6 ms·

The Tragic Beauty of Google+

71 points by technologizer 13y ago

cnahr 13y ago
Journalists love to talk about how "beautiful" Google+ is -- first the mobile apps, now the web interface. But you are posting this link here, on a picture-free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.) "Beautiful" does not enable discussion, it enables advertising. Google+ vs Facebook misses the point. Having lots of random people chatting about random things isn't very profitable, as Facebook discovered. There's no point in emulating that. Instead, Google+ is the universal publishing & commenting platform for the highly profitable Google advertising ecosystem. Here's where Google talks to its actual G+ target audience: https://www.google.com/+/business/ https://www.google.com/+/business/
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  Text enables ads too. Job ads on HN or search ads on Google blend in more naturally , and are easier to make relevant than images.
- ergo14 13y ago
  You are wrong - there is plenty of discussion on g+.
  - splitbrain 13y ago
    There's plenty of discussion despite Google sabotaging it with every other update. :-/
    - patrickaljord 13y ago
      How so?
  - cnahr 13y ago
    Not really, no. Most people post a couple of times and get few reactions beyond one-liners, if that. Over time, fewer and fewer people who aren't Google employees (1) bother posting anymore. Picture posts get by far the most +1s and shares. Completely incomparable to the text-based discussion networks. (1) As well as anyone promoting a business, I should add. I've seen a couple of writers and lots of professional photographers using G+ for self-promotion. That seems to work quite well for them, especially the photographers given how image-heavy G+ is.
    - ergo14 13y ago
      yes, really ;-) Ok, I'm Marcin Lulek, find me on g+ i can share my developer circles with you, maybe then the system will be more valuable to you guys.
    - johnyzee 13y ago
      That's all true, but try the 'Communities' function for a given topic you are interested in if you haven't already. I use Google+ for that exclusively, after giving it up due to the same observations you made.
  - robryan 13y ago
    Maybe, most of us aren't involved in it. Since day one I never found g+ to be an accessible place to converse with people I know or people who share interests. I am sure there are some great posts going around limited circles of people, just that is not the common experience.
    - ergo14 13y ago
      Btw. did you guys notice the COMMUNITIES functionality of g+? This is a good place to start.
- vanderZwan 13y ago
  "But you are posting this link here, on a picture-free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.)" In a public forum setting - for semi-private discussions among like-minded peers I prefer G+, certain Facebook groups, and most of all the (probably idolated) memory of Google Reader's social features.
peterkelly 13y ago
I've recently given up Facebook due to realising it was almost a complete waste of my time, and I have the same feeling towards Google+. With Facebook it was becoming that I'd log on each day and see a bunch of irrelevant content from people I hadn't spoken to for years (and in some cases, met only once or twice). Occasionally I'd end up having a meaningful conversation but the signal-to-noise ratio was just ridiculously high. And then there was the advertising and lack of concern for privacy etc. I could go on. It may be just me, but sitting down together for lunch or (if the person lives elsewhere) chatting on phone or Skype seem much more pleasant and fruitful modes of social interaction. And of course HN for reading interesting discussions about topics of interest :)
- meric 13y ago
  You can hide people from the timeline.
- henrikschroder 13y ago
  Facebook, Google+, and any other social network or electronic communication is what you make it. But you have to actively use the tools provided to curate your experience. I don't friend people on Facebook that I haven't met in real life. I de-friend people if I'm no longer interested in what they post or what they do. I hide or throttle down posts from people who have a high noise ratio. In return, my Facebook feed is pretty enjoyable, and keeps me up to date on what a bunch of people I care about are doing in their lives. But it takes a little bit of work on my side, it doesn't appear automatically, and if you're indiscriminate about adding people as friends, your feed will be not be enjoyable. Simply walking away from it instead of curating it is a lazy solution.
  - lkozma 13y ago
    What you say is obviously true, but there must be some curve between the effort needed to make it useful and the utility derived from it, based on which some people can rationally decide that it is not worth it for them, while others can decide the opposite. That doesn't make one of them lazy and the other one stupid (although some people might be better or worse in estimating the effort or the utility of the process) - notice that otherwise the same generic argument could be made for anything: "X is what you make of it ... walking away from it is a lazy solution." where X could be nuclear weapons, hard drugs, etc. etc.
alipang 13y ago
Google plus is the Nokia Lumia of social networks. Solid, great looking and not better enough than the incumbent to gain a significant market share.
- paganel 13y ago
  It's been two years of putting "more wood behind fewer arrows" and all they could come up with is a Pinterest-lookalike thingie. For an outsider like me it's really, really frustrating, they have all this data and smart engineers and all they can think about is winning every battle and not realizing that they're losing the war. And just to make sure, "the war" is not against Facebook, Microsoft or any short-term, market-driven non-sense, "the war" and fight itself should be related to trying to reach the Singularity, trying to make us (the human species) less dependent on only one potential point of failure (this planet) etc.
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    Wait, your source of frustration with Google is that they're not doing enough to move the human race to another planet in the near future?!? I just want to make sure I understand what you are getting at, here.
    - paganel 13y ago
      Yeap, got that right, they have some of the smartest guys on the planet as their employees and they fill up their time with what looks like gibberish. You do have to think big.
chj 13y ago
Didn't like G+ design. They really should copy twitter's style.
- chrisvineup 13y ago
  I struggle to find the similarities you are talking about do you care to share which bits you are referring to?
  - James_Duval 13y ago
    I think you have misread >should as >shouldn't although I find the parent comment equally baffling if I read it either way.
johnchristopher 13y ago
I still work and browse the internet with an asus eeepc 1000he and g+ is barely usable on that machine. Javascript and html(5) are gobbling my CPU to display images and snippets of text: typically post of maximum 3 lines and 7 displayed comments that are heavily dynamic for no real (imo) value for the end-user. Before that ajax everywhere and like buttons non-sense it wouldn't have been a problem. The irritating point is that density of information hasn't changed that much. On the whole I think it's a regression of the web.
- RDeckard 13y ago
  Time to upgrade.
- snaky 13y ago
  Time to setup goodold Mutt and subscribe to good old mailing lists, if you care about information density.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Let me dispute the "beautiful" argument. I don't think Google does a good job at UI at all: http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png My first impression after opening this was "WTF is going on here?". It's floating panes atop floating panes, reinvented scrollbars, while the actual content is sparse. The same kind of nonsense that put me off using GMail. But hey, that's what you get when you cram a desktop inside a desktop. I bet their new UIs work great on Chrome OS.
- robotmay 13y ago
  It's a bit weird; I actually really like the G+ interface when used on the Nexus 7, but it just doesn't look good on the desktop. I now have 3 columns of tiny boxes, and I don't really understand why. Couldn't it just be flexible width, two boxes per row?
  - estebank 13y ago
    The amount of columns displayed depends on the width of the window, with generous margins to the sides (you could fit an extra column without margins).
    - robotmay 13y ago
      Aye, I guess the margins are there to accommodate the menu and the hangouts column?
- James_Duval 13y ago
  It's still pretty, but confusing for a new user. That's more user experience than aesthetic design (I appreciate the line I have drawn can be blurred, but I choose not to blur it here). Especially as there's no gentle introduction to features or etiquette as there is with Facebook/Twitter, you're just thrown in to find it all out for yourself.
- nwh 13y ago
  There's a lot of "flat" design going on, and they're struggling to display any hierarchy within it. It's a similar problem that Windows 8 is facing with it's Modern UI, and pretty much any other interface that has been stunted by the flat design trend.
rogerbinns 13y ago
My problem with G+ is they keep making it harder to read content. The new layout is terrible for that (arbitrary sized boxes in arbitrary alignments). Newspapers have done that but there is human supervision for the content (which is almost always longer than a few sentences) and the layout is human supervised. The irony is that there is a product specifically geared towards towards reading productivity and following lots of sources. Google will be killing it in two months (Google Reader).
- Lewisham 13y ago
  You can turn it into single-column if you don't like the arbitrary-boxes.
  - edtechdev 13y ago
    If they allowed a title-only layout, it would be closer to google reader, and you could skim hundreds of posts very quickly.
  - johnyzee 13y ago
    First thing I did. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be available for the Communities pages.
    - bockris 13y ago
      Home->Settings->Accessability checkbox should fix community pages
  - Grue3 13y ago
    How? I can't find the option. The tiles are absolutely dreadful.
perlpimp 13y ago
there was a post that explained that what facebook did with timeline - put it into 2 line, so that people would not ignore sponsored posts on their timelines/feed. I wonder if google is trying to do the same. I find this feed quite distracting - my eyes keep on dithering between those columns. I suspect google is trying to do pretty much same thing as facebook. It feels pinterest-y too, seems alot of social media sites have have had their design converge into what pinterest has realized with theirs.
danmaz74 13y ago
"The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting." So, Facebook feels more "warm, personal" to the author - and I would agree, for the same reasons: On Facebook I share with my friends and family, while on G+ I mostly deal with interesting people I don't know directly. The funny thing is that Facebook wants its users to interact more with people (entities) they don't know, for good monetization reasons, and exactly this could make Facebook much less warm and personal - and thus worse for its current users. Incidentally, I just wrote a post exactly about this (from a branding perspective): http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetization-clashes-with-branding/ http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...
apricot13 13y ago
I have a fairly good windows 7 machine. 64bit, 6gb. I opened g+ in chrome and it crashed, twice. There are pop overs everywhere I move my mouse, making it even slower! I have a resolution of 1024x768 so everything is squished and hard to find/read. I'll keep giving it a go, but I do wish they would add a 'lightweight' version, like the html only gmail for us people without top of the line machines that can run crazy amounts of javascript.
- stack0v3erfl0w 13y ago
  For a lightweight version you can try the mobile version https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream
dade_ 13y ago
I found Google+ great for collaborating with the maker community. The strength is use cases that involve discovery of pictures (&diagrams) + discussion of ideas/things, as the communities feature works well for this. Adafruit is making great use of hangouts as well. However, I find that Twitter & Facebook work much better than G+ as news feeds.
nmridul 13y ago
Is there a way in G+ where we can follow only relevant topics from people we follow ? Say if someone I follow posts something which he tags something ("tech", "travel" etc) and I can choose to follow only the posts that are tagged "tech". This is something I cannot figure out and if its there, I'm sure it will avoid most of the clutter in G+.
- snaky 13y ago
  That's desirable feauture for any information feed, from RSS to IRC
- johnyzee 13y ago
  The 'Communities' part of Google+ is pretty good for following particular topics. It's the only reason I use Google+.
methodin 13y ago
I think a revelation I've had recently is that, in general, friends are boring unless they are doing something of interest. The information I find on Google+ and other non-real-life endeavors from people outside my real-life bubble is much more interesting, as a rule of thumb.
heme 13y ago
- Facebook wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising. - Google also wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising. However, Google also uses that information to provide useful tools such as directions, search, etc. - I am much more likely to give Google my info because they give me all of these extra useful tools. Facebook provides nothing except a place for my mom to see photos of her grand kids. AS soon as she is on G+ I will be dropping FB.
pilooch 13y ago
For the past month, I've been checking on G+ before Twitter and other media or sources. Here is how I was dragged into it. I had never used Facebook, and I had never used Google+. I guess I was too busy with Emacs. Then recently I had to hit Google+ to follow some community thread on the Deep Learning channel, https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725 https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725 Somehow, the researchers from the field did settle there. Next I started reading the Machine Learning community threads, then the C++ one, etc... Eventually I did post to the Machine Learning community, and I saw the hits on our website, a few hundreds every day, for a few days, not much, but I could tell the right people were visiting, because they were spending way more time than visitors from other sources. So my current understanding is that G+ is worth for its communities, and the targeted traffic it offers... my 2cents :)

71 points by technologizer 13y ago

cnahr 13y ago

Journalists love to talk about how "beautiful" Google+ is -- first the mobile apps, now the web interface. But you are posting this link here, on a picture-free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.) "Beautiful" does not enable discussion, it enables advertising. Google+ vs Facebook misses the point. Having lots of random people chatting about random things isn't very profitable, as Facebook discovered. There's no point in emulating that. Instead, Google+ is the universal publishing & commenting platform for the highly profitable Google advertising ecosystem. Here's where Google talks to its actual G+ target audience: https://www.google.com/+/business/ https://www.google.com/+/business/

hayksaakian 13y ago
Text enables ads too. Job ads on HN or search ads on Google blend in more naturally , and are easier to make relevant than images.
ergo14 13y ago
You are wrong - there is plenty of discussion on g+.
- splitbrain 13y ago
  There's plenty of discussion despite Google sabotaging it with every other update. :-/
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    How so?
- cnahr 13y ago
  Not really, no. Most people post a couple of times and get few reactions beyond one-liners, if that. Over time, fewer and fewer people who aren't Google employees (1) bother posting anymore. Picture posts get by far the most +1s and shares. Completely incomparable to the text-based discussion networks. (1) As well as anyone promoting a business, I should add. I've seen a couple of writers and lots of professional photographers using G+ for self-promotion. That seems to work quite well for them, especially the photographers given how image-heavy G+ is.
  - ergo14 13y ago
    yes, really ;-) Ok, I'm Marcin Lulek, find me on g+ i can share my developer circles with you, maybe then the system will be more valuable to you guys.
  - johnyzee 13y ago
    That's all true, but try the 'Communities' function for a given topic you are interested in if you haven't already. I use Google+ for that exclusively, after giving it up due to the same observations you made.
- robryan 13y ago
  Maybe, most of us aren't involved in it. Since day one I never found g+ to be an accessible place to converse with people I know or people who share interests. I am sure there are some great posts going around limited circles of people, just that is not the common experience.
  - ergo14 13y ago
    Btw. did you guys notice the COMMUNITIES functionality of g+? This is a good place to start.
vanderZwan 13y ago
"But you are posting this link here, on a picture-free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.)" In a public forum setting - for semi-private discussions among like-minded peers I prefer G+, certain Facebook groups, and most of all the (probably idolated) memory of Google Reader's social features.

peterkelly 13y ago

I've recently given up Facebook due to realising it was almost a complete waste of my time, and I have the same feeling towards Google+. With Facebook it was becoming that I'd log on each day and see a bunch of irrelevant content from people I hadn't spoken to for years (and in some cases, met only once or twice). Occasionally I'd end up having a meaningful conversation but the signal-to-noise ratio was just ridiculously high. And then there was the advertising and lack of concern for privacy etc. I could go on. It may be just me, but sitting down together for lunch or (if the person lives elsewhere) chatting on phone or Skype seem much more pleasant and fruitful modes of social interaction. And of course HN for reading interesting discussions about topics of interest :)

meric 13y ago
You can hide people from the timeline.
henrikschroder 13y ago
Facebook, Google+, and any other social network or electronic communication is what you make it. But you have to actively use the tools provided to curate your experience. I don't friend people on Facebook that I haven't met in real life. I de-friend people if I'm no longer interested in what they post or what they do. I hide or throttle down posts from people who have a high noise ratio. In return, my Facebook feed is pretty enjoyable, and keeps me up to date on what a bunch of people I care about are doing in their lives. But it takes a little bit of work on my side, it doesn't appear automatically, and if you're indiscriminate about adding people as friends, your feed will be not be enjoyable. Simply walking away from it instead of curating it is a lazy solution.
- lkozma 13y ago
  What you say is obviously true, but there must be some curve between the effort needed to make it useful and the utility derived from it, based on which some people can rationally decide that it is not worth it for them, while others can decide the opposite. That doesn't make one of them lazy and the other one stupid (although some people might be better or worse in estimating the effort or the utility of the process) - notice that otherwise the same generic argument could be made for anything: "X is what you make of it ... walking away from it is a lazy solution." where X could be nuclear weapons, hard drugs, etc. etc.

alipang 13y ago

Google plus is the Nokia Lumia of social networks. Solid, great looking and not better enough than the incumbent to gain a significant market share.

paganel 13y ago
It's been two years of putting "more wood behind fewer arrows" and all they could come up with is a Pinterest-lookalike thingie. For an outsider like me it's really, really frustrating, they have all this data and smart engineers and all they can think about is winning every battle and not realizing that they're losing the war. And just to make sure, "the war" is not against Facebook, Microsoft or any short-term, market-driven non-sense, "the war" and fight itself should be related to trying to reach the Singularity, trying to make us (the human species) less dependent on only one potential point of failure (this planet) etc.
- FireBeyond 13y ago
  Wait, your source of frustration with Google is that they're not doing enough to move the human race to another planet in the near future?!? I just want to make sure I understand what you are getting at, here.
  - paganel 13y ago
    Yeap, got that right, they have some of the smartest guys on the planet as their employees and they fill up their time with what looks like gibberish. You do have to think big.

chj 13y ago

Didn't like G+ design. They really should copy twitter's style.

chrisvineup 13y ago
I struggle to find the similarities you are talking about do you care to share which bits you are referring to?
- James_Duval 13y ago
  I think you have misread >should as >shouldn't although I find the parent comment equally baffling if I read it either way.

johnchristopher 13y ago

I still work and browse the internet with an asus eeepc 1000he and g+ is barely usable on that machine. Javascript and html(5) are gobbling my CPU to display images and snippets of text: typically post of maximum 3 lines and 7 displayed comments that are heavily dynamic for no real (imo) value for the end-user. Before that ajax everywhere and like buttons non-sense it wouldn't have been a problem. The irritating point is that density of information hasn't changed that much. On the whole I think it's a regression of the web.

RDeckard 13y ago
Time to upgrade.
snaky 13y ago
Time to setup goodold Mutt and subscribe to good old mailing lists, if you care about information density.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

Let me dispute the "beautiful" argument. I don't think Google does a good job at UI at all: http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png My first impression after opening this was "WTF is going on here?". It's floating panes atop floating panes, reinvented scrollbars, while the actual content is sparse. The same kind of nonsense that put me off using GMail. But hey, that's what you get when you cram a desktop inside a desktop. I bet their new UIs work great on Chrome OS.

robotmay 13y ago
It's a bit weird; I actually really like the G+ interface when used on the Nexus 7, but it just doesn't look good on the desktop. I now have 3 columns of tiny boxes, and I don't really understand why. Couldn't it just be flexible width, two boxes per row?
- estebank 13y ago
  The amount of columns displayed depends on the width of the window, with generous margins to the sides (you could fit an extra column without margins).
  - robotmay 13y ago
    Aye, I guess the margins are there to accommodate the menu and the hangouts column?
James_Duval 13y ago
It's still pretty, but confusing for a new user. That's more user experience than aesthetic design (I appreciate the line I have drawn can be blurred, but I choose not to blur it here). Especially as there's no gentle introduction to features or etiquette as there is with Facebook/Twitter, you're just thrown in to find it all out for yourself.
nwh 13y ago
There's a lot of "flat" design going on, and they're struggling to display any hierarchy within it. It's a similar problem that Windows 8 is facing with it's Modern UI, and pretty much any other interface that has been stunted by the flat design trend.

rogerbinns 13y ago

My problem with G+ is they keep making it harder to read content. The new layout is terrible for that (arbitrary sized boxes in arbitrary alignments). Newspapers have done that but there is human supervision for the content (which is almost always longer than a few sentences) and the layout is human supervised. The irony is that there is a product specifically geared towards towards reading productivity and following lots of sources. Google will be killing it in two months (Google Reader).

Lewisham 13y ago
You can turn it into single-column if you don't like the arbitrary-boxes.
- edtechdev 13y ago
  If they allowed a title-only layout, it would be closer to google reader, and you could skim hundreds of posts very quickly.
- johnyzee 13y ago
  First thing I did. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be available for the Communities pages.
  - bockris 13y ago
    Home->Settings->Accessability checkbox should fix community pages
- Grue3 13y ago
  How? I can't find the option. The tiles are absolutely dreadful.

perlpimp 13y ago

there was a post that explained that what facebook did with timeline - put it into 2 line, so that people would not ignore sponsored posts on their timelines/feed. I wonder if google is trying to do the same. I find this feed quite distracting - my eyes keep on dithering between those columns. I suspect google is trying to do pretty much same thing as facebook. It feels pinterest-y too, seems alot of social media sites have have had their design converge into what pinterest has realized with theirs.

danmaz74 13y ago

"The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting." So, Facebook feels more "warm, personal" to the author - and I would agree, for the same reasons: On Facebook I share with my friends and family, while on G+ I mostly deal with interesting people I don't know directly. The funny thing is that Facebook wants its users to interact more with people (entities) they don't know, for good monetization reasons, and exactly this could make Facebook much less warm and personal - and thus worse for its current users. Incidentally, I just wrote a post exactly about this (from a branding perspective): http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetization-clashes-with-branding/ http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...

apricot13 13y ago

I have a fairly good windows 7 machine. 64bit, 6gb. I opened g+ in chrome and it crashed, twice. There are pop overs everywhere I move my mouse, making it even slower! I have a resolution of 1024x768 so everything is squished and hard to find/read. I'll keep giving it a go, but I do wish they would add a 'lightweight' version, like the html only gmail for us people without top of the line machines that can run crazy amounts of javascript.

stack0v3erfl0w 13y ago
For a lightweight version you can try the mobile version https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream

dade_ 13y ago

I found Google+ great for collaborating with the maker community. The strength is use cases that involve discovery of pictures (&diagrams) + discussion of ideas/things, as the communities feature works well for this. Adafruit is making great use of hangouts as well. However, I find that Twitter & Facebook work much better than G+ as news feeds.

nmridul 13y ago

Is there a way in G+ where we can follow only relevant topics from people we follow ? Say if someone I follow posts something which he tags something ("tech", "travel" etc) and I can choose to follow only the posts that are tagged "tech". This is something I cannot figure out and if its there, I'm sure it will avoid most of the clutter in G+.

snaky 13y ago
That's desirable feauture for any information feed, from RSS to IRC
johnyzee 13y ago
The 'Communities' part of Google+ is pretty good for following particular topics. It's the only reason I use Google+.

methodin 13y ago

I think a revelation I've had recently is that, in general, friends are boring unless they are doing something of interest. The information I find on Google+ and other non-real-life endeavors from people outside my real-life bubble is much more interesting, as a rule of thumb.

heme 13y ago

- Facebook wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising. - Google also wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising. However, Google also uses that information to provide useful tools such as directions, search, etc. - I am much more likely to give Google my info because they give me all of these extra useful tools. Facebook provides nothing except a place for my mom to see photos of her grand kids. AS soon as she is on G+ I will be dropping FB.

pilooch 13y ago

For the past month, I've been checking on G+ before Twitter and other media or sources. Here is how I was dragged into it. I had never used Facebook, and I had never used Google+. I guess I was too busy with Emacs. Then recently I had to hit Google+ to follow some community thread on the Deep Learning channel, https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725 https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725 Somehow, the researchers from the field did settle there. Next I started reading the Machine Learning community threads, then the C++ one, etc... Eventually I did post to the Machine Learning community, and I saw the hits on our website, a few hundreds every day, for a few days, not much, but I could tell the right people were visiting, because they were spending way more time than visitors from other sources. So my current understanding is that G+ is worth for its communities, and the targeted traffic it offers... my 2cents :)