3 ms·
The marketing was all wrong. The rate at which Google admitted new users to the platform left many potential users feeling alienated. It took several days for m
by Kequc 10y ago
The marketing was all wrong. The rate at which Google admitted new users to the platform left many potential users feeling alienated. It took several days for me to get an invite and I'm pretty saavy.
When they launched all the talk was focused on the social network. The focus should have been on the primary product which is that they introduced an account system. The social network just simply came with it for free. You could use it or not use it.
Google accounts meant you no longer needed to use your Gmail accounts to sign up for Google services.
Could bind everything, Gmail, any other Google services all to the same Google account. When Google then pushed to get people onto the new accounts system people thought Google was trying to shove the social network down their throats.
The social network again, though was secondary to the account system. Google+ likely would have been better received had people been properly informed on the benefits of creating a Google account.
- nostrademons 10y agoGoogle accounts actually came out several years before Google+. I remember that Google already had a unified account system across all products before I started working for them; I think they rolled it out in 2008. Google+ didn't launch as a destination site until 2011.
- Kequc 10y agoAs far as I can remember Google services required a Gmail account before Google+. Here is Schmidt commenting about the release of Google+ as an identity service. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/08/29/googles-eric-schmidt-says-plus-is-an-identity-service-not-a-social-network http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/08/29/googles-e...
- nostrademons 10y agoMy point is that Google's had a unified login system across all products (except legacy Blogger and YouTube accounts) since at least 2008. It doesn't really make sense to call it a GMail account - GMail was one of the services that it gave you access to, but it also was your account for AdWords, Analytics, Google Voice, Blogger, Reader, Docs, etc. You can find references to it on the web from 2009 onwards, as well as reports that the Chinese hacked it in 2010: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/164385.html http://blogoscoped.com/forum/164385.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2517360/security0/report--google-attack-targeted--gaia--password-system.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2517360/security0/repor... The "G+ is just an identity layer on top of Google" was a common soundbite reported by executives at the time, and perhaps they even believed it, but my engineers-level view as someone who worked with the G+ codebase was that this was mostly marketing speak to differentiate us from Facebook and deflect criticism of "Well, if G+ is a new social network, why would I use it over Facebook?" By saying it's the identity layer for Google, they can then say "Well, you use Google already, this is just the social layer that ties all Google products together." On a technical level a "G+ account" was just a bit set in your Gaia record that indicated whether you had opted in to G+ features.