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Inside the Failure of Google+
An anonymous reader writes: An article at Mashable walks through the rise and fall of Google+, from the company's worries of being displaced by Facebook to their eventual realization that Google services don't need social hooks. There are quotes from a number of employees and insiders, who mostly agree that the company didn't have the agility to build something so different from their previous services. "Most Google projects started small and grew organically in scale and importance. Buzz, the immediate predecessor to Plus, had barely a dozen people on staff. Plus, by comparison, had upwards of 1,000, sucked up from divisions across the company." Despite early data indicating users just weren't interested in Google+, management pushed for success as the only option. One employee said, "The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off." Despite a strong feature set, there was no acknowledgment that to beat Facebook, you had to overcome the fact that everybody was already on Facebook.
At least with Facebook, you generally knew what non-FB sites would post on your FB, as it would ask for your FB login. Google has the same thing, but the parts of the web that are already Google's don't have that separate login. The big ones would be your search history and YouTube.
I've never seen anything on Facebook that I didn't post there, but I did see things on my Google+ page that I didn't put there. That prompted me to make everything I could find private, and that in turn killed Google+ for most people indefinitely. Worst perhaps is that Google+ is linked to what may actually be your real email account, whereas Facebook was linked to (in my case) my 90 year old two-spirit avatar from Stromness. Of course one can create a Google+ avatar, but because its so intertwined you really can't ever kill off one that is linked to your real account, you simply make it all boring.
Facebook has been slower: because only things you send it could be visible by undesireables, people have been slower and laxer in locking down their profiles. So you still see some fun things on FB that make it something to look at, schadenfreude at its finest. Ultimately FB primarily has turned into a conglomerate of a desperate small-business owners way to try to push their bad ideas on their friends, a place to post pictures of your children and a news aggregator. I don't think it has much of a future on its present vector either. It will simply last longer because it is slightly less dangerous.
I went in to Facebook knowing it was using my real name and all my posts were public. I self-censor as appropriate given that limitation.
Google started as a variety of unrelated anonymous and pseudonymous services that I already used when they decided to link them all together and tack on a real-name mandate. No thanks.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.
This is wrong, and insulting to frogs. Contrary to popular opinion, a frog will not allow itself to be boiled alive, and when the water temperature gets too hot, will simply jump out of the pot. It's an old wives' tale that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if you turn the temperature up slow enough.
It's only humans that are so stupid that they'll accept horrendous conditions if you make the change slow enough.
Sure you do. Even if you don't register for the site, they create shadow accounts based on the contact numbers in people's phones, based on ID'ing the same person showing up in pictures, etc. They, I think, even allow your friends to tag you in pictures using the shadow account.
Nonsense. Microsoft was successful.
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