12 ms·

Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?

37 points by eibrahim 9y ago

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
More work to remove it than leave it chained to a fence as a zombie?
- elicash 9y ago
  I think this is it. They knew their best way of beating Facebook was going to be incorporating Plus as tightly into Google as possible. If you remember, it even integrated into Google searches for a while in a very obvious way (though they rolled back how visible that is). I'm not a developer, but I'd imagine it's not a single thing they can remove, that it's mixed into of every team's code, all over the place.
Klockan 9y ago
I think that Google plus is too integrated in things like youtube to be killed.
jacquesm 9y ago
At a guess because it would be admitting defeat. At least they could drop the '+' idiocy from the search engine.
martiuk 9y ago
I think they use it internally.
- _ao789 9y ago
  ..shame
kardianos 9y ago
Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. Does it seem like a ghost town to you? Well, we just aren't sharing with you.
- evilmoo 9y ago
  So, how long have you both worked at Google?
  - hylianwarrior 9y ago
    Got 'em
- H1Supreme 9y ago
  > Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. That's all I needed to hear. Google+ is the most legit social networking site now.
  - HelloNurse 9y ago
    If you haven't heard about this person's wife using Google+ it's a little bit of anecdotical evidence that it's doing its job of supporting communities rather than generically connecting people (like Facebook). The user interface remains outstandingly bad, but I've never seen clickbait links or scammers on Google+.
    - DarronWyke 9y ago
      I've seen plenty of spammers, though. People who tag you in things that have nothing to do with you to only drop dodgy links.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      The user interface remains outstandingly bad... ? This grumpy old engineer likes it.
    - jsgo 9y ago
      Some elements seem unnecessarily complex, but I actually like Google+'s UI. No one I know uses it so therefore I don't either, but I do like the look of it.
technofiend 9y ago
Same reason everyone not Facebook hasn't yet given up and declared defeat? This isn't Highlander: there can be more than one. Google+ has plenty of active communities of people who choose not to use Facebook. Nothing wrong with that.
- sundarurfriend 9y ago
  In fact afaict G+ has a very different vibe from Facebook, so I think of it as an alternative to Twitter rather than to Facebook - it generally feels like a public discourse rather than a "share my baby pictures with homies" type vibe. Except you have more than 160 characters (or whatever Twitter's new limit is), so conversations can flourish much better. There are multiple writer communities, DIY communities, Yoga/meditation groups, sci-fi fan groups, etc., and a lot of android apps use their G+ communities as their support forum + user communications page. (And those are just the ones I know of.) For whatever reason, these kinds of "I don't use it and my friends don't use it, so why does it exist" type posts and comments - which seem to happen repeatedly here - are posted disproportionately more so with G+ than any other minor but thriving network/forum /thingamagick.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    Except you can do almost everything on g+: Share with the world like twitter: check Share to selected people: check Share in a collection so people who like my posts on topic x don’t have to follow my posts about topic y: check Multiple identities: actually yes, check
  - soylentcola 9y ago
    That's also how I tend to use it. I think the main issue was that it was positioned as "hey, we built a better Facebook!" This was somewhat accurate IMO since I prefer the layout, features (many of which Facebook added shortly after), and granular sharing (which Facebook most certainly lacks). The main issue I ran across was that Facebook continued to dominate in the space because it was the first to gain a critical mass of users across a wide spectrum. MySpace was big with the younger crowd but typically you didn't find your mom, your boss, your barber alongside your friends and drinking buddies. Facebook was the first big one where eventually all of your relatives (even the ones who typically didn't care about "techie" stuff) and acquaintances built a profile. So when G+ came out, most of my friends tried it out and quickly realized that they would still need to cross-post things to Facebook if they wanted to share with all of their contacts and not just those who like trying out new things. Without a common API or protocol, there was no way to just pick the service you prefer and go on with your life. With email, I could switch from Hotmail to Yahoo to Gmail (or even roll my own server) in search of the right setup for my preferences. I could still email anyone who refused to give up their AOL account or who used their work email. Facebook-style social networking requires everyone to be on the same platform in order for it to work. So instead of some people sticking with Facebook while a big chunk slowly migrated to G+ or other competitors over the space of a few years, you ended up with lots of people trying out G+ and getting annoyed that only a few friends bothered to read/reply. So now it's mostly used as more of a subreddit-style thing where you can have topical groups rather than personal friends and acquaintances. I still do think it's a shame they couldn't "build a better Facebook" because it would be nice to have a few options for that type of thing. But unless some new player can convince absolutely everyone you know to migrate, it just isn't happening anytime soon.
wybiral 9y ago
At my last job we used it internally (part of the G Suite, I believe) for employee profile pages, especially since we used Hangouts and Gmail a lot to communicate.
goalieca 9y ago
Good question because google has killed so many other projects people do rely on (eg: google reader!)
- wybiral 9y ago
  That was over four years ago. It's time to move on with your life. You'll meet other feeds and timelines...
  - thrill 9y ago
    It's still a sore spot. It was like a knife in the ribs. A really long knife. Serrated. And floppy. Spinning, too. Laced with Carolina Reaper sauce.
    - thedaemon 9y ago
      With the death of Google Reader, I completely stopped reading feeds. It killed a part of the internet for me.
      - wybiral 9y ago
        Social networks came in with their own version of what a "feed" is and then Push started to rise. So the old model of on-request feeds was probably on the downfall anyway.
      - ldiracdelta 9y ago
        I found https://goread.io/ https://goread.io/ as my replacement. Doesn't have the intelligence to spotlight articles, but it does pretty well.
      - gorbachev 9y ago
        Feedly is better than Google Reader ever was these days. The team there is also super responsive to issues.
        9y ago
dovik 9y ago
Because you can't kill something that's already dead.
- _ao789 9y ago
  Thank God
Grumbledour 9y ago
I think it can only be a matter of time. Not, that no one is using it. I am using it daily and at least the several hundred people I follow do so too, there is quite a big community in tabletop roleplaying games for example. But google has for years only done what they always do to their products in recent years: add more and more whitespace while taking away features. And of course, this drives people away. So it is getting slowly quieter over there and of course, all it takes google to finally close it down is one engineer finishing his 20% project for the "next big thing" to replace it. This will be a sad day for many communities on google plus, but at this stage in googles life, nobody should be surprised by products just going away.
ageofwant 9y ago
Because millions of people are using it ? I use it daily, I'm subscribed to ~40 communities mostly tech and photography. The signal/noise ratio is way better than facebook. I've not used facebook in several years so maybe it's better now but it did not add anything to my live, quite the contrary, G+ does.
senectus1 9y ago
because its a binary world. if you're not using G+ you're using Facebook and I'm sure i'm not the only one to say "F* that"....
tn_ 9y ago
Personally, I haven't used google plus in awhile but when I used it, it wasn't for the social networking of people I already knew, but it was for following communities w/ topics that I liked. The problem I'm finding with Facebook right now is I don't want to spam everyone with science-y articles or to offend/bother people who might not care for liberal view-points.. just because there are so many people that I know that are on their network. Also, I'm too lazy to create groups to target my posts with. It ends up just being a photo-dump with maybe written posts once a month + mostly keeping brief tabs with family+friends. When I first started on Fb, it was addicting posting things I could reference later or writing long-ish essays or being ridiculous with friends (photoshop wars).
laurent123456 9y ago
Maybe because of Google+, Facebook as 1 or 2% less users and Google thinks that's good enough a reason to keep it alive.
wodenokoto 9y ago
When I visited a Google office a few years ago, I noticed that they are heavily dogfooding Google + Anythins that other bigCorps would use Exchange for, they use G+ This is stuff like looking up employees, across teams and entire organization, etc.
- away2017throw 9y ago
  Few years is eons in this field.
grizzlylabs 9y ago
I always thought they should morph/change/add circles as a method to do authentication, authorization and enterprise group permissions. Imagine an Enterprise IT worker creating a Resource Circle called "Salesforce" or "DropBox" and a user group called Marketing. I would want it to work for inside private resources as well as public resources. Same thing with user groups. Groups of employees, contractors and outsiders.
dyeje 9y ago
Probably a combination of hubris and it being cheaper to just let it sit there then rip out all the integrations to other products.
sigsergv 9y ago
It's killing it slowly.
- _ao789 9y ago
  "Killing me softly with his plus"
_nalply 9y ago
An important feature is OAuth2. Google+ is an identity provider. In other words, Google+ is perhaps used a lot more than it seems. It's like an underground infrastructure nobody sees.
akud 9y ago
I'm a regular Google+ user and I find it incredibly valuable. The fact that there are fewer people on there is actually an asset - the people that do use it do so because they have some topic they're interested in that they're discussing with other interested parties. There's a lot of mathematicians, scientists, and authors. In general, the average g+ user is much more knowledgeable than on any other site. Also, the actual features are super valuable. You can create collections with varying levels of privacy for your posts. I use some private collections to take notes, and post more well thought out content in the public versions of those collections. The collections help me organize my thoughts, and I can see different ideas emerging over time. I have a collection to talk about software engineering practices, for example. Also, being able to create private communities is nice. My wife and I have a private community where we share things about our daughter - photos, things we want to remember, things she's learning. Overall, g+ has enriched my life.

37 points by eibrahim 9y ago

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

More work to remove it than leave it chained to a fence as a zombie?

elicash 9y ago
I think this is it. They knew their best way of beating Facebook was going to be incorporating Plus as tightly into Google as possible. If you remember, it even integrated into Google searches for a while in a very obvious way (though they rolled back how visible that is). I'm not a developer, but I'd imagine it's not a single thing they can remove, that it's mixed into of every team's code, all over the place.

Klockan 9y ago

I think that Google plus is too integrated in things like youtube to be killed.

jacquesm 9y ago

At a guess because it would be admitting defeat. At least they could drop the '+' idiocy from the search engine.

martiuk 9y ago

I think they use it internally.

_ao789 9y ago
..shame

kardianos 9y ago

Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. Does it seem like a ghost town to you? Well, we just aren't sharing with you.

evilmoo 9y ago
So, how long have you both worked at Google?
- hylianwarrior 9y ago
  Got 'em
H1Supreme 9y ago
> Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. That's all I needed to hear. Google+ is the most legit social networking site now.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  If you haven't heard about this person's wife using Google+ it's a little bit of anecdotical evidence that it's doing its job of supporting communities rather than generically connecting people (like Facebook). The user interface remains outstandingly bad, but I've never seen clickbait links or scammers on Google+.
  - DarronWyke 9y ago
    I've seen plenty of spammers, though. People who tag you in things that have nothing to do with you to only drop dodgy links.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    The user interface remains outstandingly bad... ? This grumpy old engineer likes it.
  - jsgo 9y ago
    Some elements seem unnecessarily complex, but I actually like Google+'s UI. No one I know uses it so therefore I don't either, but I do like the look of it.

technofiend 9y ago

Same reason everyone not Facebook hasn't yet given up and declared defeat? This isn't Highlander: there can be more than one. Google+ has plenty of active communities of people who choose not to use Facebook. Nothing wrong with that.

sundarurfriend 9y ago
In fact afaict G+ has a very different vibe from Facebook, so I think of it as an alternative to Twitter rather than to Facebook - it generally feels like a public discourse rather than a "share my baby pictures with homies" type vibe. Except you have more than 160 characters (or whatever Twitter's new limit is), so conversations can flourish much better. There are multiple writer communities, DIY communities, Yoga/meditation groups, sci-fi fan groups, etc., and a lot of android apps use their G+ communities as their support forum + user communications page. (And those are just the ones I know of.) For whatever reason, these kinds of "I don't use it and my friends don't use it, so why does it exist" type posts and comments - which seem to happen repeatedly here - are posted disproportionately more so with G+ than any other minor but thriving network/forum /thingamagick.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  Except you can do almost everything on g+: Share with the world like twitter: check Share to selected people: check Share in a collection so people who like my posts on topic x don’t have to follow my posts about topic y: check Multiple identities: actually yes, check
- soylentcola 9y ago
  That's also how I tend to use it. I think the main issue was that it was positioned as "hey, we built a better Facebook!" This was somewhat accurate IMO since I prefer the layout, features (many of which Facebook added shortly after), and granular sharing (which Facebook most certainly lacks). The main issue I ran across was that Facebook continued to dominate in the space because it was the first to gain a critical mass of users across a wide spectrum. MySpace was big with the younger crowd but typically you didn't find your mom, your boss, your barber alongside your friends and drinking buddies. Facebook was the first big one where eventually all of your relatives (even the ones who typically didn't care about "techie" stuff) and acquaintances built a profile. So when G+ came out, most of my friends tried it out and quickly realized that they would still need to cross-post things to Facebook if they wanted to share with all of their contacts and not just those who like trying out new things. Without a common API or protocol, there was no way to just pick the service you prefer and go on with your life. With email, I could switch from Hotmail to Yahoo to Gmail (or even roll my own server) in search of the right setup for my preferences. I could still email anyone who refused to give up their AOL account or who used their work email. Facebook-style social networking requires everyone to be on the same platform in order for it to work. So instead of some people sticking with Facebook while a big chunk slowly migrated to G+ or other competitors over the space of a few years, you ended up with lots of people trying out G+ and getting annoyed that only a few friends bothered to read/reply. So now it's mostly used as more of a subreddit-style thing where you can have topical groups rather than personal friends and acquaintances. I still do think it's a shame they couldn't "build a better Facebook" because it would be nice to have a few options for that type of thing. But unless some new player can convince absolutely everyone you know to migrate, it just isn't happening anytime soon.

wybiral 9y ago

At my last job we used it internally (part of the G Suite, I believe) for employee profile pages, especially since we used Hangouts and Gmail a lot to communicate.

goalieca 9y ago

Good question because google has killed so many other projects people do rely on (eg: google reader!)

wybiral 9y ago
That was over four years ago. It's time to move on with your life. You'll meet other feeds and timelines...
- thrill 9y ago
  It's still a sore spot. It was like a knife in the ribs. A really long knife. Serrated. And floppy. Spinning, too. Laced with Carolina Reaper sauce.
  - thedaemon 9y ago
    With the death of Google Reader, I completely stopped reading feeds. It killed a part of the internet for me.
    - wybiral 9y ago
      Social networks came in with their own version of what a "feed" is and then Push started to rise. So the old model of on-request feeds was probably on the downfall anyway.
    - ldiracdelta 9y ago
      I found https://goread.io/ https://goread.io/ as my replacement. Doesn't have the intelligence to spotlight articles, but it does pretty well.
    - gorbachev 9y ago
      Feedly is better than Google Reader ever was these days. The team there is also super responsive to issues.
      - 9y ago

dovik 9y ago

Because you can't kill something that's already dead.

_ao789 9y ago
Thank God

Grumbledour 9y ago

I think it can only be a matter of time. Not, that no one is using it. I am using it daily and at least the several hundred people I follow do so too, there is quite a big community in tabletop roleplaying games for example. But google has for years only done what they always do to their products in recent years: add more and more whitespace while taking away features. And of course, this drives people away. So it is getting slowly quieter over there and of course, all it takes google to finally close it down is one engineer finishing his 20% project for the "next big thing" to replace it. This will be a sad day for many communities on google plus, but at this stage in googles life, nobody should be surprised by products just going away.

ageofwant 9y ago

Because millions of people are using it ? I use it daily, I'm subscribed to ~40 communities mostly tech and photography. The signal/noise ratio is way better than facebook. I've not used facebook in several years so maybe it's better now but it did not add anything to my live, quite the contrary, G+ does.

senectus1 9y ago

because its a binary world. if you're not using G+ you're using Facebook and I'm sure i'm not the only one to say "F* that"....

tn_ 9y ago

Personally, I haven't used google plus in awhile but when I used it, it wasn't for the social networking of people I already knew, but it was for following communities w/ topics that I liked. The problem I'm finding with Facebook right now is I don't want to spam everyone with science-y articles or to offend/bother people who might not care for liberal view-points.. just because there are so many people that I know that are on their network. Also, I'm too lazy to create groups to target my posts with. It ends up just being a photo-dump with maybe written posts once a month + mostly keeping brief tabs with family+friends. When I first started on Fb, it was addicting posting things I could reference later or writing long-ish essays or being ridiculous with friends (photoshop wars).

laurent123456 9y ago

Maybe because of Google+, Facebook as 1 or 2% less users and Google thinks that's good enough a reason to keep it alive.

wodenokoto 9y ago

When I visited a Google office a few years ago, I noticed that they are heavily dogfooding Google + Anythins that other bigCorps would use Exchange for, they use G+ This is stuff like looking up employees, across teams and entire organization, etc.

away2017throw 9y ago
Few years is eons in this field.

grizzlylabs 9y ago

I always thought they should morph/change/add circles as a method to do authentication, authorization and enterprise group permissions. Imagine an Enterprise IT worker creating a Resource Circle called "Salesforce" or "DropBox" and a user group called Marketing. I would want it to work for inside private resources as well as public resources. Same thing with user groups. Groups of employees, contractors and outsiders.

dyeje 9y ago

Probably a combination of hubris and it being cheaper to just let it sit there then rip out all the integrations to other products.

sigsergv 9y ago

It's killing it slowly.

_ao789 9y ago
"Killing me softly with his plus"

_nalply 9y ago

An important feature is OAuth2. Google+ is an identity provider. In other words, Google+ is perhaps used a lot more than it seems. It's like an underground infrastructure nobody sees.

akud 9y ago

I'm a regular Google+ user and I find it incredibly valuable. The fact that there are fewer people on there is actually an asset - the people that do use it do so because they have some topic they're interested in that they're discussing with other interested parties. There's a lot of mathematicians, scientists, and authors. In general, the average g+ user is much more knowledgeable than on any other site. Also, the actual features are super valuable. You can create collections with varying levels of privacy for your posts. I use some private collections to take notes, and post more well thought out content in the public versions of those collections. The collections help me organize my thoughts, and I can see different ideas emerging over time. I have a collection to talk about software engineering practices, for example. Also, being able to create private communities is nice. My wife and I have a private community where we share things about our daughter - photos, things we want to remember, things she's learning. Overall, g+ has enriched my life.