14 ms·

Why the Google+ long game is brilliant

45 points by bernardmoon 14y ago

taligent 14y ago
If Google+'s long game equates to simply integrating with other Google services then I fail to see how it is brilliant.
- davidpayne11 14y ago
  >I fail to see how it is brilliant. This is why the guy who designed this Google+ plan (Vic Gundotra) is where he is (at Google) and you are still a commentator in a public forum. You need some long-term vision, bro.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    I do think Vic Gundotra is pretty brilliant and pretty "Steve Jobs-like". If Larry Page intends to stop being CEO of Google anytime soon, I hope Vic gets it (although I guess Sergei would be next in line).
    - minwcnt5 14y ago
      If not Sergey it would probably be an old timer like Urs. Vic is pretty new and probably well down the totem pole.
    - marssaxman 14y ago
      Vic Gundotra is a master of bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense: when he speaks, he shares nothing of his own beliefs or opinions. Rather, his words are the party line, and nothing more than the party line; he doesn't say the things he says because he believes they are true, but because he wants you to behave as though they are true. In this he is hardly alone, as a spokesman for a major corporation: but Google used to be better than that, and Google especially used to be a place where the top brass would tell the truth internally. It was a place where any Googler could speak up on a Friday company meeting and ask pointed questions and expect to get a real answer. Not so with Vic Gundotra: he bullshits internally just as hard as he does externally. You can't crack him; no matter how obvious his boosterism for G+, he never stops grinning and blustering and insisting that everything is awesome. It is severely off-putting.
  - waitwhat 14y ago
    Of course taligent can speak for himself, but I think the argument is not that this is a bad game plan, but that it is not a "brilliant" one (but merely obvious.)
- dude_abides 14y ago
  s/integrating with/adding identity, profile, and friend graph to/ and then you will see how this is an amazing strategy.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  And let me guess, Google Now is just a gimmick despite being praised by tons of people as one of the biggest things of 2012? It being, arguably, the result of tighter integration and further intelligence based on user data, ie: Google+'s goal.
  - sbuk 14y ago
    Yes, it is a gimmick. It has been of no use to me other than to be an even bigger battery drain on my Nexus S.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      I've never even seen the app show up in battery stats. Want to provide a screenshot?
      - sbuk 14y ago
        Not really. It's yet another app that offers nothing useful that connect to the net, uses data and battery, to bug me.
        drivebyacct2 14y ago
        Your last two pages of comments are almost exclusively anti-Google. I highly doubt that it has any impact on your battery life and we both know you can more than easily disable it. You opted-in to turn it on, you haven't turned it off and I don't believe that it sucks your battery at any perceptible level. edit: to be fair, it does use data. a whole 5MB tying it in near last place with the stock News and Weather widget. Though that also includes the data used for all of my searches, including my voice based searches from the app.
        sbuk 14y ago
        Why didn't you just call me a liar and have done with it? The majority of this post were criticising Google based on their blocking Windows Phone access to maps, based on extremely spurious notions. To counter, your history is mostly praise for Google and reproaching those that criticise them. In short, I have nothing to prove. The battery life on my unsupported, Google branded phone has been poor from day one, as has the other Android devices that I have owned. Google now in my experience has added to the load and not provided me with anything that I consider useful. It's as much a gimmick as Siri, which has the same issues but is marginally less needy.
- therobot24 14y ago
  The idea is that you already use what were partitioned services; picassa, gmail, docs, chat, groups, calendar, voice, etc. Thus integrating them is obvious. However, the idea of Google+ gradually tightening the relation of these services separates itself from facebook in terms of how you use your social network. Facebook is largely an image sharing network to communicate with friends and family, while you use many google services such as a calendar, gmail, docs, and groups for work and networking and not necessarily just friends and family. Facebook will arguably never be something i use professionally (aside from promotions), while Google+ is something i already use professionally and could easily use instead of facebook socially.
creativityland 14y ago
Venturebeat: Yes, now Google will spend more Ad dollars with us and rank us higher in search results.
exabrial 14y ago
I'd use Google+ if their mobile app didn't have the appeal of a flaming monkey diarrhea breaking the sound barrier on a cold winder day in antartica.
- guyzero 14y ago
  Is that supposed to be terrible or awesome? Because it sounds sort of awesome.
- myko 14y ago
  Which mobile app? The web app? I find the Android/iOS apps pretty great myself (much better than any other social networks official mobile apps).
- igravious 14y ago
  That sounds rather intriguing. I almost wish I hadn't de-registered from G+ during my social networking existential crisis. By the way, the people saying that you can't navigate the Google ecosystem without being prompted to join G+ at every turn, I'm finding them hard to believe as that has not been the case for this lone datum, me.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Assuming this a complaint against the iOS Google+ app? The Android Google+ app is very spiffy.
jere 14y ago
'The animals of the forest thought it was very strange that tropical fruit should want to race a very fast animal. "The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve," a moose said. Pineapples don't have sleeves, an owl said "Well, you know what I mean,” the moose said. "If a pineapple challenges a hare to a race, it must be that the pineapple knows some secret trick that will allow it to win.” “The pineapple probably expects us to root for the hare and then look like fools when it loses,” said a crow. “Then the pineapple will win the race because the hare is overconfident and takes a nap, or gets lost, or something.” The animals agreed that this made sense. There was no reason a pineapple should challenge a hare unless it had a clever plan of some sort. So the animals, wanting to back a winner, all cheered for the pineapple.' http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-question-state-exam-stumps-article-1.1064657 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-questi... MORAL: Google+ doesn't have sleeves.
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  Sorry, this isn't entirely relevant to Google+, but is relevant at the nydailynews article. To anyone looking at that article: clearly the test meant that the owl was the wisest, as he literally said the moral of the story. And the animals ate the fruit as they were annoyed (there's no other negative emotion there, and the whole point of the story was the animals didn't like that the pineapple seemed to be tricking them). The more difficult question is actually "What would have happened if the animals had decided to root for the hare," though the correct answer is probably "They would have been happy to have cheered for a winner." Upon reading the first part of the story, I was actually really excited about the questions that "had everyone stumped," because if given in a class discussion, they'd lead to students saying all kinds of outlandish, but really interesting, and hopefully perceptive and creative, things. Unfortunately, there were then four answer choices: what's the point of having creative thinking exercises, with a very creative story, if the students don't then get to show off a bit of creative thought themselves? And here is where I really dislike standardized tests, as done by companies like Pearson's or The College Board: educators want to tell students to be creative, to explore on their own, sometimes to be silly and give silly answers, and need a good outlet for that. But if we teach to these sorts of tests, then we're saying that you need to suppress your silliness and creativity even in the face of a dauntingly silly story. As a personal note, I always really liked taking standardized tests, because the math was usually fairly easy and fun to do, and the reading passages were usually very interesting reads (I remember one was about the Trail of Tears, another about a girl climbing a redwood, and there were a bunch more. The worst ones were the passages that read like shopping lists). Also, it definitely didn't hurt that on most the tests I took, I was told I was in the 9xth percentile (this likely had a lot to do with the fact that I enjoyed the tests, rather than getting anxious at them).
drstewart 14y ago
I agree their strategy is the best one they could use. I still think they messed up in a big, big way when they announced Google+ but then didn't allow anyone to sign up for it. The hype was a huge: everyone wanted to signup and be part of the next big Google thing. Then one month later when they opened up registration nobody cared anymore. I wonder where it would be today if they had managed that correctly.
sgaither 14y ago
This has little to do with Google+ itself and more to do with Google becoming ubiquitous and + riding along
- roc 14y ago
  Inasmuch as plus has actually caused Google to better-integrate some of its services [1] it can be quite convenient. Unfortunately, that convenience is often paired with bad default privacy options and seemingly-impossible-to-stop annoyances. [2] [1] Compare youtube integration vs the various clumsy half-measures they've taken since the acquisition. Or consider chrome/google+ bookmark sync'ing vs the various iGoogle bookmark situation and plugins and half-measures. [2] a.) the emails google continues to send me, recommending people i may want to add to my circles. b.) the nonsense 'popular' post crap they inserted into my google+ 'timeline'-thing, back when i was actively trying to use it. I turned that off, at least once. But after a few weeks, it just magicked itself back on. c.) the nonsense 'popular' post crap they email to me every few months.
Irregardless 14y ago
> They are being understated about it but doing exactly what business strategists talk about when they describe the long game as the one to play. I had a hard time reading past that line since Google is literally ramming G+ down everyone's throats at every possible opportunity. It's almost impossible to use their services without being forced into a G+ account nowadays. It's not that they're being understated, it's just that people aren't noticing because G+ is that boring to everyone. Edit: And as I write this comment, I'm once again reminded of how idiotic the name 'Google+' is. Do I call it GPlus? G+? Google Plus? Google+? Should I put a space between them? How do you search for a plus sign? Oh, that's right... Google didn't realize they had to completely break that operator until AFTER they named their social network. How's that for a brilliant strategy?
- myko 14y ago
  > It's almost impossible to use their services without being forced into a G+ account nowadays. Google+ is Google. It is a way to consolidate all Google services. Requiring a Google account to utilize Google services seems pretty okay to me.
  - sbuk 14y ago
    So long as it's not a requirement for search. That said, integrating it with gmail in the way they have is underhand.
  - gcb0 14y ago
    > Google+ is Google. It is a way to consolidate all Google services. Requiring a Google account to utilize Google services seems pretty okay to me. that couldn't be more wrong. it used to be a gmail account was a google account. They even 'consolidated' in the clumsiest possible way my google-domain account into my personal gmail account some time ago. now they are bullying everyone to use their gfacebook.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      You must have been livid when you found out that your Blogger account had a "profile" attached to it as well. People act like Google waits for you to do a search and then says "Please post to Google+ to continue with your search".
mikeryan 14y ago
Why the Google+ long game is brilliant I'd usually expect an article like this to at least end up with what Google really gains from G+. Whats the big win in this game? Eyeballs? Behavior data? It may or may not be successful, but honestly I'm not sure I ever see a mass seachange of friends and family from Facebook to G+. I think its much more likely for a challenger in this space come from out of left field. I'd love to see Google doing something else with the G+ resources, something really new and innovative then iterative. The whole G+ thing seems kind of a waste (I say this as I see my usage of social networks start to slip every day)
j_col 14y ago
Despite Google's muscle, G+ is still largely irrelevant until they release a third party API (unless that is also party of the brilliant strategy and I'm just not clever enough to work it out).
- cheald 14y ago
  No write API means that literally everything I read on G+ was typed by a human. I really, really like that.
  - j_col 14y ago
    Facebook and Twitter have become part of the fabric of the web because if their open APIs, which have greatly helped their widespread adoption. There are many non-write use cases, for example auth. Seen "Sign-in via Google+" implemented anywhere?
    - cheald 14y ago
      Yup. In fact, I've implemented it. :)
      - j_col 14y ago
        Care to share?
        cheald 14y ago
        Sure - http://mashable.com/login/ http://mashable.com/login/ Implementation docs are at https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2 https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2
        j_col 14y ago
        Nice! Thanks for sharing (sorry, don't read Mashable so missed this).
eykanal 14y ago
So, this person hates the calendar, hates the phone, and lives in Chrome and gmail. For this person, the G+ long game is brilliant. For the rest of us who use calendars, get along with our cell phones/landlines just fine, use a browser as a tool to browse the internet rather than as our permanent desktop, and may or may not use gmail, I'm not convinced at all.
- gcb0 14y ago
  G+ will be the bane of google. i use gmail, gmaps, i use android, i use gcalendar, i use gdocs... but I don't use freaking facebook or g+. but now every new feature i click i get a "you must have a g+ profile"... want to leave a review for an android app? too bad, you need G+. Want to thumb up/down a youtube video? too bad, need G+. want to share location with someone on latitude? too bad, he's not in your circles. for the first time, i'm looking for alternatives to Gmail. because i'm pretty sure i won't be able to use it unless i have g+ at some point. And everyone knows what happens after you get free from the gateway drug...
vasco 14y ago
Bing is also in a long game for 3 years now, in web years that has got to be more, surely.
Zigurd 14y ago
If by brilliant you mean "less incompetent" then, yeah. Any site, such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. with a large number of users and multiple properties that touch social network features like posting (images, videos, blog entries), comments, followers/friends/groups, etc. could have grown a social network the way Google is doing. Google tried to do it as a standalone product, with Orkut, and failed, and then they correctly realized that by integrating the concepts of "posting" and "circle" into all their properties that have similar characteristics, they would succeed. Yahoo tried this half-heartedly and failed. I'm sure others went halfway, without discipline that enforced implementation in multiple Web properties, and failed. Google is integrating more systematically than these failures.
holri 14y ago
No single word about privacy?
webwanderings 14y ago
Google+ is certainly improving slowly but I don't think there is a mass of general users there as of yet. For Google+ to succeed on its own as a social network, they need to get the Mom, Pop, Cousins, Aunts and all.
- Shooti 14y ago
  The premise of the article seems to be that its not crucial for the dedicated social network portion of G+ to be a success if the features it enables within individual Google products get used.
  - webwanderings 14y ago
    Well, from that perspective, the Hangout feature has turned out to be a clear winner. Has it not? Unlike its intended use, I personally have been using private Circles for bookmarks where I drop lengthy articles in my Read Later circle (where I am the only one there) to come back to it as time permits. G+'s search feature is not bad and if you add few keywords to the text box of a post, you can make a fine bookmarking service for yourself.

45 points by bernardmoon 14y ago

taligent 14y ago

If Google+'s long game equates to simply integrating with other Google services then I fail to see how it is brilliant.

davidpayne11 14y ago
>I fail to see how it is brilliant. This is why the guy who designed this Google+ plan (Vic Gundotra) is where he is (at Google) and you are still a commentator in a public forum. You need some long-term vision, bro.
- mtgx 14y ago
  I do think Vic Gundotra is pretty brilliant and pretty "Steve Jobs-like". If Larry Page intends to stop being CEO of Google anytime soon, I hope Vic gets it (although I guess Sergei would be next in line).
  - minwcnt5 14y ago
    If not Sergey it would probably be an old timer like Urs. Vic is pretty new and probably well down the totem pole.
  - marssaxman 14y ago
    Vic Gundotra is a master of bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense: when he speaks, he shares nothing of his own beliefs or opinions. Rather, his words are the party line, and nothing more than the party line; he doesn't say the things he says because he believes they are true, but because he wants you to behave as though they are true. In this he is hardly alone, as a spokesman for a major corporation: but Google used to be better than that, and Google especially used to be a place where the top brass would tell the truth internally. It was a place where any Googler could speak up on a Friday company meeting and ask pointed questions and expect to get a real answer. Not so with Vic Gundotra: he bullshits internally just as hard as he does externally. You can't crack him; no matter how obvious his boosterism for G+, he never stops grinning and blustering and insisting that everything is awesome. It is severely off-putting.
- waitwhat 14y ago
  Of course taligent can speak for himself, but I think the argument is not that this is a bad game plan, but that it is not a "brilliant" one (but merely obvious.)
dude_abides 14y ago
s/integrating with/adding identity, profile, and friend graph to/ and then you will see how this is an amazing strategy.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
And let me guess, Google Now is just a gimmick despite being praised by tons of people as one of the biggest things of 2012? It being, arguably, the result of tighter integration and further intelligence based on user data, ie: Google+'s goal.
- sbuk 14y ago
  Yes, it is a gimmick. It has been of no use to me other than to be an even bigger battery drain on my Nexus S.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    I've never even seen the app show up in battery stats. Want to provide a screenshot?
    - sbuk 14y ago
      Not really. It's yet another app that offers nothing useful that connect to the net, uses data and battery, to bug me.
      - drivebyacct2 14y ago
        Your last two pages of comments are almost exclusively anti-Google. I highly doubt that it has any impact on your battery life and we both know you can more than easily disable it. You opted-in to turn it on, you haven't turned it off and I don't believe that it sucks your battery at any perceptible level. edit: to be fair, it does use data. a whole 5MB tying it in near last place with the stock News and Weather widget. Though that also includes the data used for all of my searches, including my voice based searches from the app.
        sbuk 14y ago
        Why didn't you just call me a liar and have done with it? The majority of this post were criticising Google based on their blocking Windows Phone access to maps, based on extremely spurious notions. To counter, your history is mostly praise for Google and reproaching those that criticise them. In short, I have nothing to prove. The battery life on my unsupported, Google branded phone has been poor from day one, as has the other Android devices that I have owned. Google now in my experience has added to the load and not provided me with anything that I consider useful. It's as much a gimmick as Siri, which has the same issues but is marginally less needy.
therobot24 14y ago
The idea is that you already use what were partitioned services; picassa, gmail, docs, chat, groups, calendar, voice, etc. Thus integrating them is obvious. However, the idea of Google+ gradually tightening the relation of these services separates itself from facebook in terms of how you use your social network. Facebook is largely an image sharing network to communicate with friends and family, while you use many google services such as a calendar, gmail, docs, and groups for work and networking and not necessarily just friends and family. Facebook will arguably never be something i use professionally (aside from promotions), while Google+ is something i already use professionally and could easily use instead of facebook socially.

creativityland 14y ago

Venturebeat: Yes, now Google will spend more Ad dollars with us and rank us higher in search results.

exabrial 14y ago

I'd use Google+ if their mobile app didn't have the appeal of a flaming monkey diarrhea breaking the sound barrier on a cold winder day in antartica.

guyzero 14y ago
Is that supposed to be terrible or awesome? Because it sounds sort of awesome.
myko 14y ago
Which mobile app? The web app? I find the Android/iOS apps pretty great myself (much better than any other social networks official mobile apps).
igravious 14y ago
That sounds rather intriguing. I almost wish I hadn't de-registered from G+ during my social networking existential crisis. By the way, the people saying that you can't navigate the Google ecosystem without being prompted to join G+ at every turn, I'm finding them hard to believe as that has not been the case for this lone datum, me.
RyanZAG 14y ago
Assuming this a complaint against the iOS Google+ app? The Android Google+ app is very spiffy.

jere 14y ago

'The animals of the forest thought it was very strange that tropical fruit should want to race a very fast animal. "The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve," a moose said. Pineapples don't have sleeves, an owl said "Well, you know what I mean,” the moose said. "If a pineapple challenges a hare to a race, it must be that the pineapple knows some secret trick that will allow it to win.” “The pineapple probably expects us to root for the hare and then look like fools when it loses,” said a crow. “Then the pineapple will win the race because the hare is overconfident and takes a nap, or gets lost, or something.” The animals agreed that this made sense. There was no reason a pineapple should challenge a hare unless it had a clever plan of some sort. So the animals, wanting to back a winner, all cheered for the pineapple.' http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-question-state-exam-stumps-article-1.1064657 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-questi... MORAL: Google+ doesn't have sleeves.

mjmahone17 14y ago
Sorry, this isn't entirely relevant to Google+, but is relevant at the nydailynews article. To anyone looking at that article: clearly the test meant that the owl was the wisest, as he literally said the moral of the story. And the animals ate the fruit as they were annoyed (there's no other negative emotion there, and the whole point of the story was the animals didn't like that the pineapple seemed to be tricking them). The more difficult question is actually "What would have happened if the animals had decided to root for the hare," though the correct answer is probably "They would have been happy to have cheered for a winner." Upon reading the first part of the story, I was actually really excited about the questions that "had everyone stumped," because if given in a class discussion, they'd lead to students saying all kinds of outlandish, but really interesting, and hopefully perceptive and creative, things. Unfortunately, there were then four answer choices: what's the point of having creative thinking exercises, with a very creative story, if the students don't then get to show off a bit of creative thought themselves? And here is where I really dislike standardized tests, as done by companies like Pearson's or The College Board: educators want to tell students to be creative, to explore on their own, sometimes to be silly and give silly answers, and need a good outlet for that. But if we teach to these sorts of tests, then we're saying that you need to suppress your silliness and creativity even in the face of a dauntingly silly story. As a personal note, I always really liked taking standardized tests, because the math was usually fairly easy and fun to do, and the reading passages were usually very interesting reads (I remember one was about the Trail of Tears, another about a girl climbing a redwood, and there were a bunch more. The worst ones were the passages that read like shopping lists). Also, it definitely didn't hurt that on most the tests I took, I was told I was in the 9xth percentile (this likely had a lot to do with the fact that I enjoyed the tests, rather than getting anxious at them).

drstewart 14y ago

I agree their strategy is the best one they could use. I still think they messed up in a big, big way when they announced Google+ but then didn't allow anyone to sign up for it. The hype was a huge: everyone wanted to signup and be part of the next big Google thing. Then one month later when they opened up registration nobody cared anymore. I wonder where it would be today if they had managed that correctly.

sgaither 14y ago

This has little to do with Google+ itself and more to do with Google becoming ubiquitous and + riding along

roc 14y ago
Inasmuch as plus has actually caused Google to better-integrate some of its services [1] it can be quite convenient. Unfortunately, that convenience is often paired with bad default privacy options and seemingly-impossible-to-stop annoyances. [2] [1] Compare youtube integration vs the various clumsy half-measures they've taken since the acquisition. Or consider chrome/google+ bookmark sync'ing vs the various iGoogle bookmark situation and plugins and half-measures. [2] a.) the emails google continues to send me, recommending people i may want to add to my circles. b.) the nonsense 'popular' post crap they inserted into my google+ 'timeline'-thing, back when i was actively trying to use it. I turned that off, at least once. But after a few weeks, it just magicked itself back on. c.) the nonsense 'popular' post crap they email to me every few months.

Irregardless 14y ago

> They are being understated about it but doing exactly what business strategists talk about when they describe the long game as the one to play. I had a hard time reading past that line since Google is literally ramming G+ down everyone's throats at every possible opportunity. It's almost impossible to use their services without being forced into a G+ account nowadays. It's not that they're being understated, it's just that people aren't noticing because G+ is that boring to everyone. Edit: And as I write this comment, I'm once again reminded of how idiotic the name 'Google+' is. Do I call it GPlus? G+? Google Plus? Google+? Should I put a space between them? How do you search for a plus sign? Oh, that's right... Google didn't realize they had to completely break that operator until AFTER they named their social network. How's that for a brilliant strategy?

myko 14y ago
> It's almost impossible to use their services without being forced into a G+ account nowadays. Google+ is Google. It is a way to consolidate all Google services. Requiring a Google account to utilize Google services seems pretty okay to me.
- sbuk 14y ago
  So long as it's not a requirement for search. That said, integrating it with gmail in the way they have is underhand.
- gcb0 14y ago
  > Google+ is Google. It is a way to consolidate all Google services. Requiring a Google account to utilize Google services seems pretty okay to me. that couldn't be more wrong. it used to be a gmail account was a google account. They even 'consolidated' in the clumsiest possible way my google-domain account into my personal gmail account some time ago. now they are bullying everyone to use their gfacebook.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    You must have been livid when you found out that your Blogger account had a "profile" attached to it as well. People act like Google waits for you to do a search and then says "Please post to Google+ to continue with your search".

mikeryan 14y ago

Why the Google+ long game is brilliant I'd usually expect an article like this to at least end up with what Google really gains from G+. Whats the big win in this game? Eyeballs? Behavior data? It may or may not be successful, but honestly I'm not sure I ever see a mass seachange of friends and family from Facebook to G+. I think its much more likely for a challenger in this space come from out of left field. I'd love to see Google doing something else with the G+ resources, something really new and innovative then iterative. The whole G+ thing seems kind of a waste (I say this as I see my usage of social networks start to slip every day)

j_col 14y ago

Despite Google's muscle, G+ is still largely irrelevant until they release a third party API (unless that is also party of the brilliant strategy and I'm just not clever enough to work it out).

cheald 14y ago
No write API means that literally everything I read on G+ was typed by a human. I really, really like that.
- j_col 14y ago
  Facebook and Twitter have become part of the fabric of the web because if their open APIs, which have greatly helped their widespread adoption. There are many non-write use cases, for example auth. Seen "Sign-in via Google+" implemented anywhere?
  - cheald 14y ago
    Yup. In fact, I've implemented it. :)
    - j_col 14y ago
      Care to share?
      - cheald 14y ago
        Sure - http://mashable.com/login/ http://mashable.com/login/ Implementation docs are at https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2 https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2
        j_col 14y ago
        Nice! Thanks for sharing (sorry, don't read Mashable so missed this).

eykanal 14y ago

So, this person hates the calendar, hates the phone, and lives in Chrome and gmail. For this person, the G+ long game is brilliant. For the rest of us who use calendars, get along with our cell phones/landlines just fine, use a browser as a tool to browse the internet rather than as our permanent desktop, and may or may not use gmail, I'm not convinced at all.

gcb0 14y ago
G+ will be the bane of google. i use gmail, gmaps, i use android, i use gcalendar, i use gdocs... but I don't use freaking facebook or g+. but now every new feature i click i get a "you must have a g+ profile"... want to leave a review for an android app? too bad, you need G+. Want to thumb up/down a youtube video? too bad, need G+. want to share location with someone on latitude? too bad, he's not in your circles. for the first time, i'm looking for alternatives to Gmail. because i'm pretty sure i won't be able to use it unless i have g+ at some point. And everyone knows what happens after you get free from the gateway drug...

vasco 14y ago

Bing is also in a long game for 3 years now, in web years that has got to be more, surely.

Zigurd 14y ago

If by brilliant you mean "less incompetent" then, yeah. Any site, such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. with a large number of users and multiple properties that touch social network features like posting (images, videos, blog entries), comments, followers/friends/groups, etc. could have grown a social network the way Google is doing. Google tried to do it as a standalone product, with Orkut, and failed, and then they correctly realized that by integrating the concepts of "posting" and "circle" into all their properties that have similar characteristics, they would succeed. Yahoo tried this half-heartedly and failed. I'm sure others went halfway, without discipline that enforced implementation in multiple Web properties, and failed. Google is integrating more systematically than these failures.

holri 14y ago

No single word about privacy?

webwanderings 14y ago

Google+ is certainly improving slowly but I don't think there is a mass of general users there as of yet. For Google+ to succeed on its own as a social network, they need to get the Mom, Pop, Cousins, Aunts and all.

Shooti 14y ago
The premise of the article seems to be that its not crucial for the dedicated social network portion of G+ to be a success if the features it enables within individual Google products get used.
- webwanderings 14y ago
  Well, from that perspective, the Hangout feature has turned out to be a clear winner. Has it not? Unlike its intended use, I personally have been using private Circles for bookmarks where I drop lengthy articles in my Read Later circle (where I am the only one there) to come back to it as time permits. G+'s search feature is not bad and if you add few keywords to the text box of a post, you can make a fine bookmarking service for yourself.