A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+
scottporad.com
scottporad.com
I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off.
I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.
Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
As for now, here are my options :
- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing
- not publishing anything
Sadly, it often comes to that last option.
Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying.
Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.
Sharing to a specific circle only implements privacy control, but it's much too heavy handed - nobody else can see it. Also, you can't change sharing options after the fact, so choosing the right options becomes particularly important.
And you have no way of knowing which of your post topics they're interested in.
Google failed to grasp the distinction between author and content.
This was pointed out by many, many people very early on (myself included), and remained one of the huge failings of the services from day one. Certainly one of my own frustrations.
"Pages" and "Communities" were bolted on later to try to address this, but were both poorly designed and communicated (I still can't tell you what "Pages" are supposed to be). UI/UX on many of these features was also poor.
G+ is great for passions, Twitter for perceptions and FB for people. Check out Guy Kawasaki's Book, "What The Plus". It's short read and really helped me get the most out of it.
I'll play a bit with this to see if it's well integrated enough, since when you click on someone name, you reach post list rather than about section (I would not have people think I don't publish anything, not realizing there are many pages).
They seem to have been created for marketing purposes. Using them to topically divide my posts ... never occurred. Literally, until the past day or so.
Definitely not good enough :)
Note that I often feel G+ to be off as well, but for other reasons. One issue that sprung into my eye lately: There's absolutely no notification about new messages if you don't have any G+ apps or extensions installed. The logged in google page shows me notifications, which do not include messages, but rather useless clutter I don't care about. Is this Google's way of forcing people into installing their browser extension? It seems a rather big oversight to me.
No, what I want is to give people I don't know a mean to choose in what topics I cover they are interested in.
"French" is just a topic, here, it could have been "politics", "funny pictures" or "food".
edit: Users who subscribe to a feed would always see the feature if the publisher has enabled it of course
People will say something "I'm wearing my Engineers hat now" to make it clear that they are communicating from a particular viewpoint.
Hats, and indeed Masks(where you see only the headgear and not the identity behind it), would be a great addition to Google+.
But if your young and perhaps living an unbalanced life (everything is just about work) you might not see that.
Are you working at Valve?
Novel in-game aesthetic that turned into a huge money spinner.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/idukg/valve_vs_most_...
It lets you create topic-based "channels" that people can follow. So you could have one for 3-D printing, and when you add to it, you know everyone following it is specifically interested in 3-D printing. I'd love your feedback if you decide to have a play :-)
In Reddit you can approximate this with post flair (tedious to set up, but doable). See http://reddit.com/r/AskScience or http://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians for good examples.
Alternatively: an RSS reader with categorized streams I can follow. Again, Reddit offers this:
http://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
http://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathoge...
For example the sender can sort their messages into out-channels (as it is partially implemented in Google+ via circles) and the receiver can chose what out-channels he subscribes to (which is not present in Google+) - this is the classical publish-subscribe design pattern.
What I would like to see is a bit more - I would like the receiver to be able to also apply some additional sorting logic to the subscribed channels, and he could choose the results depending on the mood - or he could some of it also copy directly to his out-channels. In short what I would like to see is a 'social routing' - but that would probably require that the user has full control over his node.
I'd actually rather a de-centralised platform. And prefer a glorious feed organiser.
Very simple open comment/status feed APIs would be more beneficial for the community at large with a pub/sub mechanism that was easy to understand and utilise.
Add an RSS feed for a news website, add a Twitter feed, or friend, add a Facebook (channel for a better word), or whatever. Organise these somehow. Integrate privacy controls. This would probably suit a next generation browser rather than an online silo.
I must trust they suck me into a web design circle also AND then; Trust they share related content only to that circle.
What actually happens is I have a random stream of peoples kids and dogs etc as they all seem the "share with all" by default.
Yup, that's a killer. I have people who follow me for personal stuff, a few people who follow me for kayaking stuff, a couple hundred people who apparently follow me for tech/entrepreneurial stuff and some people who follow me for interesting links to French content.
But the tech people have only a limited interest in kayaking, none of the kayaking people care weird French TV series, and so on. So anything I say is going to bore someone. At least Google+ circles make it easy to restrict 99% of the "adorable child" photos to my immediate family. But that only works for those followers I know personally, not the couple hundred strangers who follow me for one reason or another.
How not to be boring, rule 101: Thou shalt not obsess about one's hobbies to people who are not interested.
Twitter works a bit better, because I can have several independent Twitter accounts: one per language that I write in, or one per enthusiasm, or whatever works for me.
But Google+ forces me to publish only that subset of content which is interesting to almost all my followers. And that's very nearly the null set.
I want to be able to forget the stuff I do now, in the future.
The FB way of solving this is having a "fan page" for each topic
Pages exist in G+ but they're not as popular and not as integrated to the thing
Doesn't Google+ have "circles" which lets you decide who you want to share with? Couldn't that take care of the above issue?
> publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
On google+, it's the publisher who decides which people are in which circle, not the reader who decides in which circle he wants to be (and circle names and person list are totally private).
So, if you publish to a circle rather than publicly, only people you added in circle will see your content. It's not guaranteed they actually care about it, and those who care about it and you don't know won't be able to see the content.
As others have mentioned, circles are meant for privacy (I want to publish this to my family, that to my close friends), not to separate content (I want to publicly talk about politics, I want to publicly talk about cats).
* Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface *
* Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream
* Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora)
* Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature.
* Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users.
----
*) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)
Then they spent the next few years trying to fix the disaster they had caused. It would have been a great product if they thought through the launch. But they didn't.
It's clear that from the start they wanted this platform to also serve the basis of an identity service for the rest of google, so the public aspect completely screwed them over.
I think Google+ in general is totally fine. In general it's better than Facebook or Twitter.... I'm not sure why so many people seem to dislike it. The integration with other Google products doesn't bother me at all. I don't comment on youtube pretty much ever, and I don't mind the auto-cross posting when I post to my blogger blog.
Facebook is, generally, a better experience for a person that wants to keep up with their friends, because posting, discovering others' posts, organizing groups, having get-togethers in real life are quicker, simpler, easier for the general user.
So they'll ignore Google+ because they don't need that second social network if Google+ comes in second.
Which, for that persona, it really does.
Now I don't have any reason to have Google Account, and so I don't have one†. Of the users I introduced to Gmail, some have since moved back to live.com (e.g. family) because they saw me complaining so much, even though they had no real reason to move.
I no longer recommend Android since after 2 attempts, watching both my phones with otherwise perfectly functional hardware have their software go unsupported and crumble into the ground as every new update got pushed. And so my mom still has a Blackberry (yep!)
† Not strictly true, I still have an apps account to forward my mail, but only because I haven't migrated the last remaining user off the domain.
Remaining stuff is all data, so its just on my laptop. Of my last three employers, two were big Microsoft Outlook houses, so that's how corp calendar sharing has worked.
For RSS I am running Selfoss. It's passable, but it's no Reader. After obsessing over sundry services like YouTube I finally just decided to delete the account - playlists and all, since services like that are basically huge wastes of time anyway.
Right now I'm carrying a phone that doesn't even support e-mail, never mind web, and honestly have no intention of changing the situation unless forced by an employer. It's great, the battery lasts about 2 weeks. The only real aspect of this that hurt initially was the lack of a good GPS, but since I don't own a car and live in a big city, turns out it was just another excuse to pointlessly glue my head to a screen
I haven't used desktop client for private mail for years, and I don't see that changing, because of the privacy and security concerns. I'm willing to let NSA or some other faceless foreign entity snoop my email if that will prevent people around me that can get hold of my phone or computer from reading my mail.
To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability.
So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base.
I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews.
Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.
Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.
Google never needed Google+ to be successful, it was just a means to complete their analytics and ad platforms with more data about the users by awkwardly signing them up.
As Wave, it might also have led to the development of new internal processes (providing a band aid for things like youtube comments) and finally on Google's look and feel rebranding.
Now Google has new ideas on how to feed the analytics and ad platforms with a line of futuristic projects that may or may not improve your daily life.
Taking this with a grain of salt it might make sense. For Google to do what they do they need to know everything about their users and their environment, which closes the circle feeding the products that are giving the company value.
I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument.
But Plus is ultimately still a failure
If Circles were the other way around -- a way to organize and categorize your thoughts for better consumption of other people -- I think that would have been better, and more along the lines of what you're talking about. If it had done it somewhat automatically that might have been even better.
But one thing that always kept me unhappy with G+ was that managing my circles felt like painful busywork better left to a computer, and it was only for my own benefit. It feels like work to control who gets to see what, and it's amortized on the wrong end, so I never did it. I don't know that anyone really does.
At any rate, no one's arguing people use facebook because of the people they don't want to hear from. That would be ludicrous.
Truth is, G+ was mis-architected from the ground up, starting with Circles. Numerous abortive directions were taken (anyone remember "sparks"?).
The real blunders, though, were in utterly mismanaging and misunderstanding what real community is, and how it is formed and fostered. Real Names, Nymwars, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all massive (and entirely avoidable) blunders.
A large part of it was that Google had a very clear idea of what it wanted, but didn't much care for what its users' interests were. And when the users told them, they basically said "la la la la la, I can't hear you!".
The underlying technology is solid. I wish the sites I use instead of G+ had the clusters, search depth, breadth, and speed, the reliability, and the performance of Google. They don't. But what they've got are much better UI, often other features which exceed G+, and above and beyond all else, VASTLY healthier communities and relations between the sites and those communities.
I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive.
I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile.
All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too.
We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.
I can explain this quote with this quote.
> I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.
I think this shops the problem with combining a public forum with people publishing content to the world, and a social network of connected individuals talking to each other. Facebook is the latter, Twitter is the former, and Google+ seems to want to be both and is not succeeding. It may end up successful as one or the other, time will tell, it's too early to write it off, though.
If you have any proof to this, please let us know - otherwise I'd suggest this is pure conspiracy-theorist idiocy.
A lot of people would have just been pissed off that "G+ is borging google reader just like it is everything else".
http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-o...
There seems to be cognitive dissonance on people's aversion to strategic opportunism.
you'd think that between that post and this one that i have some reason for caring that google+ succeed. i don't...i have no vested interest.
i just annoys me when big companies with massive amounts of resources bungle stuff. it seems like with so much talent and money it would be easier to get stuff right.
The main difference is that small companies go down when their bold attempt backfires or fails. Large companies usually have financial buffers in place to stomach the blow.
[Insert classic Dilbert strip about only doing the 10% of projects that will succeed.]
I used to be a Google fan for many things. but that was conditional on execution. They just seem to start things and then abortively stop them short of completion, over and over again. Then revamp the appearance or something a couple of times and let it rot until it's deprecated, or they crank up the prices. I don't understand how so much money and talent can help so many visionary ideas just stall and get clubbed to death.
Contrast with Maps: Maps made Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every release.
It is an execution failure.
With FB, Twitter, etc. I can use one app to fill all of them with content. Can't do that with Google+ and only recently it started working for pages (which I have no need of).
But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.
So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.
I do think Google is thinking about a new strategy, but when he says "Google is getting away from Google+" is just pure speculation.
The real deal is that we have gap. There is a distance in using so many tools. I post it on Twitter but i want that to appear on FB but not G+. Or whatever. I have RSS feed. I have photos I want to share but not indexed or shared on Google Plus. This is sure something a startup can take on. But this is where social network companies are failing to do well BECAUSE they all want everyone to join their platform and ONLY their platform.
Really we should be talking about feeds and subscriptions. Wording needs to be friendlier: add my friend's feed or follow Kate Bush. It doesn't matter what the technology is so much underneath. RSS and Atom are meaningless to the general public and only confuse matters. But I think they'd grok the idea of following an interest or person, or giving feedback to a post, a thing, or a happening.
IIRC, facebook was all about the "wall" before friendfeed. Google has already gotten real names and identity from Google+, but I can't help but think the key insight into social existed at google before anyone had talked about Google+. Google+'s big mistake is being too late. The product is perfectly fine.
If anything, it would make RSS more compelling to those of us who never really liked the experience of any readers (Google Reader included). Personally, I see RSS as little more than food for web-robots to consume, metabolize, and excrete.
If they would have allowed it to grow naturally and wouldn't have forced people to use it whether they wanted to or not attempted to make it more user friendly and intuitive the would have succeeded.
We just hate change. Change leads to frustation, to fight-or-flight reactions. That's why people seat at the same spot every day.
Sadly, more and more platforms are abandoning RSS/atom (hello twitter) --they want no part on anything defined on an RFC that decentralizes and makes it easier to consume a service without entering their site. Other than that I guess XML.
As of % of internet users that use RSS, count me in.
If no one uses a product then it's clearly providing no value. That's pretty much the definition of a bad product.
I agree with OP on this though - Google simply didn't push enough features people actually want the most, and those that they pushed usually lacked polish.
- price and cost (doesn't really apply here, though)
- marketing and image
- critical mass and network effects
Therefore, your conclusion is invalid.
The image of the product was equally bad. Google rarely gave a clear picture of what G+ was actually for - it looked a lot like a social network, but Google's messaging was always "It's not a social network! We're not competing with Facebook!" They always told people what they weren't, rarely what they were. Frankly, I still don't know. That's ignoring the forced "G+ is your Google account" thing because many Google products could actually be used without G+; G+ was never your Google account.
As for critical mass, if you haven't got that when you have 500 million users, you're obviously getting something very wrong.
tl;dr G+ didn't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile spending time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't spend time with.
That's a good point. I still don't really "get" Google+, and I find it somewhat counterintuitive.
> tl;dr G+ didn't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile spending time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't spend time with.
I was challenging your "few users ==> bad product" line of reasoning in general, not necessarily the statement "Google+ is a bad product". Sorry, I should have been more clear on this.
Still, I stick to my point that there are more factors influencing the market share of a product than its pure quality. Even if I made a better Facebook clone, I wouldn't gain any noteworthy market share.
That would have changed nothing at all. There's nothing like totally simple magic way to avoid fucking up G+.
Let's do this from first principles.
Twitter was successful early on because they never discouraged multiple, independent, throwaway accounts. Why doesn't Google let you manage an unlimited number of independent and unlinked first-class-citizen profiles under one Google Account, under any name you choose? They can still mine all the data because they know (and keep secret!) that it's all one person. Facebook and Twitter do this too, just with cookies instead of login credentials.
People want to share lots of personal details on their social network. Facebook is wildly successful because they make it easy for people to do so - perhaps to the point of oversharing. Google could have dispensed with the whole "following"/"circles" nonsense and gone with the undirected, two-way-confirmed model (with group support) that doesn't confuse people not familiar with graph theory, or the twitter model of basically casual, unconfirmed, directed-graph subscription, independent of the underlying personal relationship. Either would have been fine - instead, the egghead googlers tried to solve both and ended up solving neither.
Last but not least, pretending that I want Google+ (no, don't "ask me again later" you fucking cunt of a website) to infect all the other important basic utilities of the web that Google's huge pile of cash has bought their way into (YouTube of course first comes to mind, but Maps and Gmail and Search too) is blatantly disrespectful to their only true asset: their users. Even Zuckerberg doesn't pretend like he's doing us that much of a favor when Facebook once-again revises its default privacy controls downward...
It's pretty simple, really. It's super tragic that Google has turned into such a monolith of a Big Company that it can't even execute on a simple vision without tons of management getting involved and figuring out, through endless meetings, how to make every single step of the experience as user-hostile as possible.
It's not like they're incapable of making user-centric experiences anymore. Look at how great Maps is these days, or how Gmail's webmail has become completely untouchable the way Outlook/Exchange or Blackberries were in their heyday - both cases because they did exactly what their customers wanted.
(Aside: Interestingly enough, Apple was doing this for a long time, and now with things like iAds and IAPs and carrier override of my ability to tether my phone, it seems like they are slowly beginning to fail to consider exactly why and how they got to their position as market leader. (The argument could also be made that they are serving multiple masters - carriers/developers versus end-users.) If they continue, as Google has, eventually their customers will be right to leave.)
I imagine it will take a lot of smart Googlers leaving in utter frustration before Google-the-entity finally changes course.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I'm not sure I agree with this.
Apple have had some pretty famous "We know what's best for you" stances in their history - one button mouse, original Mac keyboard with no cursor keys, original iPod only working with Macs, very limited array of products configurations, no licencing of MacOS to non-Apple computers, iPhone apps only available through their app store etc etc. Some of those have eventually changed, but (apart from maybe the iPods being Mac-only) they haven't typically restricted the success of those products.
If anything, the darkest days of their history were probably at the point when they were offering a vast array of products and configurations in an attempt to give users exactly what they thought they wanted.
It was an uphill battle, and nearly unwinnable the way Google chose to take it on.
Google Hangouts was, in my view, one of their biggest assets. It's a solid piece of technology. It was way better than its competitors. The problem is that they couldn't come up with a viable way to make it part of Google+, rather than a great standalone project. The vision was that people would spend time in Google+ and "hang out" with others who were available. I knew, off the bat, that that wouldn't happen without (at first) a context around which to structure a hangout. Board games are a great starting social context for early adopters, but since they're a cognitively upscale group, you need quality games, not Zyngarbage like Farmville.
I thought that a focus on game quality (Real Games Initiative) could, even though it'd piss off counterparties like Zynga wanting to throw us our crap (because they didn't expect us to succeed) and still get preferential treatment, give people a context in which they'd actually get comfortable in G+, and then want to use it. Games were an area in which (circa 2011) Facebook was shitting the bed-- low-quality games and game spam were a primary driver of social network fatigue-- and I thought it was a great way to distinguish ourselves as cognitively upscale and attract early adopters and the more charismatic elements of the early majority.
Maybe a quality Games product wouldn't have saved G+. It's too late to know for sure, and I'd guess that RNCH was a bigger problem, but I feel like that was a key battle that has been lost.