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I really don't think they are in the second place. Twitter fills that spot. The thing is, they had a chance to capture the market of early adopters, but they'v

I really don't think they are in the second place. Twitter fills that spot. The thing is, they had a chance to capture the market of early adopters, but they've lost it in the nymwars. And I know a lot of people try to come up with all sorts of reasons for why Google+ didn't stand a chance against Facebook, ranging from UI to availability of games and the network effect, but no, Google+ appeared at a moment in time when people where nervous about their online privacy and getting tired of Facebook and Google had one chance and totally blew it with their real name policy. But then it got worse, they forced YouTube users to migrate to a Google+ account and thus adopt the real name policy. I mean YouTube, their biggest online community. It has been a total clusterfuck and guess what, YouTube comments are still shitty, even with real names, because many people are in essence jerks and a real name policy isn't going to change that. I sometimes wonder if they were clueless about this, or knew it and did it anyway for advertising value. But lets rewind a little and remember that they killed Google Reader because of Google+. I'll never forget them for Google Reader, I'll never trust their free offerings again. If anything, their current attitude of backtracking from their Google+ push users-be-damned has been nothing but healthy.

dmix 10y ago
True, youtube comments are really bad. Not just in terms of content but the interactive experience. This could have been a good opportunity for Google to do something like Disqus did with cross-website identity. With a high-quality messaging UX. But no, Youtube still has second-rate commenting. Even a voting/ranking system closer to Reddit would be better.
- bnolsen 10y ago
  oh yeah! and g+ notifications do a super crappy job of putting you in a position to efficiently jump to the youtube thread and respond. a stupid tuny window, no good indication what to click on to get there, clicking on things takes you places you don't want to go. makes me want to break things.
imron 10y ago
> I really don't think they are in the second place. But maybe they could have been. Unfortunately, their desire not to be second place meant they did all sorts of user unfriendly things in order to rope users in to using the system and boost numbers. Abusing users' trust might work great for short term numbers, but it's bad for the long term.

dmix 10y ago

True, youtube comments are really bad. Not just in terms of content but the interactive experience. This could have been a good opportunity for Google to do something like Disqus did with cross-website identity. With a high-quality messaging UX. But no, Youtube still has second-rate commenting. Even a voting/ranking system closer to Reddit would be better.

bnolsen 10y ago
oh yeah! and g+ notifications do a super crappy job of putting you in a position to efficiently jump to the youtube thread and respond. a stupid tuny window, no good indication what to click on to get there, clicking on things takes you places you don't want to go. makes me want to break things.

imron 10y ago

> I really don't think they are in the second place. But maybe they could have been. Unfortunately, their desire not to be second place meant they did all sorts of user unfriendly things in order to rope users in to using the system and boost numbers. Abusing users' trust might work great for short term numbers, but it's bad for the long term.