The Horror of setting up a Google+ account for my mom | Hacker News Reader

The Horror of setting up a Google+ account for my mom

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60 points_ankit_35 comments

I've been a social media programmer since 2001 and personally I think Google+ needs a paper book to explain how to use it.

I always have people trying to get me to join them in hangouts and sometimes it works, but often it takes me 10 or 15 minutes to get the invitation and actually get into the hangout.

The funniest time was when it wanted me to update the software on my mac and it gave me step-by-step instructions to open a terminal window and use the command line to do the update.

I give Google credit for developing a sharing model that's different from the Facebook and Twitter model, so that Google+ isn't just an imitation of it's competitors. On the other hand, I dont know if I like sender-controlled sharing... There are so many people that want to spam me with this or spam me with that, and I'm not just talking about Nigerian spammers, I'm talking about close friends, family members, C-level people at places I work with and so forth. I'd rather see an intelligent social media platform that helps me pick out what I want and what I need to know; Facebook comes closer to that.

I'd love to see good, simple two-way sharing control. I should be able to decide who a post is visible to, and they should be able to decide what proportion/type of my posts they want to see. G+ is better at the former while FB is better at the latter; neither do the whole package very well.

This article is a random list of annoyances, not a horror story about setting up Google+. Ultimately, it sounds like the author's mom would prefer email to Google+.

I think Google+ is a good tool for groups larger than families, like companies. You might want to share things with your coworkers, but email doesn't scale. So you can instead have a nice access-controlled internal sharing site, and people that are interested in pictures of your CNC mill or whatever can see them. ("Pages" are great for things like your cafeteria posting menus or pictures of food.)

The issue I have with G+ within companies is that it leaks to the public side.

You can switch off some parts of it so the content is visible only internally, but your account picture, name, company you work for and the fact that you have an account are visible to anyone on G+.

Google has some inner conflict here. The marketing strategy is "more private than Facebook" but the obvious way to measure the success of Google+ is by how much oversharing people are doing. Optimize for that and you get pushy UX like the one described. Hopefully they can figure out a more nuanced metric.

The network effect says that a person that's connected to five family members is not as (measurably) valuable as someone connected to fifty people.

If you were Google, which would you rather sell to advertisers, correlations between groups of five people of fifty?

Hmm, is this backed by data?

I mean that is it known that in current social networks a life-time value of a person that with 5 strong relationship ties is less valuable over time than a person who has 50 very very weak ties (like most of my Google+ followers, people who I don't know)

My conjecture on top of the general value of a more connected network.

What is Facebook's motivation for connecting people? Or Google's? Or LinkedIn's.

A newspaper sold millions of individual pairs of eyeballs to advertisers. I would think the large numbers of correlations available in a largely connected network would be much more valuable than unconnectable individuals.

But stronger ties could be more "sticky", i.e. it's harder to leave Facebook than Twitter because people (in general) have stronger ties to people they are connected in Facebook than in Twitter. Thus, life-time value of a stronger tie for the service provider is larger. This seems common sense, but I'm interested in if there's any kind of data what the ratio is. Inside a single service, of course, as values are not directly comparable over the services due to different business models)

> If you were Google, which would you rather sell to advertisers, correlations between groups of five people of fifty?

I would rather sell a network that people want to use over one that they don't.

But what if you don't have that network?

Hi _ankit_, sorry to read that you and your mom had troubles with her initial Google+ experience. A few things sound like possible issues, and the whole thing is valuable feedback, so I'll file a few bugs, and pass the post along to our team. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

Thanks dewitt for the positive reply! It feels great to be heard.

she uses Google+ to stay in touch with other family members online (< 10)

What I don't understand is if you want to stay in touch with a small group of close acquaintances/family why not use email? It's vastly easier to use than any "social network"

A big part of staying in touch is sharing photos, and video calling. Especially, if you live far away from your family.

I once thought this but not again. Your family, at least the elders, would more appreciate that you pick up the phone or send postal mail than use technology.

You think it's a big part but you are in fact making that personal connection weaker.

At the very most in the world technology, email would suffice for your family.

To clarify, almost all the usability issues mentioned in the article are the ones I face myself too. The title is a bit misleading, it's just what prompted me to write it.

Your family, at least the elders, would more appreciate that you pick up the phone or send postal mail than use technology.

Most of the elders in my family - talking people 65+ - have computers, use Facebook, to keep in touch. Most of my mother's _friends_ are on Facebook for that matter. They do appreciate a phone call, but for grand-baby pictures and video, that's where the action is.

My mother is the exception. At the age of 70, she's never touched a computer. She likely never will.

Anyway - my point is that my family is not exceptional, nor especially early-adopting. We're pretty typical Americans, I think.

Not my family; the "elders" (my Dad and his 3 siblings) all get on go-to-meeting every other Saturday and have a video chat. They were very excited that I joined their meeting last week. I have dozens of cousins of various degrees I only know through facebook, which we are using to organize a family reunion. I'm not sure how this makes our family's personal connections weaker.

by the way; phones and postal mail still use technology.

because your young folks are all using it. You have to participate or be left out in the cold.

Google's concept of a "ghost profile" (that they submitted as a patent, so I assume they're planning to implement on G+) is actually a decent solution to this problem. It lets you be "in the loop" and receive content posted on G+ accounts in your email without having to create an account yourself or post the images publicly.

You're definitely right that families are currently using email for this, but there is a huge opportunity to use newer technology to keep families even closer in touch. e.g. photos, videos, and up-to-date lists of contact information. Google Groups and email lists don't cut it.

This is actually what we're working on at FamilyLeaf: http://familyleaf.ocm

The younger generations don't use email, so you have to encourage them to share in different ways. But at the same time, you must make it dead simple for older people to share their photos and updates. On FamilyLeaf, we've solved that by using Chute (http://getchute.com) to allow people our age to selectively share from their photos on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, etc.

And older people can just attach photos in a message to send@familyleaf.com - they're automatically emailed to the whole group and collected in your universal family album.

Those are valid points but Google has a different target.

The pages are designed to get the user to spend more time on G+.

Google started their life with a simple UI that anyone could use. You simply entered keywords into a textbox and hit the enter key.

Suddenly all their new stuff is too complicated. Google+ and Google Listen are painful to use.

And that still exists. Now Google has other products too, which you can use if you want to, or not use if you don't want to.

All true. However surely Google want to deliver an intuitive and easy to use social media tool to their end users. I thought G+ is for the mass market - maybe it isn't.

Google+ is definitely not intuitive and during their recent upgrade have ripped off Facebook's profile and cover photo idea.

And you can't page down using the spacebar anymore. That seems like a fundamental feature of the modern Web browser that Google decided not to support, and for what reason?

Wait, really? It seems to work for me (Safari 5.1.4 / Chrome 20.0.1096.1 on Lion).

Definitely broken for me in Firefox 11 and 12 on Lion.

Without getting into the specific point-by-point refutation of this because, some of it is valid, I must first wonder why it is that people assume that every product should fit every person.

My first reaction is how horrible it would be to set up a Google+ account for my dog. I mean, my dog doesn't even have hands! Pulling that back a little bit though, it starts off with "my mom isn't big about the internet."

More to the point, there isn't actually any 'horror' in 'setting up a Google+ account for his mom'. By all accounts, the lack of horror in the actual account setup tells me that it was probably a fairly trivial affair, or even, uneventful. I was expecting something about real name guideline violations or switching accounts being an issue, but that's not the case at all, it seems.

Perhaps the most legitimate complaint (to my ears, your mileage will vary) is that there are non-circled posts added to your stream. The 'promoted' or 'hot' posts or whatever could certainly do with a toggle permission or something for the 'closed circle' types, and I actually thought that there was a way to keep people's stuff out of your stream.

I agree that you can't have every product fit every person, but isn't one of the primary selling points of Google+ that "you can have private conversations with small groups of family and friends". I would personally think the features and UX should be designed keeping that in mind.

Even saying so, a lot of the points I say there are potential usability issues for everyone (at least for me they are). For example, the big banner ads for mobile apps and Hangouts.

I agree, the title is a bit misleading. By "setup", I meant creating an account and simplifying the user interface, and explaining to my mom how to start hangouts, share photos, etc.

Perhaps that's my point of contention. I think that, for sharing to small groups of individuals, G+ is the best platform around (though I haven't tried EveryMe as they aren't on Android). I type a message, I type a group or two, I hit enter. Done.

Sharing is simple.

Where it seems like your complaints lie are in getting too much information - above and beyond what has been shared.

To me, I suppose that's small potatoes. I get the occasional distraction in my stream, but Google's usually smart enough to make it relevant, and about half the time I see something from outside of my circles, it ends up drawing me into a conversation.

I am decidedly not your mom, and I don't mind it. Also, my stream is active enough that those 'outsiders' ever take up any significant percentage of it, so perhaps I'm unable to see it from her point of view, but I don't think that showing me things I like, that I might otherwise have missed, is a 'problem' that needs to be 'fixed'.

Again, just my opinion. Can I ask what other social networks your mom has used, and how she found those, in comparison?

Yes, it does depend how one is using Google+. I primarily use it to interact with small groups of friends and family who are using Google+ (which is not a lot), which might be very different from how you use it.

Also, these views are all mine, what triggered them was the annoyances I came across as I was trying to simplify the Google+ interface for my mom. I find Google+ great for sharing links, photos and doing hangouts and I definitely don't know of a better or simpler solution for private sharing among groups of people. Like you said, it is really simple to share.

I do feel strongly about letting users easily opt out of getting too much information. If I want to see what's trending, I can visit the Explore tab. Like the left navigation, maybe it makes sense to let you hide stuff on the right sidebar as well.

My main annoyance though is with the persistent adverts (the banners you see on Explore, Hangout and Photos pages). And the "in your face" banner that you cannot get rid of, if you have less than 10 people in Circles. The only way is to add strangers to your Circles to get rid of it. Would it be too bad to have a "X" icon on the top right to get rid of these?

While not every product should fit every person, G+ is a social networking platform. As such, it should be accommodate a fairly broad user base.

This article and some others I've read all hint a larger issue, that if we're not celeb watchers, hangout addicts, et al, then we should be. We all want to be like the cool kids, right? Well, I don't really want to follow Felicia Day. I don't want to hang out on G+. I don't want to chat on G+. I just want to see what my friends and a few others are posting, and post a few things myself for their consumption. This would work a lot better without the persistent, distracting and annoying nagging for me to become the median user.

There is some truth in that but until Google+ is "mom"friendly it will go nowhere.

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