How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users | Hacker News Reader

How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users

blog.cloudorado.com

110 pointsokrasz35 comments

If they found a good way of incorporating RSS into Google+, that would certainly be an incentive to use Google+; but just adding RSS feeds to a circle in Google+, as this article suggests, would be terrible. Google+ (like Facebook and Twitter) works on a "forget by default" system, where, if you don't consciously make a choice to save an item for reading later, it gets lost off the bottom of the feed. Replacing Google Reader with that would be a bit like replacing a DVR with a system that broadcasts all your favourite TV shows at once.

I think if I wanted to disrupt social networking, I'd work on something like a DVR for social media shares (or, perhaps, a more socially-integrated service like Pocket), which allows you to specify certain content as content you don't want to miss.

> allows you to specify certain content as content you don't want to miss.

like... circles? and tags?

Actually, when I visit various discussion communities on Google Plus, it has a count of the unread posts in the various areas of the community. So they have read tracking in Google Plus, although not in the default display of the main feed. Not sure Google wants people reading outside content anyway, though, compared to interacting inside a locked in Google Plus community. They are pretty anti-standards lately.

In Twitter, you can make it send you a text message whenever specific users post.

This is a good idea. However, one thing I have learned from unsuccessfully pitching good ideas to very successful people/businesses is that the more successful they are, the less their decisions will make sense to outside observers. This is largely because their resources allow them to have different motivations for doing or not doing things than virtually anyone else.

Telling a wealthy person that you can make them alot of money, or in this case, telling a business that has hundreds of millions of users how to save a few million of them, isn't necessarily compelling to them. A company like Google has the luxury of deciding that a few million users aren't worth keeping for whatever reason, even though dismissing that number of users for any reason sounds absurd to most of us.

There's an assumption here that doing this would result in a material number of users for Google+. But I'm not sure it would: it's reasonably safe to assume that everyone using Google Reader knows about G+, and is either using it already or has decided to not use it. At best, what's proposed would convert some percentage of that latter group (maybe) over to using G+. It might be a couple million users if everything plays out well. It's probably less.

That sounds like a lot, but at the scale G+ and FB are competing, a few million (possible) users isn't worth allocating dev resources for. They're looking for things that move tens, or hundreds of millions of users. Some opportunities are just too small to pursue.

My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.

Even if only 50% of those migrated over to Google+, if they had found a way to cleanly incorporate RSS feeds into their interface, that's probably a non-trivial amount of users, especially if they are checking multiple times a day, and sharing news/information from their RSS out to readers.

It's not just about users, it's also about activity..

6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users. And 50% is a wildly optimistic percentage for how additional G+ users you'd create.

Let's say they have 12M monthly active users; a large percentage of those are probably already G+ users (let's call it 50%.) A large percentage of the remainder have deliberately decided they don't want to use G+, so you'd be doing pretty damn well to convert 10-20% of them over.

So that's only 600K-1.2M MAU in a "best case" outcome. You're just not going to be able to sell that as being worth allocating a half-dozen engineers to pursue building a new product. It's not even close.

>6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users.

In the use case of a type of site where cascading network effects are of paramount importance, 6M engaged users is huge.

Yeah, but you're assuming they'd be engaged. If they don't like G+ and they're just using it as a news reader, that's pretty much the opposite of engaged, from a social network perspective.

The last 6 million maybe nothing, but the first 6 million is huge. So is the 2nd and 3rd.

> My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.

My understanding is that the better figures are closer to twice that: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#fn5 (and that Reader users were very active).

You underestimate engagement. I guess most of these users already has a Google + profile, but are not engaged.

By integrating both services (specially the old social features from reader) they could make Google + a much more active community, overnight.

Instead, they decided to send their users to other venues. This is just dumb.

It would be like adding Flickr (something like 30M) to Facebook (1B) -- the difference just wouldn't be noticeable.

My problem is that G+ is unreadable. Every iteration they make it harder and harder to actually read the content. I completely gave up on their Android app for that reason. Most recently they switched the web site to arbitrary sized blocks in a 2d random layout using images wherever possible instead of truncated text. It is true that newspapers do this, but at least they have more readable content in each block. I had to switch G+ to single column view to at least make heads or tails of what is going on.

Reader was focussed on reading content and did a good job of that. Virtually every pixel on the screen was about reading content. Here is what G+ does with actual reading content highlighted in yellow http://i.imgur.com/ASKMSRv.png

Reader used to be the first tab in my first browser window. This meant I always had a tab open at Google and it was a single click to get into G+. Now I have to consciously choose to go to G+ which happens rarely.

Totally, my new homepage is my online RSS reader of choice. I doubt I'm alone there.

If Google had announced the end of reader, but allowed you to integrate the RSS feeds into Google+, all the nerds would have just complained that Google was killing a good product to try and bolster a shitty one (not that I think G+ is shitty). It's always easy after the fact to say that Google could have done this to ease the passing of Reader, but face facts: There's nothing you can do on the internet where people won't complain. Deprecating Reader in favour of g+ would have been a cheap replacement at best, and at worst it could have been viewed as poisoning the water so you'll have to drink Fanta.

This makes the assumption that Google's goal with Google+ is just to syndicate content, something that clearly isn't the case. They want content created specifically for Google+ - if they wanted a firehose of data they certainly had the capability and time to allow third-parties to put data into the stream.

Whether or not Google's goal is to create a social network or get more users is up for debate, but this certainly wasn't simply overlooked.

This is true that they could push content. Though, there is a slight difference - a user subscribes or wants a given content. Obviously they want it to be created there, but it could help in transition of some users ... like me.

I'm thinking you're on the right path. Instead of just adding passive feeds to Google+ and you clicking through I imagine that Google wants content creators to sign up for Google+ accounts and either create content there or post it there.

Reader had ~single digit millions monthly actives, very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have). It's just not that many people (which is why Reader got cancelled after all).

That link has a response saying:

I asked this question at the German Google Developer Day 2010 and a Google Engineer / PM who works on Buzz said it's "tens of millions active monthly users".

Nothing on that page has anything stating "single digit millions monthly".

> very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have).

How did you get 'likely less than ten million' out of a Quora comment saying 'tens of millions'?

While I agree it is an interesting idea as someone who uses Google+ a decent amount I would not have wanted non-user contexts mixed in anymore than what is already there (these are already present for a lot of brands etc). I am already starting to get annoyed with the "What's Hot" elements and such inside Google+ I would rather have more subscribed human content that algo picked or rss generated.

I think that moving that into its own interface _within_ Google+ would have been a great idea though.

This makes the assumption that these users were using the Reader web interface. I'd bet a good number were using it simply as a sync backend.

I don't know how well it would have worked for Google (or not), but, personally, I am very, very "+1" on RSS feeds in social network streams as a general concept. No, you don't get the exact same experience that you get with a "conventional" RSS feed reader, but when your news stream can have arbitrary RSS/Atom delivered content, it opens up a lot of options.

This is why I was so happy that we just got RSS feed subscriptions incorporated into Quoddy[1] - our enterprise social network product. So many things that you might be interested in can be syndicated via RSS / Atom - new documents posted to a document management system, new customer records posted to a CRM system, etc. Personally I'm more excited about this feature than almost anything we've done lately.

What will be interesting, will be exploring how to utilize UI elements to give a user the ability to get the "best of both worlds" and view their content in a fashion akin to the way Google Reader (or other readers) work, OR view it "in stream" ala a G+ or Facebook style news stream. When you take a step back and look at it, in many ways, a "wall" or "stream" isn't that different than an "inbox", and one wonders if you can't find a neat way to collapse all of this "stuff" (email, rss feeds, social "status updates", etc.) into one interface.

Anyway, call me bullish on syndication, but I almost feel like we need a song titled You Can't Stop RSS set to the tune of Twisted Sister's You Can't Stop Rock and Roll.[2]

[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy/tree/prhodes

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaehBH7DtR4

I see the logic, but given recent spying revelations, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to move further away from google and US based services, and certainly not an opportunity to get closer and more integrated. If I had a shred of trust left in both google and the USA's ability to protect and respect my data, I might have tried a G+ RSS solution. Nothing short of massive legislative change in the US would even begin to help me want to use such a service.

All a bit of a shame how this has turned out TBH. Although, the whole thing has caused me to educate myself and seek out alternatives rather then just dumbly sign up for things assuming there was little to be concerned about.

Sadly, just more drip, drip away from the US and towards using things like encryption and doing my own thing.

Come on American, what the hell happened? :(

Wasn't the Reader announcement before the NSA scandal though? It seems that most people who would make the switch would have done so before that came out.

With the lack of options available in Google+ to adjust the UI, I would not want to move my RSS over to G+. Rather, they could have expanded Google News to transition the feeds over.

It's not just the number of users. It's that people who were heavy Reader users are particularly valuable nodes in a network like Google+. They are more likely to draw other people to Google+ than the average user since they curate more content than the average user.

Another way to get millions of google+ users, stop plastering ads for it all over Google properties and instead make it useful.

No I don't want to use + on Youtube, no I don't want my search Google+ enabled. On the average week I probably get 5 or 6 requests to do something related to Google+. Worst of all most of the requests are modal dialogues that interrupt the flow of what I wanted to do.

After reading the title, I thought this was going to relate back to Google's involvement with the NSA spying program.

Think about it... what facebook user in their right mind would ditch facebook for google+ now?

They're both in bed with the NSA, and if that doesn't bother you (privacy concerns) you would probably never want to leave facebook in the first place.

Many users would have seen that as another instance of google trying to shove google+ down their thoats.

Make people sign up to G+ to use android. Bam! millions of users

Google better go back to basics.

They need to work on real honest not ad-driven search again.

Search quality is dwindling(I don't need 2 billion amazon and ebay listings on search results, Google!).

Months ago when I used duckduckgo I'd bounce right back to Google. Today I can use DDG without regrets.

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