6 ms·

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 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.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    According to someone that worked on Blogger, a decade ago one of the top three or five sites in all of Greece was this blog, Troktiko, which tragically went into hibernation when the cofounder, a journalist, was murdered.
  - rincebrain 8y ago
    IMO the more entertaining learnings from Wave went into Hangouts Chat, because the embedding Docs/Sheets and other rich content into your threaded conversations just gives me Wave flashbacks every time I see a new one. I liked Wave, even if nobody knew what the actual use cases for it were.
rbinv 8y ago
> 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. So, Blogger? Feels kind of abandoned as a product, though.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Sort of abandoned but still works well enough.
  - eitland 8y ago
    Hasn't worked well enough IMO since the day they started changing the domain name of my blog depending on where it was accessed from. At some point it became too ugly and too hard.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I've thought about switching to wordpress but I mostly publish on other sites these days and blogger still basically works for me and it's free.
smacktoward 8y ago
> 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 Back in the heyday of blogging, there were people working on building exactly this. See for instance FOAF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) Of course, then along came the walled gardens and that was the end of that. (Sigh.)
carl8 8y ago
> If I was Google I would be providing ... 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. They did. It was called OpenSocial, which originally released in late 2007, and was implemented by MySpace and others to compete against the Facebook platform (also released in 2007). I remember when I first looked at its complex XML documentation, that it was much easier just to use the Facebook API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
- nl 8y ago
  OpenSocial was a standard for "widget" which could be hosted on a site. I don't think it was ever used on Plus, but it was available on iGoogle. That was more for games than for the type of links the OP was talking about though. OTOH Google did a lot of work around things like PubSubHubbub to get cross site links working.
- swivelmaster 8y ago
  OpenSocial was great in theory, but in practice it was awful. At launch, it had a fraction of the features of the FB platform, was much more complicated to build for, and its behavior was not actually consistent across all the social networks that implemented it. I joined a startup that was building for both FB and OpenSocial and as soon as we had a successful Facebook game we ditched all thirty-something OpenSocial widgets.
nl 8y ago
I was fairly close to some of the people at Google involved in this. This narrative misses a lot. The most important part was the purchase of FriendFeed by Facebook and the failure of Google Buzz (the more open predecessor to Plus). The narrative I've heard is more like this (It goes back over 10 years, so the context is much different. Google was much smaller, and there were many doubters about Facebook). Facebook was founded in 2004 By 2007 it was clear that social networks were a thing, but there was a very strong feeling among technologists that they should be more open. During 2007 a bunch of pretty well credentialed Googlers left to start a more open social network called FriendFeed. This aggregated open sources of content from all over the web. This worked fairly well technically, and people at Google were generally supportive of it (there were many Googlers on the service, and they were actively working on things like PubSubHub[1] to make open aggregation services work well. However by 2009 it was clear it FriendFeed had product issues. It was being used just as a republishing tool (primarily from Twitter) and they ended up selling to Facebook. This upset a number of people at Google, who were relying on it to create an open alternative. These people were involved in the creation of the (mostly forgotten) Google Buzz[2], which was basically a clone of FriendFeed. Buzz failed as a consumer product, so then Google attempted the pivot to Google Plus. [1] https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/PubSubHubbub https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/PubSubHubbub [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
- 0815test 8y ago
  > It was being used just as a republishing tool So, like Google Plus. Except that an "open" publishing tool is at least more useful than an entirely proprietary one! Let's face it, Google dropped the ball here.
  - nl 8y ago
    No. Google Plus never had an API for incoming content. Buzz allowed one-click connection to Twitter. Great idea, but people would use it to publish straight from Twitter, and wouldn't engage on the Buzz platform. This was a terrible experience - you'd miss the conversational aspect of Twitter, and be ignored if you tried to have conversations on Buzz. Google dropped the ball here. Maybe, but it isn't clear to me what they should have done differently.
GordonS 8y ago
I totally agree about the bland UI - when Google+ first became a thing, I tried to get into it, but bejesus it was just so bland and uninspiring. I found it difficult to discover functionality, and honestly it just completely lost my interest.

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.
- puzzle 8y ago
  According to someone that worked on Blogger, a decade ago one of the top three or five sites in all of Greece was this blog, Troktiko, which tragically went into hibernation when the cofounder, a journalist, was murdered.
- rincebrain 8y ago
  IMO the more entertaining learnings from Wave went into Hangouts Chat, because the embedding Docs/Sheets and other rich content into your threaded conversations just gives me Wave flashbacks every time I see a new one. I liked Wave, even if nobody knew what the actual use cases for it were.

rbinv 8y ago

> 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. So, Blogger? Feels kind of abandoned as a product, though.

ghaff 8y ago
Sort of abandoned but still works well enough.
- eitland 8y ago
  Hasn't worked well enough IMO since the day they started changing the domain name of my blog depending on where it was accessed from. At some point it became too ugly and too hard.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I've thought about switching to wordpress but I mostly publish on other sites these days and blogger still basically works for me and it's free.

smacktoward 8y ago

> 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 Back in the heyday of blogging, there were people working on building exactly this. See for instance FOAF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) Of course, then along came the walled gardens and that was the end of that. (Sigh.)

carl8 8y ago

> If I was Google I would be providing ... 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. They did. It was called OpenSocial, which originally released in late 2007, and was implemented by MySpace and others to compete against the Facebook platform (also released in 2007). I remember when I first looked at its complex XML documentation, that it was much easier just to use the Facebook API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial

nl 8y ago
OpenSocial was a standard for "widget" which could be hosted on a site. I don't think it was ever used on Plus, but it was available on iGoogle. That was more for games than for the type of links the OP was talking about though. OTOH Google did a lot of work around things like PubSubHubbub to get cross site links working.
swivelmaster 8y ago
OpenSocial was great in theory, but in practice it was awful. At launch, it had a fraction of the features of the FB platform, was much more complicated to build for, and its behavior was not actually consistent across all the social networks that implemented it. I joined a startup that was building for both FB and OpenSocial and as soon as we had a successful Facebook game we ditched all thirty-something OpenSocial widgets.

nl 8y ago

I was fairly close to some of the people at Google involved in this. This narrative misses a lot. The most important part was the purchase of FriendFeed by Facebook and the failure of Google Buzz (the more open predecessor to Plus). The narrative I've heard is more like this (It goes back over 10 years, so the context is much different. Google was much smaller, and there were many doubters about Facebook). Facebook was founded in 2004 By 2007 it was clear that social networks were a thing, but there was a very strong feeling among technologists that they should be more open. During 2007 a bunch of pretty well credentialed Googlers left to start a more open social network called FriendFeed. This aggregated open sources of content from all over the web. This worked fairly well technically, and people at Google were generally supportive of it (there were many Googlers on the service, and they were actively working on things like PubSubHub[1] to make open aggregation services work well. However by 2009 it was clear it FriendFeed had product issues. It was being used just as a republishing tool (primarily from Twitter) and they ended up selling to Facebook. This upset a number of people at Google, who were relying on it to create an open alternative. These people were involved in the creation of the (mostly forgotten) Google Buzz[2], which was basically a clone of FriendFeed. Buzz failed as a consumer product, so then Google attempted the pivot to Google Plus. [1] https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/PubSubHubbub https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/PubSubHubbub [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

0815test 8y ago
> It was being used just as a republishing tool So, like Google Plus. Except that an "open" publishing tool is at least more useful than an entirely proprietary one! Let's face it, Google dropped the ball here.
- nl 8y ago
  No. Google Plus never had an API for incoming content. Buzz allowed one-click connection to Twitter. Great idea, but people would use it to publish straight from Twitter, and wouldn't engage on the Buzz platform. This was a terrible experience - you'd miss the conversational aspect of Twitter, and be ignored if you tried to have conversations on Buzz. Google dropped the ball here. Maybe, but it isn't clear to me what they should have done differently.

GordonS 8y ago

I totally agree about the bland UI - when Google+ first became a thing, I tried to get into it, but bejesus it was just so bland and uninspiring. I found it difficult to discover functionality, and honestly it just completely lost my interest.