Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
blog.google
blog.google
The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.
Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.
And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.
Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.
Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.
The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.
Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.
I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.
This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.
Insanely, insanely hard.
At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.
Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.
Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.
Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.
Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.
Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
Requires 2 things: - feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them) - feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle).
AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
You can do that already, with lists.
Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name.
Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence.
But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it.
In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.)
Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them.
I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services.
Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.
[0] No idea if anyone on the Google team had actually used Lycos Circles but it's not unreasonable to think they might of.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...
I don't think Facebook will add them, but Diaspora has them.
From my POV, the release was terrible because it let people in too fast. Social networks need to go through a period where only the "cool kids" are there. It creates a network effect. It was kind of impossible to go through that, so being on Google+ conveyed no status...in fact, it kind of did the opposite.
https://www.facebook.com/help/204604196335128
Sadly it seems they've hidden this to push their more tailored feed so they can push whatever ads and things through there aka filter (censor?) your friends posts better.
I still wish these had caught on more, or at least that Facebook hadn't implemented Friend Lists as an answer to this that they all but bury in their UI. It would be a much more tolerable place if they made it easier to use this, but similarly, if you have to categorize people in such a way that you rarely see their posts, what is the point of "keeping in touch" via Facebook in the first place? At least for me, if I don't care enough to see your updates (or at least the memes you like) on my news feed I may not think to look at your profile.
Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.
I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing.
Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is.
So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY.
Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful.
Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.
I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air.
However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate their contacts.
On the other hand, this can enforce echo chambers, but as long as one is aware of that effect (and sadly, most wouldn't care), I really like broadly selecting my audience.
Sounds like you need https://circles.app
It's the reason why I never used Google Plus. And it's the reason why when I had a facebook account I never friended coworkers or professional contacts.
For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.
Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.
This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.
Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.
Absolutely this.
It is, however, not the marketing strategy that failed them. G+ was hyped for some time before release and it became a hit since day one.
With the level of attention any Google product gained at that time, there was no need to focus on a niche. The issue were their horrendous decisions in UI and product design as well as feature integration. In short, it was a product for the tech savy user, yet aimed at the mainstream. It wasn't satisfying anyone.
I still can't understand why they would not cap the most valuable resource they had, GMail, GDocs, GCalendar, GReader, etc. Zero integration.
As Google Reader history shows, Google does not care about the passionate users.
Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.
Great advice for a YC startup, but not how big companies that already have large user bases operate. Big companies have a metric they want to drive, then look for big opportunities, simply because dominating a “niche” is too small an opportunity to make a dent in a big-company metric like DAU, time spent, etc. If you do want to start with a niche, it can be super hard to justify continued investment from management, given that there are so many other bets that can drive larger near-term changes to metrics.
But there was no feature parity, not even close.
When G+ launched it was more like a tech demo, interest died down when people discovered that there really was not much to do.
They added more features over time, but at that point the hype was already dead.
If it had copied Facebook shamelessly, it would've given an alternative for all those people fed up with Facebook for the last decade or so, and thus increased usage too.
Doesn't Google Wave live on as Google Docs?
Not so much defeat , but more avoiding future liability. They sure could afford to run it , but under the current circumstances, a data leak like the one they claim they didn't have would be very damaging to their image and their moneymakers.
To me it seems like google is forcing more and more on selling services rather than user information.
The median Googler works there for something like 1.1 years, and gets recruited straight out of college. Combine this with the fact that Larry Page almost immediately abdicated after being handed back the reins from Eric Schmidt around this time, and a lot of other influential old timers like Marissa Mayer are long gone, it's no small wonder, I guess, that the sensibilities and follow-through of early Google are dead.
Kind of describes Google Wave in a sense - private collaboration and passionate users. But it couldn't expand out of that niche set of users/use-cases.
Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so often much closer to the truth. In G+'s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn't want everyone named "Dog fart", which was a pretty ridiculous argument).
And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility.
Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would've been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone's throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash.
The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it's very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google).
It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great.
Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head.
Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don't speak for this or any other company.
EDIT: TIL the origin of "a fish rots from the head" is disputed and possibly Turkish not Chinese: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...
This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt.
But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.
Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products.
But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user.
If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.
This was a half-arsed attempt at inflating user numbers by counting every user of YouTube as a login to Google+.
This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.
What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.
I think a lot of this is because of Steve Jobs. He did this but was for the most part successful at it. Everyone wants to think they are the next Jobs.
Funny, that YCs motto is "make something people want".
That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty sure that like me, everyone else stopped.
Now, I have to figure out a way of re-importing all that content to something else, probably homebrewed this time.
IN FACT I've just checked, and G+ seems to have forgotten every single post I've made, but one. https://plus.google.com/+MichelPollet
EDIT: Now the posts are back. I must have been archived on CDs or something ;-)
I left Google Plus after Google Search kept turning up private posts that I had opted to remove from search.
They keep moving the functionality, but I can still get to it on desktop. Search for something, "Posts" tab, change "From Everyone" dropdown to "From just you".
(Disclosure: I work at Google, on other things)
I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.
I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to "copy" or "follow" AWS in the early years.
Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be "amazing" and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, "More ads, more ads, more ads..." continues on relentlessly.
[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.
I think they were attempting to encourage new connections, but that's not how to do it.
Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs:
Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API.
The bug meant that apps also had access to Profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public.
This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age. (See the full list on our developer site.) It does not include any other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers or G Suite content.
We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018. We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change.
We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.
We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one succeed, and who knows, maybe Mastodon will overtake Facebook one day, but I don't see any evidence in the Google+ shutdown that suggests that this is the case.
- linking their accounts (yep, bad)
- shuttering Reader (didn't care personally but I really doubt they calculated how much it would cost them in goodwill)
- etc
... and decided to use Google+ the social network as a target for all that frustration.
Google+ was really nice. And I'm gonna miss it.
Twitter? The place where I need to have 5 accounts to avoid spamming someone with things they don't care about?
Facebook? The place that 1.) Tries to make everything everyone puts into it public and 2.) makes large scale data harvesting possible and then say "didn't see that coming" after CA.
I've since been on Whatsapp (until Facebook bought it and destroyed the single reason why I was a walking billboard for it,) and later Telegran (don't like it either and I won't write anything there I cannot comfortably send on a postcard, but at least it is not proven yet that they will mine every ounce of metadata out of my connections and then try to kill me with spam, (including on my 2-factor address like Facebook will).
Mastodon? I don't know. Haven't tried yet. It might be brilliant but when I first heard about it it was presented as a twitter thingy and twitter is one of the more useless services I have a relationship with (of course, this is personal, for everyone who likes twitter that is more power to them I guess.)
They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?
G+ has been a laughingstock in terms of actual usage numbers for years. Nobody is using it. The fact that it was still supported is amazing. Is Google supposed to support failing products until the end of time?
Poor G+.
1. They save face a little by not publicly confessing it was a failure.
2. Big tech (Facebook, Google, etc.) is facing privacy-related criticism right now. They can say, hey, this is yet one more step we're taking to improve the situation for everyone.
And they might even be partially right about both. Maybe they would have shut it down eventually but privacy challenges caused them to do it sooner than they otherwise would have.
This is, I think, a really key point. It’s debatable to what extent people are willing to try something new (it may be that they’ve soured on social media in general), but it’s certainly true that Facebook has lost a huge amount of trust, and that a company with vision might be able to take advantage of that weakness.
I really liked G+; I even left Facebook for awhile in favour of it. But the great masses didn’t follow, and eventually G+ turned into a wasteland. There was a lot of potential there, IMHO, but it was never really exploited and was ultimately squandered. Very sad.
What? They spent a decade on G+, launched it with much fanfare, annnd it just didn't pan out. Sure, they didn't drive it down Google users' throats as aggressively as they could have (via e.g. Search, Chrome or Gmail) but that really wouldn't have helped them - Facebook didn't grow like that either. Social networks need to grow via organic growth, via word of mouth.
Anyway they're cutting their losses finally instead of indulging in the sunk cost fallacy, I say good riddance. You also mention Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Android but these are all highly popular - and profitable - services and have been since the start.
Social is absolutely the most important space for Google, even more so than cloud. FB is eating up large chunk of their ad money and putting biggest chunk of content out of their reach. For a company out to organize world's information, this is unthinkable. And this is a company with $100B in bank, accumulation of largest talent pool, ability to attract the best. And it's not that FB is perfect and strongest at this point.
There is no "cutting losses" in tech when product category is this important. It takes years of struggle, experimentation, patience and competition to win. They gave up within an year after G+ release, left it on "maintenance mode" and now finally kissing good bye.
To me, Google has lost its charm as company that makes big bets and goes all-in until they win. Now they are company which does half-assed product and if they don't see traction right away, they cut off the oxygen and then just kill it. There is little or no reflections, learning and applying it to do course corrections.
After Larry Page arrived at the scene and flew out to his Caribbean island on extra-extended vacations, the company has failed to produce any big new product category. Eric Schmidt was able to start new product category virtually every year and become undisputed leader in it. That wasn't coincidence or luck but sheer drive to win. For example, in maps they had to invest huge amount of money with multi-year milestones and constant innovations to displace existing players.
Edit: here are some other articles providing coverage:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/17951914/google-plus-data...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/08/google-reportedly-exposed-pr...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-plus-hack/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45792349
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/google-plus-shut-down-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-says-it-found-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-shutters-google-socia...
Source: https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/google-plus-shut-down-...
Google+ started out as the best social network. Unfortunately Google has taken every opportunity to ruin it, remove popular features, force ill-considered integration, remove that integration once people are used to it. Lately the spam filtering has been utterly broken, alternating between leaving painfully obvious spam, and marking and hiding comments from people you were following. It seemed like it was an experimental testbed for them where they didn't care if people were using it.
Despite all of that, we hung on because of the great communities, the people we got to know, and because frankly there's no good alternative.
It really seems to me it shouldn't be too hard at this point to design a sane social network. Google+ had all the elements, but refused to apply them correctly.
Facebook is a horrible mess of privacy violations with no control over your feed (though G+'s control often doesn't work as intended either), and besides, there's family and co-workers there. Twitter seems designed for screaming into the void. Tumbler and Instagram don't seem to be my thing.
There's a specific Diaspora node for Google+ refugees: https://pluspora.com
At the moment, G+ers seem to be gravitating towards MeWe.
C'mon Google, why'd you have to try and hide this...
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
Events were eventually added much later (like a year after launch?), but at that point interest had already died down.
Why they did not delay the launch until it had parity with Facebook's core features is beyond me.
At the risk of not being taken seriously, er, what are the first 5 wonders of the tech world?
Is AWS #1? Is Google's huge swarm of web search indexing machines #1? What makes it onto that list?
It somewhat acted like a better version of Twitter for me, where I can write a lot more on the post, and actually engage a meaningful discussion with people.
I don't know, even with relaxed character counts on Twitter that it will accommodate same use cases, and I don't like to use Facebook for this purpose as I really don't want introduce a total stranger as my friend...
I'm fine with it shutting down, though. At least I no longer have to feel like I'm missing out on anything for not using a Google product (for various reasons, one of them being that it might be cancelled any minute).
The early adopters reached enough of a critical mass that others used it solely because of who was already there, making it an actual social network for at least that purpose.
Much like when Reader folded, G+'s critical mass is going to spread out to a half-dozen other places and refragment. And like Reader's exit, there's a vacuum right now for someone to jump in with something better and charge a nominal amount for it.
If they'd made public read & write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You've got to either:
1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you
2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.
G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren't _that_ compelling.
- announced no API access - real names policy debacle
Between those two things they completely destroyed all good will and within months it was essentially dead. I actually think it was a larger turning point that made developers significantly more cynical about Google overall.
They also blew a lot of time tinkering with minutae / fringe features while fairly basic functionality was sub-par.
Still, on balance I've found G+ both useful and fun, and I'm annoyed it's shutting down. I'm growing more + more wary of relying on any Google services to be around in N years' time.
As opposed to trying to take advantage of the opportunity and improve it -- fixing the bork-headed management design shoved onto it prior to external launch.
Facebook has shown how it's failing its users. Google has the opportunity to make a big show and potentially market share gain by doing the opposite. But, nope.
Instead, 'our market share is corporate'.
Which is fine. But, it tells you a lot about where Google has been going.
(And, if I were corporate Worldmerica, I'd be hesitant about investing too much good will in and dependence upon +.)
As an individual Google user, unfortunately I have little hope that this unwinding will also back out other changes co-morbid with the + deployment, such as the account "unification" that allows a single "mistake" to lock you out of everything. And a single Google "mistake" in execution to haunt you across all their properties.
I'm in the process of exiting Facebook, except for a mostly placeholder presence. A lot of my friends don't have the wherewithal to set up and maintain privately implemented social presences. But, we won't be switching to +, I guess.
Maybe an old-fashioned bulletin board -- with otherwise unlinked pseudonyms -- will do. Back to the Future...
As I think about this, maybe there is a strongly implied message in this. Assuming parts of Google still emit good will. Namely, that, these days, NO commercial network can escape the pressures -- governmental as well as commercial -- to compromise their users.
We aren't making it, because we can no longer do so honestly and securely.
An interesting alternative perspective.
(And, we're even less inclined than Mark and Co., to try to ride herd on all the nut jobs out there.)
They will keep it active as an internal network, but regular old joes won't be able to use Google+ anymore.
FTA: Action 1: We are shutting down Google+ for consumers. seems pretty obvious that's the case.
I bet G+ has more active users than your average indie developer could ever dream about. But Google is not that kind of company. It's all or nothing. World domination or shut it down and try again (or buy a company that succeeded).
Overall I'm not sure how to feel because I didn't realize how bad it was. How many apps have required access to my contacts for legitimate reasons, and I wasn't aware I was providing access to our interaction data?
> Finding 4: When users grant SMS, Contacts and Phone permissions to Android apps, they do so with certain use cases in mind.
> Action 4: We are limiting apps’ ability to receive Call Log and SMS permissions on Android devices, and are no longer making contact interaction data available via the Android Contacts API.
Something like the automatic generation of circles in Google Mail, and integrate some kind of generalized wall posts for Google Mail users.
Google+ was never a go-to social network like Facebook, but many of its features became successful products in their own rights.
[1] https://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adap...
- Google Reader
- Google Buzz
- iGoogle
- Picasa Web Albums
- Google Talk
- Google Latitude
- Google Wave
Now the latest victim was added to the list:
- Google+
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-a-break-f...
90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.
Their own stats seem to back this: people arrive by mistake and immediately go somewhere else
Yep: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-says-it-found-...
"As many as 438 applications might have used the API. Google maintains that it didn’t uncover evidence developers were aware of or abused the security flaw, or that profile data was misused. However, it acknowledged that it has no way of knowing for sure because it doesn’t have “audit rights” over its developers and because it keeps a limited set of activity logs." (https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/08/google-security-breach/)
Google wrote: “Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.”
--
From 2016: "The search engine company publicised a critical Windows bug 10 days after informing the software firm about it" (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/01/google-mi...)
From February: "Microsoft misses Google's 90-day deadline, so Google has published details of an exploit mitigation bypass" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-security-google-exp...)
And then: "For the second time in a week, Google reveals another unpatched Windows 10 vulnerability" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-bug-google-again-re...)
In August: "Google discloses vulnerability in Fortnite launcher that allowed possible malware installation" (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-08-27-google-dis...)
Again in August, reporting Samsung bugs: (https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-project-zero-heres-the-...):
"Two terms irked her and simply clashed with Project Zero's practices. "You MUST hold off disclosing the vulnerability in reasonable time, and you MUST get Samsung's consent or inform Samsung about the date before disclosing the vulnerability," said Samsung. "In some cases, Samsung may request not to disclose the vulnerability at all." Again, this clashes with Project Zero's insistence on disclosure."
A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.
Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was briefed on the plan not to notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision, the people said.
.... The document shows Google officials knew that disclosure could have serious ramifications. Revealing the incident would likely result “in us coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” the memo said. It “almost guarantees Sundar will testify before Congress.”
https://t.co/DExCeKTGHX (seems to link directly to the WSJ article):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared...
It's a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We're closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.
And, sure, it might not make the top list of 1000 words you might hear on the street on any given day, but it's also very easy to search for. That doesn't make it a weasel word.
It is therefore presumably not the primary consumer-facing announcement of the shutdown.
Hopefully they will use one of the terms you noted, or something similar, for that announcement.
> Action 1: We are _shutting down_ Google+ for consumers.
> software types
> weasel word
Pull the plank from your own eye first.
"We are shutting down Google+ for consumers."
> this is fucking infuriating
Comments like yours are much worse.
Does this mean they are just shifting the social network features over to other products?
'Use this service/product because you now have to in order to access something you like' is not a good way to endear your company/service/product to users, and usually has the exact opposite effect to whatever you were intending.
Then recently they tried to make it better by redesigning it, and apparently gave some graphic designers free reign. This lead to a significantly worse user experience, so much so that I and many others who were still clinging on stopped using it almost entirely.
That said it had some good ideas, and the signal-to-noise ratio was much better than on Facebook. I'm guessing the active communities I visited will migrate to Facebook or similar, but it won't be quite the same.
Reader was an active product for 8 years. What more do you want?
Plus Chrome not going anywhere as well as the Google home. But would still expect them to iterate. So even though Android has over 80% share still would not be surprised to see them move to Fuchsia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_smartphon... List of most popular smartphone apps - Wikipedia
- Create a way to communicate with your friends.
- Try to monetize it by adding feeds of ads and irrelevant junk.
- Users get annoyed.
- Double down on the ads.
- More users get annoyed and leave.
- Usage shrinks.
This used to be called "pulling a Myspace". Since then, Twitter, Google+, WeChat in India, and Facebook have followed Myspace's lead.
It works out OK for the founders if they cash out around step 3.
It's a classic case of google dipping their toes in a service and if they don't reach critical mass in 3 months just ignore it until it becomes a liability and shut it down quietly. I would love to hear if they ever pushed updates for it or just had some intern maintaining the code up until now.
Google can filter this perfectly on image searches, but not on their social networks?
It's a shame, I really liked the concept of circles. Where am I going to get my Buzz now?
Hopefully this will put an end to that nonsense?
But it's because I've also been a long-time user of the service, signing on in July of 2011, and continuing to use it, often through gritted teeth, and desperately hoping something better would come along, and yet ... nothing really has, at least not that I've been aware.
There's a long litany of mistakes and errors (and many successes) in the service, and I might eventually sit down and write my own post mortem of what I thought went right and wrong -- I've written a few, most of which still stand, though the cooption of media, social and otherwise, for propaganda and disinformation purposes could be expanded on.
There are several groups formed to look at exodus options, presuming people want to go to any one platform (something I'd actually somewhat discourage). It may be that the age of centralised social networks is over, though self-hosting and federation also have considerable challenges. Or, maybe, we go back to other models. Hacker News is an exemplar I've referenced more than a few times. It's not a personal network the way G+, FB, Twitter, or a personal blog are, but it has a (usually) high level of discussion of an interesting array of topics. Thanks in large part to active moderation and flying slightly under the radar.
If you're on G+ and want to discuss next steps, stop by Google+ Mass Migration:
https://news.google.com/search?q=google%2B&hl=en-US&gl=US&ce...
Google+, with all its missteps, was one of those products that even a company with Google's money, resources and people (like Luke Wroblewski) that couldn't get better at all. I liked the concept of "circles" as opposed to the concept of "lists" on Facebook that most people don't know about or use. The only mistake that Google+ did was not copying Facebook on its features. That increased the barriers to adoption and made the product almost worthless. Even something as useful as creating an event was buried in a classic G+ interface, and in the new interface it's buried under profile. Treating vanity URLs as very scarce commodities and letting people live with long unspeakable links, not implementing a groups like functionality well (called "Communities"), and many other things could've been handled if they just copied what Facebook did and took the good lessons from those.
It's sad that Google+ would be gone soon, though it could've been a viable competitor for Facebook as far as centralized, ad supported platforms are concerned. But it's good that an abandoned product gets a quicker death, and that's exactly what Google+ was — an abandoned zombie product trying to figure out whether it was alive or dead.
I'd take this as one less commercial social network to worry about, and await the adoption of a decentralized social network.
I really felt the need for Android like permission model for my Google account, where you can reject a permission request and still use the app.
Much appreciated change, that allows more refined control over account privacy.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-%201-button...
I think in the back of their minds, possibly subconsciously, people like me probably make decisions against other technology they provide even if it is in a completely different category and pretty much never going to shut down.
For example, I'm not sure I haven't decided against their cloud services because my subconscious remembered the reader being shut down and thought "they better not shut down some part of the infrastructure I rely on".
Let me throw wood on fire ... the reason Google+ is a failure has nothing to do with any of its features:
1. they killed Google Reader for it, which was more successful than Google+ ever hoped to be, forever tarnishing Google's reputation
2. they had the Real Name Policy ... by the time they reversed and apologized for it, the damage was already done
3. they shoved Google+ down on everybody's throats, like YouTube users, exposing their real identities in the process
There are no other reasons that matter. Google+ could have been at least at Twitter's scale. Twitter still understands their audience, but Google never did.
In YT they already had a massive user-based; (for a time, not sure if it's still true) the second most searched search engine in the world.
In Wave they had threaded conversations. That is a communications UX that was closer (than Slack et al) to natural / traditional human conversations.
Toss in some of the better G+ features (e.g., Circles) and they likely could have been a contender. The problem (I suspect) was they saw FB as "competition" instead of stepping over and beyond FB, as FB had done to MySpace and Friendster.
Further proof that Google isn't a product company, but an algorithm company (per Thiel, trying to hide from regulators)?
It is very hard to believe that they can't track when exactly the bug was introduced. All code changes are tracked in the source control.
----------------- I can understand this position, but I'd be curious what your thoughts are on how to best (I realize there is no perfect) keep your data private from snooping employees, hackers, or law enforcement.
I've thought about this over and over, and it's hard to come to a solid conclusion about keeping personal data safe (in this context I mean emails and files you may store in the cloud, not browsing history, social media posts, etc.). There are so many options with downfalls for each, and I'm not a security expert. So every time I get excited about trying a new service geared towards privacy, or setting up my own instances, inevitably somebody points out the terrible pitfall in it and I get discouraged.
1. Don't use the internet or internet services, period. <- Not tenable for most of us.
2. Use services who market themselves as geared towards privacy. <- Can't actually trust those services, even with E2E encryption because they could be running different code from what you think they're running.
3. Use regular cloud options, but stack stuff on top - VeraCrypt volumes or Cryptomator with Google drive, GPG for email, etc. <- Really difficult to setup and have a nice reliable way of accessing data on mobile/desktop/etc. No security audits on a lot of the open source software.
4. Host your own services - i.e. a Nextcloud 14 instance on EC2 with an S3 backend, then use client-side E2E <- Difficult to make sure you set the service up in a safe way, and not even a fraction of as much resources in auditing code as, say, a giant corporation.
5. Spread what you do out over multiple services - FastMail for email, DropBox for cloud storage, Standard Notes for notes, etc. <- A real pain.
I know there will never be a consensus on this, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the best way to keep my personal files and notes personal to me. Let's assume I'm not a target of any spy agencies or whatnot, but I want to make it very, very difficult for anyone to read my person notes and files but me.
Encrypt before you send/upload, decrypt after you receive/download. If you transmit or receive unencrypted data you are placing trust in someone else and there is no way to really avoid that unless you created and control the chain end-to-end.
So you can use Google Drive, etc., just encrypt your data before uploading if it needs to be secured. A 7-zip file protected with AES256 is decently convenient (from a PC) and secure.
Maybe they should start getting back to the roots - try to secure that first comer advantage by launching experimental products. Oh wait google glass, inbox...
For a company that is praised for biggest software talent they sure fail to deliver anything of value to the medium time and time again.
If I saw something I thought a friend would enjoy or made me think of them, I'd post it on their wall. This is drastically different than sending a message or e-mailing in that my friend's friends will also see it.
In Google+ (at least when I tried it), there was no way to perform this action. So I never used it again.
"Minimal maintenance" is often harder than it sounds, especially when privacy and security is involved.
If the product is good, people will use it. If it's not, they won't, in the end. G+ wasn't good.
Given that they are going to close this down for us as consumers, what is our best alternative? I would rather not have to have the headache of running and maintaining software myself, but what options do you recommend?
Or do we just have to bite the bullet and set up the Shaftoe e-mail list?
Your family Twitter? https://masto.host/
Your family Facebook? https://www.oxwall.com
Like what happens if I remove all google plus code related from my sites right now? My guess it's that in the short term will have some kind of negative impact, but I don't know.
What is our relationship to Google? Are we really consumers of Google? Content creators? Ad targetees? Impressionees? Folks? Lemmings?
I can imagine Google doing it that way. "The majority never used our platform, so we'll abuse the few that did (and really liked it) by only giving them X amount of time to notice and save their data."
If Google+ becomes archived my jaw will hit the floor - and I'll be very appreciative.
There will also be a software graveyard with the 1,000+ dead projects that google launched and then shut down years later.
Interesting, wasn't this basically the same problem that Facebook had with Cambridge Analytica?
Oof. Good on them for finally admitting it, but who knew the data would be even harsher than G+'s most vocal critics.
Isn't one of the stipulations of GDPR that a company must disclose privacy violations of this nature?
I'd say let's have a moment of silence for Google+, but that is clearly too generous
> Finding 2: People want fine-grained controls over the data they share with apps.
While I personally 100% agree, I would have guessed that the vast majority of Google users (i.e., non-HN crowd) wouldn't care about fine-grained controls. I wonder if they found that some people passionately care and most didn't care one way or another. In other words, perhaps the people that click/tap through permissions prompts are going to continue clicking through, but the change could win back some privacy conscious consumers.
(Also, small thin sans-serif grey body font means you hate your readers' eyes.)
"This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age."
It is also including a lot more than what they said above:
The json per profile is as follows:
{ "kind": "plus#person", "etag": etag, "nickname": string, "occupation": string, "skills": string, "birthday": string, "gender": string, "emails": [ { "value": string, "type": string } ], "urls": [ { "value": string, "type": string, "label": string } ], "objectType": string, "id": string, "displayName": string, "name": { "formatted": string, "familyName": string, "givenName": string, "middleName": string, "honorificPrefix": string, "honorificSuffix": string }, "tagline": string, "braggingRights": string, "aboutMe": string, "relationshipStatus": string, "url": string, "image": { "url": string,
},
"organizations": [
{
"name": string,
"department": string,
"title": string,
"type": string,
"startDate": string,
"endDate": string,
"location": string,
"description": string,
"primary": boolean
}
],
"placesLived": [
{
"value": string,
"primary": boolean
}
],
"isPlusUser": boolean,
"language": string,
"ageRange": {
"min": integer,
"max": integer
},
"plusOneCount": integer,
"circledByCount": integer,
"verified": boolean,
"cover": {
"layout": string,
"coverPhoto": {
"url": string,
"height": integer,
"width": integer
},
"coverInfo": {
"topImageOffset": integer,
"leftImageOffset": integer
}
},
"domain": string(from https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people)
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/17951914/google-plus-data...
> Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.
So basically, they decided that because:
1. The data exposed wasn't very sensitive (name, email address, occupation, gender, age, etc) 2. They couldn't identify any specific users whose data was leaked 3. They couldn't find any evidence that the bug was actually exploited 4. There were no actions you could take to remedy the problem (no software to update, no passwords to change, no CC numbers to revoke)
that they weren't going to notify users about the bug.
Still, I would have appreciated at least a blog post or something so if I started suddenly getting more spam emails or something I could at least identify the source.
Interesting how this is all happening right before midterms. Could these companies be trying to impact the elections and they need plausible deniability? Announcing an exploit seems like an easy way to cover ones ass.
I deleted my Facebook and Instagram three weeks ago and haven't looked back. I removed Chrome and Chromium from all my computers. No, I don't want to sync using your servers. If you let me host the sync servers myself like Mozilla does I'd consider it.
If my friends want to talk to me they can make an account on my privately hosted Matrix.org chat server and use the open-source Riot.im client.
It works flawlessly and I don't have to worry about being spied on.
Next is Gmail. I find the new UI atrocious. I'm keeping my eye on Maps alternatives as well.
The faster I can get rid of all this crap the better off I will be.
IMHO
That is pretty hard to do.
Google is evil.