Google Criticized Over Its Handling of the End of Google+ (vortex.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein shares his report on how Google is handling the end of its Google+ service. He's describing it as "a boot to the head: when you know that Google just doesn't care any more" about users "who have become 'inconvenient' to their new business models." We already know about Google's incredible user trust failure in announcing dates for this process. First it was August. Then suddenly it was April. The G+ APIs (which vast numbers of web sites -- including mine -- made the mistake of deeply embedding into their sites), we're told will start "intermittently failing" (whatever that actually means) later this month.

It gets much worse though. While Google has tools for users to download their own G+ postings for preservation, they have as far as I know provided nothing to help loyal G+ users maintain their social contacts... As far as Google is concerned, when G+ dies, all of your linkages to your G+ friends are gone forever. You can in theory try to reach out to each one and try to get their email addresses, but private messages on G+ have always been hit or miss...

And with only a few months left until Google pulls the plug on G+, I sure as hell wouldn't still be soliciting for new G+ users! Yep -- believe it or not -- Google at this time is STILL soliciting for unsuspecting users to sign up for new G+ accounts, without any apparent warnings that you're signing up for a service that is already officially the walking dead! Perhaps this shows most vividly how Google today seems to just not give a damn about users who aren't in their target demographics of the moment. Or maybe it's just laziness.
I'd be more upset about this if I actually used Google+ -- but has Google been unfair to the users who do? "[T]he way in which they've handled the announcements and ongoing process of sunsetting a service much beloved by many Google users has been nothing short of atrocious," Weinstein writes, "and has not shown respect for Google's users overall."

Comments

Re:Welcome to the Cloud

[Solandri]

The basic problem with Facebook, Google+ etc. is that you actually don't know the real price - your privacy, and you don't have control over what information that you own anymore when you have dropped it to another site.

Agree with this.

In the early days of the internet people experimented by setting up their own homepages, then came Geocities and now everything is essentially collected in either Facebook or LinkedIn.

Disagree with this.

In the early days, it was really hard to set up your own home page. You had to:

• 1. Register a domain (this used to cost over $100/year).
• 2. Pay for a dedicated server which was online 24/7 (shared servers not having been invented yet).
• 3. Install and configure Apache on that server.
• 4. Edit HTML files locally on your computer, previewing them to see what they'd look like as a web page.
• 5. Then you could set up your own home page by uploading the .HTML files.

Geocities made it easy. They took care of steps 1-3 for you, and combined 4-5 into one step. All you had to do was craft your HTML files on their server, and your Geocities homepage was immediately active.

Where the train went off the rails was that people refused to pay even a token amount for this service. Within a short time, domain names dropped to less than $10/yr, and web services with shared hosting became available which either took care of steps 1-3 for you or handheld you through it. All you had to do was steps 4-5 to create your own web page (which became much easier to do with Dreamweaver or later even Word). But these web hosts charged about $4-$10 a month. Given a choice between giving up a couple days of coffee per month to pay for your own private website, or getting one from Geocities or Myspace for free (paid for by letting them collect your private info), people overwhelmingly picked free.

Email went down a similar path, except it had additional pressure from spam. I ran my own email server for over a decade, using my own domain. Eventually I had to give it up because my spam filters were becoming increasingly ineffective, and my server was being blacklisted by other email servers more and more often because some spammer managed to weasel an account with my hosting service and fired off a couple million spam emails before the hosting service shut them down. The other email servers would blacklist the entire IP block for my hosting service, and I would have to petition every one of them individually saying I'm not the spammer. When the frequency of this happening rose to once or twice a month, and I wasn't even bothering anymore to try to petition some of the email servers I rarely sent mail to, I finally threw in the towel. I redirected all my domain's email through Gmail, and let them deal with the spam filters and clearing up blacklist blocks.

Re:I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did and .

[Chazmati]

I don't think it's Google's hatred of anonymity so much as a poor seed for the autocomplete engine (you spelled/typed it wrong).

I take your point on the real names policy, but I think your comment about the web already having a social network was really hitting the nail on the head. I never understood what Google+ was, how it was different, what advantages it might have had over the market leader (Facebook) seems to me their marketing was ill-conceived or non-existent.

Re:Surprised they don't find it worthwhile

[swillden]

I would think that a project as mature a Google+ wouldn't cost too much to maintain, specially for company the size of Google.

You'd be wrong. Running any decent social media system is a constant battle against spam and ToS-violating content. Unless you want your system to become an ad-ridden cesspool, it takes constant work to adapt systems, policies and processes to the changing strategies of the spammers, pornographers, trolls, etc.

In addition, any system in Google requires constant attention to maintain, even when the system itself doesn't have to change at all. This is a consequence of Google's internal source management and architecture policies. With only a few exceptions, all of Google runs from HEAD (well, very close to HEAD), and has a single-version policy for libraries, tools (e.g. compilers, build system) and infrastructure components (e.g. storage and messaging). So there's a significant level of work required to adapt to the changing environment. This work is usually not performed by the project team, because that would impose constantly-fluctuating engineering resource demands on the team and make it difficult for them to plan their own forward progress. Instead, it's performed by the teams that build the infrastructure components and maintain the libraries. When they decide to make a change in, for example, the core C++ libraries, or upgrade a compiler, or update a third-party library, they have to update all of the project code that depends on their changes.

This is feasible because Google uses a single source repository which all engineers have access to, and because Google has a centralized build system and test infrastructure. So an engineer who changes a library can issue a single command that will rebuild every Google system and run all of their automated tests, to see what breaks. There is also tooling that enables automating changes to code across hundreds of projects and facilitates the management of very large numbers of change lists (commits, or perhaps pull requests, in git terminology). Of course, those change lists have to be approved by project owners before they're merged, so there is some effort required of the project teams, to read and approve.

For bigger, systemic changes, like, say, replacing one storage infrastructure component with another, the process is different. The replacement is built and deployed in a mostly-functional state and then the announcement is made that the to-be-replaced component is deprecated. Project teams then have to build their own migration plans and strategies. For complex and important components, the time between deprecation and turndown is measured in years, so the transition generally isn't urgent, but it does have to be made eventually. A common jokey lament among Google engineers is that for whatever you need to do there are always two options in Google: one that's deprecated and one that's incomplete. Sometimes this complaint is less of a joke and more of a problem, but it's so often true that everyone gets the joke.

The upshot of this is that even a mature, stable system that isn't actively being changed requires significant ongoing code maintenance as the foundations on which it rests are continually rebuilt to accommodate the needs of other projects. Even if most of this work isn't done by the project team, it still has to be done, so there's pressure from the infrastructure teams to shut down under-performing projects to reduce their workload and increase their agility.

The benefit of running from HEAD and enforcing the single-version policy is elimination of dependency hell, reduced fragmentation, reduced server memory use and greater agility. The downside is that mature, stable projects cannot simply be left to run without engineering staff, and even a skeleton crew is often insufficient. That, combined with the fact that such projects find it difficult to retain staff, who tend to move to other teams doing more exciting work (like building the umpteenth chat clie

Re:Surprised they don't find it worthwhile

[iampiti]

Thanks for the detailed explanation

The source of my anger....

[mseeger]

I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011. That is 2757 days ago.

In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.

They kill all that. So my anger has multiple angles:

1) I pay for G+ as part of my GSuite. So I expect it to work roughly in the way I am used to. But Google kicks off 90+% of the users and says something like "Yeah, we promised you a car but not a motor." So I feel cheated by Google. How can I trust them to not discard the IMAP access to GMail or remove files from my GDrive because of some obscure policy decision?

2) The shutdown is handled in an unprofessional way. It starts by giving us bogus reasons. If the API is the problem, fix it or disable it and the problem is solved. But the shutdown is not even close to a logical conclusion. They have other reasons but decide to give us just PR bullsh*t. All the information about the shutdown is handed out as if letters were in short supply. You can still create a G+ account and you have no idea that you are heading for a cliff. There are dozens of questions surrounding the shutdown. People have tried very hard to get them answered but Google even refuses to acknowledge them. I have seen services run by a single person who outperformed Google by 2 orders of magnitude concerning the communication.

3) The shutdown is done in an unseemly haste. This can be considered to be a part of 2) but it is an insult of it's own. My own leaving is faster than I like, but I want to be on the safe side with my backups before Google messes with things.

4) Google refuses all communication with users. Either you have someone like the ex-boyfriend of the sister of your best buddy that has cousin who works at Google or you will get no information. The ONLY way left to communicate with Google for me is to put all my services elsewhere. Lauren Weinstein has diagnosed similar problems with his request for an ombudsman already some time ago.

I do not hate Google. My anger is born of disappointment, very deep disappointment.