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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.
As compared to Facebook?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ambition is one thing, but ignoring reality is something completely different.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Media of all kinds pushes, and has pushed Facebook. I have almost never heard any celebrity, actor, "news" caster, etc.. say "G+" in a positive context, only negative as in "nobody ever uses it" or "only tinfoil hatters and basement dwellers use it."
Media made Facebook by doing just the opposite. "follow us" is still heard more often than "visit us at our site".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Media doesn't want people switching because then they have to spend money on G+. They already spent marketing dollars on Facebook. Why would they want to waste that investment?
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
Facebook doesn't have a search engine nor the defacto video sharing platform. But yes, Facebook is after the same things; Google had them already and was arbitrarily mesh-mashing them together -- very unsettling to the user.
Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.
Except that facebook doesn't tie into the same account that I use for almost everything else.
The thing that distinguishes G+ is circles, which is actually a terrific idea. I have very little use for Facebook, but I use G+ for non-public communications quite regularly. (I won't call them exactly private, since the communications are still being mediated, and archived, by a centralized social network.) However, as with many other examples of technology, technical superiority doesn't mean much of anything with respect to widespread adoption. Facebook is the de facto standard, even if it sucks.
For me, and I would hazard to guess quite a few other people, the thing that makes G+ useful is that it failed to be adopted as a social media standard. I'll miss it when they finally turn it off.
Except that facebook doesn't tie into the same account that I use for almost everything else.
That is it right there, also I have a simple plugin for my browser that allows me to disable websites I visit from reporting back to Facebook via my browser.
There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.
I actually think a big part of the failure of Google+ was something that, in hindsight, looks so small that a lot of people forget about it: When Google+ launched, it was a limited invite-only service.
Google had previously had good experiences with that sort of limited/phased rollout, particularly with Gmail. The fact that it was hard to get an invite helped generate hype for Gmail, and I suspect they were hoping that creating the same kind of artificial scarcity would help Google+ accounts to become equally sought-after. And it worked, for a little while. There was a brief period of time where lots of people wanted account, and they were nearly impossible to come by.
However, whereas Gmail users can continue to communicate with people who use other Email providers, the utility of having a Google+ account is directly related to having all of your friend on the same social network. Because of this, in hyping the service by limiting the availability of accounts, Google was shooting themselves in the foot. At the time of greatest hype, right when the early adopters and people who are social networking hubs would be most eager to try the service, they either weren't able to get an account, or else they got an account only to find that their friends couldn't get an account. In the very important window of time between when Google+ was launched and when people had made up their minds about it, it had already earned a reputation as being "possibly potentially good, but useless because no one is on it."
And that narrative just stuck. A social network with nobody on it is of no use to anyone, so the narrative became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nobody ever bothered using Google+ because everyone already knew that nobody used it. As Google started to realize it was a failure, they then tried to force people to use it by linking it with all of their other services, but they should have known better. The harder they tried to push people to use it, the more of a backlash it created.
Remembering back to the time, there were a lot of people who had become frustrated with Facebook, and I think that it would have been possible to get a substantial user base simply by offering a viable alternative. Unfortunately, Google tried the wrong marketing strategy, generating hype by limiting availability, and it backfired spectacularly.
You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.
That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.
So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?
Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.
Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.
Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.
I remember back in the day when I got a Facebook account, the colleague next to me asking: so what is this Facebook thing all about? Not very many people had heard about then. But for those family and friends that had, it was a great way to keep track of everyone (staying updated without, you know, actually engaging in social activities like phoning or e-mailing or meeting up). Which was great from the introvert standpoint. Back then, not much thought was spent on the more sinister intelligence-gathering capabilities. Ads were not really obnoxious.
Then it slowly, very slowly, turned up the frog heat. Today it is a place where the few social updates that you are still interested in, are buried between reams of mindless meme reposts, ads in which you have not the slightest interest, and algorithmic down-prioritisations.
Be the time G+ came along, I guess a lot of the more tech-savvy people had become clued-up and wary about the data-collection. I for one didn't want to give more data to yet another company, and strenuously declined to enter details, or use a G+ profile to log in to any of the few other google services I used. I also linked-out, have never twittered, instgrammed, whatsapped etc.
Giving people back a non-data-farmed, non-ad-soldout experience would have needed to be an indispensable part of their required killer feature set. But that of course didn't serve their purpose.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
One also doesn't have to use facebook. I don't even have a facebook account, nor do I plan to ever have a facebook account.
On the other hand, for Google's integrated stuff for Android to work properly, ie, contacts list, mail, documents/drive, calendar, etc, one has to have a Google account. Before Plus, that Google account was essentially private. Plus felt like an unwelcome intrusion that was one messed up privacy setting away from publishing stuff that wasn't meant for more than my own personal interoperability.
Fact of the matter is, most people that want a social network for personal communication have signed up for one already, and they've probably gone with Facebook because it's the biggest, and being the biggest makes it easiest to justify choosing it. Google's attempts to foist Plus on us felt a lot like how Microsoft forced Internet Explorer on us by bundling it with Windows 95 OSR2 and later versions of Windows.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've said it before, but I'll repeat it here: Google didn't know how to capture public interest at the time.
I remember when Google+ first appeared as an "invite only" service. That was just before Facebook made the huge blunder of putting members' profile photos in ads for any pages they "Liked," suggesting an endorsement. A lot of people everywhere got really angry at Facebook about "faces on ads," and even threatened to leave Facebook because of it.
That would have been a great opportunity to open up the Google+ service to everyone, seize the opportunity when people wanted to abandon Facebook. But Google+ remained invite-only. Only a few people could get new accounts.
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.
Yes, definitely. Facebook IS a social media site. That's ALL it is. When I post things or pictures on there, it's stuff I'm explicitly putting out there for public consumption.
Google on the other hand, has a TON of services that contain private data. GMail, the search engine, and Drive. Heck even Picasa - it's a photo album program but many people were using it before it was "social". I'd upload pictures to link to in various forums and such. Took me by great surprise when I uploaded one right after Google+ went live and started getting comments on it. Granted, it was nothing embarrassing as I was linking it in a public discussion elsewhere, but what had been a gallery I had to provide a link to earlier was now just open for people in my "circles" to view. It's not the situation that's bad - it's that it STARTED as something else and then morphed into that.
Put simply - I don't have any issue with social media existing, but I don't want every single thing I use to be "socially connected".
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Small business owners always will want a place, but they are relying on a captive audience to get visibility in a way they wouldn't otherwise get. Moths don't go to the zapper because they like electricity, they go because of the cool looking UV light. The current trend on FB is all electricity, no light. I predict this will stop being a thing, because we're going to stop visiting FB for social purposes if the present trend continues.
And you're exactly right, all the anti-obama nuttery, which is very popular amongst the senior crowd, is further drowning out the ability to share pictures of the brats with the people asking for pictures. Dear old mom watches Fox News for the day-time soap that it is, likes all the links and foists her various religious and political viewpoints on people for whatever reason she thinks we'd want to see it. In doing so that content gets served to her more, while my ability to send pictures of the kids, which she's asked for 15 times, gets diminished because she doesn't like or share that (not that I think she SHOULD). So in a nutshell my wife and I are using FB less and less, and back to email for sending pictures because email reliably gets through and is visible. Meanwhile I clearly don't share political or religious views with most FB people I am linked to (being a liberal in Texas), and actively want to avoid reading FB myself. I'm not alone, many of my friends have more or less abandoned their accounts because it's become a cacophony of various types of noise.
My point I guess is that FB is killing itself. It will live on, I'm sure, but its going over the peak and going to drop to some plateau. It's not going to be dominating the internet, and Google was foolish for being baited into believing it was ever a good idea. Social has never been an unmitigated good idea, it has some strengths but some weaknesses that most recently have culminated in inventing nuclear weapons to address.
And that's their other mistake. The people that want a FB like service are already on Facebook. Google never stopped to consider why us holdouts aren't on FB, they just assumed we were waiting for something different/better and could be grabbed before FB wore us down.
Offering even more intrusive creepy tracking was never going to convert any of us.