twice. Facebook has that market cornered, and I'm not interested in switching. I think it probably doesn't matter what Google does - most users are content. That's a hard market to win over. I sort of feel like Google should be using their engineering efforts elsewhere, and thinking up something new and great that we don't already have, vs. trying to beat this dead horse.
Yes! We are now calling it a "stream!" The "stream" will have the ability to be more in-your-face! It will be the NUMBER ONE choice for social blaggers within a couple of years! Everyone is going to want Google+'s stream in their face! NUMBER ONE!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Good of them to do something with photos. But what i really wish they did was to turn the circle concept on it's heads.
Content should be put in circles instead of people. As an example I like to follow Linus Torvalds, but only for Linux related stuff - if they allowed linus to put his Linux content in Linux circles, and Diving stuff in Diving circles, and then allowed me to follow the content i like, then we could talk about managing information.
Pinterest is splitting it the right way, but are only focused on pictures. I want google+ to do it for content.
Maybe they'll rebrand to 'Big Brother' instead. The whole 'social web' just seems like an endless maze of corporate surveillance. Sometimes I don't understand how people avoid running away screaming in terror.
I, for one, don't really use Google+, but it's not because of any particular problem other than, "No one else is using it," with just a smidge of "I don't know what I'm supposed to be using it for," thrown in.
It does seem to me like "Hangouts" should be its own thing, along with chat and VoIP. If anything, those things should should sooner be integrated into Gmail somehow. I'm not sure I want that, but it would make more sense, at least, since it's all, roughly speaking, private communications.
I also think that there should be a separate web application that is, "Where my phone automatically uploads my photos, where I can organize them and track them myself, but they're private." Personally, it just makes me a little uncomfortable for that to be bolted straight on to the "photo sharing social networking site," but maybe that's just me. I'm old. I feel ok if the social networking site can connect in and pull photos from the private site. Hell, even if I know it's all ultimately stored in the database, that's not what bothers me. It's just to have my private stuff be in the same interface as the publicly shared stuff, without a clear apparent distinction... it worries my poor little monkey brain.
Ultimately, between Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I tend to use Facebook for sharing posts/photos/updates. Not because I like it or think it's good, and only somewhat because my friends seem to use it more. As much as anything, I think it's because it's the site that confuses me the least.
They need to divide it into the department of nobody and nothing and the department of gtfo of youtube. That's the proper corporate organization.
I see that Google is still trying to make something of its social network. Even though I have heard that Google has practically cut in half the people working on Google Plus. Its either a sign that Google has pulled away and accepted Google + as a failure. Or that its content with it being what it is. I don't participate in any social sites anymore. I finally saw the light and realized how much of a time waste it is. I think Facebook took off because it was really the first to attract large numbers and they in tern attracted even more users as any social networks success depends on everyone you know or want to know be on the same network.
Google + was never going to really succeed because it lacked large numbers of converts which would eventually bring others over. Facebook has become the staple social site by default, and while that may not stay that way forever. It so far has provided the default meeting place like the local diner or favorite bar.
I know this is standard for /. but what the hell is Coogle+
Can't you at least do a basic spell check?
no one cares. I was about to write,
no ones gives a shit
but then it's Teh G, and there is a whole lot of shit there, so that would just be wrong. Main gist, who TRUSTS Teh G? No one.
Same here. I had to quit using gtalk just last week and I can't use google hangouts on my work pc because it doesn't support multiple accounts. Guess I'll have to find an alternative.
The problem for me is that it nags me constantly. Do I know these people? Do you want to connect to these people? Are these groups of interest to you? Tell us about yourself. Naturally it doesn't offer options to hide these panes or put them away in a "discover" section where they're out of sight. They're always there nagging me.
I don't expect to give my fucking life story over for a glorified feed and so I don't use it much at all. Another issue for me is that I used to use iGoogle as my home page. They canned that service and some other related ones, presumably because they thought people would use G+ instead if they removed the alternatives. It didn't work for me because I want a page with news headlines and some other RSS stuff I read and some wall of stuff is simply not what I want - so I use My Yahoo instead.
Is to spread the love around to multiple companies. Therefore, I won't use anything Google for anything else (other than the Gmail and search I currently use - and I'm desperately trying other alternatives to get off of those, too.)
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Google made the first step by removing the Google+ requirement for Hangouts. Splitting photos and streams is also welcome news.
I like the Google ecosystem, but not everyone wants a social "wall". Apple seems to have managed delivering core functionality without the need for social integration.
I've never really understood the vitriol toward G+. The press doing what they do (and no doubt strongly encouraged by Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) created a narrative of Google taking aim at Facebook and how they will most certainly fail. Google has repeated many times what the G+ initiative was about, but the press either ignored the facts or said Google was lying. How dare Google try to disrupt their narrative with something as inconsequential as facts. G+ is a framework to unify Google services. Before, it was a complete mess. You had different userids and passwords, Google App accounts were completely walled off from non-app services, every service had it's own comment engine. This was because each of those services were developed in their own bubble. Now, Google has a unifying framework for existing and new services as they are created. Yes, I'm sure they would have been thrilled if the G+ stream would be more popular than FB, but that wasn't the goal. They had to do something with the mess of unrelated services. It was becoming an administrative nightmare for them. Making hangouts and photos available through their own entry point is a good thing. Some people didn't want to deal with the stream or even see it. They figured fine, make a separate entry point. The important thing to remember though is the framework did exactly what they wanted it to do, and it is a success. You have one Google account that accesses all their services. Apps users can access all services. The more people use the services they'll find it's easy to just click a button to put it in the stream if they wish.
Sounds a lot like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... sadly enough there may be more similarities than we want.
Yo dawg, I heard you like Cobol Engineering, so I put some COBOL in your Cobol so you can dream while you dream.
Fortran, on the other hand...
Everyone is going to want Google+'s stream in their face!
But how will it compare to Will Wright's Pee?
Circles, hangouts, streams... who came up with these names so devoid of any grace?
I remember when a rather excited friend told me about Skype for the first time; the name had hightech-charisma and being a scramble of 'speak' it made sense for that it represented.
Every time I heard/read 'hangouts' sounds to me like a mediocre record by Vanilla Ice trying to sound cool in the 2010's.
Streams... means more stupid names may be coming soon.
Facebook is apparently extremely successful and they still have a real names policy: https://www.facebook.com/help/... Google had one and now no longer has it; but people keep pointing to the real names policy as a major reason that G+ isn't more popular. If that was the case, no one would be using FB.
It's always lurking there, waiting for Facebook to fail. Please never stop using it, as it is the only real threat to Facebook.
Again with the complete failure to grasp reality. Facts aren't perjoratives or talking points. They're facts.
Because... one of the keys ways for Google to compete with Facebook in the only arena that matters (the bottom line) was to compete for advertising dollars. G+ was a shortcut to more easily tracking Google users across multiple services and increasing the value (to Google) of their massive database of user information.
I note you don't debate the facts - you just throw mud to try any deny their existence. The only "point" you've proven is how far you're willing to go to deny the facts.