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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."
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
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+?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook doesn't really enforce their real names policy. G+ does.