21 ms·

What did Google+ get right?

112 points by eitland 8y ago

eitland 8y ago
The rest of the Internet won. On my way home today I wrote down why I liked it.
arkitaip 8y ago
It's only now that I use Twitter on a daily basis that I realize the problem of having a single feed for your private life, work, hobbies, etc. It just doesn't work and is one of the main reasons why I unfollow people. I think the underlying functionality of circles and collections are a must but maybe they can be implemented in a better and easier to use way.
- eitland 8y ago
  When Twitter first appeared my guess was they'd create a kind of messaging backbone for the Internet and start to add features like machine-to-machine, group communication etc. Guess my disappointment.
- edgarvaldes 8y ago
  On a side note: Twitter is strange to me, as someone who visits it once every two or three weeks. After a while, I'm usually surprised by some tweets, because I started following someone because of their profession or hobby that lines up with mine, but then they post data about other activities. Why am I following someone who talks about food? Oh, right, for another completely unrelated reason. And I do not even follow so many people.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    I have this happen as well, where I'll follow someone for a certain subject they post about, but then when they post about something else I'm confused as to why I'm following this person, until I look at their full feed and remember why. I doubt, even with the option that most people who separate their posts into "categories" or circles but it would be nice.
- alttab 8y ago
  I liked the idea of circles but G+ never really stuck for me. One thing I think about is tagging. Arguably circles is a private configuration. If I tag someone in a picture I posted to my Family Facebook Circle, but who on their end would see it on the timeline? I never used G+ enough to know how it handled that scenario. My intuition wants to tell me it's tricky things like that which piled up in Facebook's mind when evaluating whether to copy them. They've copied many competitors and social media outlets especially if it fit easily. Privacy features isn't one of their strengths.
- neonhomer 8y ago
  I find the issue is with the actual authors. One post will be something helpful to my work and then the next will some politic rant. I want a social network where I only see the former post.
  - Ajedi32 8y ago
    That's what Google+'s collections were for: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/6320409?hl=en&ref_topic=6320387 https://support.google.com/plus/answer/6320409?hl=en&ref_top...
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  I find Mastodon's Content Warnings an interesting/useful model for mixing such content, and it's interesting the number of folks I follow that are falling into a "CW everything" philosophy for this sort of reason. The "Show More" to expand a subject/topic is an interesting "pull" mechanic, as contrasted to Circles' larger focus on "push".
  - eitland 8y ago
    > I find Mastodon's Content Warnings an interesting/useful model for mixing such content, ... Same here. I also hope circles and collections will come to the fediverse. Pixelfed already had circles as one of four options for what to focus on in coming iterations.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I don't mind CWs as much since they finally added a global "show all" setting you can set in your profile. There's definitely some nice uses beyond "trigger warnings", like keeping a long post from dominating your feed view, or as a spoiler tag for discussing movies.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      Semi-related, my big hack in my instance's custom CSS was to substantially enlarge the Show More/Show Less buttons to make it a much easier target to tap/click, which makes it much easier to expand or recollapse a post.
      - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        This sounds handy. Out of curiosity, does Mastodon have any form of extension/plugin system yet, to allow you to manage these through upgrades and/or distribute them easily, or are you modifying the stylesheets directly?
        WorldMaker 8y ago
        So far I've been sticking to things I can do purely in CSS (I wanted to move the CW subject lines into the buttons, for instance, but couldn't find a way with the current markup). For that, the Administrator section of Mastodon does keep and store a custom CSS section that it will output as a <style> block on page renders. I've been sharing my CSS changes on my account as I make them, and other admins could just copy and paste them. (Probably the most major other change was I fought the CSS to make the background 100% black for OLED power savings.) I'm told there also is a deeper theming system and some shared themes as Ruby gems. I haven't explored that personally because I'm using a shared host and so far I've been happy with the simple custom CSS overrides.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  I think of the underlying problem as "the metadata delusion." We programmers look at difficulties users have dealing with large volumes of data and think, aha! I can solve this by giving them ways to add metadata to those data, so it can be more easily browsed/filtered/faceted/whatever. (We think that because programmers have an analytical cast of mind, which we then extrapolate from -- this would be useful for me, we figure, therefore it would be useful for anyone.) So we build these elaborate systems for storing and managing metadata, and then build elaborate UIs to expose those systems to the user. Our system goes out to the users, and as long as those users are people like us -- analytical types -- it works OK. But then it goes out beyond that to a general audience, and suddenly we discover a new problem: namely that most users don't want to add metadata and simply will not do it, even if by doing so they could realize huge productivity gains. It doesn't matter how useful the metadata would be to them, to them adding metadata is work, and worse, it's nerd work of a kind they feel fundamentally uncomfortable with and unequipped to deal with. So they just don't do it. And they won't do it, no matter how hard you try to sell them on it. That was the problem with "circles" in G+: not that it was a bad idea to let people split up their feeds, but that having multiple feeds required them to add metadata (creating circles, naming them, adding people to them, periodically removing people from them, etc.), and people just didn't want to do that. So they didn't. It's not impossible to build systems that categorize data to make it more comprehensible, but if you want them to work, they have to do so in some way that doesn't put the burden on the user to keep everything correctly tagged/categorized/faceted/whatever. Because they just will not do that, no matter how many carrots you dangle.
  - sethhochberg 8y ago
    It seems to be working for Instragram, but they implemented the simplest possible thing for stories - you can have your "everyone" group, or your "close friends" group. No custom labels, no additional groups, just those two and thats it. I see quite a few friends who never even participated on G+ or similar making use of it.
    - smacktoward 8y ago
      Yeah, that's a good example: if you must have the user add metadata, keep it as simple as you possibly can. "You have exactly two buckets, everything goes in one or in the other" is about as simple a metadata system as you can get.
- fold_left 8y ago
  An option that can achieve something like circles on Twitter is to not follow any accounts but instead assign them to Twitter's "lists". You can create lists for work, hobbies etc and view whichever one you're interested in at a given time.
- pmarreck 8y ago
  I divide things up thusly: Programming- or gaming-related: Twitter "Fit for mass consumption": Facebook Personal: Facebook (with privacy settings activated)
40dslf 8y ago
The website felt slow and bloated performance-wise, despite the design being simple. YouTube feels like that now too.
- unilynx 8y ago
  And Google Cloud console. And Gsuite Admin. And Gmail. Well, maybe the latter isn't simple anymore
  - TheHypnotist 8y ago
    They seem to have lost sight on a big part of what made them attractive to begin with.
    - k__ 8y ago
      It's funny because Google has this guy, I think he's called Alex Russel, running around and telling the world which websites are too slow and how to improve web performance. Somehow the rest of Google seems to ignore him.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    All that botnet takes time to execute.
  - OrgNet 8y ago
    Google wants your website to load fast or they'll de-rank you but they need all that javascript on their websites (it doesn't matter if it slows things down).
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  This got worse over time. It used to be quite zippy when it first launched.
- eitland 8y ago
  Sorry for that. I host it with write.as, and I guess they might have some scaling problems or something. It is a just a small (but very cool IMO) startup.
Sniffnoy 8y ago
Some of this could also be "What did LiveJournal (and therefore also its clones) get right?" Oddly LiveJournal seems to always get left out of these discussions, even though it had more features than many later sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc). There's good reason to avoid LiveJournal itself these days, but the clone sites still live (e.g. Dreamwidth).
- k__ 8y ago
  Wasn't LJ just a blogging platform? I used it in early 2000 and was blown away by what MySpace offered compared to LJ.
  - Sniffnoy 8y ago
    I mean, you had your friends page, which aggregated all the posts from people you'd added as friends (this was a one-way thing, it didn't require the other person's agreement). You could also make posts locked so that only your friends, or specific subsets, could see them. (Later it became possible to separate these two different functions of adding someone as a friend, although a little troublesome. On Dreamwidth these are entirely separate functions, with the "friends page" now called the "reading page"; you "subscribe" to people to add them there, and you "give access" to people to let them read your locked posts.) People can also set up "communities" that people can join and post to. And of course people had profiles where they could write a little bit about themselves, and you could see their friend lists (or these days on Dreamwidth, subscription lists and access lists). Seems to me it basically resembles the later "social networking" sites in features (and outdoes them except possibly Google+), just the tone was more focused on long-form blogging. I guess the one thing lacking that people these days would expect was that you couldn't easily upload pictures and such (that was a paid feature IIRC; haven't checked how that works on Dreamwidth). But if you ignore that...
  - codingdave 8y ago
    If by blogging platform, you mean a place where people can post content, comments on each other's content, have friends lists, send messages, have public pr private posts, and have community pages with shared content authoring, then yes. But then, so is Facebook.
jpswade 8y ago
The question is, what problem did Google+ solve?
- john-radio 8y ago
  It solved the problem of "It's 2016 and the fourth presidential debate. I want to post about Marco Rubio! But I don't want to annoy my non-political-junkie friends with this..." IIRC, Facebook had Friend Lists at the time, but it wasn't easy to share content exclusively with a friend list.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Google didn't have a social network, and their competitors did. /s Seriously though, I really liked the Twitter-esque default-public interaction model, but with long form posts. Just doubling Twitter's character count has helped a ton with this. Public interaction still feels like an oddity on Facebook. And then the ability to divide out people I was following was super nice, although I eventually filtered it down to two groups: One which I read religiously and had notifications of in my email, and one I would scroll through when I was bored and had time.
- stale2002 8y ago
  There was actually a brief period of time, right when google+ started, where everyone would just start a Google Hangout (which was released at the same time), and people were just chilling in the Hangouts. That experience was cool. It felt like modern social square, to just have open video chats, than anyone would just join.
PaulHoule 8y ago
Aren't the circles really aimed at the spammer mentality? (e.g. I am broadcasting)
- derfnugget 8y ago
  For me, circles seemed to do the opposite. Instead of blasting an update to every person on my friends list (coworkers, family, friends) I could limit the exposure to a subset. This seemed like a better way to control spam in the ~3 posts I made on Google+.
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jcousins 8y ago
I scrolled through my long dead plus profile before I nuked it a few weeks ago. The main thing I noticed is that I posted a broad spectrum of things there from all the hobbies and interests in my life. When I moved to twitter my profile became almost two dimensional - mostly about two topics of interest and nothing in between. Lots of quips and no longform posts. Although I do like being able to curate my feed and my own posts down to a very limited set of topics, I also miss the way I could discover new things on Plus and, long before that, Stumbleupon. It was easier to break out of my echo chamber. I don't have a modern day tool to fill that role (would love to hear some options if anyone has suggestions)
erikig 8y ago
Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.
- LanceH 8y ago
  This. I have family, military friends and recruiters and I don't want those conversations crossing over. With facebook, I have no idea what will leak across various groups of friends.
  - CodeCube 8y ago
    I 100% agree, however I really didn't like manually curating those circles ... I share a relatively diverse set of things/interests, so would have loved to leave it up to the other party which facet of my "feed" they could have subscribed to. This isn't my use case, but a perfect example is people with kids. They're gonna share pictures and stuff of their kids, but as I'm sure you've seen, tons of people make comments like, "I wish I could just filter out pictures of babies and dogs!".
    - AlanSE 8y ago
      Any system that requires manual curating of these things by the user is doomed to fail. I'm probably the demographic most prone to try features, so I'll try to make some circles, but I have to admit failure. Even whatever you called it in livejournal where you had specific sharing groups of friends - that was a burden to maintain. I eventually lost track of my organization. It just wasn't worth it.
      - LanceH 8y ago
        All the automated systems fail as well. I don't see any way the overlaps can be automated without some people either missing out, or other people getting a bit much.
    - naravara 8y ago
franze 8y ago
as an eexample of: it's not worth to screw your culture to pursue one(1) goal.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
It was actually super strange that in all the years it was there, Google never bothered to put ads in Google+. Had they done so, I wonder if they would've considered the platform more viable long-term?
- combatentropy 8y ago
  Do you mean that they canned Google+ because it was making no money? Surely at any time they could add ads. They knew how many people were going there and how often. Therefore they then could make a good guess, from their other apps, at how much money it would make them if they were to add ads. It must have been that after doing the math they thought it was not worth it. Or maybe they never meant it to make money directly, only to feed into their other products, which make money. Either way, they knew how many people were going there and how often, and decided it wasn't doing what they wanted it to do and that it could not make enough money even if they added in ads.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    For quite a long while, Google+ was the third largest social network. It's hard to imagine it could not have made a significant amount of money on ads. It's definitely true that initially Google intended G+ to feed into the overall Google thing, and that many integrations of combining disparate Google properties together was actually done under the banner of G+. But I do wonder with Ruth Porat's more "must be profitable" approach to Google divisions, if they had added ads a couple years ago, if it might've been considered worth maintaining.
    - combatentropy 8y ago
      I guess we're still talking past each other. > It's hard to imagine it could not have made a significant amount of money on ads. Yes, I agree. And Google knew this better than either of us. Therefore no one at Google ever would have said, "We need to close down Google+ because it is not making enough money." It was making zero dollars, because they chose to give it no way make money, directly. There was no sign-up fee, and there was no advertising. Your original comment that I was replying to: > Had they done so, I wonder if they would've considered the platform more viable long-term? They don't need to turn on ads to know if it is viable, because they can just turn on ads in their heads. "Google+ has this many users, who use it this often per day. Therefore, if we were to turn on advertising, it would probably bring in about $___________ per year." They did the math. They thought it still wasn't worth it.
ken 8y ago
Each of the individual features of Google+ sounded great on paper. I never used it so I can't comment on the implementation. What killed it for me is that it came from Google. They'd already showed they're terrible at customer service, and terrible at service longevity/continuity, and it just seems creepy for the same company to want to do my web browser, my phone, my search engine, my social media, my web hosting, my advertising, my payments, my shared documents (editing and storage), etc. It seems like, to Google engineers, "fully integrated with 173 other Google services" is a feature. To me, it's a red flag. If they want me to use any more services from them, they need to come up with some way to wall it off so I'm assured that any potential issues with X don't affect my usage of Y.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Google unification didn't not work. It forced so many things brutally .. even with cool ideas it would remove value from the whole Google brand. (a tiny barely significant example: I lost my youtube channel due to g+ real name policy) That said, Google+ had a good bunch of interesting people discussing things nicely (vintage computing, craftmanship). There was a lot to enjoy and way less of the social network usual noise and chit chat drama.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  Back when Google+ launched, we weren't yet at the "Google is evil" stage. Social Media was just taking off. What really killed it was no public API. It launched in the era of Tweetdeck and the like being major tools for consolidating social media interaction. There was no API. So to send a message to Google+, one had to specifically go across to the only application capable of talking to it, theirs. When you're already in/using Tweetdeck to post messages to Twitter, Facebook etc, why would you want to go to a whole new client to post a message? While it seems like mostly people have moved away from using such catch-all clients for interacting (in no small part because Twitter have made it hard by their various API antics), this missed the zeitgeist at the time, and never got that critical mass going to sustain it. If you're moving late in the market, you've really got to go where people are and bring them to you, or you've got to fundamentally solve problems to a mind blowing degree that other platforms have and can't. It did neither, even though the features like circle were really good.
hateful 8y ago
The reason I used Facebook (emphasis on the past tense here) and not Google+ is for one reason only: I could not post something on my wife's "wall/timeline" in Google+. This is different than "tagging" someone in that it goes on their page, not yours so their friends can see it. I closed it and never used it again.
- rak00n 8y ago
  When you tag someone their friends can see it on her wall if she chooses to.
eclipseo76 8y ago
But where will I be able to read Linus words? That was my only use of Google+.
aboutruby 8y ago
It's a redirect to: https://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right https://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right (I was just checking for url shorteners)
- eitland 8y ago
  That is the real url. I was in a hurry and pasted the internal one. It doesn't redirect automatically though.
electriclove 8y ago
Reverse chronological list of all posts that I am interested in with no 'helpful' filtering/automated curation/suggested content. Oh wait, I don't think Google+ had that..
AndrewStephens 8y ago
I was an early proponent of G+ when it first opened. I loved the idea of Circles and their implementation of Groups was really good. I didn't love the UI, which I found bland, but the functionality was well thought out. For a while I used it as my primary social media site but Facebook was entrenched even back then and nobody I knew used G+. I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing useful features for the web at large - walled sites like Facebook should be considered the enemy, not something to emulate. If I was Google I would be providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate. Instead they killed Google Reader and made G+ and youtube just as much as a walled garden as Facebook.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  Pretty sure some googlers can chime in or someone will dig a post from that time but I seem to recall the inability for Google to crawl facebook private profiles, where juicy profiling bits live, was one of the incentives for google to get into the game. And the fact that someone at Google freaked out over the sn revolution but don't quote me on that. I am pretty sure I read the demise of google reader was because it's hard to make money off of RSS/Atom and harder to bolt adtech on top of it. Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed edit: they failed with g+ I mean I am more amazed at how microsoft had the messenger brand and how it's now facebook's. It's mind boggling. And ms had a blogging strategy at some point.
  - zeroxfe 8y ago
    Yep, I recall that the FB like buttons proliferating the web was perceived as a huge threat (and drove the +1 buttons.) > Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed. Wave failed, but was a fantastic experiment, and the learnings went into Google Docs/Sheets for collaborative editing. Blogger and Orkut didn't fail. They were hugely successful -- Blogger worldwide, and Orkut primarily in Brazil (and India, I think.) Both had great rides, and withered away as everything does.
dredmorbius 8y ago
I've yet to write a definitive post mortem (still in the thick of the Google+ Exodus, see: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/), but most treatments I've seen miss substantial points. G+ was endlessly frustrating, and yet still compelling. The features many list were not part of the site for much its life: it launched without Search, Communities, or Collections. It morphed several times, significantly: May 2012 and 2013, the November 2013 YouTube forced integration, and several generally lesser ones after the site was in clear decline. The low-friction interaction with notifications, and search capabilities, along with all-but-unlimited-length text posts, were strengths. As was underlying platorm stability. The user cohort, yes, small, but geeky and academic, was a strength. (The SEO marketing contingent not so much.) Noise, poor filters and organisational capabilities, and unwanted and intrusive integrations were downsides. Overall management was abysmal, likely for numerous reasons. And yet I'd found it useful, within limits.
reality_czech 8y ago
What they got right was shutting down. If only AMP would do the same.
mikelward 8y ago
I thought it was a great idea as a social network graph, so you could share things on various Google properties (e.g. ACLs for photos). It also had a lot of potential as a contact sync method. Too bad Google kept promoting it like it was just another Facebook news feed.
Defcon6 8y ago
A nice post about a really well built social community that got lost because most social media users crave Likes/attention. I can tell you that all your points are good points and I don’t have a BUT neither :) Facebook, insta and Whatsapp make it way too easy for people to use their platforms. Most people take the easiest root and all their friends are there too. For 5 years I’m trying to get people to stop using Whatsapp and step over to Signal. Everyone tells me, that they don’t know anyone on Signal. The same goes for G+ On G+ I had like 20,000 followers on just one type of collection of photos. The people followed it because they where interested in the subject. Facebook connects people and people are nosy, they want attention and want to see what others are doing. G+ didn’t have that.
INTPenis 8y ago
In my view there are two things FB achieved; they got people to come, and they got people to stay. G+ got people to come, had an amazing position to abuse their monopoly just like with Chrome, but failed to hold them there. And I believe the interface might have scared some away but I also believe there was nothing fun to occupy your time with while you're waiting for the next notification high.
idlewords 8y ago
It rid us of that awful Google Reader!
mcv 8y ago
This article misses a couple of important strengths of Google+: * The combination of Events and Hangouts was magical. This was great for planning open online meetups, games on hangouts, and tons of other things. * Circle sharing. This really jump-started informal communities. Yes, they added more official communities later, but circle sharing was in my opinion a far more effective way to create real communities of people who get to know each other. * Ultimately, of course, the most important part were the people themselves. It attracted a lot of interesting people. Geeks, early adopters, people with a passion for a wide variety of topics. People weren't using it to connect with families and friends they already know in the real world, they connected to new people with similar interests that didn't always fit a specific formal Community. Friendships were made, several businesses were launched based primarily on interaction on Google+. I'm sad to see it go. I'm sadder still that Google mismanaged it into the ground. They had something great, but seemed determined to destroy it by forcing low quality content onto it, and removing popular features.
dbrgn 8y ago
Circles were nice. The overall design was nice. But was it original? To me, it seems that they directly copied quite a few UI elements and concepts from Diaspora, including circles: https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2011/8/23/google-plus-inspired-by-diaspora/ https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2011/8/23/google-plus-inspired-by-dias...
ArtDev 8y ago
Good: Circles. Bad: Circles privacy; who can see what. I found it confusing when it should have been obvious. This kept me from posting. The UI should have made it obvious.
ArtDev 8y ago
With so many people abandoning Facebook for Instagram or Twitter, perhaps G+ was just before its time. Not many people were on it. Well, except the Dalai Lama. He rocked it!
judge2020 8y ago
The only thing I give to Google is its security. Search HN for just Google[0] and the threads are all things regarding the company's decisions/politics: shutting down products, abusing their Chrome monopoly, Google Play, etc. Meanwhile, you can search for Facebook [1] and all of the top stories are related to infosec/data breaches, actual crimes like the research VPN (although Google also did this, be it more transparently), etc. I'm not saying Google is perfect, they did have the Google+ API leak. You can hate Google for their decisions all the same as being able to hate FB for their infosec (or, better yet, hate both of them for the ad targeting) but I'd rather have my data stored by Google instead of FB. 0: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google 1: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  Google plus had a huge data breach that prompted its early closure. People just like to concentrate on every single minor issue fb has.
jameshart 8y ago
Increasingly seems that what Google got right was getting the heck out of the social networking arms race before the 2016 election season.
- dbbk 8y ago
  They still have YouTube.
effnorwood 8y ago
Nothing
discordance 8y ago
Since they killed Google Reader because of G+, my question is now that G+ is officially dead, can they bring back Google Reader?
- zamadatix 8y ago
  I'm sure they won't bring something back based on one of many the rumors of why they closed it.
dingo_bat 8y ago
I liked Google buzz more. It required very less user interaction. Since both services were unwanted, I'd rather have something that requires less attention of mine.
usaphp 8y ago
> The design was so much nicer, ux so much smoother than everything else. I disagree, It felt unpolished and raw and did not have any distinct style or consistency. You can hate facebook but they managed to cramp a lot of functionality in a pretty clean looking design.
blunderkid 8y ago
What Google had to do was to blindly copy Fakebook and use its search engine to market the hell out of it while there was still hope. In other words be ruthless. But that trait comes easier to MarkZ than the Google trio. If you couldn’t, at least don’t use math guys to build a product for humans. You see Circles and collections and a plus one button may sound cute to HN audience but are far too complex ideas for an average user. The avg dude needs a textbox and a feed. Any value adding concept scrambles brains.
egfx 8y ago
Instead of a seperate UI, Google+ should have been integrated into Gmail. Then more people would naturally use it everyday. The integration would not center around a separate UI but features would be enhanced to gradually bring circles and the like into the core email experience. AOL managed to expand in this way with email and chat as core features.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  I think that would have made many people close their accounts, since such an integration wouldn't be welcomed by all. I only use social networking for professional relations. Sharing anything beyond that with Google would be a nightmare, even if that is a minority opinion. To the topic at hand: I think their failure was mainly a timing problem. Facebooks largest argument has always been that it is the largest network with the most users. Many people didn't have an interest to change the network.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Being integrated into Gmail didn't save Google Buzz. (That was also one of Buzz's early critical privacy missteps was being integrated into Gmail and showing up barely announced as opt-out rather than opt-in.) If they were really smart, G+ should have better bootstrapped out of Google Reader. Google Reader at the time had a very interesting and active social community. (Instead they killed Reader as if it were a competitor to G+ and just hoped the now incredibly inconvenienced community would just move to G+.)
vikaskyadav 8y ago
That they are shutting themselves down.
ggm 8y ago
Lack of basic boolean logic to define interaction of a post into circles and groups and people. The "how do I tell all my friends, except John, about a secret birthday party" problem. I complained about this near the launch. I have a circle of friends in g+ I will miss, if they do not migrate to pluspora or a like service, which is inferior to g+ if not grossly inferior.
pier25 8y ago
It had some great features, but the UI/UX was IMO wrong and I'm sure it's what turned people off about it. So for example instead of having one stream of info, there were multiple columns. This goes against the scrolling list behavior that everyone seems addicted to.

112 points by eitland 8y ago

The rest of the Internet won. On my way home today I wrote down why I liked it.

It's only now that I use Twitter on a daily basis that I realize the problem of having a single feed for your private life, work, hobbies, etc. It just doesn't work and is one of the main reasons why I unfollow people. I think the underlying functionality of circles and collections are a must but maybe they can be implemented in a better and easier to use way.

eitland 8y ago
When Twitter first appeared my guess was they'd create a kind of messaging backbone for the Internet and start to add features like machine-to-machine, group communication etc. Guess my disappointment.
edgarvaldes 8y ago
On a side note: Twitter is strange to me, as someone who visits it once every two or three weeks. After a while, I'm usually surprised by some tweets, because I started following someone because of their profession or hobby that lines up with mine, but then they post data about other activities. Why am I following someone who talks about food? Oh, right, for another completely unrelated reason. And I do not even follow so many people.
- josefresco 8y ago
  I have this happen as well, where I'll follow someone for a certain subject they post about, but then when they post about something else I'm confused as to why I'm following this person, until I look at their full feed and remember why. I doubt, even with the option that most people who separate their posts into "categories" or circles but it would be nice.
alttab 8y ago
I liked the idea of circles but G+ never really stuck for me. One thing I think about is tagging. Arguably circles is a private configuration. If I tag someone in a picture I posted to my Family Facebook Circle, but who on their end would see it on the timeline? I never used G+ enough to know how it handled that scenario. My intuition wants to tell me it's tricky things like that which piled up in Facebook's mind when evaluating whether to copy them. They've copied many competitors and social media outlets especially if it fit easily. Privacy features isn't one of their strengths.
neonhomer 8y ago
I find the issue is with the actual authors. One post will be something helpful to my work and then the next will some politic rant. I want a social network where I only see the former post.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  That's what Google+'s collections were for: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/6320409?hl=en&ref_topic=6320387 https://support.google.com/plus/answer/6320409?hl=en&ref_top...
WorldMaker 8y ago
I find Mastodon's Content Warnings an interesting/useful model for mixing such content, and it's interesting the number of folks I follow that are falling into a "CW everything" philosophy for this sort of reason. The "Show More" to expand a subject/topic is an interesting "pull" mechanic, as contrasted to Circles' larger focus on "push".
- eitland 8y ago
  > I find Mastodon's Content Warnings an interesting/useful model for mixing such content, ... Same here. I also hope circles and collections will come to the fediverse. Pixelfed already had circles as one of four options for what to focus on in coming iterations.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I don't mind CWs as much since they finally added a global "show all" setting you can set in your profile. There's definitely some nice uses beyond "trigger warnings", like keeping a long post from dominating your feed view, or as a spoiler tag for discussing movies.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Semi-related, my big hack in my instance's custom CSS was to substantially enlarge the Show More/Show Less buttons to make it a much easier target to tap/click, which makes it much easier to expand or recollapse a post.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      This sounds handy. Out of curiosity, does Mastodon have any form of extension/plugin system yet, to allow you to manage these through upgrades and/or distribute them easily, or are you modifying the stylesheets directly?
      - WorldMaker 8y ago
        So far I've been sticking to things I can do purely in CSS (I wanted to move the CW subject lines into the buttons, for instance, but couldn't find a way with the current markup). For that, the Administrator section of Mastodon does keep and store a custom CSS section that it will output as a <style> block on page renders. I've been sharing my CSS changes on my account as I make them, and other admins could just copy and paste them. (Probably the most major other change was I fought the CSS to make the background 100% black for OLED power savings.) I'm told there also is a deeper theming system and some shared themes as Ruby gems. I haven't explored that personally because I'm using a shared host and so far I've been happy with the simple custom CSS overrides.
smacktoward 8y ago
I think of the underlying problem as "the metadata delusion." We programmers look at difficulties users have dealing with large volumes of data and think, aha! I can solve this by giving them ways to add metadata to those data, so it can be more easily browsed/filtered/faceted/whatever. (We think that because programmers have an analytical cast of mind, which we then extrapolate from -- this would be useful for me, we figure, therefore it would be useful for anyone.) So we build these elaborate systems for storing and managing metadata, and then build elaborate UIs to expose those systems to the user. Our system goes out to the users, and as long as those users are people like us -- analytical types -- it works OK. But then it goes out beyond that to a general audience, and suddenly we discover a new problem: namely that most users don't want to add metadata and simply will not do it, even if by doing so they could realize huge productivity gains. It doesn't matter how useful the metadata would be to them, to them adding metadata is work, and worse, it's nerd work of a kind they feel fundamentally uncomfortable with and unequipped to deal with. So they just don't do it. And they won't do it, no matter how hard you try to sell them on it. That was the problem with "circles" in G+: not that it was a bad idea to let people split up their feeds, but that having multiple feeds required them to add metadata (creating circles, naming them, adding people to them, periodically removing people from them, etc.), and people just didn't want to do that. So they didn't. It's not impossible to build systems that categorize data to make it more comprehensible, but if you want them to work, they have to do so in some way that doesn't put the burden on the user to keep everything correctly tagged/categorized/faceted/whatever. Because they just will not do that, no matter how many carrots you dangle.
- sethhochberg 8y ago
  It seems to be working for Instragram, but they implemented the simplest possible thing for stories - you can have your "everyone" group, or your "close friends" group. No custom labels, no additional groups, just those two and thats it. I see quite a few friends who never even participated on G+ or similar making use of it.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    Yeah, that's a good example: if you must have the user add metadata, keep it as simple as you possibly can. "You have exactly two buckets, everything goes in one or in the other" is about as simple a metadata system as you can get.
fold_left 8y ago
An option that can achieve something like circles on Twitter is to not follow any accounts but instead assign them to Twitter's "lists". You can create lists for work, hobbies etc and view whichever one you're interested in at a given time.
pmarreck 8y ago
I divide things up thusly: Programming- or gaming-related: Twitter "Fit for mass consumption": Facebook Personal: Facebook (with privacy settings activated)

40dslf 8y ago

The website felt slow and bloated performance-wise, despite the design being simple. YouTube feels like that now too.

unilynx 8y ago
And Google Cloud console. And Gsuite Admin. And Gmail. Well, maybe the latter isn't simple anymore
- TheHypnotist 8y ago
  They seem to have lost sight on a big part of what made them attractive to begin with.
  - k__ 8y ago
    It's funny because Google has this guy, I think he's called Alex Russel, running around and telling the world which websites are too slow and how to improve web performance. Somehow the rest of Google seems to ignore him.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  All that botnet takes time to execute.
- OrgNet 8y ago
  Google wants your website to load fast or they'll de-rank you but they need all that javascript on their websites (it doesn't matter if it slows things down).
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
This got worse over time. It used to be quite zippy when it first launched.
eitland 8y ago
Sorry for that. I host it with write.as, and I guess they might have some scaling problems or something. It is a just a small (but very cool IMO) startup.

Sniffnoy 8y ago

Some of this could also be "What did LiveJournal (and therefore also its clones) get right?" Oddly LiveJournal seems to always get left out of these discussions, even though it had more features than many later sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc). There's good reason to avoid LiveJournal itself these days, but the clone sites still live (e.g. Dreamwidth).

k__ 8y ago
Wasn't LJ just a blogging platform? I used it in early 2000 and was blown away by what MySpace offered compared to LJ.
- Sniffnoy 8y ago
  I mean, you had your friends page, which aggregated all the posts from people you'd added as friends (this was a one-way thing, it didn't require the other person's agreement). You could also make posts locked so that only your friends, or specific subsets, could see them. (Later it became possible to separate these two different functions of adding someone as a friend, although a little troublesome. On Dreamwidth these are entirely separate functions, with the "friends page" now called the "reading page"; you "subscribe" to people to add them there, and you "give access" to people to let them read your locked posts.) People can also set up "communities" that people can join and post to. And of course people had profiles where they could write a little bit about themselves, and you could see their friend lists (or these days on Dreamwidth, subscription lists and access lists). Seems to me it basically resembles the later "social networking" sites in features (and outdoes them except possibly Google+), just the tone was more focused on long-form blogging. I guess the one thing lacking that people these days would expect was that you couldn't easily upload pictures and such (that was a paid feature IIRC; haven't checked how that works on Dreamwidth). But if you ignore that...
- codingdave 8y ago
  If by blogging platform, you mean a place where people can post content, comments on each other's content, have friends lists, send messages, have public pr private posts, and have community pages with shared content authoring, then yes. But then, so is Facebook.

jpswade 8y ago

The question is, what problem did Google+ solve?

john-radio 8y ago
It solved the problem of "It's 2016 and the fourth presidential debate. I want to post about Marco Rubio! But I don't want to annoy my non-political-junkie friends with this..." IIRC, Facebook had Friend Lists at the time, but it wasn't easy to share content exclusively with a friend list.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Google didn't have a social network, and their competitors did. /s Seriously though, I really liked the Twitter-esque default-public interaction model, but with long form posts. Just doubling Twitter's character count has helped a ton with this. Public interaction still feels like an oddity on Facebook. And then the ability to divide out people I was following was super nice, although I eventually filtered it down to two groups: One which I read religiously and had notifications of in my email, and one I would scroll through when I was bored and had time.
stale2002 8y ago
There was actually a brief period of time, right when google+ started, where everyone would just start a Google Hangout (which was released at the same time), and people were just chilling in the Hangouts. That experience was cool. It felt like modern social square, to just have open video chats, than anyone would just join.

PaulHoule 8y ago

Aren't the circles really aimed at the spammer mentality? (e.g. I am broadcasting)

derfnugget 8y ago
For me, circles seemed to do the opposite. Instead of blasting an update to every person on my friends list (coworkers, family, friends) I could limit the exposure to a subset. This seemed like a better way to control spam in the ~3 posts I made on Google+.
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jcousins 8y ago

I scrolled through my long dead plus profile before I nuked it a few weeks ago. The main thing I noticed is that I posted a broad spectrum of things there from all the hobbies and interests in my life. When I moved to twitter my profile became almost two dimensional - mostly about two topics of interest and nothing in between. Lots of quips and no longform posts. Although I do like being able to curate my feed and my own posts down to a very limited set of topics, I also miss the way I could discover new things on Plus and, long before that, Stumbleupon. It was easier to break out of my echo chamber. I don't have a modern day tool to fill that role (would love to hear some options if anyone has suggestions)

erikig 8y ago

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

LanceH 8y ago
This. I have family, military friends and recruiters and I don't want those conversations crossing over. With facebook, I have no idea what will leak across various groups of friends.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  I 100% agree, however I really didn't like manually curating those circles ... I share a relatively diverse set of things/interests, so would have loved to leave it up to the other party which facet of my "feed" they could have subscribed to. This isn't my use case, but a perfect example is people with kids. They're gonna share pictures and stuff of their kids, but as I'm sure you've seen, tons of people make comments like, "I wish I could just filter out pictures of babies and dogs!".
  - AlanSE 8y ago
    Any system that requires manual curating of these things by the user is doomed to fail. I'm probably the demographic most prone to try features, so I'll try to make some circles, but I have to admit failure. Even whatever you called it in livejournal where you had specific sharing groups of friends - that was a burden to maintain. I eventually lost track of my organization. It just wasn't worth it.
    - LanceH 8y ago
      All the automated systems fail as well. I don't see any way the overlaps can be automated without some people either missing out, or other people getting a bit much.
  - naravara 8y ago

franze 8y ago

as an eexample of: it's not worth to screw your culture to pursue one(1) goal.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

It was actually super strange that in all the years it was there, Google never bothered to put ads in Google+. Had they done so, I wonder if they would've considered the platform more viable long-term?

combatentropy 8y ago
Do you mean that they canned Google+ because it was making no money? Surely at any time they could add ads. They knew how many people were going there and how often. Therefore they then could make a good guess, from their other apps, at how much money it would make them if they were to add ads. It must have been that after doing the math they thought it was not worth it. Or maybe they never meant it to make money directly, only to feed into their other products, which make money. Either way, they knew how many people were going there and how often, and decided it wasn't doing what they wanted it to do and that it could not make enough money even if they added in ads.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  For quite a long while, Google+ was the third largest social network. It's hard to imagine it could not have made a significant amount of money on ads. It's definitely true that initially Google intended G+ to feed into the overall Google thing, and that many integrations of combining disparate Google properties together was actually done under the banner of G+. But I do wonder with Ruth Porat's more "must be profitable" approach to Google divisions, if they had added ads a couple years ago, if it might've been considered worth maintaining.
  - combatentropy 8y ago
    I guess we're still talking past each other. > It's hard to imagine it could not have made a significant amount of money on ads. Yes, I agree. And Google knew this better than either of us. Therefore no one at Google ever would have said, "We need to close down Google+ because it is not making enough money." It was making zero dollars, because they chose to give it no way make money, directly. There was no sign-up fee, and there was no advertising. Your original comment that I was replying to: > Had they done so, I wonder if they would've considered the platform more viable long-term? They don't need to turn on ads to know if it is viable, because they can just turn on ads in their heads. "Google+ has this many users, who use it this often per day. Therefore, if we were to turn on advertising, it would probably bring in about $___________ per year." They did the math. They thought it still wasn't worth it.

ken 8y ago

Each of the individual features of Google+ sounded great on paper. I never used it so I can't comment on the implementation. What killed it for me is that it came from Google. They'd already showed they're terrible at customer service, and terrible at service longevity/continuity, and it just seems creepy for the same company to want to do my web browser, my phone, my search engine, my social media, my web hosting, my advertising, my payments, my shared documents (editing and storage), etc. It seems like, to Google engineers, "fully integrated with 173 other Google services" is a feature. To me, it's a red flag. If they want me to use any more services from them, they need to come up with some way to wall it off so I'm assured that any potential issues with X don't affect my usage of Y.

agumonkey 8y ago
Google unification didn't not work. It forced so many things brutally .. even with cool ideas it would remove value from the whole Google brand. (a tiny barely significant example: I lost my youtube channel due to g+ real name policy) That said, Google+ had a good bunch of interesting people discussing things nicely (vintage computing, craftmanship). There was a lot to enjoy and way less of the social network usual noise and chit chat drama.
Twirrim 8y ago
Back when Google+ launched, we weren't yet at the "Google is evil" stage. Social Media was just taking off. What really killed it was no public API. It launched in the era of Tweetdeck and the like being major tools for consolidating social media interaction. There was no API. So to send a message to Google+, one had to specifically go across to the only application capable of talking to it, theirs. When you're already in/using Tweetdeck to post messages to Twitter, Facebook etc, why would you want to go to a whole new client to post a message? While it seems like mostly people have moved away from using such catch-all clients for interacting (in no small part because Twitter have made it hard by their various API antics), this missed the zeitgeist at the time, and never got that critical mass going to sustain it. If you're moving late in the market, you've really got to go where people are and bring them to you, or you've got to fundamentally solve problems to a mind blowing degree that other platforms have and can't. It did neither, even though the features like circle were really good.

hateful 8y ago

The reason I used Facebook (emphasis on the past tense here) and not Google+ is for one reason only: I could not post something on my wife's "wall/timeline" in Google+. This is different than "tagging" someone in that it goes on their page, not yours so their friends can see it. I closed it and never used it again.

rak00n 8y ago
When you tag someone their friends can see it on her wall if she chooses to.

eclipseo76 8y ago

But where will I be able to read Linus words? That was my only use of Google+.

aboutruby 8y ago

It's a redirect to: https://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right https://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right (I was just checking for url shorteners)

eitland 8y ago
That is the real url. I was in a hurry and pasted the internal one. It doesn't redirect automatically though.

electriclove 8y ago

Reverse chronological list of all posts that I am interested in with no 'helpful' filtering/automated curation/suggested content. Oh wait, I don't think Google+ had that..

AndrewStephens 8y ago

I was an early proponent of G+ when it first opened. I loved the idea of Circles and their implementation of Groups was really good. I didn't love the UI, which I found bland, but the functionality was well thought out. For a while I used it as my primary social media site but Facebook was entrenched even back then and nobody I knew used G+. I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing useful features for the web at large - walled sites like Facebook should be considered the enemy, not something to emulate. If I was Google I would be providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate. Instead they killed Google Reader and made G+ and youtube just as much as a walled garden as Facebook.

johnchristopher 8y ago
Pretty sure some googlers can chime in or someone will dig a post from that time but I seem to recall the inability for Google to crawl facebook private profiles, where juicy profiling bits live, was one of the incentives for google to get into the game. And the fact that someone at Google freaked out over the sn revolution but don't quote me on that. I am pretty sure I read the demise of google reader was because it's hard to make money off of RSS/Atom and harder to bolt adtech on top of it. Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed edit: they failed with g+ I mean I am more amazed at how microsoft had the messenger brand and how it's now facebook's. It's mind boggling. And ms had a blogging strategy at some point.
- zeroxfe 8y ago
  Yep, I recall that the FB like buttons proliferating the web was perceived as a huge threat (and drove the +1 buttons.) > Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed. Wave failed, but was a fantastic experiment, and the learnings went into Google Docs/Sheets for collaborative editing. Blogger and Orkut didn't fail. They were hugely successful -- Blogger worldwide, and Orkut primarily in Brazil (and India, I think.) Both had great rides, and withered away as everything does.

dredmorbius 8y ago

I've yet to write a definitive post mortem (still in the thick of the Google+ Exodus, see: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/), but most treatments I've seen miss substantial points. G+ was endlessly frustrating, and yet still compelling. The features many list were not part of the site for much its life: it launched without Search, Communities, or Collections. It morphed several times, significantly: May 2012 and 2013, the November 2013 YouTube forced integration, and several generally lesser ones after the site was in clear decline. The low-friction interaction with notifications, and search capabilities, along with all-but-unlimited-length text posts, were strengths. As was underlying platorm stability. The user cohort, yes, small, but geeky and academic, was a strength. (The SEO marketing contingent not so much.) Noise, poor filters and organisational capabilities, and unwanted and intrusive integrations were downsides. Overall management was abysmal, likely for numerous reasons. And yet I'd found it useful, within limits.

reality_czech 8y ago

What they got right was shutting down. If only AMP would do the same.

mikelward 8y ago

I thought it was a great idea as a social network graph, so you could share things on various Google properties (e.g. ACLs for photos). It also had a lot of potential as a contact sync method. Too bad Google kept promoting it like it was just another Facebook news feed.

Defcon6 8y ago

A nice post about a really well built social community that got lost because most social media users crave Likes/attention. I can tell you that all your points are good points and I don’t have a BUT neither :) Facebook, insta and Whatsapp make it way too easy for people to use their platforms. Most people take the easiest root and all their friends are there too. For 5 years I’m trying to get people to stop using Whatsapp and step over to Signal. Everyone tells me, that they don’t know anyone on Signal. The same goes for G+ On G+ I had like 20,000 followers on just one type of collection of photos. The people followed it because they where interested in the subject. Facebook connects people and people are nosy, they want attention and want to see what others are doing. G+ didn’t have that.

INTPenis 8y ago

In my view there are two things FB achieved; they got people to come, and they got people to stay. G+ got people to come, had an amazing position to abuse their monopoly just like with Chrome, but failed to hold them there. And I believe the interface might have scared some away but I also believe there was nothing fun to occupy your time with while you're waiting for the next notification high.

idlewords 8y ago

It rid us of that awful Google Reader!

mcv 8y ago

This article misses a couple of important strengths of Google+: * The combination of Events and Hangouts was magical. This was great for planning open online meetups, games on hangouts, and tons of other things. * Circle sharing. This really jump-started informal communities. Yes, they added more official communities later, but circle sharing was in my opinion a far more effective way to create real communities of people who get to know each other. * Ultimately, of course, the most important part were the people themselves. It attracted a lot of interesting people. Geeks, early adopters, people with a passion for a wide variety of topics. People weren't using it to connect with families and friends they already know in the real world, they connected to new people with similar interests that didn't always fit a specific formal Community. Friendships were made, several businesses were launched based primarily on interaction on Google+. I'm sad to see it go. I'm sadder still that Google mismanaged it into the ground. They had something great, but seemed determined to destroy it by forcing low quality content onto it, and removing popular features.

dbrgn 8y ago

Circles were nice. The overall design was nice. But was it original? To me, it seems that they directly copied quite a few UI elements and concepts from Diaspora, including circles: https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2011/8/23/google-plus-inspired-by-diaspora/ https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2011/8/23/google-plus-inspired-by-dias...

ArtDev 8y ago

Good: Circles. Bad: Circles privacy; who can see what. I found it confusing when it should have been obvious. This kept me from posting. The UI should have made it obvious.

ArtDev 8y ago

With so many people abandoning Facebook for Instagram or Twitter, perhaps G+ was just before its time. Not many people were on it. Well, except the Dalai Lama. He rocked it!

judge2020 8y ago

The only thing I give to Google is its security. Search HN for just Google[0] and the threads are all things regarding the company's decisions/politics: shutting down products, abusing their Chrome monopoly, Google Play, etc. Meanwhile, you can search for Facebook [1] and all of the top stories are related to infosec/data breaches, actual crimes like the research VPN (although Google also did this, be it more transparently), etc. I'm not saying Google is perfect, they did have the Google+ API leak. You can hate Google for their decisions all the same as being able to hate FB for their infosec (or, better yet, hate both of them for the ad targeting) but I'd rather have my data stored by Google instead of FB. 0: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google 1: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook

dingo_bat 8y ago
Google plus had a huge data breach that prompted its early closure. People just like to concentrate on every single minor issue fb has.

jameshart 8y ago

Increasingly seems that what Google got right was getting the heck out of the social networking arms race before the 2016 election season.

dbbk 8y ago
They still have YouTube.

effnorwood 8y ago

Nothing

discordance 8y ago

Since they killed Google Reader because of G+, my question is now that G+ is officially dead, can they bring back Google Reader?

zamadatix 8y ago
I'm sure they won't bring something back based on one of many the rumors of why they closed it.

dingo_bat 8y ago

I liked Google buzz more. It required very less user interaction. Since both services were unwanted, I'd rather have something that requires less attention of mine.

usaphp 8y ago

> The design was so much nicer, ux so much smoother than everything else. I disagree, It felt unpolished and raw and did not have any distinct style or consistency. You can hate facebook but they managed to cramp a lot of functionality in a pretty clean looking design.

blunderkid 8y ago

What Google had to do was to blindly copy Fakebook and use its search engine to market the hell out of it while there was still hope. In other words be ruthless. But that trait comes easier to MarkZ than the Google trio. If you couldn’t, at least don’t use math guys to build a product for humans. You see Circles and collections and a plus one button may sound cute to HN audience but are far too complex ideas for an average user. The avg dude needs a textbox and a feed. Any value adding concept scrambles brains.

egfx 8y ago

Instead of a seperate UI, Google+ should have been integrated into Gmail. Then more people would naturally use it everyday. The integration would not center around a separate UI but features would be enhanced to gradually bring circles and the like into the core email experience. AOL managed to expand in this way with email and chat as core features.

raxxorrax 8y ago
I think that would have made many people close their accounts, since such an integration wouldn't be welcomed by all. I only use social networking for professional relations. Sharing anything beyond that with Google would be a nightmare, even if that is a minority opinion. To the topic at hand: I think their failure was mainly a timing problem. Facebooks largest argument has always been that it is the largest network with the most users. Many people didn't have an interest to change the network.
WorldMaker 8y ago
Being integrated into Gmail didn't save Google Buzz. (That was also one of Buzz's early critical privacy missteps was being integrated into Gmail and showing up barely announced as opt-out rather than opt-in.) If they were really smart, G+ should have better bootstrapped out of Google Reader. Google Reader at the time had a very interesting and active social community. (Instead they killed Reader as if it were a competitor to G+ and just hoped the now incredibly inconvenienced community would just move to G+.)

vikaskyadav 8y ago

That they are shutting themselves down.

ggm 8y ago

Lack of basic boolean logic to define interaction of a post into circles and groups and people. The "how do I tell all my friends, except John, about a secret birthday party" problem. I complained about this near the launch. I have a circle of friends in g+ I will miss, if they do not migrate to pluspora or a like service, which is inferior to g+ if not grossly inferior.

pier25 8y ago

It had some great features, but the UI/UX was IMO wrong and I'm sure it's what turned people off about it. So for example instead of having one stream of info, there were multiple columns. This goes against the scrolling list behavior that everyone seems addicted to.