The mystery of Google+

Google Plus is like the movie Dark City. It's a group of technical aliens picking apart the human experience, trying different scenarios in order to find out what the human soul is.

Once per day, humans wake up and find themselves in its meticulously-constructed parallel universe, doing things as ordinary humans do on other websites. Their activities, such as appreciating music and searching for lovers, feel familiar, necessary and meaningful, but at the same time, the unsettling atmosphere prevents the existential questions from settling deeply repressed where they should be. Instead, we're left wondering, "Why are we doing this here?" Isn't there something better? Is there a Shell Beach out there somewhere? Couldn't I just do this all myself on 1999-style website and live a more natural life?

Successful, albeit defunct, networks like MySpace work b/c above and beyond, they were passionate about connecting people with things they want. e.g. music... at all costs! Facebook reassures you that you dodged a bullet when you didn't marry your high school sweetheart. Google Plus just screams "use me. use me. use me for... everything or anything.. so that... um... so that google can keep track of what's hip and make money while I don't." There's no soul or love deep at the bottom.

There's a whole lot more I could say about passion, sacrifice, vulnerability, and empty vs. full cabinets, but I have a customer to service now, so I'll leave you with this hint: Germick is onto something with the google doodles. Hire me as a consultant if you really want to pick my brain.

Google+ is a UI disaster. Look at some of the basics. When the browser is fully maximized, my screen can see 8 chats / contacts / "hangouts" / whatever they're called in the sidebar on the right. On my Facebook chat sidebar, I can see 14 contacts. When you refresh a G+ page, the open chats mysteriously disappear. This cuts down on usage, because, for example, each time I go to Facebook, my chats are still open and I can immediately continue from where I left off. Google+ has 3 "toolbars" at the top of each page, taking up an enormous amount of vertical space. Honestly, with the sidebars open, it feels like you're working in a 500px x 500px window. For God's sake, the "About" page doesn't even let you be in a relationship with another member. The "About" page also doesn't allow other users to see your interests, or favorite books / TV / music. Essentially, G+ utterly fails to encapsulate everything Facebook offers in this regards: when you first Facebook friend someone you just met, you immediately get the basic information about their life: where they stand romantically and what things they like.

There are other problems. Tagline? Bragging Rights? Skills? Links? Is G+ a page for socializing or a resume?

I simply cannot fathom why some people in the tech industry think that G+ is in any way a viable competitor to Facebook. Outside of the tech bubble, its usage is nonexistent and unhelpful. It is cluttered with things people don't want, and it lacks some of the basic things people DO want.

I'm increasingly convinced that the mystery amounts to "Circles working as designed."

Let's say you've got a classic oversharer in your Aunt Sally. It's uncouth to ignore her entirely, as sometimes she does post things you need/want to be aware of, if for no other reason than to reduce family stress.

On Facebook, there's just a steady peppering of her stuff in all the other posts. On Google+, you can shunt her off into a "noisy" circle and deal with her posts maybe once a week.

But there-in lies the rub: any given dull Facebook session you can click on an Aunt Sally link -- they're always right in front of you. But on Google+ even if you've got 5 minutes to kill on a random link, clicking over to the "noisy" circle carries a mental obligation to not just find a link, but actually do the chore of scanning her aggregated posts to see if there was anything in there about your Uncle's knee surgery or the family reunion.

So you generally don't do it. Or, if you do, you're not concentrating on the random links, you're dealing with the chore of sorting the pile, and the random links still aren't getting clicked.

And the flip side is that when you construct circles for your own sharing, you may think you're sparing your gear-head uncle bob from all your links to computing articles, not realizing that he actually did read them from time to time on Facebook.

Though this explanation does raise the question of "was the lost traffic actually valuable?" as your killing 5 minutes on an Aunt Sally post, or Uncle Bob skimming an anti-Facebook rant are certainly going to be page-views, they're unlikely to have resulted in any sales or ad-clicks.

I've been using G+ more frequently since the upgrades introduced at IO. It is a better product now, and the photo sharing is quite good (at least compared to Facebook and Twitter).

It is still a UX nightmare, however, and I imagine hat turns off a lot of users that try to dabble in G+.

Communities seem to be the best draw for Google Plus right now, maybe because it is otherwise difficult to converse with a large group of people (e.g. friends, family) on G+.

There's no mystery.

> is Google artificially inflating it's numbers while really dying a slow death

Yes.

Every free Google product that they don't know how to monetize is being moved under g+ in an effort that g+ will be highly monetizable(?) In the future.

I have some 7 g+ accounts just for such logins.

The article says it's a mystery but then nails it:

"In line with Google’s vision to organize the world’s information, the focus on Google+ seems to be shifting to content more than relationships. ... I wonder if Google is more interested in being Reddit (the front page of the Internet), than it is in being a Facebook/Twitter clone (what your friends are up to)."

Of course network effects are more important than technical factors for a social network.

For what it's worth, I gave Google+ a pretty solid try when it came out, but very little of my social network actually moved over there, and then I moved to a new city and all my new friends were on Facebook instead, so I stopped using G+.

It's no mystery. Google creeps people out. I am one of them. I read his comments on Google plus, but you have to be on Google + to respond. Seems self limiting if you are trying to find out why people don't use it. Facebook is at least as creepy, but for some reason, people don't seem to care. Twitter, for the most part, doesn't seem creepy. If I was to be on any of those 3, it would probably be twitter, though I don't see any reason to use it, so I don't.

I wonder about that “#2 social network” statistic. Google is, e.g. getting increasingly pushy about getting me to merge my YouTube account with my G+ account. I wouldn’t be surprised if a sizable proportion of whatever metrics went into determining that #2 ranking were derived from people who did NOT think of themselves as “being active on G+”.

Of course the same is true for Facebook, to some extent, with an increasing number of web sites outsourcing their comment system to them.

> Does it mean that Google did too little, too late? Does it mean that the major social networks are all syphoning off their own unique customers that will never overlap? Is Google inflating the numbers artificially and it is, in fact, dying a slow death? Or, most disturbingly, does it mean that having a superior product doesn’t matter as much as strong network effects?

I've never given Google Plus a serious try, but I would totally do it if it had no barrier to entry (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html). If I could try it for a while, use it to create content, then know that if I don't like it, I can go back to Twitter and others won't even know that I left, then I would give Google Plus a try.

If Google Plus already does this.. well. Then it's marketing's fault.

So perhaps Google⊉ might have been a more accurate name?

Google should "remove" whatever person is in charge of the G+ UI/UX . It's so bad . that's why people dont use it. Let the content breath , get ride of the header that takes half the page on laptops , stuffs like that. It's like they want it to fail ... It's funny with the load of money Google has , they usually suck at UI. Youtube UI is good most of the time though some iterations were bad.

Keep things simple for god sake. Even Microsoft is better at UI than Google.