5 ms·

I think G+ was dead on arrival. Don't really know why that was the case but it just never made any sense. They had Orkut and killed it which kinda makes me wond

I think G+ was dead on arrival. Don't really know why that was the case but it just never made any sense. They had Orkut and killed it which kinda makes me wonder how management at Google thinks.

baldfat 10y ago
It was a better twitter, but the people were already on twitter It is a better subreddit community feature then reddit, but people were already at reddit. Single sign on made people mad, but YouTube and Google passwords being different needed to become the same. They made it look like it was a conspiracy for everyone to be on Google+. Then this tied people's real names with their YouTube content and outed some people. Just a bunch of mistakes. Heck I think if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack but then again ....
- nirvdrum 10y ago
  When it first launched, it reminded me a lot of the original Facebook design. I rather enjoyed it. It had communities, which facilitated a different kind of interaction than Twitter. It was less intimidating than Facebook's UI and wasn't full of social game requests and rants from distant relatives. But, then Google redesigned Google+ into some amalgamation of Pinterest and modern Facebook, undoing nearly all of its advantages IMHO. I stopped using it shortly thereafter. I check back in periodically, but nearly everyone I've interacted with has also moved on. It's really quite a shame.
- mtrpcic 10y ago
  Their invite-only model for the first X months was also an early nail in the coffin. It's hard to enjoy a social network when none of your friends are able to join you.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I disagree completely. It was a good step, copied directly from the Facebook (and earlier: Usenet) playbook, and created a group that others wanted to get in to and join. That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months. Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters. I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half. The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward. I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  It wasn't a better twitter or reddit because it's Google. I don't like all my eggs in one basket. Besides that Google wrecking their search results to give Google+ more prominence made me even more wary of such cross ties between services.
- gman83 10y ago
  Actually I think the fact that reddit enables pseudonyms makes it quite different. I don't particularly want to share the fact that I'm super into weird animes with my colleagues, and reddit enables this, google+ not so much.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Forget weird animes; your coworkers might rib you about it a little, but that's not a career-ending revelation. What if you're a recovering or current addict, and your support group is on a subreddit? What if you're advising people considering opiates to not follow your path, based on your own life experiences? That's not likely something you want to sign your name to. What about domestic abuse victims who want to support each other? Victims of sexual abuse as children? Parents of children who have been abused? What if you're into something that's would really set people off, even if it's something consensual? Consider what's happening over in Drupal-land - regardless of your opinion of Goreans, BDSM practitioners, etc., what if you're just into something that your local community or coworkers find anathema?
    - Danihan 10y ago
      LOL this made me wonder if there is a The_Donald for google+
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    That's a tremendous difference, right there. Reddit allows compartmentalisation of interests. G+ actively prevents that.
  - oridecon 10y ago
    Can't you create multiple Google accounts? And they removed the policy to require real names, they even let you use a single word now. You can't fool the machine but at least you can hide that you like anime from your co-workers and relatives. I know people that own like 10 Google accounts between their YouTube and other services. You can't trust Google to not expose you (like they did it with YouTube account merges, Google Plus and other instances).
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  Wave felt like too much of a hyperactive firehose to ever become anything like Slack.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  G+ didn't have a community feature until about 18 months after launch. ~ December 2012. It's always been tremendously underpowered, in terms of admin and moderation tools. Large Communities rapidly became cesspits or marketing tarpits. Small and private communities -- I had one with about 40-50 members -- were suprisingly good, though that involved a lot of attitudinal orientation and careful curation of participants, most of whom I'd come to know over several years' general discussion.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    The R Programming community has over 14,000 and is by far the best community. It still is my favorite NBA Community.
- etatoby 10y ago
  > if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.) As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug. I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.
  - pasbesoin 10y ago
    Yes, it was a Javascript nightmare, in terms of performance then and on then equipment. Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts. As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs. I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE. Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails. Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap. I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration. Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Orkut was a usability nightmare and dominated by Brazilians who typically don't write in English. It was hostile to US users and a bizarre acquisition all around. What was the value proposition here other than "not Facebook?" I think they realized their mistake but it was too late and had to move to something else. They couldn't make it "Googly" and no one wanted anything to do with it outside of Brazil. I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "Gmail Social" and let you build it out with your name, info, photos, etc and have that be a sort of opt-in social network straight from gmail, a bit like how hangouts is now in gmail. Instead they created this Google+ pig that makes no sense and fits in nowhere comfortably. Also, it was bizarrely tone deaf to somehow tie youtube in this and to get these confusing prompts about merging accounts and such only to find your youtube shitposting and viewing habits now tied to your real name for any employer to find. This is a colossal mistake that I imagine will be studied in business schools for decades to come. I read somewhere that Jobs gave Google the idea of a centralized social area for their users and considering Jobs' success rates with iCloud and other Apple initiatives on the cloud back then, it seems like they took advice from the wrong guy. Worse, Jobs might have been able to pull off some kind of Apple social network this way, but mostly because there is so much zealous fandom with Apple. Google is just a boring, unsexy service for most. They didn't realize how little liked they are. They're the barely tolerated nerds of the industry, not the popular kids. They should have just launched something easier, simpler, and more modest. Jobsian-like antics just won't work for their brand.
- frik 10y ago
  > I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "GMail Social" Google tried it, called Google Buzz. It was pretty unpopular because they forced it on every GMail user. Suddendly everyone had his name, email and account private details exposed on public readable pages indexed by Google search engine. One year later it was dead. Yet to be replaced by Google+ with almost the same shaddy tactic. No wonder it failed, people don't like such shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    Well, I did say "opt-in." I can imagine that approach working far better than an instant on "Hi, your stuff is now public" approach. Look, they weren't going to dethrone facebook, but they didn't need to fuck up this badly. They could have gone with a more modest approach and pleased a lot of people who wanted a quick social profile in gmail in a jiffy and not a whole other service. >Google Buzz. Branding still matters. Google Social tells grandma whats up. Buzz, wave, etc make no sense to her.
agmcleod 10y ago
I enjoyed the communities it had for a while. Some cool developer chats I was able to read, though after a bit I kinda stopped checking in.
notlisted 10y ago
Hmmm. Orkut was a 20% project that blew up, but as friends at Google told me, was never created/properly engineered for the growth it experienced (after a while mainly in South America and India). I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Just looking back at my 2006/2007 email, Orkut was one big mountain of spam and 30% fake profiles.
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  The fact that Orkut was implemented in .net might have made it too embarrassing for Google to maintain.
mcv 10y ago
It was not remotely dead on arrival. It's in many ways better than twitter and facebook. Google+ users were very enthusiastic. And many still are. But Google has worked hard to undermine their own good work, by removing popular features, doing needless redesigns, and by forcing people from other services onto Google+. Particularly the integration with Youtube, infamous for its low quality comments, fell badly with a lot of people who loved Google+ for its very high quality of discussions. Google+ survives despite Google's mismanagement.

I think G+ was dead on arrival. Don't really know why that was the case but it just never made any sense. They had Orkut and killed it which kinda makes me wonder how management at Google thinks.

baldfat 10y ago

It was a better twitter, but the people were already on twitter It is a better subreddit community feature then reddit, but people were already at reddit. Single sign on made people mad, but YouTube and Google passwords being different needed to become the same. They made it look like it was a conspiracy for everyone to be on Google+. Then this tied people's real names with their YouTube content and outed some people. Just a bunch of mistakes. Heck I think if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack but then again ....

nirvdrum 10y ago
When it first launched, it reminded me a lot of the original Facebook design. I rather enjoyed it. It had communities, which facilitated a different kind of interaction than Twitter. It was less intimidating than Facebook's UI and wasn't full of social game requests and rants from distant relatives. But, then Google redesigned Google+ into some amalgamation of Pinterest and modern Facebook, undoing nearly all of its advantages IMHO. I stopped using it shortly thereafter. I check back in periodically, but nearly everyone I've interacted with has also moved on. It's really quite a shame.
mtrpcic 10y ago
Their invite-only model for the first X months was also an early nail in the coffin. It's hard to enjoy a social network when none of your friends are able to join you.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I disagree completely. It was a good step, copied directly from the Facebook (and earlier: Usenet) playbook, and created a group that others wanted to get in to and join. That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months. Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters. I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half. The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward. I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.
jacquesm 10y ago
It wasn't a better twitter or reddit because it's Google. I don't like all my eggs in one basket. Besides that Google wrecking their search results to give Google+ more prominence made me even more wary of such cross ties between services.
gman83 10y ago
Actually I think the fact that reddit enables pseudonyms makes it quite different. I don't particularly want to share the fact that I'm super into weird animes with my colleagues, and reddit enables this, google+ not so much.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Forget weird animes; your coworkers might rib you about it a little, but that's not a career-ending revelation. What if you're a recovering or current addict, and your support group is on a subreddit? What if you're advising people considering opiates to not follow your path, based on your own life experiences? That's not likely something you want to sign your name to. What about domestic abuse victims who want to support each other? Victims of sexual abuse as children? Parents of children who have been abused? What if you're into something that's would really set people off, even if it's something consensual? Consider what's happening over in Drupal-land - regardless of your opinion of Goreans, BDSM practitioners, etc., what if you're just into something that your local community or coworkers find anathema?
  - Danihan 10y ago
    LOL this made me wonder if there is a The_Donald for google+
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  That's a tremendous difference, right there. Reddit allows compartmentalisation of interests. G+ actively prevents that.
- oridecon 10y ago
  Can't you create multiple Google accounts? And they removed the policy to require real names, they even let you use a single word now. You can't fool the machine but at least you can hide that you like anime from your co-workers and relatives. I know people that own like 10 Google accounts between their YouTube and other services. You can't trust Google to not expose you (like they did it with YouTube account merges, Google Plus and other instances).
DonHopkins 10y ago
Wave felt like too much of a hyperactive firehose to ever become anything like Slack.
dredmorbius 10y ago
G+ didn't have a community feature until about 18 months after launch. ~ December 2012. It's always been tremendously underpowered, in terms of admin and moderation tools. Large Communities rapidly became cesspits or marketing tarpits. Small and private communities -- I had one with about 40-50 members -- were suprisingly good, though that involved a lot of attitudinal orientation and careful curation of participants, most of whom I'd come to know over several years' general discussion.
- baldfat 10y ago
  The R Programming community has over 14,000 and is by far the best community. It still is my favorite NBA Community.
etatoby 10y ago
> if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.) As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug. I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.
- pasbesoin 10y ago
  Yes, it was a Javascript nightmare, in terms of performance then and on then equipment. Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts. As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs. I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE. Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails. Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap. I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration. Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

Orkut was a usability nightmare and dominated by Brazilians who typically don't write in English. It was hostile to US users and a bizarre acquisition all around. What was the value proposition here other than "not Facebook?" I think they realized their mistake but it was too late and had to move to something else. They couldn't make it "Googly" and no one wanted anything to do with it outside of Brazil. I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "Gmail Social" and let you build it out with your name, info, photos, etc and have that be a sort of opt-in social network straight from gmail, a bit like how hangouts is now in gmail. Instead they created this Google+ pig that makes no sense and fits in nowhere comfortably. Also, it was bizarrely tone deaf to somehow tie youtube in this and to get these confusing prompts about merging accounts and such only to find your youtube shitposting and viewing habits now tied to your real name for any employer to find. This is a colossal mistake that I imagine will be studied in business schools for decades to come. I read somewhere that Jobs gave Google the idea of a centralized social area for their users and considering Jobs' success rates with iCloud and other Apple initiatives on the cloud back then, it seems like they took advice from the wrong guy. Worse, Jobs might have been able to pull off some kind of Apple social network this way, but mostly because there is so much zealous fandom with Apple. Google is just a boring, unsexy service for most. They didn't realize how little liked they are. They're the barely tolerated nerds of the industry, not the popular kids. They should have just launched something easier, simpler, and more modest. Jobsian-like antics just won't work for their brand.

frik 10y ago
> I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "GMail Social" Google tried it, called Google Buzz. It was pretty unpopular because they forced it on every GMail user. Suddendly everyone had his name, email and account private details exposed on public readable pages indexed by Google search engine. One year later it was dead. Yet to be replaced by Google+ with almost the same shaddy tactic. No wonder it failed, people don't like such shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Well, I did say "opt-in." I can imagine that approach working far better than an instant on "Hi, your stuff is now public" approach. Look, they weren't going to dethrone facebook, but they didn't need to fuck up this badly. They could have gone with a more modest approach and pleased a lot of people who wanted a quick social profile in gmail in a jiffy and not a whole other service. >Google Buzz. Branding still matters. Google Social tells grandma whats up. Buzz, wave, etc make no sense to her.

agmcleod 10y ago

I enjoyed the communities it had for a while. Some cool developer chats I was able to read, though after a bit I kinda stopped checking in.

notlisted 10y ago

Hmmm. Orkut was a 20% project that blew up, but as friends at Google told me, was never created/properly engineered for the growth it experienced (after a while mainly in South America and India). I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Just looking back at my 2006/2007 email, Orkut was one big mountain of spam and 30% fake profiles.

DonHopkins 10y ago
The fact that Orkut was implemented in .net might have made it too embarrassing for Google to maintain.

mcv 10y ago

It was not remotely dead on arrival. It's in many ways better than twitter and facebook. Google+ users were very enthusiastic. And many still are. But Google has worked hard to undermine their own good work, by removing popular features, doing needless redesigns, and by forcing people from other services onto Google+. Particularly the integration with Youtube, infamous for its low quality comments, fell badly with a lot of people who loved Google+ for its very high quality of discussions. Google+ survives despite Google's mismanagement.