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Google Insiders Talk About Why Google+ Failed
An anonymous reader writes in with this story about what happened to Google+ from an employee perspective. "Last month, Google announced that it's changing up its strategy with Google+. In a sense, it's giving up on pitching Google+ as a social network aimed at competing with Facebook. Instead, Google+ will become two separate pieces: Photos and Streams. This didn't come as a surprise — Google+ never really caught on the same way social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn did....Rumors have been swirling for months that Google would change its direction with Google+. Business Insider spoke with a few insiders about what happened to the network that Google believed would change the way people share their lives online. Google+ was really important to Larry Page, too — one person said he was personally involved and wanted to get the whole company behind it. The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook. Another former Googler agrees, saying the company was 'late to market' and motivated from 'a competitive standpoint.'"
Google Streams of piss ......
How about launching a product and sticking with it for 10 years or more, you fucking clowns?
Nobody in their right mind chooses a Google product as part of their critical infrastructure ..... because Google keeps closing its products down.
They already have too much of my online attention. Sharing anything except my searches with them is a non-starter. It doesn't matter how well implemented the service is. Because it's Google, there's just absolutely no way I'm using it.
I won't even look at files people try to share with me through Google. I just say, "Sorry, I don't use Google drive!" I feel so strongly about it I don't even care if it loses me business or friends.
I know exactly why Google+ failed. WE ARE TIRED OF GOOGLE AND THEIR PRODUCTS It's time for new businesses to make such services, one's who won't sell our lives for a profit. But hey, takes a genius to figure that one out.
RIP Google news pre-2010, RIP pre-google+ google, RIP igoogle, RIP talk, RIP classic maps, RIP reader, RIP various gmail UI parts only available in html only mode now, RIP pre-vic google (ontopic part of post)
Posting to undo accidental mod.
It failed because anyone interested in joining couldn't join because it was Invite Only, then they stopped caring.
Lucky facebook didn't have the same attitude back when myspace was king.
Does Google persist with anything that doesn't succeed almost immediately?
They could learn a thing or two from Microsoft. (I can't believe I just said that.)
Google Answers.
Google Shopping.
Goog-411.
Google Buzz.
Google Wave.
Google Video.
iGoogle.
I don't trust Google to keep it around once it's no longer in Google's best interests to do so and since social networking isn't Google's focus or primary source of revenue, I can't trust that.
It's not that I begrudge them the decision to do what's in their own best interests but I have that same decision to make and Google+ doesn't align with them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Before we had google search, we wandered the web. Google built the in roads and the old web becomes a wasteland between walled gardens of facebook, google, the rest of the big box scum now spewing their social media garbage onto us. it's their fundamental "make the words info useful" statement. mobilegeddon continues this saddening trend.
...the inconsistent Real Names Policy enforcement... ...Eric Schmidt's statement regarding Google+ that "We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it" http://readwrite.com/2010/08/04/google_ceo_schmidt_people_arent_ready_for_the_tech ...and Vic Gundotra's (mis)management and abuse of users who disagree'd with him http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-real-name-clampdown-ignores-own-grace-period/
Despite being a relatively useful service social media service, the misguided personal agendas of the executives running it had killed good will among many early adopter non-Google employee users. Some folks at Google will tell you, under the veil of anonymity, it killed a lot of goodwill amongst Google employees too.
The big problem with G+ is that it was basically Facebook by Google. They tried to make a big deal about the circles but I didn't know anybody who found that to be a compelling feature and it just made the site more of a headache to use. Plus if you really care you can do that on Facebook anyway. This wasn't like Myspace where the site was quickly swirling the drain and people needed someplace new to go. Facebook still works alright for most people (although the way they keep using every trick in the book to use "Top" view instead of "Most Recent" is still obnoxious) and their friends are already there. It never had that killer feature to overcome people's inherent inertia.
I read the internet for the articles.
Not that it matters any more, but if you work for Google and wonder why ignored all those invites, it's because you, Google, insisted I change how I share my use of your products as a condition of joining Google+.
Before Google+, I used a variety of your products - blogspot, youtube, search. You know that the same person was using all these services - but the world in general doesn't, and most importantly, none of them were tied to my real name.
Then, to join Google+, you wanted me to "convert" my account, and attach my name to everything.* I was not interested in that, so I diligently stayed away. For Facebook, on the other hand, I knew going in that it would use my real name. (I still waited as long as possible and only signed up to avoid becoming a hermit.) Since I knew my name would be attached from the start, the way in which I share has always been somewhat sanitized.
Because you, Google, are so many things, you can't be a real-name social network, at least if you insist that I retroactively claim ownership over everything else. Sorry.
* Even if this isn't true, this is what I got from all of the media coverage, discussion, and your own promotion. If I understood this all wrong and could have keep using the other services separately and anonymously, then it's your fault for advertising Google+ so badly. That's sort of sad, given that advertising is your business.**
** IIRC they did change this eventually, but by then Google+ was already an obvious failure and it wasn't worth creating an account.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Seriously, it was, and is, far more confusing and disorienting than Facebook ever was. It looked like a steep learning curve, to guess exactly what the privacy settings are, what "adding to circle" REALLY means, who sees WHAT, etc.
Too few explanations, too many "helpful" abstractions. Not enough intuitive responses... i.e. places you'd expect to be (redundantly but helpfully) clickable, aren't...
When it rolled out it looked like an alpha. I'm amazed that they fixed nothing since then.
Google's social networking features remain marginal for the same reason all of the other social networking sites remain marginal: the value of a social networking application is proportional to the number of people who are already using it. And Facebook hit critical mass first, which means that anyone who wants to "socialize" online with all of their buddies is going to want to do that on Facebook, because that's where all of their buddies are to be found online.
Asking people to also sign up for a second social-networking service is a losing proposition, because it inconveniences them (now they have to check two sites every day) without providing any compensating benefit (why talk to their friends on site B when they could already do that on site A?).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's Teh G after all. I know. I know. FB is the biggest, most evil face bitch, but stupid silly people need a place to feel they belong. And makes it easy to avoid them. Teh G though has nothing going for it. Search? Five years back yes. Today no. Tomorrow? Are you stupid and silly?
It failed because it was boring, shitty, and unnecessary, just like this article. Next question?
I think it's an understatement to call SystemD just an "accidental mod" and I don't see how you can undo it by a simple post like that.
One problem with it was the design. The interface was awful from the beginning. It looked sparse, while at the same time having WAY too much animation. It was so JavaScript-heavy that it wouldn't run on my netbook (4 Gb RAM). They killed off XMPP-integration and then abandoned RSS. There was no API for auto-posting, which increased the difficulty for creating content by people who take social media seriously. Google+ should have been much simpler and cooler. The Android app was (and is) completely obnoxious. Google are generally awful at design and should not try to be innovative with it. I can't stand animation, especially when it tries to be "cute". I stopped using it for those reasons, and I was a supporter in the beginning.
I greatly disliked that if I wanted to comment on some stupid video, it was linked to a wok related identifier (since I have a Google apps for business account).
Basically I stopped commenting on YouTube videos at all and greatly reduced my watching of them... hmm, perhaps I should thank them. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everything looked like it was thrown together with little rhyme or reason. Nothing was obvious.
Seriously, Google comes up with these great ideas, but many never get beyond alpha because the UIs suck. They need to hire someone who knows how to design user-friendly UIs.
Even widely used Google apps like Gmail and Drive have barely adequate UIs and could use a good overhaul (without going too far in the other direction and destroying the UI with feature-bloat).
It failed because of what they did to Dejanews and Google Reader.
People at Google have no real idea why people left their service (obviously). I'm sure those reasons do have something to do with it, but if they really knew how normal people reacted to things they wouldn't have such consistent spectacular self-inflicted product failures.
What finally killed it for me and my friends who were on it when it seemed to be growing well (though slowly), and left, was Eric Schmidt being an arrogant f@#4ing douchebag and doing a one-two whammy with the real names thing and the 'you're just a bunch of pigs whose data we're selling' thing. Sure that was the obviously the case, as with Facebook, but coming out and saying it was just too much for my plausible ego denial. It had a tough uphill climb ahead, and then they strangled it in the crib.
Yeah, this is a little flamey, but it's legitimately how I feel, no trolling. I was pretty upset he'd just torpedo it like that, and I'm sure people inside Google were rocking themselves in fetal positions as their point-haired executive crapped over everything they were trying to do.
I remember when Google+ first appeared as an "invite only" service. That was just before Facebook made the huge blunder of putting members' faces in ads for any pages they "Liked," suggesting an endorsement. I remember a lot of people everywhere got really angry at Facebook about "faces on ads," and even threatened to leave because of it.
And Google+ remained invite-only. Pretty much no one I knew had an account.
Over the next week, pretty much all you saw in the news was how people wanted to leave Facebook because of the "faces on ads" thing. What an abuse of privacy! You're stealing my image to sell products! There were a bunch of petitions for Facebook to undo the new "faces on ads," or else they would delete their Facebook accounts. The only problem was that there wasn't a viable alternate social network out there. Twitter wasn't really a replacement for how most people used Facebook.
And Google+ still remained invite-only. By then, a few people I knew had accounts, but had run out of invites to share. So few others could get in.
After a few weeks, Facebook decided to calm the storm, and undid "faces on ads." And as expected, people stopped freaking out about Facebook. After another week, even the tech websites stopped writing about "faces on ads."
And finally, Google+ went "live." Anyone could join. I had an account, but few of my other friends bothered to sign up. Why? Because they were still using Facebook, they got over the "faces on ads" fiasco. Without other people to share with, Google+ failed to gain critical mass.
Google+ failed because they didn't know how to respond to the opportunity that Facebook gave them.
There is a place for google+ as is. When I want to connect with friends and family I go to Facebook. When I want to connect with people of like interest I usually go to google+. I really I hope they don't change it and recognize it hasn't failed. It just serves a different purpose of than Facebook.
Yep, if you want me to participate in an online community in a lasting and meaningful way, there's no way in hell I'm using my real name.
Even worse, Google tried to confuse the issue (i.e. talk out of both sides of its mouth) by drawing a practically meaningless distinction between your "real" name and your common" name. See, your common name is "the name that you commonly go by in daily life," as opposed to your real name which is . . . fuck if I know. IMO, it was intentional double speak so they could claim "it's not actually a real name policy" whenever convenient.
Add to that at least one false start of rescinding the policy (is this one for real? Who knows?), and it's no wonder most of the internet judged them no more trustworthy (and of course potentially far more dangerous) than Facebook.
... the beginning of the end of Google
Everything has a beginning, an end, and a stretch of roller coaster ride in the middle
Google started as a search engine. Larry Page and Co. didn't actually have much more than a search engine in mind when they started Google (and obtained that legendary check from Andy Bechtolsheim
What we are seeing now --- the branching of Google into driverless cars, into Google+, into Youtube (actually they acquired it), and so on --- is but afterthoughts, aka what should we do with all the Billions we got?
Like M$, like Yahoo, like Myspace and so on, Google is on its way down
As for fb, don't worry, it too is on its way down --- as nothing stays up forever
But I LIKE Google+.
I have much more meaningful discussions on G+ than I do FB, partly because the number of followers on G+ is less, so less crap. But FB is full f people who genuinely can't think. It's sad how hard it is to have useful discussions on FB.
G+ also has much more interesting users. Maybe because they choose to participate, I don't know or care.
I can decline to have photos shared, etc, not much worse than FB.
If they truly hose up G+ in this split, I'll miss it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Google+ failed because all it did was to try to mimic Facebook. It didn't dare enough to make a radical change. And by radical change I mean hit facebook to where it hurts: Privacy and Terms and Conditions.
Google should have taken over Diaspora and rename it to Google+.
But it didn't dare to see what people really wanted. It didn't dare to return to its roots. First do something good about community and the people and then find way to monetize it.
I think they still have time.
Google+ would have been great had they taken the people out of it. It would have been great for devices to talk to other devices. It could have been the facebook for IoT.
But they missed the mark.
Honestly, the ultimate reason it failed, in my opinion, is because it didn't have a good name. I mean, sure, Google is a strong brand, but what the fuck is "Google Plus"?? People have learned that they go to Google for searching. They won't catch on if you try to shove another thing down their throat under the Google moniker. Brands don't work that way. You need sub-brands to succeed.
Had they give it some random made-up name instead, it might have stood a chance.
I use FB because everybody already is on it.
I use Skype because everybody is on it.
Not because I particularly like FB or Skpe (I fact I do not , FB ui driver me nuts due to inconsistencies and Skype went sour recently both in connection quality and their UI design).
4wdloop
iGoogle was great. Google+ was preposterously boring.
Google already knows too much, when it linked all those together under the guise of 'unifying its privacy policy', and when it started pushing me to Google+, I said, enough.
Now I use less and less Google.
As for Google+, seriously, you think for a second I will post my photos and information for you to datamine? I can't wait to get rid of Google in Android it pisses me off it pops up a sign into Google plus at every opportunity. It pisses me off that I need a Gmail account to use Play. Go f*** off Google.
I find it really fucking irritating that despite my browser saying "do not track", Google provides adverts for some detailed thing I searched for (in DuckDuckGo). I know damn well it has Google adverts on the product landing page, and Google Analytics on the shopping site, but I said "do not track" so quick showing me targetted tracking adverts.
As for Gmail, that was dropped when the NSA PRISM program was revealed, there's still Android. I find it still sends my location matched to the Google account, and there seems to be little I can do about that.... yet.... but soon.
G+ isn't a failure for me, it does exactly what I want and desire it to do.
In short, I love that G+, because I get what I want, but without the noise--unlike that fuck-book website.
It was clear from the start that what it wanted was your information, they didn't even try to hide it with their real name policy. And for the trouble they didn't really give much more then their competitors were already giving.
Yes, I think it was better from face book, but it didn't seem to have any care for any sort of privacy. So if you are concerned about your private details? Too bad. If you are in an online community that you don't care to share your personal information with? Too bad. Teenagers didn't like it, want to post where your parents won't see? Too bad.
They mentioned that they made a service that was for Google, but not for it's customers, I don't think they really still understood how deep that went. The fact that they started forcing people to join only reenforced the reality of the situation, turning something that had potential into joke.
Maybe someday someone will build a site for people the in the modern internet age, and not just for the corporation that runs it. G+ wasn't even a compromise between the two.
I so agree on this... the invite only is so damn stupid is crazy. The inbox was invite only. am I using it? NO!!!... I waited for the invite and realized it shit(my opinion). Now the stupid FI wireless, again invite only. By the time they realize this invite only is BS is too late. Also I hear on the radio they try to spin the FI that is something to rattle the wireless for the pay as you use. Sorry google, is called prepaid and your prices are not really revolutionary. The roaming and global net is great, the rest is shit.
for setting mobile search to rank by mobile site design vs relevance. And yes all responsive websites suck. So I get an option of pinch and see and get the info I want on a normal website or I get Nintendo thumb from scrolling down and scrolling and scrolling and then going why the fuck is the navigation at the end of this bottomless pit.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Posting to undo accidental mod.
Somehow I read that as:
$sudo undo accidental mod
(and spent my last point to do that for ya).
I use G+ exactly for what the change affects, because I am developer and photographer (hobby). It is stream and photos which are going to be separated.
The current state of G+ is annoying for me. G+ is essentially great and far better for software, tech and developers than any other social nets which support blog-style postings. The reason is simply that really many people who are great are there, even Poettering (just for reference to the systemd post above).
And second thing is G+ is also great for photography. There is a huge mass of photographers who are active and generate content. I love to look at their pictures and have about 1000 photographers in my circles.
The problem: the G+ stream is cluttered. It lacks separation of topics. I like to look at photos, as I said, but when I want to read about tech the stream is hard to browse, because of all my photographer contacts. Also the same photographers might also post something, but I don't see it, because all I see are pictures everywhere. And the new content is appearing very fast. My stream has lots of updates. It is far faster than my Twitter stream with 250 contacts.
So the change will be probably OK. I cannot say before I see it, but I've noticed the problem from the start. It's interesting that Google identified it, too.
Not becoming more popular than facebook is not failure. Google+ succeeded quite well, and many enjoyed using it. It's only a "failure" because google expects to dominate and destroy all competition and gives up and shuts down solid popular products if they don't become the market leader.
This space intentionally left blank
when you started letting people post on my g+ i did not let, and tried to be like faceplant
WHICH I ALSO DONT USE
Google+ Failed because it did not provide any added value to the users.
Too much integration of services is actually lowering the value, I don't see any value between which YouTube videos I have commented on and which searches I have performed.
There is also a danger with too much integration - privacy matters, and if things are too integrated then it's a goldmine for anyone with malicious intent. If services are separated then each service needs to be targeted individually, which raises the stakes.
Of course - Providers of integrated services are obviously able to do statistical analysis of information that's valuable for marketing purposes, so that the ads that you will see when reading your favorite sites without an adblocker will be targeted for your specific demographics. There's usually no point in offering Viagra to teenagers or trendy boots to people in their 60's.
Maybe it's also a question of the personality of people, which means that you end up with different personalities:
- Facebook, a heaven for narcissists, people with a selfie stick and similar.
- Google, people that actually do things and in some cases show what they have done through YouTube.
- LinkedIn, an address book and CV online for professionals.
- Bing, a place for people unaware of technology and other offerings.
- DuckDuckGo, a place for semi-paranoid people.
- Tor, users that are either paranoid or performing illegal/semi-legal stuff.
Due to the bell curve we of course see people mainly using Google as Bing and DuckDuckGo users from time to time. But people frequently using DuckDuckGo are less likely to be on Facebook.
Also just ask yourself - do you use more than one browser? That's one way of breaking the statistics collectors to ensure that you show a different profile depending on what you do on the net. It's not a perfect safety, but it will shake up the statistics a bit and reduce the risk of cross-site reading of cookies trying to track your behavior. Personally I run Firefox, Opera and IE depending on what I do.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They tried shoving it down our throats, G+ account required for reviews on Play store etc.
I can appreciate what you're saying. I went the opposite way. I use Android, which means I use Google for maps, search, etc. Therefore, I've decided since Google has a good profile of me, I'll try to limit it to ONLY Google, rather than being thoroughly profiled by several different companies.
As a side benefit, Google Now does some pretty cool stuff as their database begins to have good data about my interests and such.
Google+ had a huge demand when it was first released. But instead of letting everyone and their brother sign up right away, they did a stupid staggered release. People would sign up, find out their friends weren't on there yet, and stop using it. If G+ had been open to everyone who wanted it right when it opened, it would at the very least have given Facebook a run for its money.
That's totally unfair and a sweeping generalisation to boot.
They only shut down the good ones.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... it's the only social network I find usable. So if they fuck with it, it'll just mean I'm not going to any. So much for that.
I always thought part of the problem with Google+ was the branding. Google is a search engine in peoples minds. It doesn't conjure up an image of a go to social site just because it adds a + to the name.
This ad space for rent.
You wanted to compete with Facebook. Which you took to mean that I should be shoved onto it forcibly even though I have a fully-functioning social network with all my details, photos and friends plugged in anyway. You thought I should be badgered into submission until I moved all that content over, and have to go via roundabout routes to opt out of this stuff - on a GMail account I'd have since the first days of invite-only accounts.
And you didn't listen or care at the time. If you're that forcible with getting the information out of me, imagine how forcible you'll be when I try to get that information on me back.
Wouldn't touch it with a bargepole (despite being quite Google-centric in my services otherwise) just because of the "YOU MUST SIGN UP NOW" attitude.
If you'd just done what you did with Google Mail, slowly adding in features (e.g. Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc.) quietly that I can choose to use as I see fit, and just stumble across them as I need, and can just use them without being required to fill out EVERY DAMN BOX every time, then it would have taken off much nicer. And if I don't want to use them... well, they're still there any time I do.
Fact is, my Google Account is still the same one and STILL does not have a Google+ profile. Not even an image. Because, sorry, it doesn't work that way. I choose to use the service, you don't choose who must use it. When you tried to force me to fill out and use that part of my Google profile, I did everything I could NOT to. And look who won.
One of the things that makes other networks successful is the ability to wall off unwanted attention. With G+, it's auto-opt in for lots of crap, and you often don't feel you have control of what people see on the site. Is that photo for a specific person? A subset of tags? What if people see how I've tagged/grouped them? It's clear they shouldn't, but it's not clear why or how that's true. In short, it has a poor user experience. They really need a clear separation from you and other users, almost like they're started in a 'private room' and then expanding from there --- plus some kind of integration with existing social networks (e.g. crossing posting with instagram, pinterest, etc). Easy interaction and *separation* of features -- like gmail, drive, docs, etc, wouldn't hurt either.
Look, it's been a while.
Reader is not coming back, you have got to let go.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
So little subject space.
Back in January /. had an article: that "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post public content. "We've got a grand spanking total of 24 profiles out of 7,875 whose 2015 post activity isn't YouTube comments but Google+ posts." http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
I've avoided Google +, even got it removed from my account, at which point when I log into Google now I'm given the choice of which one of two accounts to log in with, both mine, both old, so one with Google +, one without. I only log into Google to post videos to Youtube then log off, POPing my Gmail, to my computer.
I have a 4 second video nobody likes, and the comments threating, yet it's seen 500K views - the demographics one gets with that kind of activity is amazing, and justifies logging in only when one must, and logging off as soon as possible.
G+'s homepage was a disgrace for the longest time, filled with.. hangouts logs ? And not just at launch, this went on for months, and I gave up.
They could have populated it with my RSS feeds + Google Now stuff, but they cut Reader, and Now isn't that good for me.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It's interesting to see all this speculation based on one internal job title. Google+ isn't going anywhere.
What turned me off was the way they pushed it so hard, holding people's youtube channels hostage and such. You could not comment on your own videos w/o a g+ account. That was fucking stupid. They way they constantly tried to trick you into signing up for accounts pissed me off royally. The underhanded tactics made damned sure that I would never tie my real name to any g+ account.
It was worse than slashdot beta in how it DEMANDED you use it.
Thing is, it wasn't needed for 90% of people.
If they'd not pushed it like they were ramming it up your bog hole, 10%+ would have taken it up and liked it. If they'd done it better or as good as FB et al, or found a methodology that people liked for some purposes not easily done by other sites, they would have moved more people over to it by word of mouth, but this wasn't going to be quick enough at all, and uncertain to boot.
Larry wanting it explains why they rammed it hard and fast. Ego.
If they had still failed with G+ but not pushed so damn hard, they would have less negative feeling built up. They have to remove it now, it won't dissipate on its own except over a generation. And whilst it's there, any new feature Google makes will be looked at in the negative light of that ill will.
Youtube have problems with Google trying to monetise the youtubers' work and this will likely move almost everyone to some other site that's arisen with the exodus of most of the most profitable (from an eye-count point of view at least) youtubers to mostly producing on patreon or twitch or similar and mirroring their stuff over on Youtube to keep some of their followers who do not want to swap from "just Youtube, that has all the people I'm interested in" to "I have to include three or four sites to include all the people I'm interested in, plus Youtube for me".
If you make enough money to pay everyone the salary, there's no need to push for more money.
But not growing by an increasing percent is taken by accountanting thought to be recession.
Or, indeed, the linux kernel (with some justification there, and limited since it only bothers those who fiddle with the kernel access such as device drivers).
Title says it all. Good riddance to Google+. Gmail, too. They made it so difficult to use on Android that really I have given up even trying to make sense of it.
Those, however, are not services that belong on someone else's server that you access.
Examples you need to find that are equivalent are
WoW. Which 2004 version still connects to Blizzard? :-)
PlaysForSure. Already know how that one went...
Bing products.
Encyclopedia (online connection updates).
Origin games.
HL Online (or any Steam version 10+ years old, not updates requiring a different contractual agreement, which makes it a different service)
etc.
A product you install can continue to exist because you have the copy to use it. Services don't do that. You need to find services and see how many of those are still working with the 10+ year old product.
Google is reaping the rewards of their hubris.
Fuck your real names.
Fuck your forced G+ membership to comment in Play store.
Fuck your forced G+ membership to comment in YouTube.
Fuck your forced G+ membership to Login with Google Credentials.
Fuck your bullshit.
Fuck you.
... can you finally shitcan it now? (Like 90% of your other products...)
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
1) Hostile environment for pseudonymous / anonymous users
2) Forced account registration / deceptive integration practices
3) Poor reputation for long-term product / infrastructure support
They're wrong about why it failed. What was attractive is that they were a lot like Facebook but slightly better when they first released it. However, when Google+ first came out they demanded that you had to use your real name in order to use it. If you refused, and they caught you, then they would disable all of your Google Accounts in retaliation. That included your gmail, google voice, picasa, google docs, and other miscellaneous accounts. It pissed off a lot of celebrities, because they never go by their real names online for obvious reasons. And, of course, those of us who aren't celebrities usually value our privacy minus the millennials who would sell their social security number for a candy bar.
I know that I for one wouldn't use their service because of it, even after they dropped the rule. Because, they specifically stated in their EULA that they had the right at any time to reinstate the rule. Besides not wanting to use my real name, I also wouldn't want them to catch me and shut my accounts down as I rely on their services to do my job and in my personal life. It was a pretty viscous thing of them to do if you think about it. And, actually the whole scenario started to make me rethink using any google services at all. Over time I've started to migrate away from them, to the point that I don't even use their search engine anymore due to their malware ads and privacy bubbling.
Tying all my Google services together,
Like my youtube subsciption, e-mail and google plus. So because I did not want to change my youtube ID, They tied it to my gmail account so now people get
YouTubeNick myemail@gmail.com
So I have not posted anything on youtube since. I know their money is made by selling my name.
Fuck em.
No youtube, no google+
What we are seeing now --- the branching of Google into driverless cars, into Google+, into Youtube (actually they acquired it), and so on --- is but afterthoughts, aka what should we do with all the Billions we got?
You are quite wrong if you think a lot of the things Google is doing are "afterthoughts". They aren't. You just have to look at them from Google's perspective. Youtube isn't an afterthought, it fits very nicely in with their core advertising business - eyeballs on video has a long tradition. Google+? Integrates business lines for better advertising. Maps? Local search and advertising. Gmail? Advertising based on personal communications. Android? Defensive play to keep Apple and Microsoft from shutting them out of the mobile ad market. Almost everything Google does supports their core advertising business either by extending it or protecting it. 95% of their revenue comes from ads (look it up - it's in their financial statements) and that number hasn't budged.
Google seems to live by the "fail fast" mantra. If they don't think something is going to be a home run they close it down fairly quickly. I'm sure they get it wrong sometimes but at least I can wrap my head around what they are doing. Otherwise they would eventually end up with a bunch of small products used by a tiny group of people that cost them far more to maintain than they will ever generate in revenue. I understand the frustration with never being sure if they'll keep a product around but it's not hard to understand why they are doing it.
The driverless car thing is flashy and cool but it gets WAY more press than is justified by the amount of money and effort Google is actually pouring into it. It's genuinely not that big a deal for Google and isn't likely to move the needle on their revenue or costs for many years if ever. Driverless cars is a research project by the closest thing Google has to a basic science research group. Any benefits from it will likely take decades to fully realize.
As for fb, don't worry, it too is on its way down --- as nothing stays up forever
Google is certainly being more sane than Facebook. $2 billion for Occulus? Explain to me how that will ever tie into Facebook's business model or how that price is remotely justifiable given the likely ROI. However I don't see Facebook going away any time soon unless they do something truly moronic. Never underestimate the power of network effects in keeping a user base around. See eBay if you need a good example. Terrible to do business with but everyone goes there because that's where everyone else is.
Google+ failed miserably because no one wants every single video you saw listed for the whole world, 90% of the population does not want to show to the whole world what books you read, what pages you have visited or Android applications that you use. Hell, I'm not even sure if the hangout messages are really reserved for participants! Add it the fact that the interface is shit apparently made by trainees (probably the same idiots who made the "material style" on the Android Lollipop), and it's clear why this crap failed.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Log in and find 1 photographer. With in mins you will see more then enough posts to keep your feed full for days.
Remember Eric's brilliant response to user's privacy concerns ?
"We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
Well, I guess he got the last part figured out. We think that G+ has failed. I remember the time when that creepy curved arrow showed up on Google's home page, forcing users to go to the "+You" button. Forcing users to sign up and then exposing their real names was the perfect way to kill the product.
I know it will never work, but open-standards for stuff is what we really should shoot for.
Email and web were successful because anyone could run servers on the protocol.
Chat was starting to move that way, but nobody seems to use chat anymore. Text or FB message or instagram or twitter.
Social media is all privately controlled and that is bad for us all.
For a product or service to unseat a market leader, it's got to be MUCH better than the status quo.
No it does not. In fact most established companies are demonstrably NOT usually unseated by technology that is much better than the status quo at the time they get unseated. Often the technology is actually worse at least at first. This is the core idea behind disruptive innovations. A better mousetrap is helpful but most of the time it isn't what actually unseats a market leader. What does is technology that changes the market itself rather than being a better version of what already exists.
What has to happen is that the new product or service has to provide a new value proposition that that the market leader cannot match until it is too late. Usually they cannot match it because initially the financial value of the new technology isn't enough to be worth the time for the market leader to develop. Often they fight it because it might cannibalize their existing revenue streams.
Fighting a market leader head on almost always results in the market leader winning. Instead they get unseated by technology that changes the game. There are lots of examples. Linux still hasn't made a dent in the desktop operating system market but it dominates mobile. It changed the game and mobile arguably is where all the growth is. Cell phone cameras still aren't better cameras than standalone point and shoots but they were good enough and are integrated with a networked device everyone already carries. Kodak couldn't be bothered to develop a digital camera business even though they pioneered the technology because they were at their core a chemicals company and couldn't make the shift.
Interesting that in all the armchair analyses above, I haven't seen anyone mention the NSA snooping.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
> 'late to market' and motivated from 'a competitive standpoint.'"
Also known as the microsoft strategy.
Google doesn't know what it is doing when it comes to social media.
They had a perfectly good landing site for people, iGoogle, that aggregated feeds that people look at daily, including Twitter, Facebook etc. They neglected it and then, without any in depth analysis or community research, shut it down. To "replace" it they launched Google+, the "next Facebook". Most of the iGoogle community then defected either to Facebook or to ighome.
For a social media site to become useful, it needs to reach a certain mass. After all, you aren't going to hang out on a site where it's only you or only you and one other friend. Facebook's "stickyness" is due to practically everyone and their Grandmother having accounts. And, despite the security issues (which Facebook has very slowly improved on), Facebook is good enough that the masses put up with it.
The only reason why Google+ has 2 billion profiles is because they forced everyone to sign up for access to other Google services. While this seems like a good way to reach critical mass, it's acts against the psychology of social media. Most people join social media sites because they want to, not because they are forced to. This breeds a certain amount of resentment against the brand.
It isn't that Google+ is bad or that it isn't somewhat useful, Google just went about it the wrong way. In my opinion, they created a strategy that would solve part of the critical mass problem, but completely missed the mark when it came to the social aspect.
It is not working on my moto e phone
So, I had a great home page, which was iGoogle. I had the Google RSS reader that showed results in iGoogle. I had Google gadgets bringing me the weather, stock quotes, news, Facebook, etc.
They killed it all for Google+. So I went to Netvibes and i'm still there. I only use Google+ for my business and only because I'm forced to for competitive reasons. (e.g. search integration, adwords integration, etc)
The massive header image in Google+ was enough to kill the product for me. What the hell is wrong with them that they would think it is a good idea to take up all of the above the fold space with a flipping image?
Translation: The app store wasn't ready when the 1st gen iPhone was released (Apple had already been experimenting with 3rd party apps for the iPod before the iPhone was even announced). Like all Apple products, the 1st generation is beta testing of an incomplete product (iWatch buyers beware).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I don't think Google+ had a selling point. I suspect that a large part of the set of people who considered using it were looking for something; anything; that wasn't Facebook. They wanted to escape from that whole thing about having a big company know everything about their life and manipulate their interactions with other people for ad revenue. Because, really, what other big reasons are there to want to find an alternative to Facebook? Google+ wasn't the alternative people were looking for; it was worse. Better to split your service use between two competing companies than to give everything to a single company on a plate.
Obviously some people saw other virtues in Google+, but they were fragmented. Different people liked it for different reasons. There were never going to be enough people who liked it for the same reasons to be able to build up a critical mass of users.
Right now, I think the only thing that can replace Facebook is something that addresses the elephant in the room: people don't like handing over that much power to a single entity. Anyone who doesn't think that's a problem is likely to be happy with Facebook and to have little reason to leave. Facebook's other problems are minor in comparison to that one. Either that, or Facebook will be usurped by an opportunist and ultimately very similar rival that takes advantage of the bad feeling generated by some ill-judged change that Facebook makes, in abuse of its power.
These are why g+ failed. They wanted it to be a credentialing service more so than a "social network", and they actively stamped out any questionable content (in addition to questionable profiles).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Driverless cars are prime real estate for ads.
That's a bit of a stretch even for Google. I'm not saying you are wrong but it doesn't really explain their investment in the technology. That's just too far off to make a connection to a revenue stream at this time.
Honestly the real revenue stream for that sort of technology will probably be in licensing. Making what amounts to a navigation system for a car could be a very real standalone business if they get far enough ahead of the curve. I could see Google spinning it off or licensing the technology somewhere down the road. Google gets the opportunity to direct the technology in ways beneficial to them (maybe) but they aren't the only ones working on this so any ties to their current business model are hugely premature given that not a single vehicle sold has any of this technology embedded in it yet.
I am tired of these corporations trying to own the world. We invest time and energy in to these systems to only be farmed for ads or worse and ultimately to see it die off.
What we need is a pure peer to peer facebook where we dictate the fate our data. Think usenet, torrent, irc, webrtc. It can be done. You can still have corporations farm you in lieu of providing better hosting/support but base the system on an open, distributed protocol.
Obscenity-laced, but accurate. I started desiring Google+'s demise the day I could no longer rate an app without a G+ account. G+ wasn't logically associated with that activity in any way. It added nothing to the process. I didn't WANT that service, and was going to receive NO personal benefit from using it. In fact, it gave me one more website I had to keep an eye on to make sure my private details were kept somewhat private. Screw that.
Women never joined so men never followed them.
I will never, ever, forgive them for their short-sightedness in shutting down Reader. We told them at the time that they were shutting down a massive community of geeks & influencers, but they went ahead and did it anyway. A massive strategic mistake.
Maybe I was naive, but I never really thought about the prospect of Google shutting down a service I relied on - sure they shut down some services that had almost zero usage, but a server *I* relied on? No, Google would never do that. It's used by geeks and technologists for goodness sake, Google was *our* company.
Then the hammer fell - Reader was a service I accessed every half hour of every day. I know we some good alternatives have belatedly emerged (well, one), but the problem remained - how could I ever recommend a Google service to anyone in the future? How could I recommend gmail to my family when I wasn't sure it would vanish overnight because Google believes we were doing email wrong? How could I recommend to my boss that we move some critical infrastructure to App Engine, when Google had shown it was willing to shut down heavily used services because they just weren't quite big enough? Maybe all the snarly comments about fancy food and foosball tables were right all along - Google was staffed with kids and academics who had no idea how the real world worked.
Almost all of Google's products fail. They succeeded at search, big time. Arguably they succeeded at Android, but if I understand the numbers then Microsoft actually makes a lot more money from Android through patent licensing fees that Google does through the OS (not withstanding ad revenue from the search and services Google provides to Android).
The Nexus media player was a flop, Glass was a flop, Wave was a flop, Google video was a flop(and lead them to purchase YouTube), Web Accelerator was a flop, and any number of their "beta" projects have been flops.
Seems to me the default outcome for anything Google does outside the core of search (or selling customers as product to advertisers) is a flop, so why be surprised that Google+ flopped?
And the public persona you're going for is 'pathetic troll'? Congratulations!
This also explains why LinkedIn, notwithstanding the tonnage of electrons it devotes to spam, keeps spinning its wheels.
Right. The reason I deleted my account was that they were creeping me out with their emails asking me if I knew so-and-so. I foolishly uploaded my address book so I could transfer it to an Android phone, (somehow, it couldn't be done directly from my Mac at the time), and promptly forgot about it. Later, my email inbox started filling up with emails asking me if I knew old employers, and other people who I'd never, ever, want looking at my profile. It took me a while to figure out how they were making these connections, and when I did, I had to delete these hundreds of address book entries from their site, one by one.
I just hate the way Google scans all your data, and makes whatever use of it they like. And I really hate that they try to force you to use one ID for all of their accounts. I don't want all that shit tied together. I also stopped using Google for my googling, not only because of privacy concerns, but also because you don't get neutral search results.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Had they built it upon the existing and successful Orkut, theyd be ahead of Facebook. But no, Orkut was too Brazilian and Indian for our blue eyes and silky white complexion.
Everyone who wanted social networking is already on Facebook, and is already invested of time and energy there. Maintaining another network with less of their friends on it is a total lose for them.
Linked-in is for work and not really social. It exists so you don't have to maintain even a semblance of a social connection with the people you work with so they can be used for references in case you want to switch jobs. The evidence that you are who you say you are is there in your LInked-in associations.
The rest of us don't want to be on a social network. We don't want to leak information unwittingly and we use google for other things, so if Google+ gets leaky/grabby with our private info we'll stop using Google for anything at all.
That said youtube comments are easy to follow with Google+ so I have my throwaway google account tied into Google+ and my real name google account also tied in with only my family and close respectable friends in my real name circles. I don't communicate with nut-cases with my real name account.
I live in fear that I could accidentally click a button on my android phone that knows about both accounts which would create a link between the two accounts somewhere public. I may have to think about switching away from google for either real name stuff or fun stuff if it gets too scary. They'll end up like linked-in and be used exclusively for business if they get leaky. Good luck getting people to use anything new then..
This fear might have something to do with why people are leary of using Google+ as well.
The people who don't care are already on Facebook.
...
I still miss it.. feedly just isn't the same.
On the contrary. If one platform has more content than the other, that's a result of your choices, not the platform. If you fail to exercise the options offered over the content resulting a lower s/n ratio, that's your choice, not the platforms fault.
My answer isn't "typical FB-style", it's the blunt truth. You're a clueless fool who is blaming the tool rather than the operator.
My two cents, if they really wished to dramatically increase its usage, provide greater strength to incoming links on Google+ in Google's organic search results. Webmaster usage would increase at a ridiculous rate and the more content on the network the faster the snowball rolls. Right now as it stands with a general audience, it is still a pebble with no visible benefit of usage otherwise.
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Yeah, the anti-Apple fanboys are far nuttier and more rabid than the fanboys.
I tried to use it and honestly just didn't know how. Or maybe because none of my friends were on it, making it useless.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
No need to apologize. But can we have our +"search term" back now?
I bet they can do better than imgur. If they had a image storing service I think I would use it.
Yeah, sorry for that.
I have developed a great deal of animosity towards Google.
"Share their lives online," to be marketed to. When the perception is that your life is treated like a commodity, you tend to stop wanting to share especially in Google's aggregated mess of accounts.
If they would have integrated the RSS aspects of Reader and the versatility and customization available in iGoogle, I would have gladly used Google+. With the newsfeeds I had in Reader, sharing would have been simple and with the modules and tabs of iGoogle, I'd likely have made a start page out of it. But I simply don't visit my Google+ page. I have no compelling reason.
Google should focus on what it's good at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...
You mena there is something more to Google Plus than email?
And there's something more to Linked-In than people spamming you about jobs you've no interest in?
Who'd have thought it?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"