Google+ Pages don't make any sense | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Pages don't make any sense

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42 pointstaylorbuley21 comments

Why does everyone expect Google+ to be as fully developed as Facebook, a product that was launched 6 years ago.

I don't like Google+, but of the complaining about its lack of features is getting annoying. It's very apparent the Google+ team is working as fast as they can to implement their product plan.

My complaint isn't so much that Google+ isn't developed as what they are developing and releasing has been very underwhelming and lacks any cohesive path to increasing engagement.

Almost all successful social networks that succeed have relatively high engagement from the get go. Notice, I said engagement and not user-base(that usually takes time to grow and understandably so). Google+'s engagement sucks. And their user-base numbers are bloated: google can stick a call-to-action to any service on their homepage and claim millions of signups overnight. It speaks more about Google the search engine and almost nothing about Google+'s success.

We get it, you don't like Google+. That doesn't mean you have to take every thread tangentially related to the product and make a point to criticize them for not releasing engagement metrics barely two months after launch.

If you have any facts or statistics to back up any of your claims I'd love to continue the discussion. Wild speculation and opinions stated as facts? Not so much.

It is a fact that at 10M users, facebook was reporting engagement, notably that over 50% of the users log in every single day. (1)

It is a fact that google+ has 40+M users.(2)

It is also a fact that Google's exec refused to release any info. about engagement despite repeated attempts by journos. (3)

Given these facts, I think it is logical to conclude that google+'s engagement is poor.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-students-use-...

2. http://allthingsd.com/20111013/four-month-old-google-has-40m...

3. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_engagement....

Google+ may not be as developed as Facebook, but that also means that it hasn't had as much time to develop a half-broken, shabbily-documented api.

Yeah, like most everything about Google+, it's pretty ill-thought out, but a patch for these obvious oversights has been "promised" in the near future. I'm sure that Google will add multiple admins to +pages, but this is another large complaint in a long list of errors that Google has made with this product. Sadly, Google+ is here to stay, and users of other Google products (gmail, youtube, everything...) can expect G+ to be shoved further and further down their throats.

I'm honestly surprised by the defenses of Google in the context of G+ pages. Yes, G+ is a new product, but releasing G+ Pages for business without multiple account support is not anything like a minimally viable product. It's just not. It's actually worse than useless, it actively frustrates and confuses any organization larger than a few people unless you're willing to break the Google rules and used a shared account.

The fact that multiple admins are coming means they should have waited until they were here. Releasing before then is kind of a trick to make companies not dismiss G+ as worthless.

They already said multiple admins for +Pages will come...

here's the announcement for that:

https://plus.google.com/101560853443212199687/posts/BbbJc6tB...

This is an odd rant. First, it's coming from a Yahoo employee. Next, it's about a service that is only a couple months old and a feature that is just a couple weeks old. Next, it's the type of feature that is easy to see not making the first release but would come at some point in the probably near future. Finally, the post doesn't support the headline at all.

Hi. That was me. What's odd about a Yahoo! employee using Google+?

The point of my "rant" was specifically that it doesn't make any sense to launch a feature like Google+ Pages -- a feature targeted at organizations and groups -- without the ability for those pages to be owned and administrated by more than one user. This ability is fundamental to the usefulness of the feature (and even to the way Google has chosen to market the feature), so the fact that it launched without it is puzzling and frustrating.

It's odd on a number of levels. First, does Yahoo have anything similar? If yes, use it. If not, why not? Yahoo doesn't even have a blogging or publishing service? Second, unfortunately, Yahoo criticism of Google doesn't resonate well in 2011. The whole thing just comes off as further evidence of some weird problems over in Sunnyvale.

No, Yahoo! does not have anything similar to Google+. Even if Yahoo! did have a similar product, it would be silly for me to restrict my community outreach efforts to that product, ignoring YUI users on Twitter, Google+, and elsewhere.

Please go back and look at my Google+ post one more time. Look closely. The name next to it is "Ryan Grove", not "Yahoo!". The profile photo is a sketch of my face, not a Yahoo! logo. The word "Yahoo!" isn't even used in the post.

This is not "Yahoo criticism of Google". This is me, Ryan Grove, person, criticizing Google+ Pages. And to be even more clear, I'm criticizing out of frustration because, on the whole, I like Google+ a lot. I wanted to like Google+ Pages as well, but it has fundamental flaws. I'm criticizing it not because I want to hurt it, but because I want it to get better.

This is not "evidence of some weird problems over in Sunnyvale". This is my personal opinion, expressed on my personal account, and has nothing to do with any views held by my employer.

Bradley Horowitz "kind of" explains why pages look like user profiles: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/QBPAvCBa...

Release Early, Release Often.

The day they released pages they mentioned multiple admins was planned. By releasing earlier they can also get some more user feedback as-they-go, I would imagine.

what exactly are the benefits of creating a G+ page for YUI?

We currently use Google+ Hangouts (via our personal profiles) for team meetings, since several members of the team (including me) are remote. It works great (much better than iChat or Skype, which we've previously used).

It'd be super awesome if we could use a Google+ Page for YUI (instead of a personal account) as a community hub, which would allow us to more easily host Hangouts that are open to the community, share YUI news and videos, and just generally interact more closely with our community on Google+.

In theory, this is exactly the sort of thing that Google+ Pages are for. In practice, there's no point to us creating a Google+ Page for YUI, since it currently has no actual benefits over just using a personal profile (and would actually be more work).

You see, G+ is doing exactly what Facebook does. The brands are basically duplicating their efforts for social interaction. I don't see any difference between how FB treats page creation versus Google Plus.

Facebook allows multiple personal profiles to manage a Page. See http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=187316341316631

Difference is, Google will be integrating the Google+ pages and profiles into the Google search results, something Facebook only has a slight chance to do with BING.

Google: facebook pepsi

Not sure how more integrated into google search results facebook could get.

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