Google +1 is failing, miserably | Hacker News Reader

Google +1 is failing, miserably

gerger.co

52 pointsyalimgerger63 comments

Comparing the Tweet, +1 and Facebook buttons next to each other, I can easily see how people just don't understand what +1 means. The button graphic has a colored ribbon at the top with the label '+1'. Next to it, I see the number of the total clicks. However, there is no explanation what it means. Compare that to the Facebook button. It says "Recommend", and "60 people recommended this".

'Recommend' is a clear call to action. '+1' requires a lot of interpretation and prior knowledge. It's the same issue G+ faces with huddles, sparks, hangouts and circles. By not adopting everyday language, features become mysterious.

Excellent point. Very well put.

Isn't that a little post rational? It took people quit some time to get the whole idea of tweet.

I think that's true to some extent, but at least with a tweet the user is also commenting/providing some context for their audience. One of the issues with +1 is that it's not always clear to users how the +1 will be interpreted.

Exactly. I am also surprised that Google hasn't done more testing on the names. Perhaps they have some A/Bs going on this that I haven't seen, but they certainly need it.

I don't think it's the buttons so much as the lack of context. Google profiles aren't used in the same way facebook or twitter accounts are.

Once I looked at my google profile, saw the +1 section, I understood immediately. But I still don't care much because nobody looks at my google profile including me.

I honestly thought +1 not appearing in the stream was a feature. A feature I liked. After all if they want to share it they can share it. It's the same thing about games not appearing in the stream -- I honestly don't give two shakes if you need two more friends to visit your farm in order to get the golden shovel, I'm not interested. I like how it's segregated to it's own tab, IMO the only improvement they could make is adding an option to toggle whether you see your friend's +1s and game 'trophies' in the stream or not.

I agree. I also get it from a position angle- if everybody else is doing A, we'll do !A. Of course, the risk is that people may prefer A.

I don't think looking at one site is enough to judge whether Google +1 is failing or not.

With a site like msnbc, I can't help but picture an older less tech savvy crowd. A crowd that wouldn't know what google +1 is, let alone have an email other than an @aol.com.

If you look at other sites, Techcrunch for example. The primary mode of sharing there is Twitter, and suprisingly linkedin with facebook really lagging behind. That doesn't mean facebook likes are failing.

All valid points. This demographic is the exact demographic I wanted to look at though. Most of the world is not tech savvy.

Understood. Now that you mentioned that, I can more clearly see what you were getting at with the article.

Only tech savvy people are allowed to use Google Plus. You can't just sign up. Calling a service in closed beta "failed" because it has a small number of users is totally irrational to the point of being an obvious troll.

What benefit do I get from +1'ing something? It doesn't go in my stream, it doesn't affect anything that I know of... Why would I do it?

It's like they implemented it without have any idea why the customer would use it... They were just copying other people... Badly.

And while we're on the topic of sharing, why doesn't Google Reader send shared items to G+ yet? It has sent it to Buzz for quite a long time, and Buzz isn't even popular.

Ohhh...don't event get me started with Reader. Sharing articles in Reader deserves its own blog post. It looks like the entire UX for sharing is designed to make the user feel helpless. I cannot imagine a non tech user being able to share anything with anyone in that UI. We literally had to involve several software engineers the first time we tried to set the sharing settings among each other.

It's really not that hard. You go to the Sharing Settings, you choose which lists of people you want to see the items you share (admittedly, making a list does require going to Google Contacts, which that page links to), and then when you see an item you want to share you press the share button.

I would much rather that it integrate with G+, or at least allow selection of which groups I want to be able to see a single item rather than just being able to decide who gets the entire stream, but I find it very difficult to believe that you required "several software engineers" to set it up.

Of course, it's very fashionable to hate Reader, as it has been for a while.

Actually, except for the setup of sharing, I love it.

The benefit is that it (allegedly) improves your search results. If someone in your social circle +1'd something, it affects your search results.

If that's the case then I wonder if my search results will end up populated solely by witticisms and novelties. In my experience so far +1 seems mainly used as a polite nod or chuckle, because its primary effect is that it's visible to the person who said the thing you approve of. Something like del.icio.us seems much more likely to identify timeless great content worth sharing -- it's a bookmark to come back to rather than a nod of social approval.

If you were designing a search algorithm it does not seem like you want want to give much weight to an embedded easy approval button (reddit, digg, +1, like, etc.) compared to something that requires more investment of someone's time and thought, like making a del.icio.us bookmark. I mean, half the time you have to go try to remember what your password was, then have them send you a password reset mail, then re-login -- now that's a bookmark I care about.

> What benefit do I get from +1'ing something?

The link shows up on your Google profile, in the "+1" section. It's would be fairly convenient way of sharing bookmarks, if anyone used Google profiles.

Yes, after 5 years of running Google+, they still don't have 750 million users. :-(

I'd guess that the fact that Facebook has hundreds of times more users at the moment has something to do with it as well.

997 > 100 * 6, 330 > 100 * 1, 7000 > 100 * 63

Oh, thank you. :-) I also would like to mention again that you don't have to be on Google+ to use +1.

+1 has been around for like 5 minutes and already I see it on almost all of the sites that I visit daily. I'd say that's a good start.

It's too early to say if it has failed or succeeded, though. I do wish people would be a bit more patient... But looking at the stock market, people obviously are short-termists.

In my circles which contain 800+ people, Jason Calcanis is the most prolific (and only) poster. It's essentially the Jason Calcanis feed until more people start posting things.

Really??? The author of this post is comparing the number of Facebook likes (750 million active users) to the number of Google +1s (some 25 million users) from a small sample of Internet articles...

People really need to stop mentioning how Google+ does not have this or that feature. It's not open to the public at large because it's not a finished product yet!

You don't need to be on Google+ to +1 anything. All you need is a Google account. Most people think +1 and Google+ are related which is not true. But this is what happens if a company build two products with the same name.

You are right but I am guessing well over 90% of the +1s are coming from Google+ users.

This article seems to boil down to the idea that because plus isn't a 1:1 copy of the mental model and concepts of facebook and twitter, it has to be a failure.

It builds on a bad assumption right out the gate, that automatically reposting trash you happen to perform a lightweight operation on is what it means to be "social" online. That only happens because facebook is pandering to marketers. I wish I still had the email where facebook described to marketers the change from "Become a fan" to "like". The change was to make it so that the action that got people to spam their friends became more lightweight.

The author compares it to tweeting. Really? Last I knew on the twitter you slammed a link into the text field, just like people do on plus when they actually want to share the link.

Ultimately, a lower number of bullshit reposted from MSNBC.com showing up in my stream than my feed is a WIN for me.

Does Google+ have to be a sucess? Everbody is a user, it just sits there up in the top of your gmail, reader, docs. There is no effort to start using it, so Google can just sit and wait for it to become a natural part of the Google apps exerience.

I guess you could say +1 is still a relatively new feature. It appears that it's something Google just released without a clear end goal in mind of how to integrate it across all of their social networks.

I'm hoping that they have something new and different in mind with how they integrate +1's into Google+. It's slightly annoying as a user to be presented with so many share/like buttons on a post. As it was mentioned in the blog post, what's the incentive for a user to choose the +1 button. There needs to be a benefit beyond just making the +1 viewable in your Google+ stream.

+1 in Google+ is even weirder, because you can't see a list of your +1'd G+ content anywhere. It's just brownie points for the poster.

I +1'd this just to make sure I could: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/221414/tmp/plus_one.png

I guess they need to make the +1's appear in the stream, too, to make ppl care about them. I was hoping there is another way, though.

I was all ready to jump in -- under my real name, even -- until they started shitcanning (entire) user accounts. I am already too dependent upon my pre-existing Google account/services; I can't afford the risk.

A bit of irony in that.

This isn't true though. Unless you have some egregious terms of service violation, your account will only lose access to Google+. For example, not using your real name could get you banned from G+, but the rest of your Google account will still be usable and accessible.

Anecdotal, but I'm put in mind of one new user's experience where they accidentally "sent/addressed" (keep in mind, I have no direct experience with Plus) a message/post to all of their circle contacts or somesuch. IIRC, the message basically just said "Hey, I'm on Plus now". I don't recall whether the broad addressing was mistakenly made or the implications of the broad addressing not understood. Either way, that one message was allegedly enough to get the person's Google account suspended.

Um, no thanks.

P.S. I concede that the original article is specifically about the "+1" feature. However, I -- perhaps mistakenly -- view this all as part of Google Plus.

Honestly, that story sounds really vague and I can't see _anything_ in it that would even be remotely responsible for an account suspension. What do you think they got in trouble for? Sending a message to too many people? That certainly isn't a bannable offense, especially since there is a public posting option.

As I recall, it was a specific, first-hand account. And the author was initially as puzzled as you are. What happened? Why?

It's one of several stories/anecdotes I've run across. Unfortunately, I haven't kept a list of links to those.

En masse, they've caused me enough concern to not "push the button". In good part, if something does go amiss, you're pretty well stuck, unless you have a big enough megaphone to garner sufficient publicity and/or enough of the "right" connections to garner some love from fellow geeks.

Maybe I and others are being gamed by opposing forces. I'm not at a point where I care to find out the hard way whether that's the case.

"i'd +1 that" sounds better than "i'd like that".

Google doesn't get social... that's all. They demand everyone that applies for a job knows algorithms, but they fail to understand that to nail social, they need to hire people with a different type of intelligence: emotional and psychological. People who know what makes other people tick. We human beings crave attention, impressing others, and thinking we're special. We don't give a damn about placing people in Circles - that's a problem you solve once you give what people crave, not a problem that convinces people to join your social network.

Google does need computer scientists but the company has enough of them. This isn't a knock against Google employees, but the vast majority of their employees know how to scale search engines, or write efficient code, or write the next generation NLP parser, but to get social right, those things are unimportant.

To create a great social network requires less technical expertise, and more getting the little things right. Think about LinkedIn: You can't help but tweak with your skills and experience so it looks impressive to you, and to others (even if they aren't recruiters). Think about how much people care about filling in their Facebook profile, and making it look good. Now look at Google+. It's TOO clean. It's TOO private. That's a great recipe for a search engine. A horrible recipe for a social network.

If google doesn't get social, who developed Google+? Too clean? I find the page very easy on the eyes and easy to use. Too private? I have put way more info in public (intentionally) on Google+ than Facebook. They make it easy. You are just making general statements and assumptions we have heard all over the internet, meanwhile, Google+ continues to delight its users.

I will say: Google finally gets social. It is called Google+

So far, most of the people that I know that actively use Facebook don't even know that Google+ exists. Most of them are women. This is by no means a scientific sample and they are typically not early adopters but until I see them joining Google+, I won't be convinced the Google finally gets social.

Google copied a bunch of technical features from other networks (Facebook mainly) that do get social. But as the parent points out, they don't truly get social because there is a complexity that confuses me let alone my mom in using Google Plus.

What complexity do you refer to? Facebook has groups, it just has a crappy UX for it. Google's Circles are way better, easy, and kinda fun to setup with a slick UI. Once they are setup, it is easy to filter your content based on circles. Circles make a ton of sense to me (and a lot of other people, too). I can finally share all my information in one place, with different groups and view those groups in context in my stream. No one is forcing anyone to use Google+ though. Users have a choice and we shall see where the cards fall over the next year.

I agree, but you are talking about technical features again. The interface for circles is slick, it allows new technical fun. I think this is why Google+ is pretty popular with the tech crowd. But now, one month on, even though 60% of my Facebook friends join G+, none of them are using it. My feed is littered with celebrities that overpost because circles are great for limiting who you share with, but poor for limiting what you view. (Google doesn't let you say: show me every circle but X, and if you choose to view a specific circle it will always reset to all)

I'd say that Google doesn't really get user experience in this case. Things like making it clearer what +1 does. Does it show up somewhere? (yes) Does it affect search (sorta, but not really) Does it feed into my Google+ account? (no)

Maybe even the name "+1", which is a given for regular forum participants, but may be hard to get for others.

I can already see the arguments of the future pouring in today.

"Well, you see, Google+ just got lucky, to REALLY understand social you have to talk to people who don't know anything about science and technology or icky subjects like math"

I like how this line of reasoning comes up all the time - "I can't spend 15 minutes of my life understanding a basic procedure for sorting lists of things and subsequently got booted before the phone interview, so that must mean I understand social/seo/ux/insert_other_relatively_bullshit_job_or_industry_title and Google doesn't"

>"Google doesn't get social..."

The name '+1' bears this out. On the one hand, it's meaning is geeky enough that my mom won't understand it. On the other hand, it's use is so pathetically inarticulate, that I wouldn't want my online profile to be associated with it.

>We don't give a damn about placing people in Circles

"We"? Who the hell is this "we"? I love the functionality of circles.

On a related topic, why is google going after the "like" game anyway? They have better data than the stupid likes they can use to direct advertising. And +1 is a "meh" name. It would be more intuitive if they used a star, like gmail does, instead. Star it, save it in your bookmarks and tell your friends.

They wanna be Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo (just to be on the safe side). Is there a line of business in software that they have not dived into?

On a related topic, why is google going after the "like" game anyway?

To feed it into personalization of search results.

+1 is failing miserably, as opposed to author's sense of perspective?

Could you elaborate a little more about your point please?

He's trying to say that by stating that a brand new service that is, by most measures, doing fairly well is "failing miserably", you've lost your sense of perspective.

I am not talking about Google+ though. I am talking about +1.

Fair enough. The submission title does say google+ though. Additionally, I think strong statements like 'failing miserably' require strong evidence. This seemed more like (weak) anecdotal evidence and opinion to me.

There is a space between 'Google' and '+1' in his title.

Oops, you're right. Somehow skimmed over that on my phone. Apologies. Still I think the actual blog title is a little bit less sensationalist than the submission.

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