Bradley Horowitz Is Now Running Google+
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The argument was super compelling and I remember thinking it would have made complete sense, but instead ended up with the nightmare that became Google+, and a ton of pissed off former-users of Reader.
*EDIT: Found it: http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-go...
"Google could have avoided angry Reader users and given Google+ a massive boost by simply integrating Reader into Google+.
Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though it were another user in G+. Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.
If Google would have done that G+ would have taken off like wildfire and nobody would have ever looked back. I have no idea why they didn’t, but for some reason the lost potential has irritated me for a year. And, here we are now, with the whole effort going down the tubes.
What a waste."
Makes sense to me...
That embrace would probably have killed off RSS within a couple years anyway, since native G+ posts have more attractive window dressing, but the move would have been a dead simple way to build an instant, passionate userbase that could have taken advantage of G+'s commenting and sharing features while providing a meta-view of how users like to sort sources into Circles.
G+ could easily have been marketed as Reader 2.0, married to Facebook 2.0 for social, Instagram 2.0 for advanced photo features, and Dropbox 2.0 for hoarding. I have no idea how Google dropped the ball at the endzone.
Then you haves News, Social, Photo, Video, Files, and Office too. Add some games and there is pretty much everything anybody does on a computer.
Facebook's events are one of it's great features, but it took Google ages to implement them, despite already having a calendar that's synced with every Android phone.
The problem with that model was that publishers tended to dump their feed onto Buzz, and then engage with people via Twitter.
Of course, it's possible to ignore the lack of engagement, with the hope it will come later, and instead concentrate on the information consumer (call it "consumer-centric").
The problem with the consumer-centric model is that on its own it doesn't drive traffic, either to the app itself (GReader/Buzz/FriendFeed) or to the publisher.
That makes it a hard sell. It's difficult to know what could be done differently to fix this problem.
Well, let's put "massive" in quotes. It could have been a boost of influential people had it worked (well, some tech bloggers and HN users, but still), but let's not kid ourselves about "massive".
Second:
> Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though it were another user in G+. Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.
If you had taken Reader and replaced it with this it would have infuriated me at the time, and would have been been the same result as far as I would have been concerned: Reader would be dead. This would not have worked.
It was a fun time for sure, Brad was always a very impressive guy. A practicing Krishna, he always seemed to have his head here and in 'another realm' so to speak; when you talked to him (back then at least) he had this rather intimidating look in his eyes like wheels were constantly turning in the background, solving who knows that computer or religious quandary caught his attention that day. I lost touch with Brad around his MIT days and only recently because of the passing of our mutual friend Bob Sterner been back in touch with him.
Here's a sample song that's a good representation of their https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJMkwuL05t4
Entire Album: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spahn+ranch+thi...
Best of luck Brad, how things have changed since those heady U of M days when Brad was just a unique guitarist for an Detroit indie band.
Edit: better representative track.
http://phoenixhairpins.blogspot.ru/2014/01/spahn-ranch-thick... (Brad Horowitz mentioned in the post)
I wish they had some somebody who could cut through all the politics and read tape and build a really great, unified, product.
The first thing on my hit list - Material Design. It's just bad. It's too spread out, the animations detract from the experience, and every ui element just seems flaky. ARRG!
I saw jean flares in a designer shop yesterday. Really? Again?
I totally agree that g+ should not have been shoved into every google product, instead it should have been a place you could go to access every google product.
I'm still convinced that the power of facebook is there is one url for everything an everyday person needs from the internet. People want one website that has everything.
When my G+ and YouTube accounts were merged I ended up with (or as) the three top stories on HN (I've got a screenshot on Imgur somewhere, linked from my subreddit).
In December Google created a new "myaccounts.google.com" site where it's possible to manage Google accounts, including adding or removing services. While I can remove my YouTube account (there's nothing on it but history), it won't stay removed, thoughct that's in the cards. IOW: Google seem to be taking steps to disaggregate their offerings.
Several of the bigger blunders of G+ have revolved around both identity and bundling / tying. #nymwars, forced calendar integration (look up Robert Scoble's rant), the YouTube Anschluss. This is what Microsoft tried in the 1990s. Eventually people rebelled.
You cannot force someone to like you.
People want convenience, yes. But it doesn't mean it's got to be the same website for all of us -- I'd really like to see federated services solved.
I strongly disagree. Take SourceForge as an example. A compelling case can be made that part of the reason it died is that it tried to do everything all in once place. On the other hand, when companies like Github popped up, they did code hosting, and they did it really well. Sure they later added stuff like wikis and web sites, but Github is still 99% focused on hosting and interacting with code.
Another example is AOL. A big part of the reason the web won out over AOL is that people had choice. You could get your email from Yahoo! (back in the day their email service was excellent), your news from CNN, host your web site on Angelfire, and use Lycos for search. Sure, you might get benefits from using two services that were owned by the same company (I personally use Blogger because it makes it so easy to pull in pictures from G+ which are synced from my phone), but you could use them in isolation just as easily.
Even Facebook is splitting their app into discrete apps on mobile (http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/12/30/facebook-will-contin...). Maybe they're just idiots, but it seems like the smart money is that they know what they're doing.
Another example is Google Drive. They tried to integrate Google Docs into Drive and call the whole thing "Google Drive". Why would my file syncing service have an office suite? That makes no sense! I want my file syncing service to work with documents created by my office suite, by I don't want them to be the same product. It was a nightmare, now they've split them back out.
And a final example. What you're talking about is basically the concept of a "portal" from the late 90s. It was tried, Yahoo! bet big on it. Google won with its white page and a single text field. People wanted a search engine that rocked, they didn't really care about having a unified experience. The web is messy, that's what makes it powerful! Google had its own portal for awhile, it wasn't all that popular so they dropped it.
People want products that work together at the points where it makes sense for them to work together, but they don't want a single product that does everything under the sun, because that makes it annoying to use just one of them (even if you use them all you only use one at a time).
I switched to theoldreader.com and have been much happier.
(Here's what I've been using for the past year: http://imgur.com/a/kT3NN. Sources: https://github.com/akkartik/spew)
Need a richer text/post editor that also allows inline images & albums.
Need easier post/comment editing (a la Facebook).
Android/G+ photo autobackup is great, but god help you if you ever want or need to access those photos. The current method of manually moving a max of 500 at a time into other albums is a non-starter, especially if you had set auto-backup to also backup other local image folders from your mobile devices (Whatsapp/Telegram, photo editors, etc).
The client is waaaaaaay too heavy. G+ is unusable on a Chromebook if you have Gmail and more than one or two other tabs open.
The half-assed merging of Picasa web albums into G+ was aggressively user-unfriendly. There are a lot of us who still use the quite excellent Picasa desktop app for light photo editing and album management. The G+ album viewer/browser is horrifically bad.
Photo commenting is pretty much broken. You can comment, but it's pretty antisocial, unlike imgur/instagram/facebook.
A lot of content houses & brands don't publish to G+, or if they do, it's half-assed secondary crap that seems to just be bots posting links. Very few seem to interact with the G+ community.
The Hangouts integration is heavy & crappy compared to the nice and light fb chat integration, and almost no one seems to know about video chat, much less the ability to (in some countries) dial phones via Hangouts.
The idea of Communities is a good one, but it operates as sort of the opposite of Usenet. If someone leaves a community or deletes their account (granted, this may be a bigger problem for Google Apps for Work customers) all their content goes with them.
As other commenters have noted, G+ seems to have been created with the mission statement of being everything to everyone, but in the process it has alienated many and broken a lot. I suggest focusing on fixing the discrete parts and only then deciding whether it makes sense to integrate them.
I, for one, am thankful to at least be able to use my Google/G+ credentials to login to a bunch of common sites now, so it has that going for it.
I'm downvoted every time I say so, but combining photos with social MAKES SENSE. There are exactly three things anyone wants to do with photos -- we want to hoard them, we want to organize/enhance them, and we want to share them. G+ addresses the photo question better than anyone else on the market. There are improvements to be made -- starting with deduplication and better integration with GDrive so I don't pay twice for the same storage -- but G+ is a fundamentally excellent idea.
Combining that photo/social experience with the newsfeed aspects of Facebook ALSO makes sense. In the absence of popular adoption, G+ is still a pretty excellent newsfeed if you follow publications with a G+ presence. It's also a fantastic place to tap into the personal musings of Silicon Valley's best and brightest, though tech is admittedly one of the only niches with a presence on G+. Tied in with the fantastic implementation of Circles, it's pretty easy to switch between newsfeeds and share posts with only those I want to see my thoughts.
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That said, G+ HAS failed so far despite technical excellence and fantastic user experience. The operative idea here is "so far"... there's no reason why G+ can't be the network of choice of the next generation, and given the ecosystem benefits, it's hard to imagine digital natives NOT choosing Google products to organize and share their lives.
Horowitz, if you read this, target young women. Give them a place to organize/enhance/share their photos in a safe, private environment. Instagram did this (at least to the extent of enhancing/sharing their photos), and as always, the men followed. Just make it dead simple to dump a disorganized mess of redundant photos into GDrive that will then be automatically sorted, tagged, and enhanced. Suggest Circles based on their frequent contacts in Gmail. Give Hangouts better, more intuitive sticker options and play up the videochat features (which very few people seem to know about). Run ads where young people publish an invitation on G+, split the dinner tab via GWallet, pick up German guys via GTranslate, share their photos in a group post on G+, and track their progress the night before on GMaps.
All the pieces are already in place, they just need one last shove to make life easy for the average user. Nobody wants to deduplicate and sort their photos by date or location. Nobody wants to juggle photos between hard drives or try to figure out how many photos their limited cloud storage can still handle. Just let users dump their photos on an unlimited, subsidized GDrive subscription with full confidence that they'll be sorted, organized, enhanced, and ready to share without any further work on their part.
I'm not sure this makes sense for everyone. There are so many different uses for photos/social, that I don't think there's any single way that `makes sense`. All services have a slightly different way of sharing, but I'd say there are some specific themes here:
- photos as messages (like instagram)
- photos as art (like old flickr)
- photos as galleries (g+, new flickr)
- photos as... memories? current events? sharable stuff? (like facebook, twitter)
I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social. People share galleries with family / friends - many of who aren't even on the same platform and don't want to be.
They make very much sense with social as long as social doesn't have to mean "share publicly".
There are photos on G+ that I'd like to show my family. This is "public" from G+'s point of view, because I'm not going to make them log into G+.
Nothing goes wrong if other people see these photos too; however, I don't want people who have me in their G+ circles to get notified that I'm now "sharing" these photos that they have no interest in, and I don't want some boring photos to represent me on my "feed".
This use case worked on Picasa, but G+ broke it.
Right now I find the extremely concealed download link and e-mail them. This is not how a photo product should work.
What I meant isn't that any product gets it right ATM but rather that there isn't a good technical or, I guess, social reason for why galleries couldn't be a killer social feature. It seem there are a few economic/marketshare etc reasons though.
Perhaps the user experience is mostly there, but I would not describe it as fantastic.
For me the pain starts when you click in the "share what's new box". It's the first, most basic operation and it's bad.
For a start, I click on the left hand side of the screen the whole card jumps to the center of the screen. (at about 15 fps!) Why? Why does it move?
Not only am I forced to shift my attention from where I clicked, but everything on the screen reflows drawing my attention all over the screen.
Not only that, the icons all change size and shape, and a bunch of extra stuff is added. If you wanted a completely different dialog box, how about just a button that says "new post"
Next up lets have a look at "People I may know" box on the right side of the screen. I see a friend, and next to his icon is a button that says "Add". When I try to move my mouse over to click it, it's hidden behind a popup window that "rolls" into place (badly) and I have to check boxes to put them in specific circles.
Sure, as a developer I can see that this is an optimization of a two step process, but it breaking some basic rules about what a button is. To me its jarring and clunky. Is just weird.
I dont know what would be better, but how about some "circle" icons that I could drag my friends face onto? Too weird? How about a drop down at the top of the card that dictates what circle a new friend goes into.
I could go on and on and if anybody at Google is interested I will!
What's most frustrating for me with G+ and multimedia in general is that it keeps getting in my way.
When I'm looking for long-form text, I keep getting images.
When I'm looking for images, I keep getting long-form text.
Then there's video.
If I want to look at images I can go to a site that has images -- say, Imgur -- and browse those mindlessly. Or look at a curated set (say one of the subreddits, or an Imgur category). Imgur's even got a pretty decent image search.
Yes, if I had family and I wanted to specifically share certain images with them and all that, then G+ would be pretty cool. But quite honestly, the thought of using a third-party platform like that weirds me out and bothers me. I never cared for the "share everything personal out in public" mode, or even "on someoone's third-party service".
That said: image sharing is absolutely a killer social app, simply because the tools for users to do this themselves suck so badly (though this is increasingly less the case).
Add to all that: images and G+ are a pain in the ass. I cannot create a post with inline images. Creating an uploading albums is a pain (again, Imgur is hugely better at this). It does have autoawesome, which can create cool effects, but that's not something to pin a total system off of. There's copious free storage, which is cool, yes (and in general the underlying tech of Google / G+ has been both robust and exceptionally reliable).
But ... "fantastic user experience"? Please! From client bloat (even Yonatan complains) to ideosyncratic Markdown (dittos) to lost drafts (dittos) to hard-to-read small and low-contrast fonts and "cards" style presentation of long-form texts, it simply makes no sense. Imgur, reddit, and Ello are kicking ass and taking names in multiple categories regards G+.
Yes, it could have been good. But it isn't.
The good?
Notifications. "Subscribe by default" turns out to be pretty good (though there's a lot of stuff I'd prefer to turn off).
Search. Syntax sucks, but everything is indexed, and it's fast. Client bloat means you can't scroll back more than a few screens, but ...
Data liberation. Also useful.
The rest of it? Quite frankly, I'd scrap most of it and start over.
I read: "It's important to me that you don't think of this as a bad thing"