20 ms·

Google+ Redesigned

194 points by uptown 10y ago

dleslie 10y ago
Fullscreen on my 16x9 display wastes the clear majority of screen space. Is having a single, centered column considered superior to alternatives?
- TillE 10y ago
  Twitter has the same sort of design, but I think Google+ really draws attention to the vast ocean of whitespace by leaving a column all the way on the left. Twitter has three columns when you load the page, but then just one as you scroll down. It doesn't look as strange.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- awesomerobot 10y ago
  Banner blindness has ruined a lot of potential multi-column experiences from some basic eye tracking studies that I've done on multi-column layouts in the past. Also... you can make the same comment about hacker news, yet here we are.
  - strictnein 10y ago
    HN is one column, but it's 85% of the page. G+ content is a fixed 530px.
    - klodolph 10y ago
      HN only works because the text here is short. Try reading longer posts in a maximized window. Readability studies consistently tell us that optimum column width, for readibility, is something like 50-75 characters wide (including spaces). You can get by with more width for short text like HN comments.
- patmcguire 10y ago
  Pinterest is the only site I've seen that will fill whatever screen size you throw at it, like God intended.
  - kasbah 10y ago
    What do you think of my design? https://kitnic.it/ https://kitnic.it/
- et-al 10y ago
  This is essentially a mobile-first site. Chalk it up to lazy programmers or UX folks who didn't code/design a responsive site properly.
- keithnz 10y ago
  are you sure you are looking at the right version? mine uses most of the space. There's a setting :- Stream Restrict stream to single-column layout on all screen sizes do you have this on?
fiveoak 10y ago
It's too bad that Google+ never really caught on, but I'm not sure if redesigning it is enough to fix that.
- ajkjk 10y ago
  I don't think that's too bad. I didn't think it was a good product, and it didn't deserve to do well just because Google threw their weight behind it.
  - grendelt 10y ago
    I wish they'd wake up and throw Plus on the pile with Wave.
    - fizzbatter 10y ago
      I actually thought Wave had potential though. Sure, it had tons of flaws, but it was at least trying something new. Plus is just so.. well, not new. And this is coming from someone who used Plus for quite a while (year or two). To me, Wave felt shut down too early.. and of course, way over hyped. By comparison to Wave, i'm shocked Plus still exists.
      - mxuribe 10y ago
        You read my mind! :-)
      - tangue 10y ago
        Wave wasn't overhyped if you consider how successful products like Slack are today.
      - WorldMaker 10y ago
        I felt like Google had a lot of very interesting social tools between Wave, Reader, Talk, and Buzz (remember that?). Consolidating that wasn't a bad idea, had they picked the best innovations and smartest social groups from all three of them. Unfortunately, Plus felt more like taking the worst of all three (Buzz's forced inclusion, for instance) and ignoring any of the innovation (Wave, especially), reverence for internet standards (Reader based on RSS, Wave and Talk based on XMPP to different extents), or existing social groups (Reader had a somewhat active social scene before Plus that could not survive the transition, especially the shutdown of Reader itself). There's a sense there of some hostility between the groups involved at the time and something of a hostility against the "techie-first" nature of the company before plus. I'm one of the ones that question if Google lost a lot of its "soul" in building Plus and trying to be more like Facebook. I figure there's an alternate universe out there where something like Plus started as a smarter merger of Wave and Reader, and I'm curious what that would have looked like.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
XzetaU8 10y ago
"Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" was never more apt than now.
- audleman 10y ago
  thread
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
znpy 10y ago
Google+ shows "hot on google+ right now", and it's basically stuff that has gone very famous in south korea but makes no sense to me. And it comes from a guy (i think, because the name is written in hangul characters) that I am NOT following. I am writing some feedback hoping that some googler will read this and improve something..
- hackernews2000 10y ago
  Add more friends to your circles have better fine-tuned suggestions.
  - znpy 10y ago
    Besides the fact that I already have 15-20 friends that are more than enough to do some testing, I am NOT going to tell anyone they can reach me on google plus until I understand how it works and am satisfied with it. Google is apparently working very hard to fail at both.
- znpy 10y ago
  * The search feature is just awful * The search features suggests a lot of rubbish even before i started searching * the whole interface is still slow * When I click on "communities" on the left panel, i get redirected to the community suggestion page, while I expected to see the communities of which i am part. Also, the suggestion are completely messed up. * when i click on "communities" and am brought to the suggestion page, clicking on the "member" link (that i guess, should show me the communities i am part of) does nothing at all. * it is in general very very hard to understand what post comes from where, and this makes it very hard to use google plus more than the usual "oh crap i opened it again, how do i close it?" * Opon a click to write a post, an overlay with a popup window is opened instear of just letting me write. The popup opening is slow as the other stuff. * did i mention the whole thing is slow ?
  - znpy 10y ago
    Sharing a text post is awful: * The default option for sharing is "Public" (oh hell no) * Otherwise you can "add to a collection" (and wtf is a collection in google plus terms now?) * in order to select a community or a circle (circles should be the hot stuff of Google+, you have to make two more steps ("See more", scroll).
awesomerobot 10y ago
What's it like to work on the Google+ team? are they all kind of blindly into it, or is there any sort of "yeah yeah, we know" there? I guess it's an exciting challenge maybe?
- znpy 10y ago
  it would be fun to know. I wonder if they perform any actual user testing, when they pick truly random users and ask their feeling about google plus.
  - dmoy 10y ago
    You can't strongarm a truly random sample. Alas, hah. For some stuff you have to ask people to come on site, which tends to self select a bit. Sometimes you get... interesting folks. (Just talking generally about onsite user testing, not involved with G+ in any way)
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Initially Google+ was Google's big foray into social networking and while it gained users it never grew to the size of a Facebook, Twitter or even MySpace. But nowadays it's kept that capability along with bringing in aging Google features such as communities (it seems clear to me that communities will eventually only live in Google+). From the outside looking in it looks to me like Google+ is going to be the hub in which users can interact with all of Google's properties that have a mechanism to work with and collaborate with other, public users. They likely still have millions of users. In comparison to Facebook sure it's a massive failure. But I'm of the opinion that isn't an accurate nor useful comparison.
  - awesomerobot 10y ago
    > From the outside looking in it looks to me like Google+ is going to be the hub in which users can interact with all of Google's properties that have a mechanism to work with and collaborate with other, public users. They likely still have millions of users. Yes, but we're talking maybe about .5% of all Google accounts actively use Google+... what's their goal at this point? 1%? is it a "if we build it, eventually they might come" scenario?
katpas 10y ago
I've always wondered why Google+ did so badly. I love google apps for everything but social. Seems like a missed opportunity to make something that moves away from Facebook as the norm.
- sevenless 10y ago
  Mostly network effects/inertia. And it didn't help that Google seemed to be quite pushy about getting people to sign up.
  - dangerlibrary 10y ago
    Also, circles are a terrible metaphor. Someone I don't know added me to their circles. What the hell does that even mean? Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post? Do they see what I post? Why wasn't I asked for my permission? I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post. Who are they and what do they want? This sucks, I'm leaving.
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      I don't know I thought the circle metaphor was genius. It's quite the common phrase to have a circle of friends or a trusted circle of advisors, etc. List, like what Facebook and Twitter use, seems so...I don't know machine like but circle is a very common part of the vernacular.
      - dangerlibrary 10y ago
        As a means of organizing one's friends into groups that only see subsets of what you post, it's not bad. As the sole means of creating a directed social graph, it's awful.
    - jpfed 10y ago
      >What the hell does that even mean? It means they want to see stuff you post, and/or post stuff that (if you circle them back) you will see. >Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post? What? No. That would be super dumb. >Do they see what I post? If it's public or if you post it to a circle that includes them. >Why wasn't I asked for my permission? Because they haven't been granted any special powers by virtue of adding you to a circle. >I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post. Then don't post publicly- choose a more limited audience to post to. >Who are they and what do they want? Go to their profile page and find out, if you care. But you probably don't- it's safe to ignore them.
HelloNurse 10y ago
I enabled two-column mode and I keep the menu open for company, so my screen is "only" about 1/3 to 1/4 empty and wasted. But this is the best case: if I click the post age (obvious...) I can switch to a single-post page. More exactly, I can make everything else disappear; on my 1600x900 screen the width of the post DIV increases from 475 to 530 pixels and text and comments are generously expanded. But there's more! If I click inside the search bar, i get a 2 seconds pause to load "featured collections", "featured communities", "Suggested People & Pages" and "Suggested Posts" REPLACING THE PAGE I'M ON because Google clearly knows better.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
And now we have come full circle. The new Google+ looks like crap in my web browser because literally over 50% of the page is useless grey pixels. The reason is that the page design assumes its on a mobile phone which its somewhat unique tall portrait orientation. And sure enough, looking at the page on my phone it looks a bit flat but it works well. So now we are in a place in the web where browser users get the crappy UX experience because someone spent all their time focused on the other community and really didn't bother to make their pages responsive to both.
- notatoad 10y ago
  the individual post pages contain a lot of whitespace, yes. But text looks better at a narrower width. what do you want them to do, fill up the gutters with ads just to colour your pixels? the main index page wraps nicely to multiple columns when you're on a larger screen.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    If I were designing it I would have it either switch to multiple columns when the size of the white space got too large, or I would have the columns widen with the page. The latter results in a sort of 'tweetlike' appearance for a lot of G+ posts as they are quite short, the former makes it more 'newspaper' style and introduces the question of how you move from the bottom left to the top right. If you do it with the same posting it makes scrolling challenging, if you do it with multiple postings it makes the user scroll up and down to see the top and bottom. Then again, there is a really useful layout that folks have been using forever where you put summaries on the left and content expands in boxes on the right. But then it looks just like gmail or something, except that is exactly what it is "group email". Gooogle plus seems confused about what it is, is it twitter ? is it facebook? is it usenet? is it email? Fix its multiple personality disorder and the design will fall out of that naturally.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - 10y ago
nilved 10y ago
I'm disappointed to see that Google is still pushing +. I almost left the platform when they tried to jam it down my throat last time, and it seemed as though they'd come to their senses and shuttered that misguided project. I'm genuinely surprised to see that people are still working on it.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  There's actually been a huge changeover in Google+ in the last year. Luke Wroblewski is the new product director there, and he's absolutely busted up some of Google's worst ideas of design. Another huge thing he's done is made the change and feedback process for Google+ extremely public, whereas since 2011, it's primarily been "people notice something changed" as with most Google sites, and now we get changelogs from the man. I absolutely recommend people check out what he posts: https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski is his G+, but he's actually surprisingly active on LinkedIn of all places, and I'm pretty sure Twitter as well.
  - iwintermute 10y ago
    in his bio on G+: "Humanizing technology. Currently at Google. Previously: Mobile First" There's some irony in that, given G+ design really looks like 'mobile first'
Rygu 10y ago
The goo.gl short URLs in (parentheses) are really annoying. They totally hide the content behind the links.
- vosper 10y ago
  And why are they even visible? There's no value in seeing the link URL, so they should just make the relevant text the link like everyone in the world does.
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    Google+ doesn't support links-with-titles, even though Gmail, Docs, and Sites do. (Neither does Facebook)
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    Not to mention that this isn't Twitter there is no text limit and no reason to use godawful mysterious short urls.
kin 10y ago
Home is like my Facebook feed, except with even less of my friends and even more ads (only because I follow companies). Collections is like following random Pinterest boards created by other people. I don't know about others, but I like to follow official things, or things that have the most followers but none of that info seems to be surfaced. Featured really means nothing to me. Is it hand-picked? Randomly generated featured? Are they paid to be featured? Communities are cool but it's really hard nowadays to beat the communities in subreddits. Anonymous users seem to give a lot more to the community in an unselfish manner vs. Google+ users seem to post in communities in a self-promoting manner. This could just be anecdotal and my subjective viewpoint but that's what I see. I honestly don't know how Google can do social, but I'm glad they're trying different things. Hopefully they try something new. Random thought: I find Slack very similar to Google Wave.
Queue29 10y ago
This looks absolutely horrible on a 4k monitor http://i.imgur.com/jSlw0St.png http://i.imgur.com/jSlw0St.png
- arenaninja 10y ago
  "Mobile first, desktop never"
- jklinger410 10y ago
  Sometimes I feel like Google's design practices are on a death spiral.
  - chjohasbrouck 10y ago
    I've always thought that maybe they optimize their designs specifically for A/B testability. If everything is just kind of flat and grey, there's less noise, and it's easier to write A/B tests that produce meaningful results. That also means every product is flat and grey, though. It could also just be a side-effect of having to appeal to every person on the planet, though. Sort of the design equivalent of a good politician, appealing to the lowest common denominator in all of us. Nothing to object to, but also nothing to love. Just flat and grey, with clearly displayed content and A/B optimized calls to action. I find it incredibly boring and I'm getting tired of them rolling out new products that all look and feel exactly the same, but I suspect they have numbers that show any big design change would just be leaving money on the table.
    - unabst 10y ago
      It's because their guidelines are based on look and feel (aka "design"), not user experience or use case. They basically have no guidelines for the experience. It's all colors, motion, and size. Each product team then goes off and reinvents the experience, and decides to sacrifice the look and feel guidelines in the process. The Google+ page doesn't even appear to have any breakpoints, which is against their own guidelines: https://material.google.com/layout/responsive-ui.html# https://material.google.com/layout/responsive-ui.html# Maybe those gutters are reserved for ads?
newscracker 10y ago
Several years on and we still have to deal with the fact that we cannot have good names for our URLs ("vanity URL" or "custom URL" or whatever else you'd want to call it). Want to share your profile with others? Here's a Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to share your Google+ community's link with others? Here's another Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to share your Google+ page's link? Here's yet another Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to shorten these links? Use the built-in shortener and get a shortened-yet-gibberish-like-link. Want to simplify these links for sharing using meaningful names in the URL so people can actually remember it? Oh, then just use bit.ly (or another better URL shortener) and create a custom one with whatever name you like (assuming it's available on bit.ly)! How hard is it to provide custom URLs? Does it cost Google millions of dollars to do this? Does it make maintenance of Google+ a lot more expensive? Facebook provides custom names to be used in URLs for one's profile, for pages, and for groups (first come first served and all that, of course). On Google+ you can do this for your profile (?) after you meet some primitive pre-conditions. For something that's supposedly social, I'm deeply disappointed with how Google+ has been developed (read neglected) over time. I like some aspects of G+ (like the layout, font, font sizes, etc.), but two things that are grating are the lack of custom URLs and the unintuitive navigation scheme (compared to Facebook). I still post to G+ once in a while (although, there's really no audience there) and look for improvements with the hope that I can start nudging people away from Facebook and get more traction on an alternative platform (another walled garden, but at least not as evil, IMO). It's sad, for me, that even long wait times don't show much for progress. If the strategy seemed convoluted while Vic Gundotra was managing it, his departure left the platform languishing as if it were a part time project. Anyone from the Google+ team reading this - firstly, please bring in basic stuff to the platform that's important for people to share, and secondly, please copy Facebook shamelessly in whatever it's doing well for user experience. Lastly, thanks a lot for (reverting to and) retaining the freedom of users to use pseudonyms on the platform!
- delroth 10y ago
  https://google.com/+PierreBourdon https://google.com/+PierreBourdon
hackuser 10y ago
To use it, do I still need to share my real identity with Google? With the world? If so, is that just policy or is it enforced somehow?
- newscracker 10y ago
  The real names policy on Google+ was long removed. You can use any pseudonym and don't have to share your real identity. In this respect, it's definitely better than Facebook.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Thanks. I should have asked above: Do they my phone number (ostensibly for 2FA)?
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      You will be continuously nagged for it. If you use the Android platform, I suspect that Android device UUIDs may be transferred via Chrome or App usage. This has some benefits -- Google have quite good login-pattern tracking, and alert for logins on new devices (or devices not used for a time). OTOH, it is also, quite obviously, a mechanism for tracking patterns of use across IPs, locations, devices, etc.
    - newscracker 10y ago
      It's not necessary to provide your phone number if you don't want to. It does not force you to do that, although for account recovery purposes (getting access back to an account if it's compromised), it will bother you once in a while to add your phone number as a recovery mechanism. I see this request coming with plain Gmail and Yahoo Mail too quite often, and just choose to skip it whenever asked.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Officially, not since July of 2014 -- two years ago. Unofficially, pseudonyms were often, though not always, tolerated before that. http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reverses-real-names-policy-apologizes/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reverses-real-names-poli...
neximo64 10y ago
Odd to see Google using a brute force strategy for this. They kill off their wonderful products and keep the bogus ones.
runn1ng 10y ago
I literally cannot scroll the post itself down. It's stuck no matter what I do, so I will forever see just the first half of the article. I usually hate one-note comments about the web platform of the postings, but since this is a blogpost about Google Plus webdesign, hosted on Google Plus... I guess it's telling. No, I will not start using it again.
probably_wrong 10y ago
I wish Google had stuck to their guns, called Google+ a social network, and earned users over time. Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!", and turned into... whatever it is they are doing today. They could have been the Facebook that is not Facebook, or in Randall Munroe's words, "all I really wanted"[1]. Too bad. [1] https://www.xkcd.com/918/ https://www.xkcd.com/918/
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  Put perhaps a bit glibly, turns out "we're freaking terrified of Facebook" is not a product strategy. At the end of the day this was an executive's pet project in response to what he considered an existential crisis to Googles future. While certainly motivating, that doesn't result in focused or quality services.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I wish Google had stuck to their guns, called Google+ a social network, and earned users over time. But that wouldn't be sticking to their guns; from their very beginning, Google+ was overtly described as an identity service and social layer tying together Google's consumer services, with the Facebook-like social interface just one feature. (If anything, they've gone further in the direction you seem to prefer of designating G+ as a social network rather than "sticking to their guns", by taking everything that's not the Facebook-like social interface and ripping the G+ branding off of it.) > Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!" Actually, I think what they decided is that either Facebook wasn't the existential threat to Google that motivated what was described at the time as a "bet the company" approach, or that at least, if it wasn't, that it was so more because of the cluster of services that it might expand into and which Google was better prepared to compete directly with (and often be ahead of), and not a commonly-branded suite centered around a social feed app. So both the G+ social feed app and the G+ branding applied to a bunch of other things became a lot less important in Google's strategy.
Raphmedia 10y ago
My main issue with G+ is that every time I get back on it (few time a year) the layout is so different that I get tired and leave after scratching the surface...
millstone 10y ago
When I click on the Search field to type something, it loads a completely different page. Very unexpected and confusing.
electic 10y ago
Mobile and web aside, the amount of dead space in each of these pages is absurd. A lot of the pixels on the screen are just white or grey. One would argue, this is one of the major drawbacks of material design.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  For FSM's sake, tell me about it. I don't know why in the world Google can't figure this out. All that dead space is absolutely horrid. For the love of FSM, why can't they make the middle column wide enough to use most of that space, and/or fill the rest with something useful.
leshow 10y ago
Why is it only using 20% of my screen? the vast majority of the page is a grey background
- criddell 10y ago
  Mobile first. Desktop... some day.
ElijahLynn 10y ago
As a daily user of G+, this is great news! I am so tired of micromanaging characters on Twitter. I just want to express an idea sometimes without using extra CPU cycles. I only have so many of those available each day and I don't want to use them on Twitter. It just needs more users. It is great to follow developers on. Here is a seed list of active G+ users that may be relevant to you (remember how empty it was when you first signed up for Twitter? You had to follow some seed people...): https://plus.google.com/+ElijahLynn https://plus.google.com/+ElijahLynn (Elijah Lynn, myself, web developer) https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835 https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835 (Koushik Dutta, Android dev) https://plus.google.com/+JonoBaconProfile https://plus.google.com/+JonoBaconProfile (Jono Bacon, former community manager for Ubuntu) https://plus.google.com/+ChrisWeber https://plus.google.com/+ChrisWeber (web developer) https://plus.google.com/110043970153071176315 https://plus.google.com/110043970153071176315 (Chad McCullough, Linux/BSD guy) https://plus.google.com/+UrsHölzle https://plus.google.com/+UrsHölzle (Sr. VP of Tech Infrastructure @ Google) https://plus.google.com/+DerekRoss https://plus.google.com/+DerekRoss (Phandroid) https://plus.google.com/+KirillGrouchnikov https://plus.google.com/+KirillGrouchnikov (User interface engineer on the Android project at Google) https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski (Author of Mobile First, Product Director @ Google) https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung (USB cable guy, Google) https://plus.google.com/+DaedTech https://plus.google.com/+DaedTech (Software Engineer, Writer) https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik (Performance Engineer at Google) https://plus.google.com/+DanielleBuckley https://plus.google.com/+DanielleBuckley (G+ Team at Google) https://plus.google.com/+ChetHaase https://plus.google.com/+ChetHaase (Sr. Software Engineer at Google) https://plus.google.com/+GoogleChromeDevelopers https://plus.google.com/+GoogleChromeDevelopers https://plus.google.com/+google https://plus.google.com/+google https://plus.google.com/+GoogleMaps https://plus.google.com/+GoogleMaps https://plus.google.com/+JonathanZacsh https://plus.google.com/+JonathanZacsh (Software Engineer) https://plus.google.com/+AddyOsmani https://plus.google.com/+AddyOsmani (Engineer at Google) https://plus.google.com/+DonnaPeplinskie https://plus.google.com/+DonnaPeplinskie (Front end developer) https://plus.google.com/+NityaNarasimhan https://plus.google.com/+NityaNarasimhan (Engineer, Consultant) https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson (author and maintainer of the Acid2 and Acid3 tests, Google) https://plus.google.com/+JeffreyZeldman https://plus.google.com/+JeffreyZeldman (A List Apart) Not active but still: https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage https://plus.google.com/+SergeyBrin https://plus.google.com/+SergeyBrin https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt (former CEO at Google) https://plus.google.com/+SundarPichai https://plus.google.com/+SundarPichai (CEO at Google)
wazoox 10y ago
The only social network I'm using is Google+. As long as the new version doesn't allow me to have 3 columns display on my PC, I'll stick with the old version.
slackoverflower 10y ago
The Apps for Work integration is going to be interesting. Google should just clone Slack and make Slack Plus tier features free on their service. That would literally steal thousands of communities and companies.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Isn't that the sort of logic that caused G+ to be made in the first place? Slack's value mostly comes from their brand not their product. Same as how Dropbox can provide a weak and expensive service but still be the goto choice for what it does.
iza 10y ago
At least the navigation is sane now which is a huge improvement.
wickedlogic 10y ago
/me loads page in full browser tab, notices google still limiting single column width to less than 1/4 of my screen, closed page. Still missing the basics.
msl09 10y ago
Am I the only one that's afraid of getting emotionally invested on any Google product(or product update) because of the fear that shortly after Google will announce that will discontinue development of that service? By the way, the new design looks great I just wished the performance could be better for Firefox. [Edited for clarification]
AStellersSeaCow 10y ago
There was this super weird club in my high school who went out to hospitals and gave long-term patients (mostly vegetables who were on indefinite life support) ghoulishly gaudy makeovers. They seemed to have no motivation in doing this "community service" beyond their own weird self-satisfaction. Didn't really seem worth challenging them over the utility/sanity of their efforts, but damned if anyone thought it was a good use of their time. Anyhow, what's this thread about?
- michaelvoz 10y ago
  This is not Reddit. Please keep comments high-effort and on topic.
  - TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
    It is weird that people on HN accept certain jokes, but downvote the rest to oblivion. I don't mind honestly so long as it isn't a tangent ala Reddit style
    - yitchelle 10y ago
      I had a similar feeling recently, so I did a "Ask HN" [0] but it seems that this is also uninteresting. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12393173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12393173
  - balls187 10y ago
    > This is not Reddit. Please keep comments high-effort and on topic. That doesn't appear to be one of the guidelines when commenting on HN. For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps ironically, making comments about "likening HN to Reddit" despite having a young account IS explicitly mentioned in the guidelines.
  - IntelMiner 10y ago
    Why do you equate people making relevant jokes to "Reddit"? Humor is fairly universal
pbarnes_1 10y ago
If anyone from Google+ is reading this: Please allow me to remove shit from my 'recommendations'. In between Android developer things which I like, I'm getting weird-ass pro-Trump BS that looks like Stormfront. I guess this stuff is all that's left on G+, but still. Not interested.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Google is awful for this, even if I block someone on youtube it still recommends them to me.
whatever_dude 10y ago
"Redesigned", and yet, this is what I see on my desktop: https://imagebin.ca/v/2tORL2z4J7LW https://imagebin.ca/v/2tORL2z4J7LW Seems like an awful waste of space.
- scholia 10y ago
  Exactly. I wish I could claim to be viewing a new wonderland of Google Plusness, but it ain't so... Of course, if you logged on, you'd also see your own profile pic. This is useful if you've forgotten who you are.
- pcurve 10y ago
  I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it. How can they not see a problem with this? Is everybody at Google using vintage Apple Macintosh Portrait Display? http://www.apple-forever.com/pix_big/34.jpg http://www.apple-forever.com/pix_big/34.jpg
- drusepth 10y ago
  Does it really default to the single-column layout? I've been using it for months now on 3-column so I guess I must have forgotten switching over. This is what I see on my desktop: http://i.imgur.com/dgBAaTK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dgBAaTK.jpg I 100% recommend switching over to 3 columns; not nearly the space-waster. The setting's in https://plus.google.com/settings https://plus.google.com/settings, ctrl+f "Restrict stream to single column layout on all screen sizes" (the design is especially bad on that page).
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    The layout in the screenshot is for single articles (the link in the OP). It's always a single, tiny column. Click the link and you'll see it. The setting you mention is only used in streams (e.g. a community, your home stream, etc). Your screenshot shows your stream, not the OP link.
jeffehobbs 10y ago
LOL at all the janky looking shortened links (http://goo.gl/this http://goo.gl/this) scattered throughout (http://goo.gl/that http://goo.gl/that) the announcement. If they’re looking for a place to improve (http://goo.gl/othrthng http://goo.gl/othrthng), that’s maybe a place to consider?
jonobird1 10y ago
They'd be better off pivoting rather than wasting time on redesigning something no one wants. /end brutality
appleflaxen 10y ago
It makes me so sad that products like picasa, sketchup, wave, and google labs projects like google sets got decomissioned, but google plus lives on. Meanwhile, they are trying to make the guber car service. It's hard to understand from the outside.
cromwellian 10y ago
Lots of posts in this thread are trying to find a "reason" for why G+ isn't beating FB. I think they're overlooking the obvious: Good Enuf + Path Dependency = Inertia. Simply put, the most amazing social network the world has ever seen, that executed perfectly on every front, is not going to suddenly displace FB. It's like asking why no one disrupted Windows pre-Web/pre-Mobile. Was it because alternative operating systems sucked? IMHO, the big chance anyone had to disrupt FB was a paradigm shift away from social news feeds. That paradigm shift arrived with photo sharing and messaging on mobile, where increasingly people were just sharing pictures and text messages privately. However, Zuckerberg saw that one coming and acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to head off any disruption. That shouldn't stop people from trying to innovate. But we should not regard being smaller than the leader as a failure. I use G+, Twitter, and FB, but I have the best conversations on G+. Twitter discussions are an exercise in frustration, and I find the signal/noise on FB to be worse. There's a benefit sometimes to having a smaller audience.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  This is also why Android still is winning over various better designed competitors. It's a clunky security nightmare with performance issues, but changing to another platform requires changing how you use your device, maybe finding different apps, etc.
  - cromwellian 10y ago
    You're like the only person I know who is a Windows Phone fanboy. Perhaps you missed the part where none of the competitors were open source, or cheap to license, and shipped years later (Windows Phone in 2010, Android in 2008). The world is flooded with Android for the same reason it's flooded with Linux now, and not Windows kernel devices. Perhaps if Ballmer had stopped trying to make OS licensing a profit center on mobile, history would have been different.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Not really a fanboy, just... finally no longer fighting with my phone. It's faster, it's more secure, it's supported properly by the developer. I'd honestly probably rather an Ubuntu phone or a Tizen phone or something, but Windows is the only third option I currently have on my carrier. And there's plenty of open source options out there now too, but it requires people step away from the coddled embrace of the existing monopolist.
makecheck 10y ago
Hmmmm…they’ve changed something so that if I log into Google+ in one tab, I must remain logged into Google in all other tabs. If not, when returning to the Google+ tab, it does the obnoxious Facebook thing of “You must log in to continue.”. And it’s not like I logged out of Google+; I logged out of some completely unrelated Google page (or at least, it sure should have been unrelated). I want my context to be preserved in the tab that I’m in. I didn’t “log out” of Google+ so I should be logged-in still. These are the basics. Before they Material-Design-the-hell-out-of everything, maybe they should create a foundation that works properly.
balls187 10y ago
What the heck. This looks terrible in firefox.
balls187 10y ago
What the heck. This looks terrible in firefox. http://prntscr.com/ccb22r http://prntscr.com/ccb22r
chrsstrm 10y ago
If anyone from Google is listening, this is probably a better place to vent than submitting a support ticket. I don't care what it looks like, +'s functionality has been broken for me for almost a year and it has killed how my entire family uses it. I went through great pains to teach my family to not send photos and videos over email. We all had Gmail accounts and we all used the Google Photos camera sync so it seemed like a great idea to teach them to share content within a Circle in +. It worked great for a while until out of nowhere I could no longer see any of my sister's posts. I went through both her and my account many times looking for permissions issues or errant blocks and found nothing. I submitted multiple support issues from both her account and mine and nothing. (And on a side note, I like the support feature that allows you to screenshot and annotate the issue you are having, but 90% of all issues I have in + are inside a modal window, which cannot be screenshot. You literally cannot report issues that happen inside a modal window, WTF?). My sister generated the majority of the content my family Circle consumed and now that she can't be seen, our entire usage of + has all but stopped. People have reverted back to emailing photos and videos and we're right back where we started... I don't care what it looks like, if it doesn't work, I won't use it. I also used the Hangouts on Air feature extensively and never understood why it had to be originated in + and why you _had_ to invite people. The best use case for this tool was to do screen recording that was automatically imported into YouTube but getting the right combination of + account and YouTube account and making sure you were authorized to use Hangouts on Air with YouTube was incredibly frustrating. Hopefully the new flow using YouTube Live will allow going on-air without forcing you to invite an audience. And while I'm at it - suggesting people join Communities but hiding the fact that there are sub-topics in these communities was a huge dark pattern I hated. I joined the Linux community thinking I would see some interesting packages or hacks or discussions and all I found was perpetual posting of Wind0w$ is teh Suck memes and obvious spam. The _majority_ of my interactions on + was marking posts as spam and blocking users hoping content would improve, and it never did. It wasn't until much later that I figured out I could unsubscribe from sub-topics, if I could only find where they were listed.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Robert Scoble on G+ Noise controls, 2011: "Why yo daddy won't use Google+: no noise control" http://scobleizer.com/why-yo-daddy-wont-use-google-no-noise-control/ http://scobleizer.com/why-yo-daddy-wont-use-google-no-noise-... Blocking fuckwits helps, but you've got to be tremendously brutal about it. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...
zatkin 10y ago
>Last year we completely re-wrote the Google+ Web app from scratch. Rather than rebuild every nook and cranny that developed over the five year history of Google+, we started with a clean slate of the features people used the most (based on our data & research). We then released this preview version to collect feedback and find out what people missed the most of what we left out. Proof that Google+ 1.0 was an enormous flop. https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski/posts/Zcn7bDAwqmm https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski/posts/Zcn7bDAwqmm
thr0waway1239 10y ago
Is it just me, or do other people feel like the press release was translated into English from a different language? As if it wasn't already hard enough to use Google Plus, even their press release is hard to read.
dvh 10y ago
Whenever someone posts goo.gl shortened links, I look who reads it (it's public data): https://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/Yn6mjA/all_time https://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/Yn6mjA/all_time
HelloNurse 10y ago
The Google+ team appears scrambling to address user feedback: clicking the search bar I got the obnoxious page of featured content replacing the page I was reading, but it had a blocking popup that, when clicked, bounced me to the featured collections page. Not only Google+ knows what I should be reading better than me, but their left hand knows better than their right hand!
rdslw 10y ago
Not many noticing that this redesign removed Events functionality and Google confirmed they have NO plans to reintroduce it. And is playing with addictive while not needed 'content discovery'. In summary: * yet another redesign * mobile centric (looks like p on desktop) * removes important features (events, hangouts tight integration) * forces users into addictive content-discovery * works only now, the moment masses join it, lolcats will ruin it Sorry, content discovery has NO value for humans at the level we have it currently. Content is everywhere. It's easy to find valuable content. Whole this content discovery concept is riding on the addictive behaviour of humans: I'm losing everything I dont know about, so I need to scroll newstream every 5 minutes. While it serves one purpose: page impressions stimulated by habbit/addiction. It harms us. We don't need content discovery. Corpos need our eyeballs.
edwinyzh 10y ago
Hello G+ team, please give me code syntax highlighting. Thanks.
TheHippo 10y ago
No events anymore. This was one of the most useful features that G+ had.
lolive 10y ago
What is Google+?
ElijahLynn 10y ago
After having actually used the new G+ for a couple hours, the speed is amazing, especially on the Brave browser (probably because I don't have extensions slowing it down). Plus the ability to put links and images in comments finally brings that part on par with Twitter. I think the people who do use G+ are going to use it a hell of a lot more now that it is so much faster. Plus the people who get frustrated by Twitter's 140 character limit from time to time may be easily swayed.

194 points by uptown 10y ago

Fullscreen on my 16x9 display wastes the clear majority of screen space. Is having a single, centered column considered superior to alternatives?

TillE 10y ago
Twitter has the same sort of design, but I think Google+ really draws attention to the vast ocean of whitespace by leaving a column all the way on the left. Twitter has three columns when you load the page, but then just one as you scroll down. It doesn't look as strange.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
awesomerobot 10y ago
Banner blindness has ruined a lot of potential multi-column experiences from some basic eye tracking studies that I've done on multi-column layouts in the past. Also... you can make the same comment about hacker news, yet here we are.
- strictnein 10y ago
  HN is one column, but it's 85% of the page. G+ content is a fixed 530px.
  - klodolph 10y ago
    HN only works because the text here is short. Try reading longer posts in a maximized window. Readability studies consistently tell us that optimum column width, for readibility, is something like 50-75 characters wide (including spaces). You can get by with more width for short text like HN comments.
patmcguire 10y ago
Pinterest is the only site I've seen that will fill whatever screen size you throw at it, like God intended.
- kasbah 10y ago
  What do you think of my design? https://kitnic.it/ https://kitnic.it/
et-al 10y ago
This is essentially a mobile-first site. Chalk it up to lazy programmers or UX folks who didn't code/design a responsive site properly.
keithnz 10y ago
are you sure you are looking at the right version? mine uses most of the space. There's a setting :- Stream Restrict stream to single-column layout on all screen sizes do you have this on?

fiveoak 10y ago

It's too bad that Google+ never really caught on, but I'm not sure if redesigning it is enough to fix that.

ajkjk 10y ago
I don't think that's too bad. I didn't think it was a good product, and it didn't deserve to do well just because Google threw their weight behind it.
- grendelt 10y ago
  I wish they'd wake up and throw Plus on the pile with Wave.
  - fizzbatter 10y ago
    I actually thought Wave had potential though. Sure, it had tons of flaws, but it was at least trying something new. Plus is just so.. well, not new. And this is coming from someone who used Plus for quite a while (year or two). To me, Wave felt shut down too early.. and of course, way over hyped. By comparison to Wave, i'm shocked Plus still exists.
    - mxuribe 10y ago
      You read my mind! :-)
    - tangue 10y ago
      Wave wasn't overhyped if you consider how successful products like Slack are today.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      I felt like Google had a lot of very interesting social tools between Wave, Reader, Talk, and Buzz (remember that?). Consolidating that wasn't a bad idea, had they picked the best innovations and smartest social groups from all three of them. Unfortunately, Plus felt more like taking the worst of all three (Buzz's forced inclusion, for instance) and ignoring any of the innovation (Wave, especially), reverence for internet standards (Reader based on RSS, Wave and Talk based on XMPP to different extents), or existing social groups (Reader had a somewhat active social scene before Plus that could not survive the transition, especially the shutdown of Reader itself). There's a sense there of some hostility between the groups involved at the time and something of a hostility against the "techie-first" nature of the company before plus. I'm one of the ones that question if Google lost a lot of its "soul" in building Plus and trying to be more like Facebook. I figure there's an alternate universe out there where something like Plus started as a smarter merger of Wave and Reader, and I'm curious what that would have looked like.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

XzetaU8 10y ago

"Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" was never more apt than now.

audleman 10y ago
thread
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

znpy 10y ago

Google+ shows "hot on google+ right now", and it's basically stuff that has gone very famous in south korea but makes no sense to me. And it comes from a guy (i think, because the name is written in hangul characters) that I am NOT following. I am writing some feedback hoping that some googler will read this and improve something..

hackernews2000 10y ago
Add more friends to your circles have better fine-tuned suggestions.
- znpy 10y ago
  Besides the fact that I already have 15-20 friends that are more than enough to do some testing, I am NOT going to tell anyone they can reach me on google plus until I understand how it works and am satisfied with it. Google is apparently working very hard to fail at both.
znpy 10y ago
* The search feature is just awful * The search features suggests a lot of rubbish even before i started searching * the whole interface is still slow * When I click on "communities" on the left panel, i get redirected to the community suggestion page, while I expected to see the communities of which i am part. Also, the suggestion are completely messed up. * when i click on "communities" and am brought to the suggestion page, clicking on the "member" link (that i guess, should show me the communities i am part of) does nothing at all. * it is in general very very hard to understand what post comes from where, and this makes it very hard to use google plus more than the usual "oh crap i opened it again, how do i close it?" * Opon a click to write a post, an overlay with a popup window is opened instear of just letting me write. The popup opening is slow as the other stuff. * did i mention the whole thing is slow ?
- znpy 10y ago
  Sharing a text post is awful: * The default option for sharing is "Public" (oh hell no) * Otherwise you can "add to a collection" (and wtf is a collection in google plus terms now?) * in order to select a community or a circle (circles should be the hot stuff of Google+, you have to make two more steps ("See more", scroll).

awesomerobot 10y ago

What's it like to work on the Google+ team? are they all kind of blindly into it, or is there any sort of "yeah yeah, we know" there? I guess it's an exciting challenge maybe?

znpy 10y ago
it would be fun to know. I wonder if they perform any actual user testing, when they pick truly random users and ask their feeling about google plus.
- dmoy 10y ago
  You can't strongarm a truly random sample. Alas, hah. For some stuff you have to ask people to come on site, which tends to self select a bit. Sometimes you get... interesting folks. (Just talking generally about onsite user testing, not involved with G+ in any way)
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Initially Google+ was Google's big foray into social networking and while it gained users it never grew to the size of a Facebook, Twitter or even MySpace. But nowadays it's kept that capability along with bringing in aging Google features such as communities (it seems clear to me that communities will eventually only live in Google+). From the outside looking in it looks to me like Google+ is going to be the hub in which users can interact with all of Google's properties that have a mechanism to work with and collaborate with other, public users. They likely still have millions of users. In comparison to Facebook sure it's a massive failure. But I'm of the opinion that isn't an accurate nor useful comparison.
- awesomerobot 10y ago
  > From the outside looking in it looks to me like Google+ is going to be the hub in which users can interact with all of Google's properties that have a mechanism to work with and collaborate with other, public users. They likely still have millions of users. Yes, but we're talking maybe about .5% of all Google accounts actively use Google+... what's their goal at this point? 1%? is it a "if we build it, eventually they might come" scenario?

katpas 10y ago

I've always wondered why Google+ did so badly. I love google apps for everything but social. Seems like a missed opportunity to make something that moves away from Facebook as the norm.

sevenless 10y ago
Mostly network effects/inertia. And it didn't help that Google seemed to be quite pushy about getting people to sign up.
- dangerlibrary 10y ago
  Also, circles are a terrible metaphor. Someone I don't know added me to their circles. What the hell does that even mean? Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post? Do they see what I post? Why wasn't I asked for my permission? I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post. Who are they and what do they want? This sucks, I'm leaving.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    I don't know I thought the circle metaphor was genius. It's quite the common phrase to have a circle of friends or a trusted circle of advisors, etc. List, like what Facebook and Twitter use, seems so...I don't know machine like but circle is a very common part of the vernacular.
    - dangerlibrary 10y ago
      As a means of organizing one's friends into groups that only see subsets of what you post, it's not bad. As the sole means of creating a directed social graph, it's awful.
  - jpfed 10y ago
    >What the hell does that even mean? It means they want to see stuff you post, and/or post stuff that (if you circle them back) you will see. >Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post? What? No. That would be super dumb. >Do they see what I post? If it's public or if you post it to a circle that includes them. >Why wasn't I asked for my permission? Because they haven't been granted any special powers by virtue of adding you to a circle. >I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post. Then don't post publicly- choose a more limited audience to post to. >Who are they and what do they want? Go to their profile page and find out, if you care. But you probably don't- it's safe to ignore them.

HelloNurse 10y ago

I enabled two-column mode and I keep the menu open for company, so my screen is "only" about 1/3 to 1/4 empty and wasted. But this is the best case: if I click the post age (obvious...) I can switch to a single-post page. More exactly, I can make everything else disappear; on my 1600x900 screen the width of the post DIV increases from 475 to 530 pixels and text and comments are generously expanded. But there's more! If I click inside the search bar, i get a 2 seconds pause to load "featured collections", "featured communities", "Suggested People & Pages" and "Suggested Posts" REPLACING THE PAGE I'M ON because Google clearly knows better.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

And now we have come full circle. The new Google+ looks like crap in my web browser because literally over 50% of the page is useless grey pixels. The reason is that the page design assumes its on a mobile phone which its somewhat unique tall portrait orientation. And sure enough, looking at the page on my phone it looks a bit flat but it works well. So now we are in a place in the web where browser users get the crappy UX experience because someone spent all their time focused on the other community and really didn't bother to make their pages responsive to both.

notatoad 10y ago
the individual post pages contain a lot of whitespace, yes. But text looks better at a narrower width. what do you want them to do, fill up the gutters with ads just to colour your pixels? the main index page wraps nicely to multiple columns when you're on a larger screen.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  If I were designing it I would have it either switch to multiple columns when the size of the white space got too large, or I would have the columns widen with the page. The latter results in a sort of 'tweetlike' appearance for a lot of G+ posts as they are quite short, the former makes it more 'newspaper' style and introduces the question of how you move from the bottom left to the top right. If you do it with the same posting it makes scrolling challenging, if you do it with multiple postings it makes the user scroll up and down to see the top and bottom. Then again, there is a really useful layout that folks have been using forever where you put summaries on the left and content expands in boxes on the right. But then it looks just like gmail or something, except that is exactly what it is "group email". Gooogle plus seems confused about what it is, is it twitter ? is it facebook? is it usenet? is it email? Fix its multiple personality disorder and the design will fall out of that naturally.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10y ago

nilved 10y ago

I'm disappointed to see that Google is still pushing +. I almost left the platform when they tried to jam it down my throat last time, and it seemed as though they'd come to their senses and shuttered that misguided project. I'm genuinely surprised to see that people are still working on it.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
There's actually been a huge changeover in Google+ in the last year. Luke Wroblewski is the new product director there, and he's absolutely busted up some of Google's worst ideas of design. Another huge thing he's done is made the change and feedback process for Google+ extremely public, whereas since 2011, it's primarily been "people notice something changed" as with most Google sites, and now we get changelogs from the man. I absolutely recommend people check out what he posts: https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski is his G+, but he's actually surprisingly active on LinkedIn of all places, and I'm pretty sure Twitter as well.
- iwintermute 10y ago
  in his bio on G+: "Humanizing technology. Currently at Google. Previously: Mobile First" There's some irony in that, given G+ design really looks like 'mobile first'

Rygu 10y ago

The goo.gl short URLs in (parentheses) are really annoying. They totally hide the content behind the links.

vosper 10y ago
And why are they even visible? There's no value in seeing the link URL, so they should just make the relevant text the link like everyone in the world does.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  Google+ doesn't support links-with-titles, even though Gmail, Docs, and Sites do. (Neither does Facebook)
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Not to mention that this isn't Twitter there is no text limit and no reason to use godawful mysterious short urls.

kin 10y ago

Home is like my Facebook feed, except with even less of my friends and even more ads (only because I follow companies). Collections is like following random Pinterest boards created by other people. I don't know about others, but I like to follow official things, or things that have the most followers but none of that info seems to be surfaced. Featured really means nothing to me. Is it hand-picked? Randomly generated featured? Are they paid to be featured? Communities are cool but it's really hard nowadays to beat the communities in subreddits. Anonymous users seem to give a lot more to the community in an unselfish manner vs. Google+ users seem to post in communities in a self-promoting manner. This could just be anecdotal and my subjective viewpoint but that's what I see. I honestly don't know how Google can do social, but I'm glad they're trying different things. Hopefully they try something new. Random thought: I find Slack very similar to Google Wave.

Queue29 10y ago

This looks absolutely horrible on a 4k monitor http://i.imgur.com/jSlw0St.png http://i.imgur.com/jSlw0St.png

arenaninja 10y ago
"Mobile first, desktop never"
jklinger410 10y ago
Sometimes I feel like Google's design practices are on a death spiral.
- chjohasbrouck 10y ago
  I've always thought that maybe they optimize their designs specifically for A/B testability. If everything is just kind of flat and grey, there's less noise, and it's easier to write A/B tests that produce meaningful results. That also means every product is flat and grey, though. It could also just be a side-effect of having to appeal to every person on the planet, though. Sort of the design equivalent of a good politician, appealing to the lowest common denominator in all of us. Nothing to object to, but also nothing to love. Just flat and grey, with clearly displayed content and A/B optimized calls to action. I find it incredibly boring and I'm getting tired of them rolling out new products that all look and feel exactly the same, but I suspect they have numbers that show any big design change would just be leaving money on the table.
  - unabst 10y ago
    It's because their guidelines are based on look and feel (aka "design"), not user experience or use case. They basically have no guidelines for the experience. It's all colors, motion, and size. Each product team then goes off and reinvents the experience, and decides to sacrifice the look and feel guidelines in the process. The Google+ page doesn't even appear to have any breakpoints, which is against their own guidelines: https://material.google.com/layout/responsive-ui.html# https://material.google.com/layout/responsive-ui.html# Maybe those gutters are reserved for ads?

newscracker 10y ago

Several years on and we still have to deal with the fact that we cannot have good names for our URLs ("vanity URL" or "custom URL" or whatever else you'd want to call it). Want to share your profile with others? Here's a Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to share your Google+ community's link with others? Here's another Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to share your Google+ page's link? Here's yet another Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to shorten these links? Use the built-in shortener and get a shortened-yet-gibberish-like-link. Want to simplify these links for sharing using meaningful names in the URL so people can actually remember it? Oh, then just use bit.ly (or another better URL shortener) and create a custom one with whatever name you like (assuming it's available on bit.ly)! How hard is it to provide custom URLs? Does it cost Google millions of dollars to do this? Does it make maintenance of Google+ a lot more expensive? Facebook provides custom names to be used in URLs for one's profile, for pages, and for groups (first come first served and all that, of course). On Google+ you can do this for your profile (?) after you meet some primitive pre-conditions. For something that's supposedly social, I'm deeply disappointed with how Google+ has been developed (read neglected) over time. I like some aspects of G+ (like the layout, font, font sizes, etc.), but two things that are grating are the lack of custom URLs and the unintuitive navigation scheme (compared to Facebook). I still post to G+ once in a while (although, there's really no audience there) and look for improvements with the hope that I can start nudging people away from Facebook and get more traction on an alternative platform (another walled garden, but at least not as evil, IMO). It's sad, for me, that even long wait times don't show much for progress. If the strategy seemed convoluted while Vic Gundotra was managing it, his departure left the platform languishing as if it were a part time project. Anyone from the Google+ team reading this - firstly, please bring in basic stuff to the platform that's important for people to share, and secondly, please copy Facebook shamelessly in whatever it's doing well for user experience. Lastly, thanks a lot for (reverting to and) retaining the freedom of users to use pseudonyms on the platform!

delroth 10y ago
https://google.com/+PierreBourdon https://google.com/+PierreBourdon

hackuser 10y ago

To use it, do I still need to share my real identity with Google? With the world? If so, is that just policy or is it enforced somehow?

newscracker 10y ago
The real names policy on Google+ was long removed. You can use any pseudonym and don't have to share your real identity. In this respect, it's definitely better than Facebook.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Thanks. I should have asked above: Do they my phone number (ostensibly for 2FA)?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    You will be continuously nagged for it. If you use the Android platform, I suspect that Android device UUIDs may be transferred via Chrome or App usage. This has some benefits -- Google have quite good login-pattern tracking, and alert for logins on new devices (or devices not used for a time). OTOH, it is also, quite obviously, a mechanism for tracking patterns of use across IPs, locations, devices, etc.
  - newscracker 10y ago
    It's not necessary to provide your phone number if you don't want to. It does not force you to do that, although for account recovery purposes (getting access back to an account if it's compromised), it will bother you once in a while to add your phone number as a recovery mechanism. I see this request coming with plain Gmail and Yahoo Mail too quite often, and just choose to skip it whenever asked.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Officially, not since July of 2014 -- two years ago. Unofficially, pseudonyms were often, though not always, tolerated before that. http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reverses-real-names-policy-apologizes/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reverses-real-names-poli...

neximo64 10y ago

Odd to see Google using a brute force strategy for this. They kill off their wonderful products and keep the bogus ones.

runn1ng 10y ago

I literally cannot scroll the post itself down. It's stuck no matter what I do, so I will forever see just the first half of the article. I usually hate one-note comments about the web platform of the postings, but since this is a blogpost about Google Plus webdesign, hosted on Google Plus... I guess it's telling. No, I will not start using it again.

probably_wrong 10y ago

I wish Google had stuck to their guns, called Google+ a social network, and earned users over time. Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!", and turned into... whatever it is they are doing today. They could have been the Facebook that is not Facebook, or in Randall Munroe's words, "all I really wanted"[1]. Too bad. [1] https://www.xkcd.com/918/ https://www.xkcd.com/918/

1_2__3 10y ago
Put perhaps a bit glibly, turns out "we're freaking terrified of Facebook" is not a product strategy. At the end of the day this was an executive's pet project in response to what he considered an existential crisis to Googles future. While certainly motivating, that doesn't result in focused or quality services.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 10y ago
> I wish Google had stuck to their guns, called Google+ a social network, and earned users over time. But that wouldn't be sticking to their guns; from their very beginning, Google+ was overtly described as an identity service and social layer tying together Google's consumer services, with the Facebook-like social interface just one feature. (If anything, they've gone further in the direction you seem to prefer of designating G+ as a social network rather than "sticking to their guns", by taking everything that's not the Facebook-like social interface and ripping the G+ branding off of it.) > Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!" Actually, I think what they decided is that either Facebook wasn't the existential threat to Google that motivated what was described at the time as a "bet the company" approach, or that at least, if it wasn't, that it was so more because of the cluster of services that it might expand into and which Google was better prepared to compete directly with (and often be ahead of), and not a commonly-branded suite centered around a social feed app. So both the G+ social feed app and the G+ branding applied to a bunch of other things became a lot less important in Google's strategy.

Raphmedia 10y ago

My main issue with G+ is that every time I get back on it (few time a year) the layout is so different that I get tired and leave after scratching the surface...

millstone 10y ago

When I click on the Search field to type something, it loads a completely different page. Very unexpected and confusing.

electic 10y ago

Mobile and web aside, the amount of dead space in each of these pages is absurd. A lot of the pixels on the screen are just white or grey. One would argue, this is one of the major drawbacks of material design.

mindcrime 10y ago
For FSM's sake, tell me about it. I don't know why in the world Google can't figure this out. All that dead space is absolutely horrid. For the love of FSM, why can't they make the middle column wide enough to use most of that space, and/or fill the rest with something useful.

leshow 10y ago

Why is it only using 20% of my screen? the vast majority of the page is a grey background

criddell 10y ago
Mobile first. Desktop... some day.

ElijahLynn 10y ago

As a daily user of G+, this is great news! I am so tired of micromanaging characters on Twitter. I just want to express an idea sometimes without using extra CPU cycles. I only have so many of those available each day and I don't want to use them on Twitter. It just needs more users. It is great to follow developers on. Here is a seed list of active G+ users that may be relevant to you (remember how empty it was when you first signed up for Twitter? You had to follow some seed people...): https://plus.google.com/+ElijahLynn https://plus.google.com/+ElijahLynn (Elijah Lynn, myself, web developer) https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835 https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835 (Koushik Dutta, Android dev) https://plus.google.com/+JonoBaconProfile https://plus.google.com/+JonoBaconProfile (Jono Bacon, former community manager for Ubuntu) https://plus.google.com/+ChrisWeber https://plus.google.com/+ChrisWeber (web developer) https://plus.google.com/110043970153071176315 https://plus.google.com/110043970153071176315 (Chad McCullough, Linux/BSD guy) https://plus.google.com/+UrsHölzle https://plus.google.com/+UrsHölzle (Sr. VP of Tech Infrastructure @ Google) https://plus.google.com/+DerekRoss https://plus.google.com/+DerekRoss (Phandroid) https://plus.google.com/+KirillGrouchnikov https://plus.google.com/+KirillGrouchnikov (User interface engineer on the Android project at Google) https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski (Author of Mobile First, Product Director @ Google) https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung (USB cable guy, Google) https://plus.google.com/+DaedTech https://plus.google.com/+DaedTech (Software Engineer, Writer) https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik (Performance Engineer at Google) https://plus.google.com/+DanielleBuckley https://plus.google.com/+DanielleBuckley (G+ Team at Google) https://plus.google.com/+ChetHaase https://plus.google.com/+ChetHaase (Sr. Software Engineer at Google) https://plus.google.com/+GoogleChromeDevelopers https://plus.google.com/+GoogleChromeDevelopers https://plus.google.com/+google https://plus.google.com/+google https://plus.google.com/+GoogleMaps https://plus.google.com/+GoogleMaps https://plus.google.com/+JonathanZacsh https://plus.google.com/+JonathanZacsh (Software Engineer) https://plus.google.com/+AddyOsmani https://plus.google.com/+AddyOsmani (Engineer at Google) https://plus.google.com/+DonnaPeplinskie https://plus.google.com/+DonnaPeplinskie (Front end developer) https://plus.google.com/+NityaNarasimhan https://plus.google.com/+NityaNarasimhan (Engineer, Consultant) https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson (author and maintainer of the Acid2 and Acid3 tests, Google) https://plus.google.com/+JeffreyZeldman https://plus.google.com/+JeffreyZeldman (A List Apart) Not active but still: https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage https://plus.google.com/+SergeyBrin https://plus.google.com/+SergeyBrin https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt (former CEO at Google) https://plus.google.com/+SundarPichai https://plus.google.com/+SundarPichai (CEO at Google)

wazoox 10y ago

The only social network I'm using is Google+. As long as the new version doesn't allow me to have 3 columns display on my PC, I'll stick with the old version.

slackoverflower 10y ago

The Apps for Work integration is going to be interesting. Google should just clone Slack and make Slack Plus tier features free on their service. That would literally steal thousands of communities and companies.

intoverflow2 10y ago
Isn't that the sort of logic that caused G+ to be made in the first place? Slack's value mostly comes from their brand not their product. Same as how Dropbox can provide a weak and expensive service but still be the goto choice for what it does.

iza 10y ago

At least the navigation is sane now which is a huge improvement.

wickedlogic 10y ago

/me loads page in full browser tab, notices google still limiting single column width to less than 1/4 of my screen, closed page. Still missing the basics.

msl09 10y ago

Am I the only one that's afraid of getting emotionally invested on any Google product(or product update) because of the fear that shortly after Google will announce that will discontinue development of that service? By the way, the new design looks great I just wished the performance could be better for Firefox. [Edited for clarification]

AStellersSeaCow 10y ago

There was this super weird club in my high school who went out to hospitals and gave long-term patients (mostly vegetables who were on indefinite life support) ghoulishly gaudy makeovers. They seemed to have no motivation in doing this "community service" beyond their own weird self-satisfaction. Didn't really seem worth challenging them over the utility/sanity of their efforts, but damned if anyone thought it was a good use of their time. Anyhow, what's this thread about?

michaelvoz 10y ago
This is not Reddit. Please keep comments high-effort and on topic.
- TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
  It is weird that people on HN accept certain jokes, but downvote the rest to oblivion. I don't mind honestly so long as it isn't a tangent ala Reddit style
  - yitchelle 10y ago
    I had a similar feeling recently, so I did a "Ask HN" [0] but it seems that this is also uninteresting. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12393173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12393173
- balls187 10y ago
  > This is not Reddit. Please keep comments high-effort and on topic. That doesn't appear to be one of the guidelines when commenting on HN. For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps ironically, making comments about "likening HN to Reddit" despite having a young account IS explicitly mentioned in the guidelines.
- IntelMiner 10y ago
  Why do you equate people making relevant jokes to "Reddit"? Humor is fairly universal

pbarnes_1 10y ago

If anyone from Google+ is reading this: Please allow me to remove shit from my 'recommendations'. In between Android developer things which I like, I'm getting weird-ass pro-Trump BS that looks like Stormfront. I guess this stuff is all that's left on G+, but still. Not interested.

intoverflow2 10y ago
Google is awful for this, even if I block someone on youtube it still recommends them to me.

whatever_dude 10y ago

"Redesigned", and yet, this is what I see on my desktop: https://imagebin.ca/v/2tORL2z4J7LW https://imagebin.ca/v/2tORL2z4J7LW Seems like an awful waste of space.

scholia 10y ago
Exactly. I wish I could claim to be viewing a new wonderland of Google Plusness, but it ain't so... Of course, if you logged on, you'd also see your own profile pic. This is useful if you've forgotten who you are.
pcurve 10y ago
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it. How can they not see a problem with this? Is everybody at Google using vintage Apple Macintosh Portrait Display? http://www.apple-forever.com/pix_big/34.jpg http://www.apple-forever.com/pix_big/34.jpg
drusepth 10y ago
Does it really default to the single-column layout? I've been using it for months now on 3-column so I guess I must have forgotten switching over. This is what I see on my desktop: http://i.imgur.com/dgBAaTK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dgBAaTK.jpg I 100% recommend switching over to 3 columns; not nearly the space-waster. The setting's in https://plus.google.com/settings https://plus.google.com/settings, ctrl+f "Restrict stream to single column layout on all screen sizes" (the design is especially bad on that page).
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  The layout in the screenshot is for single articles (the link in the OP). It's always a single, tiny column. Click the link and you'll see it. The setting you mention is only used in streams (e.g. a community, your home stream, etc). Your screenshot shows your stream, not the OP link.

jeffehobbs 10y ago

LOL at all the janky looking shortened links (http://goo.gl/this http://goo.gl/this) scattered throughout (http://goo.gl/that http://goo.gl/that) the announcement. If they’re looking for a place to improve (http://goo.gl/othrthng http://goo.gl/othrthng), that’s maybe a place to consider?

jonobird1 10y ago

They'd be better off pivoting rather than wasting time on redesigning something no one wants. /end brutality

appleflaxen 10y ago

It makes me so sad that products like picasa, sketchup, wave, and google labs projects like google sets got decomissioned, but google plus lives on. Meanwhile, they are trying to make the guber car service. It's hard to understand from the outside.

cromwellian 10y ago

Lots of posts in this thread are trying to find a "reason" for why G+ isn't beating FB. I think they're overlooking the obvious: Good Enuf + Path Dependency = Inertia. Simply put, the most amazing social network the world has ever seen, that executed perfectly on every front, is not going to suddenly displace FB. It's like asking why no one disrupted Windows pre-Web/pre-Mobile. Was it because alternative operating systems sucked? IMHO, the big chance anyone had to disrupt FB was a paradigm shift away from social news feeds. That paradigm shift arrived with photo sharing and messaging on mobile, where increasingly people were just sharing pictures and text messages privately. However, Zuckerberg saw that one coming and acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to head off any disruption. That shouldn't stop people from trying to innovate. But we should not regard being smaller than the leader as a failure. I use G+, Twitter, and FB, but I have the best conversations on G+. Twitter discussions are an exercise in frustration, and I find the signal/noise on FB to be worse. There's a benefit sometimes to having a smaller audience.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
This is also why Android still is winning over various better designed competitors. It's a clunky security nightmare with performance issues, but changing to another platform requires changing how you use your device, maybe finding different apps, etc.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  You're like the only person I know who is a Windows Phone fanboy. Perhaps you missed the part where none of the competitors were open source, or cheap to license, and shipped years later (Windows Phone in 2010, Android in 2008). The world is flooded with Android for the same reason it's flooded with Linux now, and not Windows kernel devices. Perhaps if Ballmer had stopped trying to make OS licensing a profit center on mobile, history would have been different.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Not really a fanboy, just... finally no longer fighting with my phone. It's faster, it's more secure, it's supported properly by the developer. I'd honestly probably rather an Ubuntu phone or a Tizen phone or something, but Windows is the only third option I currently have on my carrier. And there's plenty of open source options out there now too, but it requires people step away from the coddled embrace of the existing monopolist.

makecheck 10y ago

Hmmmm…they’ve changed something so that if I log into Google+ in one tab, I must remain logged into Google in all other tabs. If not, when returning to the Google+ tab, it does the obnoxious Facebook thing of “You must log in to continue.”. And it’s not like I logged out of Google+; I logged out of some completely unrelated Google page (or at least, it sure should have been unrelated). I want my context to be preserved in the tab that I’m in. I didn’t “log out” of Google+ so I should be logged-in still. These are the basics. Before they Material-Design-the-hell-out-of everything, maybe they should create a foundation that works properly.

balls187 10y ago

What the heck. This looks terrible in firefox.

balls187 10y ago

What the heck. This looks terrible in firefox. http://prntscr.com/ccb22r http://prntscr.com/ccb22r

chrsstrm 10y ago

If anyone from Google is listening, this is probably a better place to vent than submitting a support ticket. I don't care what it looks like, +'s functionality has been broken for me for almost a year and it has killed how my entire family uses it. I went through great pains to teach my family to not send photos and videos over email. We all had Gmail accounts and we all used the Google Photos camera sync so it seemed like a great idea to teach them to share content within a Circle in +. It worked great for a while until out of nowhere I could no longer see any of my sister's posts. I went through both her and my account many times looking for permissions issues or errant blocks and found nothing. I submitted multiple support issues from both her account and mine and nothing. (And on a side note, I like the support feature that allows you to screenshot and annotate the issue you are having, but 90% of all issues I have in + are inside a modal window, which cannot be screenshot. You literally cannot report issues that happen inside a modal window, WTF?). My sister generated the majority of the content my family Circle consumed and now that she can't be seen, our entire usage of + has all but stopped. People have reverted back to emailing photos and videos and we're right back where we started... I don't care what it looks like, if it doesn't work, I won't use it. I also used the Hangouts on Air feature extensively and never understood why it had to be originated in + and why you _had_ to invite people. The best use case for this tool was to do screen recording that was automatically imported into YouTube but getting the right combination of + account and YouTube account and making sure you were authorized to use Hangouts on Air with YouTube was incredibly frustrating. Hopefully the new flow using YouTube Live will allow going on-air without forcing you to invite an audience. And while I'm at it - suggesting people join Communities but hiding the fact that there are sub-topics in these communities was a huge dark pattern I hated. I joined the Linux community thinking I would see some interesting packages or hacks or discussions and all I found was perpetual posting of Wind0w$ is teh Suck memes and obvious spam. The _majority_ of my interactions on + was marking posts as spam and blocking users hoping content would improve, and it never did. It wasn't until much later that I figured out I could unsubscribe from sub-topics, if I could only find where they were listed.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Robert Scoble on G+ Noise controls, 2011: "Why yo daddy won't use Google+: no noise control" http://scobleizer.com/why-yo-daddy-wont-use-google-no-noise-control/ http://scobleizer.com/why-yo-daddy-wont-use-google-no-noise-... Blocking fuckwits helps, but you've got to be tremendously brutal about it. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

zatkin 10y ago

>Last year we completely re-wrote the Google+ Web app from scratch. Rather than rebuild every nook and cranny that developed over the five year history of Google+, we started with a clean slate of the features people used the most (based on our data & research). We then released this preview version to collect feedback and find out what people missed the most of what we left out. Proof that Google+ 1.0 was an enormous flop. https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski/posts/Zcn7bDAwqmm https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski/posts/Zcn7bDAwqmm

thr0waway1239 10y ago

Is it just me, or do other people feel like the press release was translated into English from a different language? As if it wasn't already hard enough to use Google Plus, even their press release is hard to read.

dvh 10y ago

Whenever someone posts goo.gl shortened links, I look who reads it (it's public data): https://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/Yn6mjA/all_time https://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/Yn6mjA/all_time

HelloNurse 10y ago

The Google+ team appears scrambling to address user feedback: clicking the search bar I got the obnoxious page of featured content replacing the page I was reading, but it had a blocking popup that, when clicked, bounced me to the featured collections page. Not only Google+ knows what I should be reading better than me, but their left hand knows better than their right hand!

rdslw 10y ago

Not many noticing that this redesign removed Events functionality and Google confirmed they have NO plans to reintroduce it. And is playing with addictive while not needed 'content discovery'. In summary: * yet another redesign * mobile centric (looks like p on desktop) * removes important features (events, hangouts tight integration) * forces users into addictive content-discovery * works only now, the moment masses join it, lolcats will ruin it Sorry, content discovery has NO value for humans at the level we have it currently. Content is everywhere. It's easy to find valuable content. Whole this content discovery concept is riding on the addictive behaviour of humans: I'm losing everything I dont know about, so I need to scroll newstream every 5 minutes. While it serves one purpose: page impressions stimulated by habbit/addiction. It harms us. We don't need content discovery. Corpos need our eyeballs.

edwinyzh 10y ago

Hello G+ team, please give me code syntax highlighting. Thanks.

TheHippo 10y ago

No events anymore. This was one of the most useful features that G+ had.

lolive 10y ago

What is Google+?

ElijahLynn 10y ago

After having actually used the new G+ for a couple hours, the speed is amazing, especially on the Brave browser (probably because I don't have extensions slowing it down). Plus the ability to put links and images in comments finally brings that part on par with Twitter. I think the people who do use G+ are going to use it a hell of a lot more now that it is so much faster. Plus the people who get frustrated by Twitter's 140 character limit from time to time may be easily swayed.