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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I think where G+ really missed a trick was in not publishing a write-API. They were clearly trying to force people away from FB, but an open API would have allowed for a smoother migration over time. Without automation, most people simply couldn't be bothered to post the same thing twice. Third-party twitter clients, which were being shafted around the same time, would have jumped on it.

This mistake, coupled with a double-edged focus on privacy (as people shared with less friends, others wouldn't see much content) and their disastrous Real Name idiocy, was their undoing - G+ became a me-too.

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The Real Name idiocy certainly convinced a number of people like myself, and those who listen to me for advice, to avoid it like the plague if you had an important established Google account for things like GMail. That they'd tie them all together and zap all of them if you failed their Real Names test made it just too dangerous.

Also made it clear they were not doing this for us.

Ah, as a very experienced text searcher (got into it in the early '90s in the document imaging arena) disabling a leading "+" for search terms was grossly obnoxious.

Now I have to wrap "every" "search term" "in quotes", it's completely absurd. Even then it assumes you made typos.

To me, that's the biggest sin of G+, it made the search experience worse.

"my" G+ account is register to agu monkey (not a real name at all), it made the whole thing pretty sad.

> Also made it clear they were not doing this for us. Most important point in G+ state IMO

Whatever Facebook was, it was something out of a guy's desire (lowly or great). Google+ felt like yet another business attempt at market share grabbing. The original circle idea was cute, but everything else was corporate strategy and forced unification.

Indeed, like it or not, Facebook came out of Zuckerberg's desire to create a neat thing, in which he succeeded.

And Google+ came from a Microsoft veteran who started back in 1991, when Microsoft succeeded in supplanting a lot of one trick pony companies. But those had limited network effects and the big ones also manifestly failed at software development, and Facebook continues to run that part of the company well (enough).

Google+ came from Google.

The attempts in this thread to retroactively attribute this failure to something other than Google are...interesting.

While that wasn't my point, it manifestly wasn't developed in the traditional Google style.

Here I'm just talking about Gundotra likely having the conceit from his time at Microsoft that he could make a Facebook replacement that wasn't 10x times better, but through tie-ins to other parts of the Google ecosystem would draw people in (vs. a lot of Microsoft's success in that period coming from other companies failing to execute, which Facebook did not).

Hmmmm. The way I read it, you and the article are deflecting the blame away from Page and at Gundotra. The buck stops at who is in charge and that is Page.

Agree and disagree. I've got a very strong sense that many of G+'s issues had something to do with Gundotra. And that it was decidedly non-organic. Rather than an internal useful engineering hack created out of desire and practicality, it was a fear-driven reaction to Facebook.

But: the policies clearly ultimately came from the very highest level at Google. Biggest consequence is an exceptional blow to my trust in the company.

Or rather, series of blows.

I would have used a G+ without the 'real name' policy right from the start. By the time they relaxed the policy, it was too late.

You do not want to be the service people just dump their stuff to. Google tried that with Buzz and in failed even more horribly than +.

What you could do is be the service people use to write to other services and then gradually lock them out. Unfortunately the fight you have to take on against the platform you are cannibalizing is really something a few fast moving guys, who fly under the radar and have nothing to show for anyway, can do for a few months, but nothing a Google scale corporation can do.

Realistically though, nobody can now beat facebook at network effects, not big nor small. And that was already the case when G+ was launched. The best you can do is to allow people to try out your system with little investment, and then slowly persuade them to prefer it to the old system.

Buzz failed for very different causes: it was a twitter clone that offered no additional functionality and even compromised your gmail privacy.

Facebook has too much network effect - if you don't want to share your life with your parents you need to be on a platform they aren't.

In my case I never friended my parents on FB, and keep G+ for family - which means I don't share things with the wrong group.

For normal people. sharing their lives with loved ones is a positive. Creating a social network for antisocial people makes no sense.

You never share some things only with certain groups of people, because of relevance or intimacy ?

I don't think you understood the comment I was replying to, which advocated going to a totally different platform from the one your parents use in order to not share your life with them.

I wasn't very clear - I don't want to share the details of my drunk exploits with my parents, if something happens that is relevant to them and my friends I add it to both. Hardly takes a minute.

I can't tell if you're incredibly naive or if you just believe your parents are.

There's such a thing as not rubbing their noses in it....

Then don't be a storage service and just run the API for them to shovel data from point A to point B.

I'm speaking for others, but I'll still say that sometimes we don't want some of the data we post accessible to others. That seems an obvious statement, but I always use Twitter in a way that I find acceptable for sharing data with everyone. Facebook and Google+ are used in that way, but also ways where I selectively share things with people I trust to view the data I post. (To be clear, I don't use Facebook at all.) That's where things get complicated, because the service must enforce rules to keep these people from seeing those people's data. Those rules turn into 'features' and then you have a problem.

A social sharing API doesn't need a ton of features, especially when it's designed to forward the data around to the people that need to see the data. By not storing it, you make things simpler and more resilient to attack.

An API-based system might be a good potential "killer". If I am not mistaken, that is what app.net is trying to be - have not heard from them in a while.

To quote my other post [0] in this thread: Facebook cannot be killed with something so similar to Facebook like Google+, much like Google cannot be killed with something like Bing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991161

I get your point about "being the service people just dump their stuff to" but it is still a valid point. The problem with the network effect that Facebook has so thoroughly entrenched is that, in my opinion, you have to first replicate the network before luring users away with better features or, e.g., offering a more anonymous or secure or less invasive alternative to Facebook. It's somewhat similar to how a supply vessel docks to the ISS in orbit, you first have to match the speed in orbit before making an approach and then docking.

You can replicate the network with a reduced feature-set. Be something else entirely (e.g. Whatsapp, Instagram etc.), stay lean and grow. After that you can branch out or be bought by Facebook in fear of you branching out.

I get your point, though. If I were Google I would have started the whole Google+ thing as a publishing platform for businesses and/or regular news publishers and bloggers, using some benefits within the search to lure them in. Facebook clearly pisses them of as they try to squeeze them. That way Google could have gotten some content first.

Next push some commenting-system on top of it (as they did) but without the Feed-Posts appearing there and all the other crap.

They already had Hangouts/Voice and Picasa, why did they even need to cripple all these services. They could instead have made Google+ a lightweight identity services as they promoted it.

One thing Google is in a strong position to do is to provide content filters: spam, abuse, clickbait, and the rest of it. They've the technical chops and semantic processing background. Combine that with some appropriate personalisation and metrics and they might have something.

My understanding is that they didn't do a write API due to fear of automated spam and poor S/N ratios.

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