What Killed Google+ And What Can Save It | Hacker News Reader

What Killed Google+ And What Can Save It

forbes.com

32 pointsdredmorbius56 comments

"Real Names" Killed Google+ from the day it opened

Everyone was desperate to get the hell away from Facebook - but the psychotically idiotic "Real Names" policy - making pretty much every single mistake from http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... was a total killer.

Yeah, and unlike Facebook, Google was surprisingly bad at "real names". There were tons of stories about the people who either couldn't sing up - or even worse - got their accounts suspended and thus lost access to their email - because their name wasn't real enough for Google's taste.

FWIW, I've got an interesting name and FB insisted I send them a copy of my driver's license to open and account. Funny thing, since there are thousands of FB user's with that name. G+ didn't give me any such problem. So, "real name" isn't that much of a problem on G+, especially given the number of cats that have accounts.

For myself that convinced me immediately to kill my own "real name" account. I replaced it a few days later with a pseudonymous one (before pseudonymity was explicitly OK'd by Google many, many months later).

I agree fully that that one misstep put Google's home-turf advantage with the technorati early adoptors and poisoned the well. I don't think the company or platform ever recovered.

In conjunction with other moves by the company (culminated with forced YouTube-G+ integration which I've termed the Anschluss) cost me all faith and trust in the company. To the extent I can minimize my exposure to and use of it, I do.

The "Real Names" policy is actively harmful to the most vulnerable users, the ones the policy is purportedly supposed to protect. It does not eliminate online abuse, as there are enough trolls and troublemakers who have no issue with using their real names. It removes the most immediate defenses for those at-risk for bullying, abuse, etc. I know people who refuse to use the service because of this.

They've since partially relaxed this policy, mostly because it was never intended to protect people. It was pretty clearly intended to build Google's advertising database.

Wasn't forbes respectable at some point? Is this how far things have fallen?

> Guy Kawasaki released a 208 page book about it. You should be able to build your own Honda Accord in 196 pages.

What.

There's not a single valid point in the entire article, the most laughable part is the 'open source the code!' argument.

Yea, I don't really agree with the trend of big, reputable news places having such an increasing number of random blog posters. There's a big difference between Forbes proper and Forbes random-poorly-researched-blog-article (same goes for other places as well).

Then again you can also raise the same question when the more traditional columnists start spewing random ideas about fields in which they have no expertise...

Whenever I read news articles about things I know well, I wonder how much misinformation I am getting about everything else.

Possibly a subversively clever way of high lighting the value of "editorial control" ;)

Forbes does this because it's rewarded by Google, they rank for pretty much everything so they fill it with junk.

Forbes has basically sold out all of their integrity by allowing pretty much anyone to write a post on their site. It's a shame, really.

That was just a joke, right? Not a bad one I have to say.

Come on if you're going to claim Google Plus is dead you better provide evidence, like statistics. I use Google+ everyday and am very happy with it, I only see its use increasing day by day. When I need to talk to family or friends I go on Facebook, but when I want to learn about new things I go on Google Google+.

I drink a cola called Blah Cola. It doesn't mean that Blah Cola isn't dead. In a literal sense of the word it isn't; but for practical purposes, Blah Cola is dead compared to Coca Cola and Google+ is dead compared to Facebook.

Except it's more like if several hundred million other people and I drink "Blah Cola." Even if Google Plus only has 10% of the active users of Facebook - fuck, even 5%, even 1% - that's still millions of people who are using it actively. So yeah - "dead."

Note: There's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off brands of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name. And it's not because nobody buys them.

That several hundred million people claim is a hoax. It's part of the reason for Vic's departure: instead of actually increasing engagement of Google+, he forced top performing google properties like YouTube to integrate Plus, just so he can claim a portion of YouTube traffic as google+ traffic. It's the kind of shit only an exec from Microsoft would pull.

To date Google+ hasn't actually released a clear engagement metric such as how many people have made a post in the past 30 days.

Note: There's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off brands of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name. And it's not because nobody buys them.

You're proving me correct by arguing that Plus is equivelent to Supermarket cola. That's an epic failure for google. They launched Plus to become a competitor to Facebook the same way Pepsi competes with Coke. You're conceding that Plus is no Pepsi - and that makes it as good as dead.

> To date Google+ hasn't actually released a clear engagement metric such as how many people have made a post in the past 30 days.

So when they do, you'll claim that Youtube comments don't count right?

Of course they don't count. People commenting on youtube videos are there because of YT's content, not because of +.

He does provide some evidence, although I'm not sure how much like statistics it is. Here:

"Last week, the company parted ways with Vic Gundotra, a talented executive who led Google+ through a thick fog of expectations. The company is also reported to be reassigning team members and sub-products (possibly Hangouts) to other business units. "

He acknowledges that for some things like tech discussion G+ is doing fine. The argument is that, organizationally, Google itself is pivoting away from G+.

On the contrary, maybe you should provide evidence that it's alive because for all practical purposes it's dead.

Nobody I know uses it, those youtube comments look like fabricated conversations, the level of spying by google is just downright creepy.

G+ will never fly, it's a dead product like Glass.

Strike One: When G+ opened up to the world, they decided to take an "invite" approach. While this might have been cool for the first few days, there were too few invites and this nonsense just lasted far too long. Not really the "networking" roll out.

Strike Two: Combine the "Real Names Policy" and forcefeed G+ to youtuber's who want to comment. No body saw the obvious problem with that? Some may not want a LOL on a Cat video be one search away from their real name. Plus (!) it was rolled out badly - some people began to get locked out of Gmail over this.

Strike Three: Why is the UI so complicated to integrate Hangouts? Who does UI design? I still get Hangout Notifications from two previous companies.

I think the limited rollout was actually a good thing.

Remember: Facebook was developed in a world with existing and mature social networks. What gave FB a marked edge wasn't its openness but the fact that it was exclusive: Harvard, Ivies, selective edus, all edus, general world.

For the first few years of its life, Facebook was the place that outiders viewed as more selective and attractive than any other option. This was a powerful growth hack.

My own feeling was that Google had a solid initial nucleating community, mostly technical types but also some creatives (largely designers). Unfortunately, by opening the floodgates early, one of the larger adopter communities were SEO and marketing types -- not, shall we say, the most engaging party animals. The turn came early.

I also feel that G+ really didn't start getting its feet under it until ~February/March 2013. Search had been incorporated, there was a growing wealth of content that could be found. I made several posts aimed largely at G+ staff about the value of search-driven and directed navigation rather than streams (I've deleted those along with most of my content).

Unfortunately subsequent changes (the May, 2013 UI redesign) negated many positive effects. One telling post a month or so later from Circlescope showed a marked drop in engagement following that release. I continued to fight for it but watching increasingly passive-aggressive demands for my personal information (phone number, integrated YouTube account) were just pumping up the creep-out factor.

Overall I do agree with you on UI/UX -- G+ is pretty awful in that regard.

I disagree: none of these three or even the aggregate of these three historical mistakes is anywhere near enough to forever permanently condemn a product. I don't think Google gets 1 inning to win the game, or 10 inninings: they get as long as it takes them to build the thing worth using.

These minor grievances could hardly be more narrowsighted and petty in that context. I do not believe in the 'make or break' theory you work against.

It was pretty much all because of this.

It took far too long to get an invitation, and you had to be 18 or older to use it. Facebook exploded first by being used by kids still in Elementary and High School. They initially cut out an absolutely major demographic, and people lost interest after a couple days.

What is so silly is that they already had existing experience of the "invitation only" feature destroying a launch: Wave; I had a ton of friends at the time who were really excited about Wave, but they could almost never use it because there was at least one person they might want to involve in the discussion who didn't yet have access. It just seems like such a beginner-level misunderstanding of the value of networked products: even video games, which are classically purchased per user, have been moving in a direction where "if you own this game and your friends don't they will still be able to play it with you". I wish I understood the reason Google keeps doing this: it isn't like I really imagine that Google (of all companies) absolutely needs these invitation buffers to help them scale the system out (maybe for Wave, but not for G+), to the point where they have existential risk that the whole project will fail. (Am I simply misremembering how the G+ invite process worked, due to the way Wave worked? Were you guarantee access if you could get invited by a friend?)

Facebook exploded first by being used by kids still in Elementary and High School.

Last I checked, Havard University, Stanford University, and the Ivy League are neither elementary nor high school institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#History

I remember when facebook was not accessible to anyone without a university email address. So I think it was college students, not high school students, that blew it up.

"But what Google actually built was a fancier Reddit – a place to have interesting discussions with strangers with less anonymity, trolling, and nudity."

Actually it isn't. Reddit's information is incredibly well organized. If you want to be in the loop on something, there's probably a sub reddit that has a ton of people talking about it.

My G+ feed is an orgy of ads, huge images, and irrelevant posts. Some people and companies I follow are a firehose of information that is a pain in the ass to sort through. I thought I could use it as a sort of rss feed, but I was wrong.

The only reason I'm on Facebook is for my college friends, and Twitter I just use to post development and programming stuff and use as an RSS feed. Beyond that, social media does nothing for me. Since G+ started, its been useless for me.

Have you considered using the Circles feature, so that you aren't always receiving posts from "some people and companies"?

I've also found a vastly superior experience, for both reading and posting, on reddit.

G+ is now my favorite "social" site because some of the people in my circles post interesting stuff, and G+ is set up to handle long conversations via comments.

A little off topic but the most excellent open source Discourse discussion web app has many of the features of G+ and I am curious how it would scale. (I set up a public instance yesterday at http://mythingsofinterest.com/ if you haven't tried Discourse, and want to try it). BTW, Discourse is also an example of a nicely written Ember.js/Rails app (uses Postgres and also Redis for caching).

It was kind of weird to see it declared dead as I saw a slow trickle of acceptance of G+ around me and more and more people started to post interesting stuff on it now and then.

Facebook for the more personal stuff, Twitter for reading and posting news and opinions and G+ more like a Facebook for nerd stuff in the middle.

I really wish they would stop pushing those random stories about people I don't know and I don't care about or topics that might seem interesting to me because some stupid algorithm thinks so, like Armin van Buren. I hate Armin van Buren with all my guts and I don't want to see his shitty face randomly popping up. Thank you.

Google has kept tight control over the product. Where-as Twitter grew from a diverse range of different products doing different things with the API and progressed towards a more authoritarian model, Google+ has been tightly controlled and normalized an experience. There's less room in the Google+ ecosystem for interesting things to work their way in.

There is a Moments API for external applications to post specialized content into the feed, and there is a read-api giving an Activity Streams centric feed.

Conversely, perhaps it's that we're less likely as a civilization to try to push things to interesting uses. Quake1, Quake2 and Unreal Tournament mark an exemplary period where dabblers came along and tried to push the systems, tried to find interesting and creative twists. Twitter was similarly buoyed into popularity, but today we see polished, final games- games are no longer moddable, would-be hackers simply license and leverae the engine, not a complete game to hack from, and like we see movements and projects such as IndieWeb, Tent.io, app.net, Salmon, ad-infinitum saying we must do it ourselves, rather than focusing on creating a rich dynamic around something that is.

Suffice it to say, my view is that anything that attempts to stand alone is bound by very low limits, and I'm not sure where G+ needs to go to overcome it's limits of being merely itself.

> games are no longer moddable

I don't think that is true - success of Skyrim (or other TES series) stand in direct contrast. FPS are indeed non-moddable nowdays but FPS have been done to death and only the franchises (like Modern Warfare, CoD, Crysis) are making enough money.

A bunch of content packs isn't really pushing the bounds. That you end with a discussion of money and survivability of the FPS somewhat drives the point home of how different our views are: an open system doesn't necessarily attract commercial value, it attracts eccentric purposes. AirQuake wasn't made for money, it was made because someone wanted to take something known and explore. Conversely, CoD and MW might be fighting for life because it's only the same commercial hacks doing the same thing to death and not letting other people come in and muck around with shitty barely working mods. Not that people necessarily still do wide-scale show up and start building mutators, anymore: most would rather get paid by the hacks to do "blockbusters."

As per Gibson: "The street find's it own uses for things," and it's that ability of the street to do so that gives long renewing interest into the thing. Either let oneself be reborn again and again, or die of certain irrelevancy.

Skyrim mods are more than content packs. There is one that converts it into a 3D platformer, one that converts it into a puzzle game and one that converts it into an FPS by giving everyone a gun.

At some point you have to consider the fact that there really isn't much left to do in FPS. When Quake and HL came we were still in infancy. While CS survived every other mod died a horrible death in neglect. People now know what sucks. And what doesn't has been honed to perfection and there really isn't much left to do anymore.

If you want to see modding don't look at FPS, look at Minecraft.

Who said Google+ was killed?

I use G+ far more than Facebook, though I am seeing more and more Facebook-like posts on my G+. Not sure if that's good or bad...

What do you use it for? The social aspect, photos?

I use it for photos because it's amazing. I can upload RAWs and they turn out at least as well as I can do them by hand, plus the auto-awesome thing makes great extras (the pano's are pretty great).

Increasingly following experts and communities like I do on twitter and reddit. For some topics it's becoming the best place.

Ingress

Agree. what a ridiculous article.

Apparently the market did. Nobody uses it and it's creepy as f how they want all your real data.

In G+ I have more friends than in all other networks, more followers and much more subscriptions. And UI is much better than Twitter or, especially, Facebook. I hate Twitter's stupid 140 symbols limitation much more than G+ real names requirement. Maybe my opinion represent not big part of market, but I wish G+ good luck and hope it will grow and fix all their issues.

The Star Wars geek in me has to correct his spelling of Tatooine. While Tataouine is a city in Tunisia, but given context (his mention of a dive bar consisting of characters from every solar system - obviously Mois Eisley), he clearly meant the desert world and first planet in the binary star system Tatoo, home of Anakin and Luke Skywalker.

tl;dr of this my comment: G+ never died, it leveled out and waited. Now that users are looking for real alternatives to FB, those of my generation plus-or-minus one are heading to G+. Expect G+ to grow over the next while as FB declines.

Skipping past the HN echo chamber of agreeement that Google+ is indeed dead....

I've not used G+ much as I find it too Pinterest-y in style, just too hard for my linear, "tell me what's new" mind to navigate. Lately, I've been far too busy to use FB, which, with SocialFixer installed, is a reasonable platform for seeing what's new in my social circles.

Most of the time, should I have have something to post, I post it to FB; if it is particularly geeky, I also post it to G+.

This morning, after quite some time away from both, the number of friends, business associates, and acquaintances awaiting me on G+ was staggering. More and more people from my most of social circles are joining G+, except those who are either social-network-impaired or facebook-diehard.

My guess is that they are wondering what social network might be for them, now that FB has changed one too many times and made it all that much more evident that we the users are there to be consumed.

Most of my generation plus-or-minus-one won't head to Instagram, etc., these are for the young folk. Expect to see more of us middle agers on G+.

While I'd be interested in seeing a serious postmortem (pre-mortem? trans-mortem?) of Google+, this flippant piece isn't the article to do it.

The TWTR and FB earning's calls in the last few weeks have shown how their growth rates continue to collapse. Where are the X is dying articles for them? TWTR's price is down by nearly 50% and below the IPO price, is it dying? Then again, since G+ doesn't have to publish numbers, we cannot compare apple to apples.

this is more a description of Google+ as the author sees it rather than what "killed" it or what could save it. I do agree with the general point that it seems to be a place for geeks, but that could be because the author / myself are geeks and we hang out around other geeks. hardly reassuring "evidence".

Better idea for Forbes..just come out and encourage Google to buy twitter..than at least we would get a forbes article that comes close to having some actual points in the article.

ITT: Desperate google employees trying to pretend G+ isn't dead.

It's dead, gone. And it's killing the youtube comments section which now looks like fabricated conversations.

Steve actually makes a pretty good case for the dynamic and problems facing G+. I think he buries one problem, that for many people, G+ marked a major turn in perception of the company. Just as Microsoft long ago became the software you had to use rather than the software you chose to use, Google has become the Internet company you have to use, and G+ the social network it forced you into. And the fact that this happened under the watch of a former Microsoft executive is possibly not entirely coincidental.

The bigger problem, and one that's hitting pretty much all the social sites lately, is the post-Snowden era and the realization that large, centralized stores of pervasive personal information facilitating what Bruce Schneier calls "bulk surveillance" may not be a good thing. It's hitting all the social sites now, and even Zuck's trying to change his tune at F8

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russi...

http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-at-facebook-f...

(though I don't think he'll succeed: http://redd.it/24h6or).

There's a lot else going on -- many mis-steps along the G+ pathway (Real Names, #nymwars, the War on Words, the YouTube Anschluss, total failure to grasp community dynamics, and more.

And I also say, entirely without irony, that there's been a great exchange going on at Steve's G+ post on this topic, including most of what I've touched on here, and a word or 2000 from yours, truly:

https://plus.google.com/+SteveFaktor/posts/Lj3NBBUV8pa,

Also, for those who're inclined to think Steve's inherently biased, Mike Elgan , who's ... let's just say, unabashed adoration of G+ usually leaves me short of appetite, in his most recent TWiT podcast questions Google's participation and engagement numbers, and comments on the immense unpopularity of the forced YouTube / G+ integration, as well as the toes crushed by Vic during his tenure with the company.

https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGNtepAbNY&feature=youtu.be...

There was no API. They had no choice but to rely entirely on Google’s vision and internal developers.

This is usually among the top criticisms of G+. I think it has a fair point. But a quick search says the first API announcement was on Step 15, 2011, about three months after G+'s initial launch. But the main problem could have been that the G+ API is not very powerful (disclaimer: I have never used the API), based on this: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/dont-expect-a-full-readwrit...

But what Google actually built was a fancier Reddit

The word fancier is overrated. I rarely go to Reddit, but HN's appearance is similar to Reddit's. Simple layout fills with a table of rows of topics. G+ is like Facebook's newsfeed in a photo gallery style which is actually ugly and unfriendly (the ordering is such an awkward thing to adopt to). Humans, well, at least I, don't like G+'s feed layout.

Google hastily re-routed all its services through the Google+.

This is true. Most people have heard enough Youtube comedian and tumblr bloggers complaining about the whole G+ integration. I hate the fact that I would post Youtube comments to my public G+ when the two were first annexed.

That’s why I think the company should open source the code and seed it with cash and several developers. Give it the freedom that loyal power users deserve. It could become the next Mozilla (Firefox). And Google can still benefit from the data it generates.

I am not sure if he is serious about open sourcing G+ or G+ API or what? There is no way you can ever open source G+ because G+ is not a single software that you can git/hg clone down to your desktop and then start compiling like you can do with Firefox. G+ is not built with celery, ruby on rails. The stack is so complex. Unless he's promoting Richard Stallman (RMS)'s idea that we should just have an open platform where ever can log into Google's server and start hacking (anaology to his mention of someone logging into his computer and start checking out his mail directory). That would be nice if I can use the API to build "Extensions" and anyone who sees my page can actually make use of it.

Flexible layout is actually problematic for some people. Remember the days of Xanga, MySpace and today's Tumblr? You can layout your entire page yourself, but because everyone has some insanely different like/taste of layout, some profiles have the most accessible layout (missing back-forth arrows, or font too small, etc). Facebook allowed some minimal customization in the past (changing the order of how your sidebar will look like to you and visitors).

My rants:

1. Simple, please

Google needs to make G+ simple. I don't want a fancier look. I want a dead simple newsfeed. Facebook's newsfeed is not very bad to be honest. It may have some spams and sponsored ads, but afterall, the feed is linear and easy to scroll and stop reading.

I always tell people that I hate using G+ because G+ settings are so complicated. Stop making things so complicated.

2. Don't let strangers follow me!

Why would you even allow strangers to "add me to their circle" and start watching me when I don't watch them to follow me? Most of these strangers are not even real people.

3. G+ notification is annoying and yet not working all the time

The notification is so buggy. I would miss invites and I won't see the missing notifications. In fact, the integration with Gmail is so lame that if someone left me a message or I missed a hangout I will not receive any notification at all from Gmail's interface. I would have to click on the "Chats" mail folder on Gmail to find out missed conversation.

Quick point:

There is no way you can ever open source G+ because G+ is not a single software that you can git/hg clone

Interestingly, reddit's source is online, and I actually managed to make my first (very, very trivial) change to it, issued a pull request, and now I'm officially a reddit contributor.

Given that I've spent a lot of time critiquing G+ and extensively modifying its layout via CSS (2000+ lines worth), I find this ... a notable contrast.

On 2.: you decide who you share with. People can follow you but they won't see anything you don't share with them.

While it is true, the fact that someone can actually "follow you" and "add you to a circle" is really really weird. I may be making a hypocritical point since I am also a tumblr user and my public one is actually followed by strangers too, but something down in my guts suggests that knowing strangers is adding me to a circle is just really really weird.

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