Google+ Photos Is Shutting Down
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
A bit off-topic:
I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that.
Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").
Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.
What makes you think it was any different from the inside?
If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
I use Digg Reader. Web is awesome, love the simplicity, the app need some love but is way more better than Feddly. The thing I don't like about Digg Reader is the Digg part, I only want my lovely curated RSS feeds.
Also try NewsBlur, Feedreader, The Old Reader and Newsvibe but Digg Reader was the best for my needs.
The default, so far as I can tell, is to dump every feed together to provide an "all-up" view. That could be okay, but then they layer a terrible card UI on top of it that's completely unintuitive. The top cards are big and generally pixelated (because it zooms in for some inexplicable reason), and it switches to a slightly different view after the first card, again, for no clear reason. I can swipe through the cards and reach the end, where it shows a giant checkmark and the words "Done" and "N reviewed". Reaching that page doesn't actually mean I'm done, though. Nothing is actually marked read until I go back to the top and tap on each them (or use the "mark all read" option). I'm either completely missing the interaction paradigm they intend or they haven't put much thought into what the interaction paradigm actually is. Maybe the devs all use iPhones and the Android client is an afterthought?
Meanwhile their website is generally okay, but I am completely at a loss for how to mark an item as unread once I've opened it. I should probably look for a different feed aggregator.
I am actualy working on a Feedly alternative. That's sorts articles by popularity. And can import Popularty counts from Sites that offer it. I hope the 70k Hacker News Readers on Feedly would like that. My Idea is to make search free and instead offer "Sort by Time" and "Compact View" as a Pro feature. Would anyone here be interested?
Of course, maybe everyone else loves the interaction model and I'm the oddball. That's entirely possible, but regardless I want to find something else at this point. (Trying Digg reader as of last night.)
I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.
That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.
(and in retrospect that comment was a lot more negative than I really feel about newsblur, I'm absolutely not looking to switch to something else)
Why do you say that?
In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.
Some of the teens also have facebook, but none don't have Google+.
This is because of two reasons: 1: Gmail means they all have Google+ accounts almost automatically, and 2: The privacy controls are much better in Google+, and they like that.
The only few people I know on Google+ are hardcore google fans who work in tech. Every teen (~15-18) I know is on facebook. And their younger siblings.
Plugin, Facebook Messenger seems to be quite dominant across those age groups too.
It is paid-for, although very cheap (and first month free). I ended up buying a life-subscription. I really miss Google Reader as well.
*I think they are going to change the name and redesign the product to push forward the adoption.
Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.
[1] e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
I've only seen this printed in google search and google plus, not on any other website. Maybe it's an extension of yours?
If it's google search you're complaining about, just log out, or use something like DDG.
Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat.
Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing.
Odd.
I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of.
...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools.
I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.
Way to predict the past. Google's been doing that for years; its been widely noticed since Hangouts was spun out.
I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.
I feel that the FB posts are just as annoying and unwanted as those FW: FW: FW:... emails of yesteryear.
Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out.
Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory.
Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.
I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.
And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-...
If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?
iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.
And I'm a technical user. I literally don't understand how (or if) non-technical users are expected to be able to understand how these work.
But seriously, this has to take the cake. "Google Photos" is replacing "Google+ Photos", though "Google+" is still around, and you can use Google+ to share photos from "Google Photos" (but not "Google+ Photos", at least not anymore).
[0] Going to drive.google.com and then clicking "New Sheet" will redirect me to docs.google.com, even though Google Sheets was (at least at one point) presented as a "new" product distinct from Google Docs. At least that's how it seemed to me when they launched it.
"Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything"
Saying that we now have a new product that does the same as the old one, and then migrating people to the new one is just confusing to the user.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...
I am assuming that your comment re: spam is about is about Picasaweb (it doesn't make much sense to me for users to submit spam into their own desktop software). Perhaps a reason for this is that it mostly gets used by people who started with the desktop software and those people keep the photos private so that the only photos seen in public are spam?
Seems like it would be an easy win.
It's confusing to me, but trying to explain it to my mom is absolutely impossible. I wonder whether the average user even knows there's a difference between the two. It's a perfect example of unnecessary redundancy.
Google Photos was announced May 2015, explicitly as the future of what had been Google+ Photos. It has been clear since then that that's what would be supported going forward, and then Google+ Photos was deprecated legacy.
(Also, not to be picky, but I see no mention of Google+ Photos (let alone its status as "deprecated legacy") on the announcement blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/picture-this-fresh-ap...)
Look at the Inbox vs Gmail experiment for example. While not tied to Google+, Inbox runs parallel to Gmail and accesses the same things. Just a different window dressing. I'm sure many at Google want to see Inbox take over Gmail at some point.
This is one of the reasons I doubt we ever see a Material Design Gmail. I think they'll run with it until Inbox is "ready".
The latter is not a replacement for the former, which many many people depend on, so the only way Gmail is going away is if Inbox evolves to be it...
https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/d1XubVAZ5hV
Don’t worry, all your photos and videos will still be saved and available after you switch to the new, stand-alone Google Photos app.
BTW: I am unrelated to them but I do recommend QuickPic, it does pretty much exactly what you'd want and very little else.
From the TechCrunch comments.
Picasaweb, Google+ Photos and Google Photos all store the photos in the same place.
There was never any need to "shuffle gigabytes of photos" when moving from picasaweb to G+ Photos and there won't be any needed to move from G+ Photos to Google Photos.
I don't see howany of that adds up to "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs".
Conceptually, Google Photos is very much a V1 product. It might sound a little weird since the team is experienced and a lot of the technology it is built on has been through multiple iterations.
But from a _product perspective_ Google Photos is a new product.
The product team was really focused on a few key aspects of the user experience (I'm not going to try to enumerate them here. The main reason is that I would certainly do a poor job of explaining them. The other reasons are that I can't remember how much of the strategy has been talked about publicly and it doesn't really matter for the point I'm trying to make).
Being focused meant saying no to things - at least for the initial launch.
So the first answer to your question is that for most of the mentioned features the answer is that they simply didn't make the cut for V1. I can't comment on which features will or won't make it to future versions.
Date picker is an interesting one. Really, the only reason it existed was to work around how painful it was access older pictures in Google+ Photos, Date picker was added to (somewhat) ease that pain.
In building a new product, there was a desire to make things like date-picker unnecessary. Make finding older photos so fast and painless that you don't even need it. Try grabbing the scroll bar in the new web-app - you can scroll to any time you want in seconds. On mobile, it's easy to zoom out, scroll and zoom back in.
There is also search, which often means you don't even _need_ to scroll through your photos to find what you want. Just this morning my wife wanted me to find a picture of a tatoo from six years ago. I was able to find it by searching for tatoo. It was awesome! In Google+ Photos I would have spent a long time trying to figure out the right date range and then searching around.
If you really want to jump to a date, just type it in search - I just tried "September 2012" and "9/23/2012" and they both worked great.
So I would argue that date-picker just flat out isn't needed any more, because the team focused on some core user experience flows.
Still, I find it kinda weird that Google feel the need to reinvent the wheel and redesign the whole site from scratch, when the old Google+ Photos is generally considered to be very well built. Why can't you just take Google+ Photos front end and build it up from there?
You can bet I'm gonna think twice about recommending any Google product to my family just because of the time sink in doing support.
From what I've read around here, there's little to explain that matters basically, it's just a different URL, and a facelift. The fact that it's a different product is probably irrelevant to them, and not-knowing would be less confusing.
The blogger photos will still be stored in the same place and the urls should continue to work.
For the rest, Google has basically taught me not to make the investment.
(I don't have any Adword nor advertising needs, at the moment. Otherwise, I imagine I would be using them.)
I was thinking of switching from the default text messaging application to Hangouts, on my phone, for the sake of maintaining a history of texts that the default app will dump beyond a certain count, but after incidentally running across comments about how fucked over Hangouts apparently has become, I'm pretty much not going there.
Google seems to be doing fine, revenue-wise, but they are losing me as... well, I guess I'm one bit of the "merchandise" that forms the basis of their revenue.
I don't hate Google. And I like the initiative on security and, "true names" aside, privacy. But I'm not excited any more about their product development.
Even in the physical world, I understand the impending, huge market for autonomous cars, and I like the pressure that Fiber has been providing to the erstwhile moribund large-scale ISP marketplace. But I miss the "moonshots." Although maybe they gave e.g. solar power enough of a nudge -- if not a push -- when it needed it, domestically.
P.S. Personal pet peeve. In my work, particularly in large organizations, I saw the need for something like Wave. (Anyone who's ever wasted time and effort on the outside of an extended and essential email chain conversation might relate -- as one example. Or trying to effectively maintain same and keep all in the loop and revisions straight, when on the inside of one.) But the terribly overburdensome (in terms of client processing demands for average clients of that time) and partially cryptic UI were a big initial turnoff.
Back to Gmail and Apps and whatnot. What Googlers actually seem to use for their own work, and lives (Maps, Picasa now become whatever...), seems to be better maintained. "Initiatives" to "secure markets" (Plus, I'm looking at you)? Yeah, not cutting it.
Initially, I would have given Plus a chance. Except that, for much of what interested me on it, I didn't care to go about publicly using my "true name" (health, psychology, and technical topics where some of my opinions might put off a potential employer).
I just went to photos.google.com for the first time and the last ten years of my pictures were there in chronological order.
But I still like the idea of forking out the photos. That was the only thing I was using in google+
There's no "tool" to migrate your photos...all my photos are already in the new app.
You get your Drive and your shiny interface.
They are acting like they are a bunch of startup teams constantly getting aqui-hired, with services getting changed, merged or canceled. I couldn't possibly recommend any of their services[1] to non-technical people, at any time something will stop working.
I'm not a wall to throw things at to see what sticks.
[1] Beyond search, of course
The closest they've come is almost certainly the new Google Photos app, which will probably end up with a decent portion of Android users actively using it.
I later moved lightroom into my workflow instead, mostly because of quick raw edits.
then picasaweb. then google photo web. or something. photos still there.
then i was forced to join google+ to continue uploading/editing/sharing. And i think it became google+ photos. or google photos as everyone called it. i can still see all the pictures i uploaded to picasa showing as my pictures on my plus profile.
and now, i have no clue what they mean with this announcement. will i have to migrate? am i already on the right photos? will i lose things if i do not migrate?
i have backups so i can't care less. what worries me A LOT is that those photos are linked on all short of forums and people will not find the information i produced if the links dies.
Thanks for "organizing the world information", google.