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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.
Biggest detraction was the unknown of how much of your browsing and searches and youtube video history would end up on your public profile. :)
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?
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.
In addition to this, the UI was an erector set of cobbled together ideas from the thousands of people from different divisions that included aspects of facebook, myspace, and google search. intuitive features were buried in dropdowns and posts were, almost childishly, colour coded.
Good people go to bed earlier.
To me, Google+ was the social network for your one friend who refuses to use Facebook.
Since every social circle only has one of these people, perhaps two at most, there was never enough of a critical mass for it to gain relevancy.
Unfortunately, the real problem is that social networks are very much silo-ed places, so its not really practical to combine more than one of them into anyone's feed of interest. Thus, if one person uses Facebook and the other uses Google+, they're not really going to interact in a convenient fashion.
A key question for communities that have migrated to G+ is where they're going to move to. If Google's other de-emphasized products are any indication, G+'s days may be numbered.
That is all.
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.
In early 2013 I had an idea to make interacting between social media sites a little bit more seamless. So I started hunting down the google plus API (in addition to all the other popular social media sites at the time). The google plus API was by far the most anemic. To say it was even a serious API is misleading.
I was able to hunt down a Google engineer and speak with him in a slightly non-corporate exchange. Basically, they seemed to have no interest in apps or extending the site. The site is the site, no more no less. A few publicist type conglomerates could have access to a private API that let them manage their celebrity and corporate profiles from a single piece of custom software, but mere mortals only had the extremely basic API. I just did a quick search and it looks like nothing has changed since then.
Ever since that exchange I realized Google had no grand plan for Google plus and even in early 2013 was already on life support.
Google+ "rose" at some point? When did this happen? I must have missed it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Circles was a great idea. Google should have made plus a very lightweight site with circles and a couple of other features and an amazing API. Let the developers do the work for you. At that point, everything is sorta opt-in. No privacy issues. If I don't want my plus profile to have pictures, I just never download a picture app.
Google's name is too tarnished with regards to privacy and will never be able to launch a social media site again. It's like McDonald's trying to launch a health food line. About all they can do at this point is a spin-off type company that is far far away from the Google name.
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.
The name thing was a huge deal-breaker for a fair number of people, and the pathologically horrible way they handled it made it a lot worse. I know dozens of people who would have used G+ but walked away from it because at least one person they knew had bad experiences with it. I spent months with my G+ account in various kinds of limbo because the "appeals" process for name decisions was completely dysfunctional. I eventually ran into someone on slashdot who knew a person who knew a person who could unstick my account and get my name approved, but by that time everyone had lost interest.
And one of my friends used to have a Picassa account, and then somehow it got marked as a G+ profile thing (even though she never intentionally activated G+), and then suspended because their algorithm thought the name was unrealistic, and then she lost access to the Picassa stuff. I don't know whether that actually got resolved.
Very badly run at every level. The most frustrating thing is, they had a guy writing about this who was apparently in some kind of leadership role, and he talked about how the appeals process should work and how the name stuff should work... And nothing he said actually had any influence on the behavior of the product. The actual appeals process consisted of a thing that did not include any mechanism at all for stating your case or explaining why you felt a given name was the right name to use for you, which was then ignored by a machine or possibly a person, who knows. That's it. No mechanism for response or interaction.
Google's hatred of actually dealing with things personally interacted very badly with a policy which was inherently personal.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
"Facebook, noun, is yet another latest fad of online social networking services (i.e. previous failed attempts include CompuServe, AOL, Friendster, Plaxo, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) headquartered in Menlo Park, California..... After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as virtual "acquaintances" -- many of which have never physically met -- using the hijacked term "friend", exchange messages, "like" random shit that no one really gives a fuck about with no ability to downvote the stupid crap, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles all while blindly ignorant that Facebook is data-mining the shit out of them and busing selling out their data to any bidder interested. Common derogatory terms include fuckerberg, fazebook, fuckbook, fagbook, fartbook, fecesbook as a reference to all the stupid shit posted on it."
FTFY.
... they're only just now acknowledging that and putting the Plus corpse into the ground, now.
Passive-Aggressive user management is always the first step to a great fall and and epic fail.
Now that Google+ is being deprecated, can we please have the + search operator back, to indicate a +required_term in the search results?
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.
Almost everything from Google is Beta. It is subject to spurious cancellation, hard tacks in direction it is going in, and rarely is "finished" as such.
I avoid most Google things for this reason alone, there is a better chance they will lose interest and kill it than not. It is not clear to me what, if anything, is subject to long term support.
Compounding this is their invite only launches. They build huge buzz, then turn away people who want in. By time they open it up to more people I have forgotten why I was excited in the first place (Google Glass, their phone service with funky data plan, etc). If they want to sell a product, sell it. If you want to provide a service, provide it. Betas should be done quietly under an NDA, not with trumpeting press releases.
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
. . . and is made immeasurably worse by the real name policy. 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 more dangerous) than Facebook. Now they claim they're de-coupling g+ from all their services. How many people think they've had any change of heart vs. thinking (as I've seen expressed here) they've found some other sneaky way to "link" you across their services?
Back when people were really hating Facebook's draconian "real name" policy, Google plus had a real opportunity to differentiate itself by allowing anonymity. In fact, at the very outset, there was much excitement about that possibility. Such a move would have garnered goodwill and lots of buzz in the beginning. Unfortunately, Google decided to make their real name policy as bad or worse than facebook's which killed any buzz they might have gotten and eliminated their competitive advantage. There was no reason to switch. Google did finally loosen the restrictions, but way too late. It was a fatal mistake.
William Shatner killed google+ for me, when he signed up to it, google shut down his email account without any checks, leaving him with no recourse, and no email. Who wants to risk that? http://www.businessinsider.com...
I actually prefer the circles model, I can post adult things without my parents and children seeing, geeky stuff that the Mrs doesn't want to see, etc. The granular audience works better for me. The communities tend to be fairly stable and spam free
~corporate tool, but employed~
Oh, and the creepy thing- most pseudonyms or handles are chosen to be OBVIOUSLY pseudonyms or handles. This is deliberate- no one is going to think that a name like "cfalcon" is real (it doesn't fit the real name pattern). A name like "sjames" is more likely to be real than not, however, and people will interact with both assuming that fact, that one is partially anonymous and the other is reasonably easy to find in meatspace.
By having an aggressive algorithm that detected pseudonyms, it forced a lot of people to adopt pseudonyms that LOOKED real, which just fucks up comms from every direction, as everyone assumes a real sounding fake name is probably real, because Google had taken away your ability to telegraph otherwise. That was a really low blow too.
Again, G+ reversed this drek about a year ago.
google isn't for you. don't use it. stop complaining that it doesn't meet your anachronistic principles
It is noteworthy that it is an article about the failure of Google+, not that of Kunedog. So it was arguably Google+ that had anachronistic (or otherwise irrelevant) principles.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.