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Toward the end, many people working on the Reader team, which was a dozen people at its height, were poached for the now defunct Google+.
by vogon_laureate 3y ago
Toward the end, many people working on the Reader team, which was a dozen people at its height, were poached for the now defunct Google+.
- prepend 3y agoAlso Reader was a competitor to google+ as it had the feature of finding and reading content, but in a much more user pleasing way and that made google way less money.
- zhte415 3y agoA lot happened around the time of Google+. Whether because of it I cannot say, but it was in nothing but a pipe dream a substite for: Google Wave chaos collaboration brilliance vs the conventional Google+ was killed prior to Google+. Free GMail/limited apps for Domains. This was killed for new domains in 2012, and merging/destroying through failed merge via single sign on to YouTube/other services. Generic services weren't a good substitute for 'owning' a name via domain. XMPP was killed by G+ Hangouts in 2013. Reader, of course. It seemed like G+ killed anything that it could, in any fractional way, be deemed a substitute for. The memory I have of these products were of functional things. The memory I have of G+ is a large whitespace screen with an avatar and exceptionally mediocre half solutions. G+ was not fun, it wasn't social, it wasn't even average.
- vogon_laureate 3y agoI could never get my head around G+. It felt like almost every decision and element of it was sociopathic rather than social.
- GauntletWizard 3y agoHangouts, in the original form of "Real time, unstructured video call" was pretty cool. The rest was insane.
- influx 3y agoI thought circles was a great way to interact socially.
- reaperman 3y agoYep, that was a wonderful design. I wish it took off, and I wish it hadn't been a harbinger of the downfall of so many other wonderful Google products.
- kalleboo 3y agoYeah someone made a clone of the circles UI to put your Facebook contacts into Friend Lists which I used for a while, always wondered why Facebook didn't just steal that to get around people being worried about their parents seeing their party pix (back before the youth had 100% abandoned Facebook)
- vogon_laureate 3y agoTwitter has Twitter Circles which I think it similar. I'm not really sure how many people actually use it. I remember the G+ circles at least had the novelty factor but it still felt like an effort to manage.