Losing My Patience with Google+
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
Single sign on made people mad, but YouTube and Google passwords being different needed to become the same. They made it look like it was a conspiracy for everyone to be on Google+. Then this tied people's real names with their YouTube content and outed some people. Just a bunch of mistakes.
Heck I think if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack but then again ....
But, then Google redesigned Google+ into some amalgamation of Pinterest and modern Facebook, undoing nearly all of its advantages IMHO. I stopped using it shortly thereafter. I check back in periodically, but nearly everyone I've interacted with has also moved on.
It's really quite a shame.
That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months.
Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters.
I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half.
The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward.
I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.
What if you're a recovering or current addict, and your support group is on a subreddit? What if you're advising people considering opiates to not follow your path, based on your own life experiences? That's not likely something you want to sign your name to.
What about domestic abuse victims who want to support each other? Victims of sexual abuse as children? Parents of children who have been abused?
What if you're into something that's would really set people off, even if it's something consensual? Consider what's happening over in Drupal-land - regardless of your opinion of Goreans, BDSM practitioners, etc., what if you're just into something that your local community or coworkers find anathema?
Reddit allows compartmentalisation of interests. G+ actively prevents that.
You can't fool the machine but at least you can hide that you like anime from your co-workers and relatives.
I know people that own like 10 Google accounts between their YouTube and other services. You can't trust Google to not expose you (like they did it with YouTube account merges, Google Plus and other instances).
It's always been tremendously underpowered, in terms of admin and moderation tools.
Large Communities rapidly became cesspits or marketing tarpits.
Small and private communities -- I had one with about 40-50 members -- were suprisingly good, though that involved a lot of attitudinal orientation and careful curation of participants, most of whom I'd come to know over several years' general discussion.
As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.)
As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug.
I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.
Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts.
As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs.
I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE.
Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails.
Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap.
I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration.
Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.
I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "Gmail Social" and let you build it out with your name, info, photos, etc and have that be a sort of opt-in social network straight from gmail, a bit like how hangouts is now in gmail. Instead they created this Google+ pig that makes no sense and fits in nowhere comfortably.
Also, it was bizarrely tone deaf to somehow tie youtube in this and to get these confusing prompts about merging accounts and such only to find your youtube shitposting and viewing habits now tied to your real name for any employer to find. This is a colossal mistake that I imagine will be studied in business schools for decades to come.
I read somewhere that Jobs gave Google the idea of a centralized social area for their users and considering Jobs' success rates with iCloud and other Apple initiatives on the cloud back then, it seems like they took advice from the wrong guy. Worse, Jobs might have been able to pull off some kind of Apple social network this way, but mostly because there is so much zealous fandom with Apple. Google is just a boring, unsexy service for most. They didn't realize how little liked they are. They're the barely tolerated nerds of the industry, not the popular kids. They should have just launched something easier, simpler, and more modest. Jobsian-like antics just won't work for their brand.
Google tried it, called Google Buzz. It was pretty unpopular because they forced it on every GMail user. Suddendly everyone had his name, email and account private details exposed on public readable pages indexed by Google search engine. One year later it was dead. Yet to be replaced by Google+ with almost the same shaddy tactic. No wonder it failed, people don't like such shit.
Look, they weren't going to dethrone facebook, but they didn't need to fuck up this badly. They could have gone with a more modest approach and pleased a lot of people who wanted a quick social profile in gmail in a jiffy and not a whole other service.
>Google Buzz.
Branding still matters. Google Social tells grandma whats up. Buzz, wave, etc make no sense to her.
I've always preferred both the full G+ website and the mobile app to Facebook and they were doing many of the things Facebook added shortly afterward. Granular privacy/sharing controls were much easier than anything FB had or has added since.
That said, as others have mentioned, with closed networks, you can't reproduce what Gmail did to Hotmail/Yahoo/etc 10-12 years ago. You can't just switch to a client/service because you like it better because, unlike email, it requires everyone you communicate with to also make the same switch. As long as this is the case, the only important "feature" is the existing userbase.
Google+ survives despite Google's mismanagement.
Vic Gundotra, with apparently passive approval from above, killed all that and Google lost its only real differentiator in this competition: not being the centralized bad guys.
The big change, imo, came when Larry Page returned as CEO. He shifted the company's strategy away from "technology" and towards "products". In same cases this was a major success, it's when Android started to actually improve its UX, but it also meant no longer focusing on things like standards as much.
The YouTuber's (Google's biggest social platform, and displacing FB recently in Alexa's rankings) didn't like it. The G+'ers didn't like it. And the privacy nuts (self included) really didn't like it.
It took about six months for that to play out, but in the end, Vic Gundotra was pushed out of Google, and G+'s Product Manager left to join YouTube directly.
It's been fits and starts since then. A major site redesign, which despite the standard Google UI/UX fuckups, is vastly less resource-intensive under the hood, this past December. But ... little else, and very long-wearing problems still unaddressed.
The lack of meaningful search is particularly embarrassing.
I suspect what may have done more to kill this than anything though is the political cycle. I'd joked to the former G+ chief architect that "the political cycle was hard on the social graph", and got back the cryptic response that "it was more complicated than that". This all a couple of years ago.
Then 2016-17 happened.
Given the general unpleasantness of political discussion, harassment, bots, etc., and what I suspect is soul-searching on multiple fronts as to what is really worth doing and engaging in, Google are themselves increasingly tarnished.
Search quality overall (and not just Google) seems to be taking a hit in the past couple of years, maybe longer.
There was a makeover in the last six months. The article even refers to the relaunch supported by the awesome Luke Wroblewski. Luke is a smart guy and it's telling that he's active on Twitter.
One thing I will say, as a designer I'm saddened to see designers think they can re-UX a site to success. When the fundamental are against you, you might as well piss into the wind. Or visa versa as is the case with sites like Craigslist.
Agreed on the underlying tone of the article. None of this is news. The guy must be living in a cave, under the basement of the Googleplex.
"Hey, let's go check on what's happening on google+?" or "What I'll just google google+ to see what's happening there..." said no one ever.
[0] https://plus.google.com/+GideonRosenblatt [1] https://plus.google.com/collection/UgYzY
This is actually more often than I log in to Facebook because I get more interesting content from those two guys than I do from my friends and family.
Though I follow Gideon on G+, and ran across it on one of my Circles as well, later on.
It's now been shared something like 190 times (a tremendous re-share rate for G+), and is apparently being discussed inside Google itself.
The one feature G+ had, that I was sad to see failing, were their "Circles". The idea that you have different personas within different social groups, i. e. work/high school friends/family/...
It's theoretically possible with Facebook I guess, but I just don't trust them not to change my settings, nor do I actually feel like I know the ins and outs of what's private and what's not.
Twitter is a bit better because the clients are made with account-switching in mind. But one account with maybe different "channels" would still feel better.
Or better yet: failed to create a federated, open-standards, open-protocols, multi-client alternative.
So much potential, squandered.
It would've grown to Twitter like proportions easily if they would just let it grow organically. Imagine getting an invite, signing up and then seeing great content by great people. Of course you want to partake.
Then came the YouTube mistake. Millions and millions and millions of user accounts that do absolute nothing. Google somebody's name and a good chance you'll find a completely void Google+ profile.
It's hilarious that this guy seems like the last person in the world who hasn't figured out Google+ was a dud and has no future.
He's also a good illustration that technologies that were widely panned and rejected can still have users that love them.
Some have literally hundreds of photos saved on Facebook for sharing.
And since Facebook would never allow some theoretical decentralized network to interface with their service, it would end up like all the other attempts: people who like to try new things/dislike the status quo will check it out, realize they still need to cross-post to Facebook, and give up.
The only way to pull it off would be to offer something sufficiently novel and in-demand that people would scramble to use it. From what I've seen in the past, those sorts of things don't come from loose federations of decentralized network nodes. They come from commercial development and heavy promotion....or they are bought up by a company that does those things.
FWIW, I really liked Google+ at release and had hoped it would become popular, but the platform's inability to achieve anything close to a critical mass with mainstream users doomed me to continue using Facebook as my "stay in touch with friends/relatives who live far away" platform and I haven't given google plus a fully formed conscious thought in years.
It makes me curious how many other small private circles exist like that. Obviously it isn't as big as Facebook, but people don't use it like they do Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter. For my private circle, most people have Facebook, Twitter, etc in addition to Google+ and the content posted on Twitter and Facebook is usually not what is in the private Google+ circle. I think a big mistake people made was that Google+ should replace Facebook, etc, rather than work in parallel with those services.
That said, there is writing on the wall that it is either going to be eliminated or drastically changed. For example, there are sometimes now little feedback windows that pop up and ask you questions about why you use Google+.
Now you have walled gardens and people behind cages.
Even disabled, this asinine concept still exists in Gmail. On the left side UI, top part has Compose, Inbox, Sent Mail; and on the bottom are chats. About in the middle is my name, to the right is a + icon. Click that then search. Why in the fucking fuck fuck fuck does it show me people who are not in my contacts? It shows me people all over the fucking world, but won't show people in my fucking contacts. WHAT THE FUCK?
Google+ makes me irrationally angry. Still.
In the end I just deleted both my facebook and google plus and have never looked back. :)
But I think social networks have a life cycle. I still use Twitter, though it's changed a lot. I still use Instagram and Facebook, but new users just coming online in their teens or earlier, will likely choose something else. Existing social networks could support these new groups, but they want a new identity.
That said G+ was trash from the start. Shoving it down our throats didn't help.
I don't want centralised authentication (a/k/a "centralised user tracking across the Internet").
That was a major strike against G+, frankly. And any FB auth is dead to me.
Twitter also, since I have no profile there either.
Thing is, I think we're missing the point on "identity". It really devolves into a set of related, though nonidentical, considerations:
* Authority: Should you be allowed to do the thing you're trying to do?
* Reputation: What is your credibility or history? Closely related to trust.
* Integrity: Is this thing with your name/identifier on it actually yours, and the same as when you created it?
The point is that identifiers are cheap and easy. Reputation should be exceedingly expensive. Integrity is very nearly a simple technical problem. Authentication, similarly, and it carries the additional challenge that People Lose Their Damned Keys.
I'd like to see a signet ring or similar mechanical, worn, replaceable, contact-based device replace or complement password and other mechanisms. Which means establishing some kind of standard (you need a detector / sensor on a wide range of devices).
And that happens to be a Hard Problem.
* A good founder cohort if you're into intelligent, quirky, and techie discussions. Basically "Googlers and Friends". (Though this also included a bunch of marketing types, a net negative.)
* Really solid technical fundamentals. I'll scream until I'm hoarse about what Google doesn't get, but one thing that they absolutely nail is solid, robust, scalable, updateable infrastructure. The server-end side of G+ was amazingly robust and had exceedingly few outages. Only a small handful of site updates that I'm aware of ever broke the service. That's an exceedingly good record on any score.
* Scale. Basically, Gmail and Android registrations fed into the G+ userbase, and whilst that is something can, quite rightly, be criticised, it makes for a potentially large engagement pool.
* Search. Took a while, but when Google bolted Search onto G+, it was fast and comprehensive. Not necessarily useful, but every comment was indexed. (HN's Algolia is comparable, though more useful.) Reddit still struggles with search (timeouts, no comments), though the syntax is powerful. Ello's search is useless. (Yes, I poke around the oddball corners of the Internet.)
* Long posts. It was possible to, pretty much, write a book within a post if you wanted to. For those of us who live by words, this was useful.
* Integrated images and video. Photos were definitely well-presented (if overused), and being able to preview / play YouTube on-site not bade.
Later features made small-group interactions fairly viable (though large was always a nightmare), and more.
I've addressed criticisms elsewhere, most particularly in my "Plussology and Plexology" collection on G+ itself.
Google+ was never good.