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Comment by badclient | Hacker News Reader

When we look back a few years from now to see where google went wrong, it'll begin and end with Google+. It is the worst product execution and strategy in recent times.

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I've moved our Open Source Community to a Google+ Community, I've personally found it's the best way to communicate and share content, news and announcements which ended up being much more engaging, interactive, visible and functional than everything else I've tried.

It encourages a better community feeling than the 140 chars allows for on Twitter, the content posted ends up being a lot more interesting, richer and more positive than the constant dump o' hate I see in my Tweet stream. Personally I'd prefer more ex-bloggers start posting on G+ than micro blogging their opinions on Twitter

Did you consider switching to a subreddit?

Nope, I prefer G+'s insistence on dealing with real people rather than anonymous aliases - IMO it's part of the reason I see a lot less hate on G+.

It's also nice to have the option to privately msg and hangout whenever we need to.

Twitter is your counterpoint? What else did you consider?

We've moved from a mailing list which was a black-hole for Content with very poor discoverability, and despite having many members was mostly read-only/ignored with just the same small group responding. We're now directing future support questions to StackOverflow. Many people were using GitHub issues to communicate, but this was primarily only seen by the Core team and effectively invisible to the wider community.

We see much more engaging and visible feedback on G+, people frequently comment on posts, +1 and re-share.

Either that, or it's a perfectly fine social network I use routinely to stay in touch with several friends who don't use Facebook or Twitter.

If a such a highly publicized Google product is only used by "several friends" years after launch, it should be killed--not spammed more into the faces of users that do not want it.

Like Google Reader? /ducks

Even then, I bet Google Reader had a higher happy user to pissed user ratio than Google+.

Yeah, Google was pushing Reader on every opportunity they could and still was a wasteland.

The "several friends" I contact through Google+ are actual friends that I actually contact routinely, unlike the vast majority of the 200 or so friends I have on Facebook. Maybe I'm just unpopular, but I don't have more than a dozen actual close friends that I communicate with routinely.

Maybe he's talking about the ads, not plus. If the recommendations are just for people in your "friends" circle this recommendation engine has minimal impact. And just because I circle some people in Plus doesn't mean I want to see their recommendations.

You're not required to have 200 friends on fb. Just unfriend the not so real friends. You could have not do real friends on google+ too if you chose.

Most my close friends are not on google+.

I have my Facebook settings fairly well customized so that I only see updates from my closer friends. My point was that "several friends" is not a meaninglessly small number for a social network.

Sounds like bias by anecdote to me. Google+ is a quite well thought-out and executed social network, especially compared to Facebook.

Holy sensationalism batman! I know HN loves its sensationalism, but wow.

Name another time that Google spent years putting its entire weight behind something no one wanted.

Google Wave.

Entire weight behind Google Wave! I think you got that wrong, chief. Also, it was killed in 1 year: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/wave-goodbye-to-google-wave...

After spending years developing it.

Google Buzz?

Android? Everybody loves it now, but I remember most people saying, "I just don't see why we need this"

I agree. I wrote a long thing about that a while back:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/google-the-charge-of-the-li...

It really is just a single monumental mistake, everything about Google+ except for the product itself, which was always high quality (but the wrong product to begin with).

My problem with Google+ is that it's designed to trick people into sharing stuff. It's made me paranoid that anything I watch on YouTube or a story I read via Google News may end up in some stream I dont even know exists.

(OT: I just pitched you a story to your email:)

p.s. Facebook have this for years.

this is how to opt out:

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social&vie...

(select "Pair my social actions with ads for - No one")

Article about it:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/faceboo...

There were several HN posts on this as well will update once I find them...

I'd go back a little further, when the ads first started to overpower the search results.

In retrospect, Buzz might have been their last classically-Googly project.

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