6 ms·

What G+ is really about (pst it's not social)

197 points by fttechfounder 15y ago

currywurst 15y ago
Great usage of the G+ photo viewer for slides, but I don't think G+'s main focus is about moving apps/games into the cloud .. The most convincing argument I have heard is that 'social signals' are (going to be?) a fantastic resource for cutting through the spammy, link-swapping www of today.
- paulnelligan 15y ago
  That's the best argument I've heard so far for Google+
- revorad 15y ago
  Social signals also have a lot of noise. It may be even harder to tell the signal from the noise in social signals.
  - currywurst 15y ago
    Yeah, good point. However, if Google only uses the signals from my circles, I could be insulated from the noise :)
MaxGabriel 15y ago
Why can't it be about both? Also, from the perspective of Google, why let Facebook enjoy the 'blue ocean' of social, if the blue/red ocean is such an important concept for new products?
rmc 15y ago
Summary: Google+ is an attempt to move applications/things onto the web, and make sharing and coloborating easier. The goal is not to take on Facebook/Twitter, but to take on MS Office and App Stores
hm2k 15y ago
I guess this is why there's no Google Chrome App to compete with Tweetdeck.
- mmavnn 15y ago
  Tweetdeck has a Chrome App. I have it open in Chrome right now...
  - hm2k 15y ago
    Please re-read my comment.
ulvund 15y ago
On Facebook you buy ads for ~$1+ because you can set target demographic to something as specfic as "women; 42-47 years old; looking for relationships with other women; with a degree in biology or computer science; attened Harvard; Works at IBM; who likes horseback riding or skiing" Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously. That is what Google is trying to get a piece of.
- cdavid 15y ago
  I am not convinced it is that useful to have explicitly targeted audiences for advertisement. It may be better to understand and interpret an ad campaign, but generally, what works best when doing statistical prediction is not what is the most intuitive. Also, even though your example is obviously not meant to be taken as is, it shows that targeted demographics quickly don't have a lot of data behind them. Successful stories in AI usually involves lots of averaged data with only little "focused" data to adapt your model quickly (e.g. as done in speech recognition where models are estimated on 1000s of hours from many speakers, and the model is then adapted for the one speaker to be recognized). I think the value of the so called social graph for advertising is overestimated. IMO, what's interesting about facebook is more the amount and diversity of data than its personalized nature. But then, I have little knowledge about algo for advertisement targetting, maybe the situation is different than the domains I am familiar with.
  - rachelbythebay 15y ago
    Who says it's about effectiveness of the ad? It might just be effectiveness of getting money from the advertisers. More data means you can do more hand-waving to say that this ad will be the one that really really reaches people this time.
    - JanezStupar 15y ago
      Because in the end if ads are not effective, you won't be getting money from the advertisers anymore. Marketers can't know in advance which marketing channels will work - so they kinda carpet bomb with their campaigns. However once they start getting data, they sure as hell kill of the channels that don't work. Unethical behavior does not scale in business, no matter how much your calculations rationalize it. In the end people just go away from sleazy businesses. GM and Ford might tell you a story about it and millions of others short term profit oriented businesses also. Theres only so much bullshit you can pile up before your reputation catches on to you.
nl 15y ago
No, it's about social. The other stuff is already happening, and Google is winning.
nwmcsween 15y ago
G+ is a move into social media, what's a better way to have live data on your user base than the data generated by a service you control, and maybe why profiles must be public.
JonnieCache 15y ago
Why can't it be many or all of these things? I find it highly implausible that google has as strong a desire to form simple, narrow narratives around its strategy and ambitions as bloggers and the media do.
arkitaip 15y ago
It's times like this that I wish HN was curated. It seems that everyday we get posts like this where some random person - "I'm a first time tech founder; I'm also a first time programmer." - conjures up a bunch of ideas supported only by their imagination.
- nivertech 15y ago
  But we need this new blood. Let the best survive!
- JanezStupar 15y ago
  I think his usage of G+ album to create a presentation was awesome and inspiring. Also I believe he has a point. And found his message to be more lucid, clear and entertaining than 90% of three paragraph ramblings about this and that around here. And just as a conclusion. Bill Gates was once a radnom person, as was Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, etc... Maybe you should focus more on originality and evaluate merit of these ideas instead of only craving for more stuff to be fed down your throat by current status Quo holders. And I believe that this is what HN is about. HN is curated, by HN community - and it's obvious that HN community believes this contribution's place is at the top of the front page.
  - arkitaip 15y ago
    What was his point? Where's the data to back it up. That's right, there's nothing of substance, only speculation. If your high profile names wrote some speculative piece I would consider it equally worthless. Either your argumentation has merits or it doesn't. I don't think you understand the meaning of curation. Curation doesn't imply censorship or that a certain group of people filter content based on a certain set of value, rather it means that they would ensure a high signal to noise by removing posts that don't really contribute to a discussion.
    - JanezStupar 15y ago
      I think you're over analyzing. G+ is out for barely two weeks now. It has not even been released to the general public. Any internal strategy Google itself has is merely of speculative nature until it gets proven or not. Any great strategy is merely speculation also is figuring and/or anticipating other peoples moves. A great strategist needs to have a great gut feeling and be lucky. When Napoleon was presented with a new officer and after his merits have been presented to him, he supposedly asked "Very well, but is he lucky?". That is why bean counters never get to do anything great. And that is why people love good speculators. And all the guys I mentioned are incredible speculators. Not everything can be quantified and analyzed. And regarding curation - the community has decided that this specific piece of speculation is interesting and insightful. I hope I don't need to remind you that this particular mob is not you average Joe Sixpack mob?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
david_a_r_kemp 15y ago
From where I stand, G+ is about advertising - the more information Google have about you, the better they can target ads at you, and therefore the more likely you are to click on their ads, thereby making them money.
radarsat1 15y ago
> "do you know how often people still email documents / photos / spreadsheets?" Great, so G+ is yet another attempt to get people to stop using common communications standards like email and instead break the internet up into a set of distinct one-provider-oriented services that can't talk to each other?
- s00pcan 15y ago
  No, the goal is to make it not matter what service you're using.
  - a3_nm 15y ago
    In which way? Could you elaborate?
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - fttechfounder 15y ago
      Apple has the game center where all your scores form your iPhone are automatically loaded into a public database with your friends scores. It's the same for Zynga and Facebook. The problem is that your social graph on Facebook is probably everyone you've ever met. Google+, on the other hand, feels much more like using email. Circles are kind of like mailing lists which we use to keep in touch with real friends and colleagues. Incidentally, these are also the people we email photos, documents and presentations to. Circles is at the heart of Google+ because it makes everything they own better. More and more apps are going to move into the cloud and I'm betting that Google+ is going let developers take advantage of this.
    - s00pcan 15y ago
      There was a post on here about it recent enough, but I don't think I saved the link. It basically suggested that it shouldn't matter what social network your friends are using - you should be able to seamlessly connect with someone who is using facebook from google plus. I would expect that idea to apply to apps and the sharing of documents as well. If your friend is not using google plus, the document could be sent to their email instead, but the though process would be "I need to send them this document" instead of "I need to email this document to them" or even "I need to send them this document using google docs".
mirkules 15y ago
FYI, it's really hard to see the blue ocean / red ocean slides on my mobile device, and enlarging them only makes it blurry (samsung galaxy s). It's funny because I got to the punchline and couldn't read it. I still don't know what it says other than guessing that it's all about the apps.
- fttechfounder 15y ago
  Thanks for the tip, do you know if anyone else has had problem reading it on a mobile device?
  - msg 15y ago
    It was ok on my HTC Desire.
fabjan 15y ago
I really don't see Google allowing people to share apps they bought.
podperson 15y ago
Right now, G+ is populated by a bunch of early adopters and it's pretty nice, mostly because 90% of the folks you know and only keep in touch with out of a sense of duty haven't gotten in, and G+ doesn't support superpoke and Zynga yet. Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy. In to succeed, Google needs to maintain laser-like focus of usability and continue to innovate on a small number of features -- it can't just glom random stuff onto it or integrate random GoogleLabs projects. For those whom Google Docs is a suitable replacement for Sharepoint, I doubt integrating G+ will make a huge difference. For those for whom Google Docs is inadequate, G+ won't tip the balance. If G+ takes the proposed approach it will actually alienate many potential users. It's better to embrace the outside world than replace it. (And, in fact, it contradicts the "blue ocean" strategy.) Frankly, from a big picture strategic viewpoint, it's great to see Google annihilating Facebook, but it's fiddling while China burns. It's losing search, and no-one in China aspires to own an Android phone -- they're saving up to buy iPhones and using non-Google Android phones while they wait.
- jamesteow 15y ago
  "Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy." My feed has interesting/funny comments and links... because I just put interesting and funny people in my circles. And I don't consider the fact that I can only see 2-3 items on a high-res display bad if the quality of the content is higher than other sites I visit. There are some blogs whose index page have the same issue and I'm fine with it because I know that every single piece of content posted is well worth the surface area.
- fttechfounder 15y ago
  Give them some time, Facebook has been around for a few years now. G+ is just getting started.
siphr 15y ago
Nicely done and easier to follow. Although I think just like any good business Facebook cannot let it's guard down no matter what this presentation says.
leot 15y ago
G+ is also about giving Google a much richer social relationships graph than anyone has ever had. I can only wonder at the long-term effects of the information asymmetries that are developing. At least with twitter (and fb, for that matter) most of the relationships were public.
contextfree 15y ago
So ... social networking isn't "blue ocean", but office suites and app stores are? Huh?
gcb 15y ago
it's not mobile either... completely impossible to read that on android
- icebraining 15y ago
  It's bad for those of us who don't like to use the mouse too. I wonder how is the rest of G+ with regard to keyboard support?
code_duck 15y ago
I'm not quite used to seeing a photo of myself in the top bar across Google sites, but I can certainly see where they're taking this is more than the 'facebook killer!!' the media would make it out to be. Google has a lot more to offer as a company than Facebook - YouTube, Docs, two OSs, a vast ad network, search and news - in addition to their features which overlap with FB, such as Blogger or Picasa. Google+ is unifying all of that into a very impressive product, which is rather unprecedented. I'd be looking at what Apple thinks, too. And Amazon... it's definitely not just about Facebook.
quinndupont 15y ago
I can think of better ways of displaying that information. Ugh.
drdaeman 15y ago
G+ is about moving everything into the Google "cloud". In a same way Facebook (and VKontakte, and whatever else) is about moving everything into their "cloud". Cloud is a buzzword, it doesn't really mean anything here. G+ is just a Buzz (thus, GMail) + GTalk + Picasa + Latitude + Google Profiles, covered under one convenient interface. You can't peer with it, you have to actually use it itself (i.e., have and maintain an account there). Yes, there are some APIs to control that account (FB has some, too), and you could have a backup copy of your own data, but doesn't really matter. It's still almost exactly the same as Facebook.
- sc68cal 15y ago
  YES! I stopped reading when I hit that slide. It's a bunch of bullshit and handwaving that people do when they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
- JanezStupar 15y ago
  You can't do that YET. As far as Cloud hype & buzzwords goes. I was of same opinion until I started doing my startup. Now basically all infrastructure I have (besides my personal computers) is of SAAS nature somewhere in yes Cloud. We could say Internet, but that would be confusing - since Internet is such a broad term. For what its worth as a reformed nonbeliever I'm telling you. Cloud is awesome and its here to stay. So you better get used to it.
  - drdaeman 15y ago
    Cloud is a good thing, but it is pointless buzzword in that context. "Cloud" is when you distribute your stuff over some cluster of physical machines. This increases reliability, allows to scale performance, simplifies deployment and so on. Does it matter to end-user how Google infrastructure's organised inside? Sure, some cloud providers have compatible APIs (as this is the case with Amazon S3 API), so the data could be moved between "clouds" easily. Compatibility is not a general property of a "cloud", and moreover - this is not a case with G+. And SAAS is not a "cloud", it's just that nowadays most SAAS are marketed as "cloud" because they internally rely on some distributed storage or processing system. It's just that "cloud" quickly became a buzzword, replacing cumbersome "SAAS" abbreviation. We've had SAAS in 90's (and, probably, earlier). Remember hosted forums, webchats and guestbooks? This was certainly SAAS, and probably not a "cloud".
Ryan_IRL 15y ago
I just like how G+ helps me share internet jokes with my friends, and at the same time, still be within my anti-social comfort zone.
jwingy 15y ago
I remember reading somewhere that Google's overarching policy is really a "scorched earth" policy where due to the "fuck you" money afforded them by their search business, they are able to offer services and products from which their competitors (probably anybody in tech) derive their core business from for almost nothing. Effectively this creates a moat around the Google castle with the surrounding land razed, allowing no one else to subsist or grow large enough to ever challenge them. Sometimes I believe this...sometimes I don't. Any thoughts?
- divtxt 15y ago
  Here is the "scorched earth" post: http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-android/ http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an... I agree with it regarding Android & Chrome OS, but I'm not sure that it applies to web apps like G+, gmail since those have per user costs.
bonch 15y ago
This isn't hard to figure out. Google+, like every other Google product, is about indexing your personal content for their advertising platform. That's what Google's business is about. Right now, there's a MASSIVE hype campaign being waged on Hacker News (seriously, there are at least five Google stories on the front page every single day), but Facebook has 750 million users, so Google+ is just winning over people who either weren't actively using Facebook anyway or are trendy early adopters. Once the novelty wears off, you're still left with the fact that most of your friends and family are on Facebook and likely haven't even heard of Google+. I personally believe Google is too engineering-driven and doesn't have enough intuition to make a large social impact. In that sense, the company is very reminiscent of Microsoft. Even the name "Google+" and the use of "+1" is mathematical and non-human.

197 points by fttechfounder 15y ago

Great usage of the G+ photo viewer for slides, but I don't think G+'s main focus is about moving apps/games into the cloud .. The most convincing argument I have heard is that 'social signals' are (going to be?) a fantastic resource for cutting through the spammy, link-swapping www of today.

paulnelligan 15y ago
That's the best argument I've heard so far for Google+
revorad 15y ago
Social signals also have a lot of noise. It may be even harder to tell the signal from the noise in social signals.
- currywurst 15y ago
  Yeah, good point. However, if Google only uses the signals from my circles, I could be insulated from the noise :)

MaxGabriel 15y ago

Why can't it be about both? Also, from the perspective of Google, why let Facebook enjoy the 'blue ocean' of social, if the blue/red ocean is such an important concept for new products?

rmc 15y ago

Summary: Google+ is an attempt to move applications/things onto the web, and make sharing and coloborating easier. The goal is not to take on Facebook/Twitter, but to take on MS Office and App Stores

hm2k 15y ago

I guess this is why there's no Google Chrome App to compete with Tweetdeck.

mmavnn 15y ago
Tweetdeck has a Chrome App. I have it open in Chrome right now...
- hm2k 15y ago
  Please re-read my comment.

ulvund 15y ago

On Facebook you buy ads for ~$1+ because you can set target demographic to something as specfic as "women; 42-47 years old; looking for relationships with other women; with a degree in biology or computer science; attened Harvard; Works at IBM; who likes horseback riding or skiing" Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously. That is what Google is trying to get a piece of.

cdavid 15y ago
I am not convinced it is that useful to have explicitly targeted audiences for advertisement. It may be better to understand and interpret an ad campaign, but generally, what works best when doing statistical prediction is not what is the most intuitive. Also, even though your example is obviously not meant to be taken as is, it shows that targeted demographics quickly don't have a lot of data behind them. Successful stories in AI usually involves lots of averaged data with only little "focused" data to adapt your model quickly (e.g. as done in speech recognition where models are estimated on 1000s of hours from many speakers, and the model is then adapted for the one speaker to be recognized). I think the value of the so called social graph for advertising is overestimated. IMO, what's interesting about facebook is more the amount and diversity of data than its personalized nature. But then, I have little knowledge about algo for advertisement targetting, maybe the situation is different than the domains I am familiar with.
- rachelbythebay 15y ago
  Who says it's about effectiveness of the ad? It might just be effectiveness of getting money from the advertisers. More data means you can do more hand-waving to say that this ad will be the one that really really reaches people this time.
  - JanezStupar 15y ago
    Because in the end if ads are not effective, you won't be getting money from the advertisers anymore. Marketers can't know in advance which marketing channels will work - so they kinda carpet bomb with their campaigns. However once they start getting data, they sure as hell kill of the channels that don't work. Unethical behavior does not scale in business, no matter how much your calculations rationalize it. In the end people just go away from sleazy businesses. GM and Ford might tell you a story about it and millions of others short term profit oriented businesses also. Theres only so much bullshit you can pile up before your reputation catches on to you.

nl 15y ago

No, it's about social. The other stuff is already happening, and Google is winning.

nwmcsween 15y ago

G+ is a move into social media, what's a better way to have live data on your user base than the data generated by a service you control, and maybe why profiles must be public.

JonnieCache 15y ago

Why can't it be many or all of these things? I find it highly implausible that google has as strong a desire to form simple, narrow narratives around its strategy and ambitions as bloggers and the media do.

arkitaip 15y ago

It's times like this that I wish HN was curated. It seems that everyday we get posts like this where some random person - "I'm a first time tech founder; I'm also a first time programmer." - conjures up a bunch of ideas supported only by their imagination.

nivertech 15y ago
But we need this new blood. Let the best survive!
JanezStupar 15y ago
I think his usage of G+ album to create a presentation was awesome and inspiring. Also I believe he has a point. And found his message to be more lucid, clear and entertaining than 90% of three paragraph ramblings about this and that around here. And just as a conclusion. Bill Gates was once a radnom person, as was Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, etc... Maybe you should focus more on originality and evaluate merit of these ideas instead of only craving for more stuff to be fed down your throat by current status Quo holders. And I believe that this is what HN is about. HN is curated, by HN community - and it's obvious that HN community believes this contribution's place is at the top of the front page.
- arkitaip 15y ago
  What was his point? Where's the data to back it up. That's right, there's nothing of substance, only speculation. If your high profile names wrote some speculative piece I would consider it equally worthless. Either your argumentation has merits or it doesn't. I don't think you understand the meaning of curation. Curation doesn't imply censorship or that a certain group of people filter content based on a certain set of value, rather it means that they would ensure a high signal to noise by removing posts that don't really contribute to a discussion.
  - JanezStupar 15y ago
    I think you're over analyzing. G+ is out for barely two weeks now. It has not even been released to the general public. Any internal strategy Google itself has is merely of speculative nature until it gets proven or not. Any great strategy is merely speculation also is figuring and/or anticipating other peoples moves. A great strategist needs to have a great gut feeling and be lucky. When Napoleon was presented with a new officer and after his merits have been presented to him, he supposedly asked "Very well, but is he lucky?". That is why bean counters never get to do anything great. And that is why people love good speculators. And all the guys I mentioned are incredible speculators. Not everything can be quantified and analyzed. And regarding curation - the community has decided that this specific piece of speculation is interesting and insightful. I hope I don't need to remind you that this particular mob is not you average Joe Sixpack mob?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

david_a_r_kemp 15y ago

From where I stand, G+ is about advertising - the more information Google have about you, the better they can target ads at you, and therefore the more likely you are to click on their ads, thereby making them money.

radarsat1 15y ago

> "do you know how often people still email documents / photos / spreadsheets?" Great, so G+ is yet another attempt to get people to stop using common communications standards like email and instead break the internet up into a set of distinct one-provider-oriented services that can't talk to each other?

s00pcan 15y ago
No, the goal is to make it not matter what service you're using.
- a3_nm 15y ago
  In which way? Could you elaborate?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - fttechfounder 15y ago
    Apple has the game center where all your scores form your iPhone are automatically loaded into a public database with your friends scores. It's the same for Zynga and Facebook. The problem is that your social graph on Facebook is probably everyone you've ever met. Google+, on the other hand, feels much more like using email. Circles are kind of like mailing lists which we use to keep in touch with real friends and colleagues. Incidentally, these are also the people we email photos, documents and presentations to. Circles is at the heart of Google+ because it makes everything they own better. More and more apps are going to move into the cloud and I'm betting that Google+ is going let developers take advantage of this.
  - s00pcan 15y ago
    There was a post on here about it recent enough, but I don't think I saved the link. It basically suggested that it shouldn't matter what social network your friends are using - you should be able to seamlessly connect with someone who is using facebook from google plus. I would expect that idea to apply to apps and the sharing of documents as well. If your friend is not using google plus, the document could be sent to their email instead, but the though process would be "I need to send them this document" instead of "I need to email this document to them" or even "I need to send them this document using google docs".

mirkules 15y ago

FYI, it's really hard to see the blue ocean / red ocean slides on my mobile device, and enlarging them only makes it blurry (samsung galaxy s). It's funny because I got to the punchline and couldn't read it. I still don't know what it says other than guessing that it's all about the apps.

fttechfounder 15y ago
Thanks for the tip, do you know if anyone else has had problem reading it on a mobile device?
- msg 15y ago
  It was ok on my HTC Desire.

fabjan 15y ago

I really don't see Google allowing people to share apps they bought.

podperson 15y ago

Right now, G+ is populated by a bunch of early adopters and it's pretty nice, mostly because 90% of the folks you know and only keep in touch with out of a sense of duty haven't gotten in, and G+ doesn't support superpoke and Zynga yet. Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy. In to succeed, Google needs to maintain laser-like focus of usability and continue to innovate on a small number of features -- it can't just glom random stuff onto it or integrate random GoogleLabs projects. For those whom Google Docs is a suitable replacement for Sharepoint, I doubt integrating G+ will make a huge difference. For those for whom Google Docs is inadequate, G+ won't tip the balance. If G+ takes the proposed approach it will actually alienate many potential users. It's better to embrace the outside world than replace it. (And, in fact, it contradicts the "blue ocean" strategy.) Frankly, from a big picture strategic viewpoint, it's great to see Google annihilating Facebook, but it's fiddling while China burns. It's losing search, and no-one in China aspires to own an Android phone -- they're saving up to buy iPhones and using non-Google Android phones while they wait.

jamesteow 15y ago
"Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy." My feed has interesting/funny comments and links... because I just put interesting and funny people in my circles. And I don't consider the fact that I can only see 2-3 items on a high-res display bad if the quality of the content is higher than other sites I visit. There are some blogs whose index page have the same issue and I'm fine with it because I know that every single piece of content posted is well worth the surface area.
fttechfounder 15y ago
Give them some time, Facebook has been around for a few years now. G+ is just getting started.

siphr 15y ago

Nicely done and easier to follow. Although I think just like any good business Facebook cannot let it's guard down no matter what this presentation says.

leot 15y ago

G+ is also about giving Google a much richer social relationships graph than anyone has ever had. I can only wonder at the long-term effects of the information asymmetries that are developing. At least with twitter (and fb, for that matter) most of the relationships were public.

contextfree 15y ago

So ... social networking isn't "blue ocean", but office suites and app stores are? Huh?

gcb 15y ago

it's not mobile either... completely impossible to read that on android

icebraining 15y ago
It's bad for those of us who don't like to use the mouse too. I wonder how is the rest of G+ with regard to keyboard support?

code_duck 15y ago

I'm not quite used to seeing a photo of myself in the top bar across Google sites, but I can certainly see where they're taking this is more than the 'facebook killer!!' the media would make it out to be. Google has a lot more to offer as a company than Facebook - YouTube, Docs, two OSs, a vast ad network, search and news - in addition to their features which overlap with FB, such as Blogger or Picasa. Google+ is unifying all of that into a very impressive product, which is rather unprecedented. I'd be looking at what Apple thinks, too. And Amazon... it's definitely not just about Facebook.

quinndupont 15y ago

I can think of better ways of displaying that information. Ugh.

drdaeman 15y ago

G+ is about moving everything into the Google "cloud". In a same way Facebook (and VKontakte, and whatever else) is about moving everything into their "cloud". Cloud is a buzzword, it doesn't really mean anything here. G+ is just a Buzz (thus, GMail) + GTalk + Picasa + Latitude + Google Profiles, covered under one convenient interface. You can't peer with it, you have to actually use it itself (i.e., have and maintain an account there). Yes, there are some APIs to control that account (FB has some, too), and you could have a backup copy of your own data, but doesn't really matter. It's still almost exactly the same as Facebook.

sc68cal 15y ago
YES! I stopped reading when I hit that slide. It's a bunch of bullshit and handwaving that people do when they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
JanezStupar 15y ago
You can't do that YET. As far as Cloud hype & buzzwords goes. I was of same opinion until I started doing my startup. Now basically all infrastructure I have (besides my personal computers) is of SAAS nature somewhere in yes Cloud. We could say Internet, but that would be confusing - since Internet is such a broad term. For what its worth as a reformed nonbeliever I'm telling you. Cloud is awesome and its here to stay. So you better get used to it.
- drdaeman 15y ago
  Cloud is a good thing, but it is pointless buzzword in that context. "Cloud" is when you distribute your stuff over some cluster of physical machines. This increases reliability, allows to scale performance, simplifies deployment and so on. Does it matter to end-user how Google infrastructure's organised inside? Sure, some cloud providers have compatible APIs (as this is the case with Amazon S3 API), so the data could be moved between "clouds" easily. Compatibility is not a general property of a "cloud", and moreover - this is not a case with G+. And SAAS is not a "cloud", it's just that nowadays most SAAS are marketed as "cloud" because they internally rely on some distributed storage or processing system. It's just that "cloud" quickly became a buzzword, replacing cumbersome "SAAS" abbreviation. We've had SAAS in 90's (and, probably, earlier). Remember hosted forums, webchats and guestbooks? This was certainly SAAS, and probably not a "cloud".

Ryan_IRL 15y ago

I just like how G+ helps me share internet jokes with my friends, and at the same time, still be within my anti-social comfort zone.

jwingy 15y ago

I remember reading somewhere that Google's overarching policy is really a "scorched earth" policy where due to the "fuck you" money afforded them by their search business, they are able to offer services and products from which their competitors (probably anybody in tech) derive their core business from for almost nothing. Effectively this creates a moat around the Google castle with the surrounding land razed, allowing no one else to subsist or grow large enough to ever challenge them. Sometimes I believe this...sometimes I don't. Any thoughts?

divtxt 15y ago
Here is the "scorched earth" post: http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-android/ http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an... I agree with it regarding Android & Chrome OS, but I'm not sure that it applies to web apps like G+, gmail since those have per user costs.

bonch 15y ago

This isn't hard to figure out. Google+, like every other Google product, is about indexing your personal content for their advertising platform. That's what Google's business is about. Right now, there's a MASSIVE hype campaign being waged on Hacker News (seriously, there are at least five Google stories on the front page every single day), but Facebook has 750 million users, so Google+ is just winning over people who either weren't actively using Facebook anyway or are trendy early adopters. Once the novelty wears off, you're still left with the fact that most of your friends and family are on Facebook and likely haven't even heard of Google+. I personally believe Google is too engineering-driven and doesn't have enough intuition to make a large social impact. In that sense, the company is very reminiscent of Microsoft. Even the name "Google+" and the use of "+1" is mathematical and non-human.