TechCrunch covered Vic Gundotra's departure badly
mattcruikshank.blogspot.com
Worst of all, their article is being quoted as a "Report."
mattcruikshank.blogspot.com
A product that is everybody's second priority is nobody's first priority.
You can see how this plays out in practice by looking at this other bit from the TC article:
"One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of 'required' Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates."
Assuming this is true, it tells you everything you need to know about G+'s current position in the Google portfolio: it's been demoted from something strategic, something fundamental, to an optional add-on.
You can argue whether that's a good move or not (I think it is), but you can't really argue that it's not a step down. Because going from "this is part of what it means to be a Google product" to "this is something useful we'll let individual units decide whether to use or not" is definitely a step down.
This is huge. I wonder if there will be less pressure for people to use it similar to Facebook.
Otherwise? Plus is fine. That's the question. Is it "G+ is no longer mandatory" or is it "Commentary/messages can go outside of G+".
The former means G+ is alive and well. The latter means it's dead.
I don't comment on any website using Facebook. Actually, I have FB completely blocked in my primary browser, so I never even see any assets served up by facebook.com or fbcdn.net etc. If there is a Facebook comment section, I don't see it.
It's a matter of identity and overlaps in facades.
In real life I behave differently in business meetings, in pub chats with coworkers and other people in the industry, at college friend meetups, at secondary school friend meetups, at family meetups. I'm effectively different people with different shared culture for all these people. Comments I make in one context will not translate, and in some cases may even offend, in one of the other contexts because it will rely on the culture shared with that group - especially when the culture was created when I was much younger.
This is why wider web Facebook identity is abhorrent to me, just as much or almost more so than Google+ unified identity. The straw that broke the back of Google+ for me was Youtube comments. When I couldn't leave a comment on a silly cat video without wondering if it was showing up to my business contacts, I deleted my Google+ profile so that I could break the link with my YT account. I couldn't find any other way to break the link, and Google+'s benefits, such as they are, weigh so little with me that I would, and have, give them up in a heartbeat in order to be able to make another pseudonymous comment on YT.
So the question to me is more subtle than non-mandatory Google+ integration meaning Google+ is dead. Non-integration of Google+ with YT is all positive, as far as I'm concerned. And more deeply, for people who live more of their lives online (rather than especially older relatives who mostly use the internet to keep in contact with family and close friends), the idea of a single unified identity for the internet is fundamentally a non-starter. So any move from Google to make it non-mandatory is actually the only workable way forward.
But disqus? Absolutely, for the reason I outlined above. Disqus does what Google Plus should - a unified commenting infrastructure that is not opinionated about how comment threads should be run or identity or whatever.
Disqus has a lot of weaknesses, but they're mostly bugs and performance problems. Google should have made a Disqus and then bolted it onto their Facebook clone.
Instead, they made a Facebook clone and perverted it into a Disqus system.
Or what about: if you can sync your LinkedIn and Facebook address books in GMail.
Microsoft's mail services offer that feature and it is very handy. I have always assumed that GMail doesn't, because Google wants to push Google+. In other words, Google+ is blocking progress in GMail.
Another such example is Hangouts. Hangouts in itself is quite good. However, you get a severely limited version of Hangouts if you do not have a Google+ profile. E.g. you cannot add photos to a conversation on Android without G+ or initiate group conversations. Again, Google+ is blocking progress Hangouts, which could be of great use in business, but most companies probably don't want to enable Google+ in their Google Apps.
...which is a good change.
Only one of those can be your first priority, so which is it?
I think Google+ is also one of their first priorities.
If they're smart, it's not. The aggregate value Google+ provides is negligable compared to their other services.
I also upload videos, create documents, write blog posts, etc.
If I couldn't chose who I share those things with, I wouldn't be using those things.
The value G+ adds... makes those other services usable.
For you. The aggregate value Google+ provides is negligable compared to their other services, such as search, maps, email, YouTube, Chrome or Android.
In Maps, I see reviews of places written by my friends.
I rarely share YouTube videos publicly. Most of my videos are shared privately with Circles.
Google Play shows me reviews for Aps from people I've Circled. That affects my Android use.
For example, I'd say that I use G+ more than 95% Google users and I wouldn't mind much if it disappeared.
FWIW.
Security, uptime and profitability are all table stakes. Not priorities.
Google+ just went from table stakes to priority #2.
Google didn't know who you were, who you followed, who you shared with, and so Google+ looked a lot like a product to you.
No silo of Google gets to choose whether to be secure or not or what level of scalability or whether they'll decide to be profitable or not.
Not all products that a company offers need social integration.
I know quite few users using it - but none of them is using it more than just few minutes a day and most of them use this as LinkedIn alternative rather than Facebook (something that Google+ should be from the very beginning). You cannot just copy Facebook, add few features and expect to score a success. From the very beginning the whole idea was wrong.
Google as an innovative company should either rethink whole social concept (without taking FB as an example but building social network from the ground with help of boutique analytics and design companies for more personal touch), or focus on mobile social networking as a player owning second largest mobile market in the web.
Its same as Linux users trying to explain everyone why Linux is better than Windows. It is - but not for average Joe, and thats the reason this OS will be marginal one for personal use. Nothing changes that, no statistics will prove otherwise even with such a strong fan base. TC was right - no reason to hate.
The usual motivation for making new products is to satisfy users' needs, to make their lives better. Google didn't make Google+ to give value to consumers. They made it because they feared Facebook.* Without Facebook, there would be no Google+. That's the fundamental problem – Google+ provides value only to a minority of Google users – why force it down everyone's throats?
As Steve Yegge said: "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful."
Google still doesn't understand social and people. Facebook is successful because it feeds on (or exploits?) specific psychological needs. Technology and user interface are secondary factors.
* To be more specific, I think that the #1 reason they've built Google+ was to extract friend lists (social graph), because they've thought that this data can improve their other products. Their line of thinking was "If Facebook has social data and we don't, they'll be able to make a better search engine or an ad network." They've seen this as a big threat to their core business. But making a product just to exctract data is doomed to fail.
G+ definitely suffered by coming to market after FB and Twitter, but that's not the whole of the story. More specifically, it came to market after Facebook and Twitter, without doing anything fundamentally different, better, or more useful than Facebook or Twitter. (Circles, the putative differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a solution to the standard social networking UX.)
Late entrants can sometimes win; Google and Facebook were pretty far from the first movers in their respective markets. The key is that late entrants need to be significantly better than anyone who's come before them. G+ was not.
+1 I like what Yishan Wong (ex-Facebook executive) said about circles:
"if it represents the leading edge of thought regarding social networking within Google ... that seem to indicate that Google's ability to design and deploy a successful social networking product is further behind than previously thought"
The problem is that Google+ came into that space from being a Facebook clone instead of being a comment platform. G+ should have been designed and built as a replacement for Disqus instead of a replacement for Facebook, and then it would've gone much better for Youtube/Blogger et al. For example, a Disqus-replacement would have obviously known that "Real names" was a terrible idea and the host of the comment thread (the Youtube page or whatnot) needs to have a lot of control over moderation.
You get an email about activity, you see activity on the YouTube comments, you see activity through G+ notifications -- and none of it makes sense.
Did this action occur on G+? YouTube? Is this a reply to something somewhere else? What the hell is going on?
I don't mind G+ integration at all, and I think it's a good step forward, but it is simply not working well on services like YouTube at the moment and impedes use.
Also, spam control for comments is just broken. Scroll down, hover, maybe the yellow "review spam comments" box appears and maybe it doesn't. I found it interesting that G+ shares were very, very frequently marked as spam.
a) why G+ integration was a great idea, and
b) how thoroughly Google screwed up the implementation of that great idea.
If somebody comments on your Youtube post? You want to know about it. If somebody posts it to their public G+ page? You want to know about it. If somebody comments on that G+ post? You want to know about it.
Giving you a single place to drink that fire-hose of information? Great idea!
Intertwingling all those concepts together into a single mixed-up unfilterable slurry of commenting? Holy crap no wrong don't do that.
> Having every Google application sport its own commenting system is unnecessary balkanization.
I disagree, it depends, there are pros and cons.
This is the internet. People complain about everything, all the time. And youtube comments were the butt of jokes well before Google+ integration.
I preferred the "balkanization"
I don't necessarily want people figured that my account X on Youtube is ran by the same person as my account Y on Blogger or account Z on G-mail or account W on whatever...
G+ is a big no-no in terms of privacy, also its usability, even if it was a clone of Disqus, is terrible, as a user I see no reason for G+ to exist at all, much less to be forced down on user throats on all google products.
Social + news = Facebook wall
Social + location = Foursquare
Social + YouTube = Better YouTube comments. Sorry, but it does
Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't.
Social + Maps = Seeing that my friend goes to this restaurant and likes it.
Social + video calling = A phone directory and avatars.
FB Platform is the biggest thing FB produce. But their most widely end user app is wall, which sits on their platform.
As someone who never, ever, logs into plus.google.com, I still know I use gplus all the time from finding new cafes in London. It's a super great flavor enhancer.
I wish there were a way to get my food unsalted.
> Now that they have the platform they need, they're pushing social integration into all of their features, literally pushing people who know how to do social into every nook and cranny of Google
And "literally" pushing users into adopting it, regardless. I prefer the TechCrunch interpretation (G+ is dead) because for one brief moment, I had hope -- but I suspect OP is more correct.
This is where Google have gone wrong. I don't want my search results to be affected by signals from my friends. They don't search for the same things as me.
I want my search results to be ranked with signals from other relevant people... and I don't know who these people are.
Google got it right first time around. PageRank captures the link juice from these relevant people. C# bloggers linking to open source projects. F1 fans linking to interesting articles. Apple bloggers linking to rumours.
Google+ puts the onus on me to decide who is relevant and I don't know. Using this as signal for searching is making me do Google's job.
Yeah, I've never understood why Google was stressing social search so much, there's almost zero value in that.
That's not true.
But every decision you make is affected by your mood. They should add an option to select your mood to the top right corner of every Google website.
> Search is Social
What does that even mean? This sounds like some stupid, mindless, PR crap.
> I want my search results to be ranked with signals from other relevant people... and I don't know who these people are.
This is were you're partially wrong. Personally I know many people that I'd like to be included in my search ranking as signals. The problem is - those people are only a subset of the people that I follow on Twitter or Google+.
The problem with "Follow" or "Add as Friend" or whatever these social networks are calling it - is that some people are more interesting than others. Some people I follow simply because they are my friends. While other people I follow because I'm interested in whatever they've got to say. And this is the problem that Google should solve.
I do not even want search results and suggestions to be ranked by previous signals from me, especially as it was implemented on youtube. I use them to find new things and styles, not to close myself into some ghetto defined by whatever I searched for first few weeks. I got curious about, say, folk songs and spend a week searching and watching them. It was temporary thing, but youtube insisted on suggesting them even as I was watching trance video two weeks later.
When I want to see what I seen before, I search by name or use bookmarks. When I want to see what my friend like, I ask them or look at facebook. Search is for when I look for something new.
I get what you mean. But if I search for an solution for something StackOverflow-ish, it'd be be great to see JS results (98% of my coding friends) rather than, say .net results (only a handful of people).
A non-social search would merely show whatever answer had been around and popular enough to get the most pagerank.
video calling + Social = A phone directory and avatars.
video calling - Social = Animated selfiesHow would that be relevant to me? I want to know that someone who likes other restaurants I like goes to this restaurant and likes it. I don't care what restaurants my friend likes. We're not friends on the basis of liking the same restaurants.
I know that a particular friend of mine is equally picky about his steaks as me, for example, and I'd trust a recommendation of steak houses from him.
Being able to attach a particular name to recommendations helps them attach a level of trust to the recommendation that regular users might be less inclined to attach to "anonymous" recommendations.
If they're smart, they'll also consider similarity in tastes when deciding which of your friends recommendations to emphasise (especially if more than one of your friends have clashing ratings of the same places).
Social recommendations also helps you "break out" of the filter bubble.
E.g. Amazon has a very specific view of what I like to read, and so on. But people who know me will occasionally be able to provide me with other impulses that leads me to try something entirely new that is very different from what Amazon will recommend to me based on what I've read in the past.
In this particular case, the fact that G+ posts appeared as YouTube comments meant that every comment of a viral G+ video post showed up in YouTube as a series of introductions to the video, instead of… well… comments on it.
Here is a quick example, although it isn't by far the most striking; it is the first I had around.
The recent FB numbers are going to have been a very nasty awakening to a lot of them. The defensiveness around any Google related criticism is utterly incredible.
I actually read and enjoyed their recent article on San Francisco housing... But the responsible thing for me to do next is to follow up via alternate information sources if I want to know more, because I can't trust TC to relay the facts without narrative distortion.
They are very good storytellers who allow the crafted narrative to outstrip the reality too often for my taste.
On any other web platform this set of functionality is just called having an account. For example Amazon has had social features (reviews and forums) and data integration for years, but they did not call it Amazon Plus. It's just part of the service.
Likewise, I expect Google to just start talking about Google Accounts eventually. It's already sort of tortured to force Google Plus nomenclature into everything, like managing brand YouTube channels for instance.
And, behind all of this, I think companies are realizing that social graph data is not as valuable as they once thought it was, because it's constructed self-consciously. We all make decisions about friend requests carefully now. It's become so fraught with stress that people are now flocking to anonymous social tools.
I can tell you that my relationships embodied on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter, etc do NOT accurately reflect the real-life state of my social relationships. And I bet the same is true for you.
--Exactly
google+ is something people these days joke about, like that service you're forced to sign up to but nobody uses.
yes, they are integrating features to collect data across their platforms, but essentially google+ as something people come to like facebook is the walking dead.
FB is where you go to have your grandma and aunt write weird messages. G+ is where you go to share photography and travel logs. Sure, people do each of those things on both platforms, but g+ is in no way 'dead' or even close to it just because you don't personally use it.
Facebook and G+, while both being "social networks," function totally differently. Whether google wanted it to be a direct competitor or not, it's just filling a different niche.
Despite liking Google, I find Google+ a trainwreck - it was time for Google to either get out of this business of competing with Facebook or completely revamping Google+. It seems that they chose the former.
"When you see "We're hearing reports" know that reports could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message board posts, or worse.
When you see "Sources tell us..." know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.
When you see "which means" or "meaning that" or "will result in" or any other kind of interpretation or analysis know that the blogger who did it likely has absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly, wildly off the mark, because there aren't any consequences."
That unattributed sources are cited no fewer than ten times in this post is laughable. Yet people still read TechCrunch because it's not exciting to admit that "we don't really have any clue what is going on because we don't work at Google and have to rely on some flimsy sources."
Maybe I'm missing something, but who are those people at Google? Or is this tongue-in-cheek writing?
And yes, Google has missed the train on both WhatsApp (mentioned in the article) and Instagram (not mentioned).
The authors of the article are both the co-head editors of TechCrunch.
Most people do this and that isn't their fault... it's Google's.
If G+ was originally intended to be a platform, rather than a product, this would make sense. And I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but it seems to me that everything points to them wanting this to be a facebook-killing product...not a platform on which to build other things.
> Schmidt: Our view of social is a little different than what everyone has been writing. we want our core products to get better from social information. > We are trying to add a social component [to google's core products] to make them even better.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-socia...
I feel like any interaction I have with Google services, I'm defending myself against getting an unwanted G+ account.
Ha ha ha ha...
I'll just use my Facebook browser on my Facebook phone running Facebook Operating System to Facebook search for job openings where I can post my resume that I wrote in Facebook Docs, and hope the recruiter will send me a Facebook email or leave a Facebook voicemail. After that, I'll open up Facebook maps to find a take-out restaurant my friends reviewed, then I'll rent some Facebook movies my friends recommended. Or maybe I'll talk a walk, if Facebook Now says the weather is good where I am. While I'm walking, maybe I can record a video of the loons on my lake again, and post it to Facebook video. Oh, I better Facebook Keep a reminder to myself to pick up some milk.
My identity was subtly integrated into each of those things.
But most importantly, does the blog author work at Google, or has connections that are more reliable than the ones Techcrunch has? I feel like this is pretty important to know in regards to who I should believe.
http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is...
Ah, dont forget to label this (2008) ;D
I try to limit my time reading the news (and then a sample of international news) and TV, but this drama fills in the need to waste a little time on melodrama.
Considering that being integrated into everything was one of the core problems of Google+, I fail to see how this is a smart move.
My follower growth has slowed. The first product page I put on Google+ (a book about Android) got many followers quickly. Same with my personal page. The second time I put up a product page for a book, the response was much attenuated, and my follower growth has been slow and low quality. It wasn't great quality on Facebook either, but it was much faster. Maybe I need to see how well product pages would do on LinkedIn.
They specifically bifurcate the two types of users. There's ~500 million if you count the G+ interactions through youtube and other apps.
Why dont they say how many unique users create a daily post not generated from a app?
We are not talking about adding a youtube comment, uploading a photo with picasa or using the google play store. We are talking about actually using the thing.
Huh. They've been barely keeping it above the gutter several for years.
Anyone is welcome to conclude that Google+ is dead. Facebook still exists as a company. You personally don't use it. You don't like the font. Whatever...
I don't think it's dead. I use Google+ every day, and I'm looking forward to more of it.
But if a news site is going to make a conclusion, the arguments they use should be logical.
I assert that TechCrunch's specific arguments are not good ones.
That is why its the walking dead.
You used to work at Google. Were you on the Google+ team?
But this is a news article concluding G+ is dead, based on stated arguments.
Except the arguments are lousy.
Lousy journalism is bad for everyone.