Why Google Plus Will Prevail
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
False. I couldn't care less about a silly profile pic. I also don't even use Blogger. Perhaps the author is unaware, but there are quite a few bloggers out there who _aren't_ using Blogger, and who happen to control the ability to alter their blog at-will. This would include putting up silly profile pics or whatever.
> Step two: Attract every single small business and at least one of their employees. Want your business to appear on Google Maps, Google Local, et al., so that you can tell your prospective customers where you are, what you sell, and when you are open? Yup, you guessed it--you need a Google Plus Local Business page now.
False. You don't _need_ a "Google Plus Local Business page" for any of that, Google -- and, apparently, the author (who is playing the role of an agent of Google at this point) -- just wants you to believe that you do.
> Step three: Convince you, because all of those other things that you already love get better. Maybe you’re addicted to that new augmented reality game Ingress. Maybe your Google Plus profile makes it way easier to win. Or maybe you want better music, movie, or book recommendations--look no further than Google Plus. Want to find a community of skiers or chefs or race car drivers with a flick of the wrist? Or perhaps that hilarious video about that thing that you once emailed to a friend but can’t quite remember enough about it to find again? When you have Google Plus, those communities and that video just appear when you search for your best guess.
Could he be any more blatant with the Google advertising? I looked for a 'full disclosure' statement but couldn't find one, so I can only assume that the author is drunk on the kool-aid at this point. Regardless, somehow I'm still leading a meaningful, productive life without Google+. I don't know how, maybe I'm a freak of nature.....but I can still easily find music, movie and book recommendations without G+. Astonishingly, I can also still find meetups without G+. And G+ would be the last place I'd ever look to find an old video...
With that said, I'm not saying G+ has failed. But it's not for everyone, and the more Google attempts to force me down that path, the more I am going to resist.
You completely missed the biggest benefit stated by the author: the protection from duplication by content farms. When someone Googles the blog post, the original blog is always on top, rather than some content stealing farm. How did you miss that?
The point the author made was that it won't "force you down a path", rather it will lure you with capabilities. My team started using it for Hangouts, because the screen sharing/etc was better than the other products we were trying to use, and by better, I mean faster/smoother/more reliable. Anyone who refuses to enhance their capability out of sheer stubborness is someone I will NEVER do business with.
So basically, Google are using their control of the search market to pressure people into moving their actual content under Google's control by offering to rank them better in search results if that content lives on Google's servers and helps feed Google's data-gathering engines. Remind me again, when did they change their motton to "Be Evil"?
Authorsure is a good plugin if you use any Wordpress sites.
It's largely inconsequential. Google's search has progressed to the point that content farms are easily identified and penalized. I don't need to opt-in to a special club to bear the benefits of this. And my blog isn't a source of income, so I could frankly care less about who steals what.
> The point the author made was that it won't "force you down a path", rather it will lure you with capabilities.
But G+ is very clearly trying to force itself on everyone, despite the proclamations of this fellow. And _my_ point was that I'm NOT lured by these capabilities, despite the fact that the author seems to conclude that he's discovered some kind of universal truths with regards to web services.
> Anyone who refuses to enhance their capability out of sheer stubborness is someone I will NEVER do business with.
You will do what your clients require or go broke maintaining that POV; clients are stubborn by nature, and if you take the "my way or the highway" route then they will indeed take the highway. For the vast majority of us here, we are lucky to have clients -- not the other way around.
edit: I wish you people would comment if you're going to downvote. What was so patently offensive about this?
Perhaps GP is in the enviable position of having vendors he can coerce into using his choice of teleconference tools. And maybe he's in a large enough organization that he can hide in Accounts Payable and not worry about Sales.
Well, no, you're probably right. Anyone who speaks that categorically is insidiously anti-client enough to undermine the business no matter where he's hiding.
You don't have to. Link to your Plus account and do a simple authorization step on Plus and your face shows up in search results and everywhere else. I'm experiencing this benefit with custom software I wrote simply because I have a link to my Plus profile on my site.
This is called moving the goalposts. If you're redefining Google+ as Google, there's no prediction here. Google already has a staggering number of users.
>So then why didn’t Google shut down Google Plus if it was purportedly such a colossal flop? Why is the team working on it the size of the contracting team building the Death Star? And why is Google integrating its other products with Google Plus at a freakish, breakneck pace?
Sorry to keep saying the same thing, but my post from yesterday describes I how feel about this attitude: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022549
I have a couple dozen friends on Google+. There literally hasn't been a single post from one of them in over 4 months. Sometimes companies just fail.
No. "Moving the Goalposts" is a dishonest technique for arguments by which criterion for sufficiency are continually redefined.
Google has never said, "G+ is Google's Facebook" or anything of the sort. Quite the contrary, they've been clear it's something different from the outset. It's the endless parade of journalists eager to write linkbait stories that have made such comparisons, struggling to put together coherent thoughts on subjects they don't fully understand.
> If you're redefining Google+ as Google, there's no prediction here. Google already has a staggering number of users.
Google's Plus feature is an extension of existing Google services with social aspects. It has always been Google, and G+'s information is indeed provided to a staggering number of users.
But no one has redefined anything, as far as I can see.
What people want to do is paint Google as failing at something because they're simultaneously a very popular and unpopular company right now. Western civilization cherishes novelty, lionizes success, and hates the successful. A perfect storm for making up bullshit about how Google is failing, or stealing your information, or spying on your house.
> I have a couple dozen friends on Google+. There literally hasn't been a single post from one of them in over 4 months. Sometimes companies just fail.
Perhaps you should consider socializing with people on Google Plus before complaining you haven't socialized with people on G+. And maybe for you, G+ just isn't the place to correspond with your immediate friends. That's fine, most of the people I talk to on G+ I only know professionally or remotely, and I find it to be a much richer and less noisy channel than any other option.
Google doesn't really care that much if you use every feature of G+. G+ is a way for them to round up your identity and the search-relevant signals your identity generates into a single funnel so they can make better, more customized search. For example, they get great data if all you ever do is search for something, go there, then +1 an article.
I've worked on search engines, one of them is a major player. The first thing I learned is that there are two big numbers people start with in any given search engine, "Relevance" and "Recall." Recall is the relatively easy part: how many pages related to your search terms come up. Relevance is muddier, and ultimately ties into the very difficult problem of ranking search results. It's fine to have 10m results for "how to throw a fastball" but what you want is the top 10 pages most relevant to the specific user typing in that query.
Generating data to make that judgement is really, really, really involved. And it requires vast swaths of data, not just about you and your preferences but about people like you and their preferences.
Google+ has many upshots for Google, but the single most valuable thing it delivers is a rich source of data to make your searches better. Social cues are the next big data vein people are mining, and it's why social services guard their raw data so jealously. Twitter and Facebook are also doing this, but they live in mortal fear of Google because Google already has a massive search framework to integrate all that data into, and so they receive a lot more value from the data.
Given this situation, some of Google's odd decisions suddenly snap into focus. For example, why is Youtube being migrated to G+? Because those signals are hugely valuable. Why are real names important to Google? Because real identities are grist for the mill of their relevance & ranking engine. Why does their +1 button pop up a reshare dialogue? They're hoping for even more semantic context to associate with a page to improve results.
Ultimately it's up to you to decide if you like this business model. Personally I think Google has more incentive to be honest and to think of the user than Facebook does. Facebook's business model depends on lots of users using Facebook all the time, and so they're going to do whatever they can to trap you in that ecosystem. If they want to improve their profits, they can only do so by further sharing your identity with partners. Google's value propositions are much less direct and much less tied to 24/7 engagement, and they get a lot more value out of anonymized aggregate data.
>Google's Plus feature is an extension of existing Google services with social aspects. It has always been Google, and G+'s information is indeed provided to a staggering number of users.
I don't believe this. Please read this blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-pr...
Then tell me based on the features listed whether Google+ was being portrayed as "an extension of existing Google services with social aspects" or a social network similar to Facebook:
-a way to organize your friends
-video chat
-photo uploads
-location based tagging of posts
-messaging
I'm sorry, but this is basically Facebook circa 2011 with improvements. I don't see a single mention of other google services.
Do you see "facebook" anywhere here? Find in page for it? Do you see any facebook features specifically called out? Just checking. I see a series of basic social features and big sections for G+'s callout features; most notably Hangouts.
> I'm sorry, but this is basically Facebook circa 2011 with improvements. I don't see a single mention of other google services.
This is an interpretation. Your interpretation. I do not mean to be cold, but it seems like a terribly shallow and ill considered interpretation of the situation.
In actuality Google Plus has often been described as a social integration of diverse Google services including Youtube, Profiles, a much more sophisticated realtime video conferencing tool called Hangouts, heavy search integration, and search signal generation. Subsequently it has become the re-definition of "Google Profile" and is basically how Google thinks about user identity, with all major services slowly coming into line with G+.
You can say, "I think that's just Facebook", but that's just you. If Google hasn't said that, you cannot claim they or anyone else is "moving the goalposts." Think whatever you like about G+, what I'm objecting to is your imprecise co-opting of precise terminology for logical fallacies to make a muddy argument about your feelings for this article.
Well that's hideously ingenuous. Literally stating "like Facebook but from Google" is the sort of shit they shoot you for in ad-copy 101.
P.S., I think you meant the opposite of what you said.
And to your point, Google isn't making a facebook play but that is the only metric lots of people are willing to judge them by. I am just trying to drill home the point that it is the poster's interpretation and not Google's stated goal to have a use pattern like Facebook. Google doesn't need that.
Which, to some extent, is fine. I agree with the thesis fo the article that G+ is doing well. And for now, it's one of the best places for hackers to go and socialize off of news sites. It's slowly becoming more tedious as the hapless and advertisers start to realize how valuable it actually is.
What I'd hope they improve is being able to watch live in 720p (or at least being able to record it as that for now), but that might not happen until they switch to the VP9 codec, if Google feels such 5-10 people Hangouts in 720p would use way too much bandwidth for that to be worth it. But I do hope they switch to it as fast as possible.
I also hope they can work on making focusing when switching to another person much faster, and imperceptible, unless that's something they can't fix because it depends on everyone's cameras, and upgrading their cameras to something that focuses faster.
Because failure wasn't an option, considering the landscape of social networking and the consquencies of failing.
> Yes, of course Google could force most of us to use Google Plus begrudgingly tomorrow if it wanted to, but that’s playing with big, big, brand fire. And that’s not really who Google is at its core anyway.
> Want your business to appear on Google Maps, Google Local, et al., so that you can tell your prospective customers where you are, what you sell, and when you are open? Yup, you guessed it--you need a Google Plus Local Business page now.
The title "Plus-One This" is just another reminder of why G+ is such a failure: it's embarrassing to even talk about it. The name is clunky and awkward, as is trying to tell someone you +1'd something. Do you see what I just had to type? What the hell is that? And how do you say that out loud to someone? "Yeah, I plussed that article he posted". Wow, gross...
It's also got that whole "made for geeks" stygma because it's most frequently seen in use as blogging platform for techies. So not only are you labeling yourself a geek by talking about it, you're also forced to use awkward phrases like "I plussed that", or "Why didn't you plus my post?". No thanks.
Let's be honest: all new platforms and technologies are first used by geeks. Everything will sound geeky for a certain amount of time. Go back to 1980 and ask someone to "Google" you. Let me know how that goes for you.
Also, I believe the past tense of +1 is +1'd, not "plussed".
Including social networks? I highly doubt that.
> Also, I believe the past tense of +1 is +1'd
Which just proves my point, because "I plus oned that" is even more difficult to say and type. The word 'one' has no fluid way of being written or spoken as a verb. Plus one'd? +1-ed? Plus 1'd?
And yes, telling someone to 'like' something is far less awkard. Like is already a verb.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Not that I think that's Google's problem here, but yeah, "like" is much more natural than "plussed".
I think indeed, the wide variety of very high quality verticals being progressively tied up together with G+ around its users, wherever they come from, will do quite some collateral damages. We'll see if it extends to Facebook and the likes.
Me: Don't be a jackass. You know I don't use any google services apart from search and youtube. When those require a login I'll either stop using them or start registering a ton of throwaway ids as I've done for years now when someone sends me a paywall link.
There are lots of statements in the article I find easy to argue with (or find too weird to bother arguing with). But I suspect the bottom line, that Google will eventually convince most people to create a G+ profile, will prove to be accurate.
I do know a strategy that would have made it succeed because, when I was at Google, I proposed it.
We needed to brand Google+ as a high-quality social network. That was well-understood to be the strategy, and it was intended as a long-term campaign. Start highbrow, dumb down harmlessly. This wouldn't be hard, because its early adopters were Googlers, who tend to be high-quality people.
What makes "social" so difficult for Google is that it's ideologically different from Search. In Search, you win if people get in and get out quickly. The less time they spend in getting through, the better you are doing. If you're a Facebook, though, you want people to spend time in your site. That's an ideological discrepancy between Google's very successful Search ideology (get the user in and out so fast the service is invisible) and what you need to do to win in Social.
You also need to generate comfort among your users, which is hard to do and can't be forced. Google+ has a lot of awesome tech in it (cf. Hangouts). It's a really neat piece of software. But people need to get into the product and get "comfortable" so they can start exploring. Early adopters explore right away. Most users want to be comfortable first. Facebook achieved "comfort" within an Ivy League college. It was just a silly thing your friends would see. It didn't start out as a general-purpose social network. Google+ lacked that luxury. It came into the social network space as a fully-fledged product and it's harder to establish social "comfort" that way. People are more comfortable with things that develop organically (cf. boiled frog).
This makes Games a critical battlefield. Games are a great way to bring people into the site, to get them comfortable, and to get them using the other goodies (e.g. Hangouts). If the games are good, they'll use your product a lot. It was also an arena in which Facebook seriously fucked up by not curating quality. Zynga damaged Facebook's reputation (and community quality, et al) in a major way. Mid-2011 was the nadir of its weakness on that issue. We needed to make that our strength by having some really awesome games. Where would we get them, though?
Google did Games, but not with the focus on quality. Again, this is success in Search hurting in Social. Google is admirably non-editorial when it comes to Search. What the web thinks is important is important. If you send someone to a crappy website (that he thought he wanted) so what? 5 seconds wasted, and then he types in a different query. It hardly ruins Google's brand that there's garbage on the Web. Google's job is just to document and facilitate, not to curate (with Search). The problem with Games is that people are looking for quality, but game quality isn't visible until someone plays it for 30 minutes. If you deliver someone a stinker, he resents you for wasting half an hour of his time. He'll associate you with the shitty Zyngarbage and never log in again. We needed to curate, but that doesn't scale, and the people in charge of game selection (while strong in general technical and project-management competence) did not know how to pick games.
So I came up with the Excellence In Games (EIG) initiative. Originally, I called it "Real Games" (a pun on Real Names). The idea was, instead of publishing dreck from mainstream publishers, who were giving us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed, we court the independent developer community: the people who in 2013 are trolling Kickstarter for their 2D "retro" RPGs and German-style boardgames. We court these developers and give them a platform that does for them things they can't do for themselves, plus access to an enormous number of players. We also publish casual games, but only of high quality-- no Zynga dreck. By doing this, we create the image of being a gold standard for game quality. We keep the Google reputation-- we won't waste your time-- intact.
The engineers on the G+ Games team were huge fans of EIG and wanted to implement that instead of working with Zynga (who are apparently miserable to partner with) but the senior execs were not fans of this proposal. However, they were proven wrong. Google+ Games failed. Google did the smart thing and covered, which is why you've never heard of Google+ Games, but it's still an enormous missed opportunity.
and
"it [was] an enormous missed opportunity"
are not the same thing.
First, engineers familiar with the concept (including engineers responsible for working with Games) were unanimous in support of it. That's not proof of success in the market, but it's an indication. Engineers want to work on things they believe will succeed because it's good for their careers. No one thought Zyngarbage would improve the product.
Now, can I prove, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that this would have made G+ more successful in the market? No, I can't. You can't prove a counterfactual. However, it would have clearly helped. Excelling is never a bad thing, and Google has the resources necessary to afford excellence's short-term costs. Making Games more excellent would have both (a) made Google+ more excellent, and (b) brought people into the service who might otherwise have had no interest in joining "yet another" social network.
The Google way of doing things is to Excel First and Monetize Later. That's what they did with Search. It's what they needed to do with Social, but in Social, there's an added complexity... you actually need the people, and you need them to spend time in your product. So it's a different territory. Games are a great way to draw people into using a social network they wouldn't otherwise consider, but those Games need to be excellent enough to get repeat customers, so that people learn about all the other great things G+ offers (e.g. Hangouts).
Since Google+'s problems have been brand-related rather than technical (the technology's fine) I think it's fairly obvious that EIG was The Missed Opportunity of 2011. There may have been others, but EIG was the marlin.
Wouldn't the "real" games also want to launch on Facebook (and mobile), eliminating your edge?
The 6-month exclusivity would be a small cost (for the developer) compared to what we'd be offering, but give us just enough time to become the "go-to" site for this game, a long-standing advantage similar to the one that Facebook has in general "Social". Compound this across hundreds of high-quality games and G+ is the go-to site for games, even though those same games become available everywhere over time.
Of course, we'd also serve games that were already available in most places, like Angry Birds (a high-quality casual game, not Zyngarbage). However, we'd give the best terms to our brand-defining games that would have to start out exclusively with us.
Brand definition was going to be based on German-style board games (which could get people actually using Hangouts, for an awesome experience and a back-door demo of Hangouts) and 2D RPGs, to start. Many of these games would be new games from indie developers. Those two spaces would be place to get going, and there was no shortage of great ideas from engineers on other game spaces to explore after having success in those two.
So we were going to brand-define based on the "middle class" of games in terms of intensity: not mass-appeal casual, but not "gamer's games" with monstrous learning curves. We'd fill out to those spectra once we'd achieved brand definition.
I can't imagine any situation in which "quality" games would have been the silver bullet you're portraying here. They wouldn't have hurt (in fact they wouldn't hurt now should such an effort start even at this "late" date). There has to be more. Something like Hangouts, or maybe even the sort of Google Reader integration we've seen over the last year. (I'll stipulate that GR sucks, but it's still very popular and most of its users have been effectively forced onto G+ to some extent.)
It appears from the outside that the manager who decided not to concentrate on games made the right decision.
Well, yes. Would you rather play a German-style board game using a MS Hearts interface or in a crisp, modern one using a Google+ Hangout? The latter obviously.
It appears from the outside that the manager who decided not to concentrate on games made the right decision.
"Not to concentrate on games" might have been the right decision-- the games space isn't a strong match for Google's proven competencies, so staying out of it may have been the best call-- but once Google decided to do Games, it needed to do them right. It didn't, because the right people weren't calling the shots.
We did want to make the games unobtrusive, of course. Games were just the draw that would bring people into the network. The idea was that they'd stay and use the features for other things.
I don't see any support for this assertion. When was this decision taken? How many people were allocated to this "need" and for how long? Google has a vast services portfolio and a vast user base. Rather than spending cycles on a complicated area that is not a core competence, why not leverage the many services that people already use to drive interaction with G+? (Which is what Google has actually done, so far as I can tell from the outside.)
As far as I was concerned, Google should probably not have entered the Games space. Why? Because curating game designs is not something it's set up to do, and the relevant competencies don't seem to be in the leadership. Going in, as far as I'm concerned, was a big risk.
My opinion was, and still is, that there are two reasonable strategies:
1. Don't enter Games with G+.
2. Enter Games and do it right.
I saw going into Games in the wrong way as something that would embarrass and kill the product, just as Zynga contributed to social network fatigue in 2011. However, that didn't happen. Google+ Games failed, but its failure hasn't hurt Google+ in a measurable way.
I still believe that unacceptable risk of embarrassment was taken, but the course that events took (G+ Games fails, but doesn't damage Google+ wholesale) was one that I did not predict.
In fact we have heard of Google+ Games. This is because you never fail to mention this perceived injustice at every available opportunity.
I, like some other Googlers I know, regularly resist replying to his posts here. But he still hasn't let it go, so I'm going to give it a shot. Feedback from other HNers welcome.
THESE ARE MY OWN WORDS AND PERSONAL OPINIONS AND DO NOT REPRESENT ANYONE ELSE'S.
I'm a random Google engineer and a fan of Euro board games. When michaelochurch wrote his Real Games manifesto here, I thought he made some good points. He's obviously a smart guy, and his writing is long-winded but articulate. Then I watched in horror and fascination as he wrote one jaw-dropping mass email after another. I used to think he was a troll, but I now believe he's completely earnest, which ironically makes him the perfect troll. Since his short time at Google, he has continued to write screeds against Google's internal processes on one Hacker News story after another, where his passion and self-assurance makes him appear credible, when he appears to be suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
I have hesitated to get involved in these threads, figuring that it's not worth the effort, and knowing that it is asymmetrical, in three respects:
1. It's very difficult to effectively rebut Michael Church's extensive allegations with vague aspersions, but I can't cite specifics from internal discussion lists because they are confidential.
2. Michael Church is indefatigable. We saw what happened when Googler after Googler tried to engage in dialog with him, to reach out to him, to help him. I'm exhausted at the mere thought of trying to describe all the flame wars and all the dirt, much less voluntarily engaging with him now.
3. Personal attacks are distasteful, they're not "Googley," and even if true, they can end up reflecting badly on the attacker.
As the saying goes, "Never mudwrestle with a pig -- you both get dirty, but the pig likes it."
The last time I almost replied to michaelochurch and resisted, it was this post -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715734 -- where he wrote:
> The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave.
This is a quintessential example of his delusion. I say this, not for spite, but for truth: the notion that Michael Church is now "seen as right" inside Google, much less "lionized," is laughable. It literally provoked laughter.
Today, here, michaelochurch wrote:
> I do know a strategy that would have made it succeed because, when I was at Google, I proposed it.
Another quintessential example of his infinite confidence in his own ideas. Simply stunning. Imagine if someone said something like, "I do know a strategy that would have made the Ford Focus succeed because, not long after I was hired at Ford, I proposed it." You would rightly be skeptical, no matter how many thousands of passionate words he wrote on the subject over the following months and years.
I could give some more examples of things written on the web under the name Michael O. Church, but that risks entering the realm of "personal attacks" that I balk at for the reasons described above.
Instead, I'm gonna get back to work now. Thanks for reading. Like many before me, I wish Michael Church the best of luck, I harbor no ill will, and I hope he finds whatever makes him happy.
I was a troll for a few years of my life, but I kicked the habit. However, some of my Google work was White Hat Trolling. I was trying to use the skills I'd learned in my trolling years for good-- to improve the company. I actually had lined up my exit about a month before I left, so I did some purely altruistic work (including outing a bad manager) on the way out.
You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave
Emphasis on "long". One year is not "long".
Five years from now, people at Google probably won't remember Google+ Games and I hope they don't remember me by name. Although I was right on G+ Games, I was right on something that seems to have been unimportant.
What I realize about my time at Google is that I wasted a lot of energy on minor issues. For example, C++ is not my favorite default language (it has its niche, but modern web development is not it). It sure as hell is not evil. Not a battle worth fighting. (Now that I've learned C and C++ a bit better, I enjoy them.) Google's HR practices-- closed and blind allocation, 18-month transfer block (extortion), manager-as-SPOF through secret calibration scores-- are Evil. If anyone is going to take up the cause of purging Google of rot, slime, and hate (not to say that Google has more of these than most large companies; I doubt it does, but few companies have "Don't Be Evil" as a motto) then that is where to strike.
What I am sure of is that, five years from now, no company will be able to call itself a cultural leader while retaining closed allocation. So, if Google wants to remain a cultural leader, it has no other choice than to implement open allocation. And hey, that's an idea that I was one of the first to propose.
Emphasis on "long". One year is not "long".
Ha, okay. I suppose we'd just have to take this to longbets.org.