7 ms·

What we can learn from Google Plus (2014)

66 points by vincent_s 5y ago

yellow_lead 5y ago
>I’m sure there was a ton of legacy to deal with here, but you have to wonder about what might have been if an identity layer had simply been applied across all these products and they were invested in. Google kind of did this though, and everyone hated it. Remember on YouTube, the mess they made when they introduced Google+. Maybe the author means "if a single identity had existed from the beginning..."
- mooman219 5y ago
  I want the best of de-coupling and coupling of services, where you only need one identity to manage a variety of services, but each service is isolated from one another. This comes in two forms: identity and repercussions. In terms of identity, I want the ability to present myself differently depending on the service their using. I don't want my real name in say a game lobby where harassment happens more regularly. In terms of repercussions, I don't want a TOS violation on one connected service to influence the other services. I hear a lot horror stories of where malicious intent from a 3rd party on some service causes the closure of all coupled services and you're left dry. I think Microsoft does a reasonable job at this. If you violate the TOS of Office 365, you may lose access to that, but the rest of your account stays usable.
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    Yup, I lost access to bing rewards on my main account but I can still use it for everything else. (Including searching, I just don’t get points for it).
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    That's a good take. I agree with presentation, and I think Google fixed this on YouTube to some extent. However, they're failing at the repercussions aspect.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Didn't Yahoo have something vaguely like this? I don't remember the details too well, just some vague memory of Crockford bemoaning how well Yahoo services were segregated from each other compared to Google.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      At least the old pre-Verizon, non-Japanese Yahoo. Japanese Yahoo is very integrated 'till today (banned at Auctions? There's a big chance of your account being shuttered down.) and Verizon's Yahoo has gone down to mail and news (okay, there's Yahoo Finanace (the products, not their newsroom), but I don't think that most people are using it now, and Yahoo Answers being gone is one of the most prominent examples).
- hexa22 5y ago
  They did a terrible job of it. They broke all existing comment trees and pushed google+ really hard and automated posting. I seem to remember that commenting on YouTube would then make a post on google+ with your real name and likely notified your contacts about it.
  - toyg 5y ago
    They clearly didn't want to be left stuck with maintaining multiple authentication systems (legacy ones and G+), so they thought they'd eat shit for a while but results would be worth it. But they executed so forcefully, that the backlash eventually forced them to backtrack on the most visible properties. This said, now every product they create or acquire gets wired to a single authentication system, so I guess they did make some progress, even though it's a "Google account" rather than a "G+ account".
chunkyks 5y ago
I strongly resonate with the part about Circles being an active-maintenance-effort that even 10 years ago, when I actually had time, was more effort than I could be bothered with. I think an interesting question is, what would it take for google to create a social network that would succeed nowadays? They have quite the reputation [1]. If Google suddenly came out with an all-other-social-network-killer, and successfully killed all the other social networks, I'd still expect them to shut it down three years later. ... which unfortunately puts them in the position that it'll be incredibly hard for them to put out a true market-segment killer for anything, nowadays. Can't take over a market segment if no-one trusts you can be relied on, and therefore doesn't move to your product. I say this even though I met my wife on Orkut, one of Google's previous social networks that, sure enough, got shut down. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- function_seven 5y ago
  Same reason I don’t start watching any new series on Netflix anymore. They’re building a similar reputation for themselves, cancelling shows before the story can be completed. If it’s a miniseries (e.g. Queen’s Gambit), then I’ll try it out. Otherwise I won’t watch something if the rug’s going to be yanked out. Which of course adds to the likelihood of that happening, if others take the same wait-and-see approach.
  - OnlineGladiator 5y ago
    What are the series on Netflix that you feel were cancelled too soon? The only show I was disappointed to hear was 'cancelled' was Mindhunter, and I just discovered it's actually going to be coming back! https://gizmostory.com/mindhunter-season-3-release-date-rumored-cast-plot-and-all-updates/ https://gizmostory.com/mindhunter-season-3-release-date-rumo... EDIT: In response to the comment below me, I am sad to learn Glow isn't coming back.
    - chunkyks 5y ago
      A quick internet search finds lots of examples. Here are 27: https://www.businessinsider.com/best-canceled-netflix-shows-one-day-at-a-time-daredevil-2019-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/best-canceled-netflix-shows-... I, too, largely have stopped watching Netflix shows with one season for exactly this reason
ggm 5y ago
Why didn't they implement basic boolean operators over circles and people? Post (@friends !bob) "let's surprise Bob for his birthday" is about as normal as it gets
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > Why didn't they implement basic boolean operators over circles and people? > Post (@friends !bob) "let's surprise Bob for his birthday" is about as normal as it gets Because while I would love that UI, there would be 1% of the population on their site. Look at how much they had to simplify search syntax to appeal to the wider market.
  - ggm 5y ago
    Syntactic sugar it into natural language, I just wanted grouping, braces to coerce precedence with "and", "or" & "not". I even said so at the time! (Back when we naively believed Google wanted feedback)
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      It's not a syntactic sugar problem. Most people don't think like that.
      - ggm 5y ago
        My 40 years of experience in computer science thinks you're wrong. Google agreed with you, so, there's that.
        HWR_14 5y ago
        > My 40 years of experience in computer science thinks you're wrong. Why would 40 years of computer science experience be relevant to predicting how most people behave? If you had said psychology or something, I can see it being relevant.
charles_f 5y ago
> Build around people problems, not company problems This is so hard to fight for. I worked on a feature for our product where we leverage a UI component initially built to show ML recommendations, but to surface hard coded recommendations made by our partner's software, not coming from AI but hard coded. These recommendations are contextually sound because the devs _know_ what is possible given the context, which for all intents and purposes makes them much, much more relevant than anything that would come from an ML model. But for the life of them the other team will not let us use this UI because they're afraid that it might tarnish the opinion people have of their AI. So we're in this situation where the user would greatly benefit from a consistent UI, the partners as well, but because that team is afraid it will dilute their baby, we can't do it. Had similar examples where 3 months in designinga feature it becomes clear that it doesn't fit with users, that a simpler solution would be better, but designers and PMs will take a hard stance that it's how we planned it and now is too late to change it even if dev hasn't even started. Between sunk cost and babies, it's hard to forget our own interest in favor of our users.
- the_gipsy 5y ago
  > sunk cost and babies It’s not that they (middle managers) are stupid. It’s political. KPIs and objectives and individual careers are misaligned or work against what is good for the user and ultimately, good for the company. Blame the CxOs.
  - charles_f 5y ago
    Yeah that's absolutely true, things get done not because it's the right thing but because it will reflect or benefit people. If you create wrong incentives you'll get the wrong behaviors in return.
- specialist 5y ago
  Conway's Law in action. You have my sympathy and condolences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law FWIW, Tesla seems to be more willing to shake the ant farm. The tear downs and comparisons with other EVs are instructive. Tesla's octovalve, heat pumps, gigacasting, and I'm sure a dozen other things, just wouldn't happen (didn't happen) elsewhere. One blocker was functional silos. Maybe it takes a tyrant like Elon Musk to dare the things Deming, Drucker, Goldratt, and others were proscribing. Or external, existential threat. Like Churchill said about America: They always do the right thing, after first trying everything else. In my experience, the only times I've successfully busted silos, the circumstances were dire and everyone else had given up. Other times were much less successful.
taneq 5y ago
> And to put the elephant in the room to bed, Google didn’t need real names, they simply needed one common way to refer to individual people. I don't think this is sufficient treatment of what was, at the time, the biggest objection to Google+ that I heard. The hamhanded forced real name thing killed Google+ for virtually everyone I knew on there, less for the actual concern about using your real name than for the attitude it displayed towards users' privacy. I know I was well on the way to moving completely over to Google+ at the time they announced that change, and dropped it entirely almost immediately thereafter.
jaimex2 5y ago
I learnt that you shouldnt bother investing any time into any new Google service after 2010.
- hexa22 5y ago
  Google drive and google photos are after that time and they both seem to work really well and be core products.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Google Drive is mainly a response to Apple's iCloud, Microsoft's then-SkyDrive, and Dropbox. It was initially an integration into Gmail, and became a fully-fledged separate product later. Photos is the spiritual successor to Picasa, integrated into the web. It was a response and a one-up to (again) iCloud and SkyDrive which both have phot syncronisation, which is something that is missing in Android. It was initially integrated into Google Drive, and became a fully-fledged separate product just now, when the integration has been cut. So Google's next successful product would be 1) When Apple and Microsoft has bothered to be the first, and 2) whatever is connected to Google Photos. (btw, since Stadia has became a meme, it partially fits 1 (xCloud) but sure it isn't connected to Photos in any way)
    - jaimex2 5y ago
      Stadia won't be able to compete with GeForce Now anyway.
cryptica 5y ago
Facebook's success was all about network effects. It's no coincidence that it started out at Harvard. That was the root of the network where the most influential people of the next generation would come from.
tsjq 5y ago
what is Vic Gundotra doing these days? I loved his Google I/O presentations .
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Seems he's taken a hard turn to the alt-right: https://nitter.eu/GundotraVic https://nitter.eu/GundotraVic
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
Maybe the failure with google plus did them a favor: so instead of owning another social network they focused on analysing all the private data they already vacuumed up and pushed machine learning into it every corner of the system, maybe this preceived lack of private data forced them to be more thorough at analysing what they already had and forced them to focus on android as source of data.

66 points by vincent_s 5y ago

>I’m sure there was a ton of legacy to deal with here, but you have to wonder about what might have been if an identity layer had simply been applied across all these products and they were invested in. Google kind of did this though, and everyone hated it. Remember on YouTube, the mess they made when they introduced Google+. Maybe the author means "if a single identity had existed from the beginning..."

mooman219 5y ago
I want the best of de-coupling and coupling of services, where you only need one identity to manage a variety of services, but each service is isolated from one another. This comes in two forms: identity and repercussions. In terms of identity, I want the ability to present myself differently depending on the service their using. I don't want my real name in say a game lobby where harassment happens more regularly. In terms of repercussions, I don't want a TOS violation on one connected service to influence the other services. I hear a lot horror stories of where malicious intent from a 3rd party on some service causes the closure of all coupled services and you're left dry. I think Microsoft does a reasonable job at this. If you violate the TOS of Office 365, you may lose access to that, but the rest of your account stays usable.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Yup, I lost access to bing rewards on my main account but I can still use it for everything else. (Including searching, I just don’t get points for it).
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  That's a good take. I agree with presentation, and I think Google fixed this on YouTube to some extent. However, they're failing at the repercussions aspect.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Didn't Yahoo have something vaguely like this? I don't remember the details too well, just some vague memory of Crockford bemoaning how well Yahoo services were segregated from each other compared to Google.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    At least the old pre-Verizon, non-Japanese Yahoo. Japanese Yahoo is very integrated 'till today (banned at Auctions? There's a big chance of your account being shuttered down.) and Verizon's Yahoo has gone down to mail and news (okay, there's Yahoo Finanace (the products, not their newsroom), but I don't think that most people are using it now, and Yahoo Answers being gone is one of the most prominent examples).
hexa22 5y ago
They did a terrible job of it. They broke all existing comment trees and pushed google+ really hard and automated posting. I seem to remember that commenting on YouTube would then make a post on google+ with your real name and likely notified your contacts about it.
- toyg 5y ago
  They clearly didn't want to be left stuck with maintaining multiple authentication systems (legacy ones and G+), so they thought they'd eat shit for a while but results would be worth it. But they executed so forcefully, that the backlash eventually forced them to backtrack on the most visible properties. This said, now every product they create or acquire gets wired to a single authentication system, so I guess they did make some progress, even though it's a "Google account" rather than a "G+ account".

chunkyks 5y ago

I strongly resonate with the part about Circles being an active-maintenance-effort that even 10 years ago, when I actually had time, was more effort than I could be bothered with. I think an interesting question is, what would it take for google to create a social network that would succeed nowadays? They have quite the reputation [1]. If Google suddenly came out with an all-other-social-network-killer, and successfully killed all the other social networks, I'd still expect them to shut it down three years later. ... which unfortunately puts them in the position that it'll be incredibly hard for them to put out a true market-segment killer for anything, nowadays. Can't take over a market segment if no-one trusts you can be relied on, and therefore doesn't move to your product. I say this even though I met my wife on Orkut, one of Google's previous social networks that, sure enough, got shut down. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

function_seven 5y ago
Same reason I don’t start watching any new series on Netflix anymore. They’re building a similar reputation for themselves, cancelling shows before the story can be completed. If it’s a miniseries (e.g. Queen’s Gambit), then I’ll try it out. Otherwise I won’t watch something if the rug’s going to be yanked out. Which of course adds to the likelihood of that happening, if others take the same wait-and-see approach.
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago
  What are the series on Netflix that you feel were cancelled too soon? The only show I was disappointed to hear was 'cancelled' was Mindhunter, and I just discovered it's actually going to be coming back! https://gizmostory.com/mindhunter-season-3-release-date-rumored-cast-plot-and-all-updates/ https://gizmostory.com/mindhunter-season-3-release-date-rumo... EDIT: In response to the comment below me, I am sad to learn Glow isn't coming back.
  - chunkyks 5y ago
    A quick internet search finds lots of examples. Here are 27: https://www.businessinsider.com/best-canceled-netflix-shows-one-day-at-a-time-daredevil-2019-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/best-canceled-netflix-shows-... I, too, largely have stopped watching Netflix shows with one season for exactly this reason

ggm 5y ago

Why didn't they implement basic boolean operators over circles and people? Post (@friends !bob) "let's surprise Bob for his birthday" is about as normal as it gets

HWR_14 5y ago
> Why didn't they implement basic boolean operators over circles and people? > Post (@friends !bob) "let's surprise Bob for his birthday" is about as normal as it gets Because while I would love that UI, there would be 1% of the population on their site. Look at how much they had to simplify search syntax to appeal to the wider market.
- ggm 5y ago
  Syntactic sugar it into natural language, I just wanted grouping, braces to coerce precedence with "and", "or" & "not". I even said so at the time! (Back when we naively believed Google wanted feedback)
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    It's not a syntactic sugar problem. Most people don't think like that.
    - ggm 5y ago
      My 40 years of experience in computer science thinks you're wrong. Google agreed with you, so, there's that.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        > My 40 years of experience in computer science thinks you're wrong. Why would 40 years of computer science experience be relevant to predicting how most people behave? If you had said psychology or something, I can see it being relevant.

charles_f 5y ago

> Build around people problems, not company problems This is so hard to fight for. I worked on a feature for our product where we leverage a UI component initially built to show ML recommendations, but to surface hard coded recommendations made by our partner's software, not coming from AI but hard coded. These recommendations are contextually sound because the devs _know_ what is possible given the context, which for all intents and purposes makes them much, much more relevant than anything that would come from an ML model. But for the life of them the other team will not let us use this UI because they're afraid that it might tarnish the opinion people have of their AI. So we're in this situation where the user would greatly benefit from a consistent UI, the partners as well, but because that team is afraid it will dilute their baby, we can't do it. Had similar examples where 3 months in designinga feature it becomes clear that it doesn't fit with users, that a simpler solution would be better, but designers and PMs will take a hard stance that it's how we planned it and now is too late to change it even if dev hasn't even started. Between sunk cost and babies, it's hard to forget our own interest in favor of our users.

the_gipsy 5y ago
> sunk cost and babies It’s not that they (middle managers) are stupid. It’s political. KPIs and objectives and individual careers are misaligned or work against what is good for the user and ultimately, good for the company. Blame the CxOs.
- charles_f 5y ago
  Yeah that's absolutely true, things get done not because it's the right thing but because it will reflect or benefit people. If you create wrong incentives you'll get the wrong behaviors in return.
specialist 5y ago
Conway's Law in action. You have my sympathy and condolences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law FWIW, Tesla seems to be more willing to shake the ant farm. The tear downs and comparisons with other EVs are instructive. Tesla's octovalve, heat pumps, gigacasting, and I'm sure a dozen other things, just wouldn't happen (didn't happen) elsewhere. One blocker was functional silos. Maybe it takes a tyrant like Elon Musk to dare the things Deming, Drucker, Goldratt, and others were proscribing. Or external, existential threat. Like Churchill said about America: They always do the right thing, after first trying everything else. In my experience, the only times I've successfully busted silos, the circumstances were dire and everyone else had given up. Other times were much less successful.

taneq 5y ago

> And to put the elephant in the room to bed, Google didn’t need real names, they simply needed one common way to refer to individual people. I don't think this is sufficient treatment of what was, at the time, the biggest objection to Google+ that I heard. The hamhanded forced real name thing killed Google+ for virtually everyone I knew on there, less for the actual concern about using your real name than for the attitude it displayed towards users' privacy. I know I was well on the way to moving completely over to Google+ at the time they announced that change, and dropped it entirely almost immediately thereafter.

jaimex2 5y ago

I learnt that you shouldnt bother investing any time into any new Google service after 2010.

hexa22 5y ago
Google drive and google photos are after that time and they both seem to work really well and be core products.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Google Drive is mainly a response to Apple's iCloud, Microsoft's then-SkyDrive, and Dropbox. It was initially an integration into Gmail, and became a fully-fledged separate product later. Photos is the spiritual successor to Picasa, integrated into the web. It was a response and a one-up to (again) iCloud and SkyDrive which both have phot syncronisation, which is something that is missing in Android. It was initially integrated into Google Drive, and became a fully-fledged separate product just now, when the integration has been cut. So Google's next successful product would be 1) When Apple and Microsoft has bothered to be the first, and 2) whatever is connected to Google Photos. (btw, since Stadia has became a meme, it partially fits 1 (xCloud) but sure it isn't connected to Photos in any way)
  - jaimex2 5y ago
    Stadia won't be able to compete with GeForce Now anyway.

cryptica 5y ago

Facebook's success was all about network effects. It's no coincidence that it started out at Harvard. That was the root of the network where the most influential people of the next generation would come from.

tsjq 5y ago

what is Vic Gundotra doing these days? I loved his Google I/O presentations .

dredmorbius 5y ago
Seems he's taken a hard turn to the alt-right: https://nitter.eu/GundotraVic https://nitter.eu/GundotraVic

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

Maybe the failure with google plus did them a favor: so instead of owning another social network they focused on analysing all the private data they already vacuumed up and pushed machine learning into it every corner of the system, maybe this preceived lack of private data forced them to be more thorough at analysing what they already had and forced them to focus on android as source of data.