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> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011 that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet. > “I clearly kn

> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011 that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet. > “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.” I think Eric screwed up in a deeper way that this quote admits. Google+ came up at a time of broader dissatisfaction with other social networks, particularly Facebook. From both UI weaknesses and social perception, I initially saw G+ gaining a lot of interest among disparate folks I'd loosely label "influencers". And _all_ of that interest was shot dead due to attempts to own identity by enforcing the use of real names[1]. There are very real reasons why "average" people need alternate identities online. In some cases, it's mandatory professional separation; your work persona shouldn't be conflated with your author persona, shouldn't be conflated with your close-friends persona, etc. Circles were interesting, but solved a different problem. In this regard, I think Schmidt's big failing was analogous to the fable of the golden goose: he killed any chance Google+ had by trying to seize the golden eggs of online identity. This delayed G+'s adoption enough that Facebook in particular was able to react, improving both its then-primary web UI, make some privacy improvements, and significantly shore up its public perception.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars [2] Not counting the rabid social-network and/or Facebook haters, whom cannot be satisfied.

yuhong 13y ago
I still would prefer that it would not be needed, but that is not Google+'s problem to solve.
yid 13y ago
> And _all_ of that interest was shot dead due to attempts to own identity by enforcing the use of real names[1]. It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time. Facebook's commercial power was widely attributed to the fact that for the first time, wide swaths of people were using their real identity online. With the investment that Google put into +, the risk of having another sea of MetalHead444s was high. I'm just unhappy that they didn't take any really bold steps to differentiate themselves from Facebook, and instead went full Microsoft by attempting to replicate the UI.
- hangonhn 13y ago
  "It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time." That's such a good way to describe a bad decision. The accumulation of decisions with those characteristics will sink any company.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- kibwen 13y ago
  In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place? The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.
  - gwillen 13y ago
    The engineers -- the ones down in the trenches -- practically revolted over it. The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.
    - kibwen 13y ago
      Glad to hear it. I apologize to Google's engineers for my uninformed implication.
      - dredmorbius 13y ago
        I wish more had protested more strongly or simply walked. I know it's easy to project actions on others, but really, that was a BAD decision.
        rachelbythebay 13y ago
        Unfortunately, not everyone had that sort of mobility. Mortgage holders, people on visas who needed to find another sponsor (and couldn't just go anywhere) and the rest have a harder time moving on. That has to suck: knowing something is rotten but having to stick with it due to external constraints.
nostrademons 13y ago
Eric had already stepped down as CEO at the time the Real Names decision was made. That came from Vic, Larry, and the team leadership.
- yuhong 13y ago
  Yea, I knew it was Vic for a while now. BTW, I wonder if my emails to you helped.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Schmidt was unapologetically selling G+ as "an identity service". Gundotra continued that drive until it became clear that the userbase would (and did) revolt.
pekk 13y ago
Most Facebook haters could be satisfied. Just not by anything copying the creepy and unethical practices of Facebook.
encoderer 13y ago
My impression was that G+ was stymied by a bad go-to-market strategy. I'm sure the real names issue didn't help, but I'm not certain it had the impact you're suggesting. Their go to market strategy was essentially the same as the Chinese government-run construction companies that build an entire city from farmland, cut the ribbon and expect a stampede. Getting it right is complicated and I couldn't do it justice in an HN comment, but generally I think they should've focused on a specific winnable market and grown from there.
- georgeecollins 13y ago
  I think that is really smart and makes a lot of sense. Facebook started out by servicing a niche, Twitter was used by tech nerds.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    As much as I detest virtually everything Facebook, it's growth strategy from Harvard to Ivies to selective edus to all was great. From the get-go, it was the place to go to find a crowd more exclusive than the one you were in already. That ended with mass-market availability, but it's provided steam to roll on for a while. Google had an initial base which was, I think, the seed around which it could have grown a community but blew it by releasing publicly too early. Among other failings.
  - pjc50 13y ago
    Twitter took off once it got a critical mass of celebrities using it, and this fact was published in mainstream media. Stephen Fry brought in a lot of people; now it's Justin Bieber.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Fostering community is a fragile process. Google simply stepped in the brown stinky stuff far too often. The initial beta, the public release (too soon), the lack of features (no search ... from the Internet's leading search company?). Some huge reorientations of direction. A miserable client experience (it's a hugely bloated web page, and I still can't do more than a trivial amount on it). Real Names, the SEO takeover, and the YouTube Anschluss were really only the icing on the cake. The first drove me to kill my personally ascribed account and create one under this nym which I use in a few places online. The second largely dismayed me. Things looked up briefly a year or so back as search got more powerful and enough interesting content had accumulated to provide some actual utility to the site. Last May's redesign, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all pretty awful.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deelowe 13y ago
Real Names didn't come from Eric. He was gone by the time G+ rolled out. Vic had a large hand in the real names decision.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Schmidt was selling G+ as "an identity platform".
  - deelowe 13y ago
    Maybe, but by the time it rolled out, Schmidt was gone. G+ is pretty much all Vic.
  - billnguyen 13y ago
    Schmidt, like any good CEO, will always always sell anything his company outputs. You'll never find him criticising anything Google does, maybe in retrospect but never upon launch.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      My point isn't that he wasn't criticising, but that he was explicitly endorsing the "identity service" angle.
ericras 13y ago
In all honesty I probably would have pursued the same real names policy if I had been running Google+. They were trying to avoid having it immediately devolve into the YouTube comments section - aka the scourge of the Internet. I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  Totally agree that "real names" is a red herring. It irritated a small group of influential tech personalities, but as far as their influence may expand, it doesn't dictate which social network reigns supreme. The reality is that once a service hits a certain critical mass it's almost impossible to extract. Facebook, like Windows, is now a permanent fixture in the tech community, and like Windows, it will only go away by slow, eventual deterioration made possible only by the gross incompetence of the company providing the software. People don't care how much better your software is, the inertia will keep all but the most tech-savvy on the inferior solution as long as it provides basic semblances of expected functionality.
- daeken 13y ago
  > I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it. I don't think that anyone will argue that pseudonyms are important to the average user. However, they are important to a small but influential group of users. The type of early adopter that otherwise could've driven G+ upward.
  - npizzolato 13y ago
    I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.
zippergz 13y ago
My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it. Social networks have a lot of inertia for users who aren't early adopters. If they already are connected to all of your friends on Facebook, a new social network would have to be truly amazing (or Facebook would have to really screw up, in ways that "regular people" care about) to get them to move over. I think Real Names was a drop in the bucket compared to other issues.
- bpyne 13y ago
  The Real Names policy stinks. It misses completely legitimate (and innocent) reasons why people want to be anonymous sometimes. That said, your other point needs to be trumpeted to any companies thinking about taking a run at FB. The reality is that FB has its annoyances, but overall it is good enough that it's not worth losing all my posts, photos, etc. that have become a "life mosaic", as well as, my network of friends to move to another site - and I don't have time to maintain more than one social network. The situation reminds me of enterprise vendor apps that my employer uses. Overall a particular app may have its warts, but it covers most use cases alright so that we aren't tempted to go to a competing app.
- trhway 13y ago
  Real Names is the best illustration of how Google tried to copy FB instead of offering a better one. "Circles"? only sound of it is already too high-brow for average Joe. Have you heard a taxi driver using word "circle" to describe his taxi driving buddies?
  - amaks 13y ago
    AFAIK the real names policy is largely not in effect anymore, contrary to Facebook?
    - 13y ago
dgregd 13y ago
> There are very real reasons why "average" people need alternate identities online. However alternate identities also allow for click fraud things and so on. We don't know exactly why Google guys wanted so much to eliminate faked identities.
sjs382 13y ago
For me, the number one problem of Google+ was that many who were excited to try it, couldn't (for over a year, if I recall?). We were a 2nd-class-citizens with a Google Apps account, rather than a Gmail account.
- timothya 13y ago
  It was in the invite-only stage for less than 3 months.
  - npizzolato 13y ago
    You say that like it's a short amount of time. Three months is more than enough time for hype to build, peek, and wither, which can -- and did, I would agrue -- kill a social network.
    - timothya 13y ago
      I don't disagree; I think that slow rollouts of large products make sense from a technical standpoint (you can make sure that nothing breaks down at the large scale, and fix problems before they become a big issue), but I think that invite-only betas which last weeks or months can often hurt product uptake. I was just clarifying that the invite-only stage didn't last more than a year.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      A slow and phased community development worked really, really well for Facebook. Remember: it was deployed into a world already dominated by MySpace and with multiple rivals. Slower, with a solid core community, would have been far better for G+ IMO. It opened up too fast. Not only didn't it have a gelled community, but there were far too many UI / feature glitches and omissions. Many of which persist to this day.
      - npizzolato 13y ago
        But Facebook had a rather ingenious strategy for their slow rollout. They rolled out an entire college at the same time, so once Facebook was available for you, it was also available to a significant part of your friend group (the lifeblood of a social network). Google+ however just released slowly to a random set of people, so some people could get on, but none of their friends were there.
eitland 13y ago
The easy nym fix is to create a "page" with your handle. The "page" can post, comment on YouTube etc. Not heavily advertised though, I only became aware of it when I had to give up my old YouTube account. You can easily switch between main account and nym account and you only need one password.
- Macha 13y ago
  This was created a few months after they got forceful about merging people's YT and G+ accounts (maybe one month before they turned off non-G+ comments?)
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  That "easy nym fix" still requires storing your real ID with Google. That's a non-starter for many of us, as it's still available: to hackers, national security, subpoena processes, etc. See Bruce Schneier's recent Stanford talk.
  - eitland 13y ago
    Agreed. There are cases where this is not enough. For me (who are aware of the possibility of having multiple personas but is totally comfortable with national security 2014 edition to know about it ) and most ordinary people (who happily upload all their stuff to Facebook anyway) the current solution seems like a good and user friendly alternative. If the fact that Google needs to know who their customers are isn't acceptable then people need to find other services. Google can pinpoint us pretty much anyway they are just being upfront about it in my opinion.
  - Shooti 13y ago
    Actually it doesn't. You don't need a G+ Profile to connect a Youtube channel to a G+ Page. That's the crux of the whole problem, G+ is so heavily associated with being a social network connected to real identity that having it manage the profile system is untenable.
scriptproof 13y ago
Maybe the argument is right, but Eric Schmidt was replaced by Larry Page on April 4, 2010 and G+ was launched on September 20, 2011. So the former can not be responsible for how G+ works. What he failed was to not have created a social network sooner.
zmmmmm 13y ago
I completely agree with you, but don't forget one other hugely important decision wrt to G+ that was controversial at the time: the refusal to release a full fledge API. To this day, the only real client for Google+ is the one made by Google. We've all come to accept it at this point, but back then Google was a company entirely built around the concept of APIs for all their services. No matter what the service, you could integrate with it. G+ was really the first time ever that they said "no, API for you". Had Google skated around the identity issue AND enabled an ecosystem of 3rd party APIs similar to how Twitter developed, I think G+ would own the entire social network ecosystem by now. Instead, they've got a small piece of the pie, which some will claim is more valuable because it is full of "real identities" and completely controlled by Google, but to my mind is far less value because it intersects only a tiny cross section of society who use it.
- alttab 13y ago
  The same cross section of society that has already given Google their most meaningful data.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  The lack of external access to G+ remains a massive pain point. I'm fucking thrilled by the ubiquitous RSS integration at reddit -- it's pretty amazing. For G+ I've got to go to the damned site (which is a browser bloat pig) to follow stuff. Which I avoid if at all possible. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_rss_feeds_postpend_rss_to_url/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_r...
InclinedPlane 13y ago
When you come in as a secondary competitor, especially with something like a social network that is utterly dependent on network effect, you have to avoid making even small mistakes and you need several big advantages over the competition. G+ failed on both accounts. Mostly it was just another facebooky thing, and the few missteps they made turned out to actually be rather big ones. Nevertheless, I think the biggest problem google made with g+ is thinking that it was necessary at all. Social can be important but not every major tech company needs their own brand of facebook, it's just not necessary from any perspective, even a business one. Microsoft made the same mistake when they tried to out-google google. That sort of thing is dumb, and indicative of excess vanity. Let google be google, let facebook be facebook. If you think you actually have a better product offering that overlaps with some other company, great, put it out there. But don't set it as your google to stand toe to toe product wise with all the other tech giants. Concentrate on your own strengths, don't try to be something you're not.
Pxtl 13y ago
I agree. Google + came out at the right time, maybe a little late, but it had some solid ideas - the idea of Google building a consistent social layer across their entire space was great. The problem was that they screwed up so very much with it. It was far too opinionated, and at the same time obsessively asked permission for every agonizing detail. They soft-pedaled it and then backtracked on the promises implicit in this soft-pedaling. Just such a complete mess. To me, the big failure was (1) failing to let users properly manage their identity with pseudonym-anonymous aliases and whatnot and (2) failing to let content-posters manage their spaces. Let Bloggers and YouTubers and whatnot have better control of the moderation of their comment threads.

yuhong 13y ago

I still would prefer that it would not be needed, but that is not Google+'s problem to solve.

yid 13y ago

> And _all_ of that interest was shot dead due to attempts to own identity by enforcing the use of real names[1]. It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time. Facebook's commercial power was widely attributed to the fact that for the first time, wide swaths of people were using their real identity online. With the investment that Google put into +, the risk of having another sea of MetalHead444s was high. I'm just unhappy that they didn't take any really bold steps to differentiate themselves from Facebook, and instead went full Microsoft by attempting to replicate the UI.

hangonhn 13y ago
"It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time." That's such a good way to describe a bad decision. The accumulation of decisions with those characteristics will sink any company.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kibwen 13y ago
In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place? The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.
- gwillen 13y ago
  The engineers -- the ones down in the trenches -- practically revolted over it. The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.
  - kibwen 13y ago
    Glad to hear it. I apologize to Google's engineers for my uninformed implication.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      I wish more had protested more strongly or simply walked. I know it's easy to project actions on others, but really, that was a BAD decision.
      - rachelbythebay 13y ago
        Unfortunately, not everyone had that sort of mobility. Mortgage holders, people on visas who needed to find another sponsor (and couldn't just go anywhere) and the rest have a harder time moving on. That has to suck: knowing something is rotten but having to stick with it due to external constraints.

nostrademons 13y ago

Eric had already stepped down as CEO at the time the Real Names decision was made. That came from Vic, Larry, and the team leadership.

yuhong 13y ago
Yea, I knew it was Vic for a while now. BTW, I wonder if my emails to you helped.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Schmidt was unapologetically selling G+ as "an identity service". Gundotra continued that drive until it became clear that the userbase would (and did) revolt.

pekk 13y ago

Most Facebook haters could be satisfied. Just not by anything copying the creepy and unethical practices of Facebook.

encoderer 13y ago

My impression was that G+ was stymied by a bad go-to-market strategy. I'm sure the real names issue didn't help, but I'm not certain it had the impact you're suggesting. Their go to market strategy was essentially the same as the Chinese government-run construction companies that build an entire city from farmland, cut the ribbon and expect a stampede. Getting it right is complicated and I couldn't do it justice in an HN comment, but generally I think they should've focused on a specific winnable market and grown from there.

georgeecollins 13y ago
I think that is really smart and makes a lot of sense. Facebook started out by servicing a niche, Twitter was used by tech nerds.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  As much as I detest virtually everything Facebook, it's growth strategy from Harvard to Ivies to selective edus to all was great. From the get-go, it was the place to go to find a crowd more exclusive than the one you were in already. That ended with mass-market availability, but it's provided steam to roll on for a while. Google had an initial base which was, I think, the seed around which it could have grown a community but blew it by releasing publicly too early. Among other failings.
- pjc50 13y ago
  Twitter took off once it got a critical mass of celebrities using it, and this fact was published in mainstream media. Stephen Fry brought in a lot of people; now it's Justin Bieber.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Fostering community is a fragile process. Google simply stepped in the brown stinky stuff far too often. The initial beta, the public release (too soon), the lack of features (no search ... from the Internet's leading search company?). Some huge reorientations of direction. A miserable client experience (it's a hugely bloated web page, and I still can't do more than a trivial amount on it). Real Names, the SEO takeover, and the YouTube Anschluss were really only the icing on the cake. The first drove me to kill my personally ascribed account and create one under this nym which I use in a few places online. The second largely dismayed me. Things looked up briefly a year or so back as search got more powerful and enough interesting content had accumulated to provide some actual utility to the site. Last May's redesign, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all pretty awful.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deelowe 13y ago

Real Names didn't come from Eric. He was gone by the time G+ rolled out. Vic had a large hand in the real names decision.

dredmorbius 13y ago
Schmidt was selling G+ as "an identity platform".
- deelowe 13y ago
  Maybe, but by the time it rolled out, Schmidt was gone. G+ is pretty much all Vic.
- billnguyen 13y ago
  Schmidt, like any good CEO, will always always sell anything his company outputs. You'll never find him criticising anything Google does, maybe in retrospect but never upon launch.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    My point isn't that he wasn't criticising, but that he was explicitly endorsing the "identity service" angle.

ericras 13y ago

In all honesty I probably would have pursued the same real names policy if I had been running Google+. They were trying to avoid having it immediately devolve into the YouTube comments section - aka the scourge of the Internet. I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it.

cookiecaper 13y ago
Totally agree that "real names" is a red herring. It irritated a small group of influential tech personalities, but as far as their influence may expand, it doesn't dictate which social network reigns supreme. The reality is that once a service hits a certain critical mass it's almost impossible to extract. Facebook, like Windows, is now a permanent fixture in the tech community, and like Windows, it will only go away by slow, eventual deterioration made possible only by the gross incompetence of the company providing the software. People don't care how much better your software is, the inertia will keep all but the most tech-savvy on the inferior solution as long as it provides basic semblances of expected functionality.
daeken 13y ago
> I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it. I don't think that anyone will argue that pseudonyms are important to the average user. However, they are important to a small but influential group of users. The type of early adopter that otherwise could've driven G+ upward.
- npizzolato 13y ago
  I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.

zippergz 13y ago

My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it. Social networks have a lot of inertia for users who aren't early adopters. If they already are connected to all of your friends on Facebook, a new social network would have to be truly amazing (or Facebook would have to really screw up, in ways that "regular people" care about) to get them to move over. I think Real Names was a drop in the bucket compared to other issues.

bpyne 13y ago
The Real Names policy stinks. It misses completely legitimate (and innocent) reasons why people want to be anonymous sometimes. That said, your other point needs to be trumpeted to any companies thinking about taking a run at FB. The reality is that FB has its annoyances, but overall it is good enough that it's not worth losing all my posts, photos, etc. that have become a "life mosaic", as well as, my network of friends to move to another site - and I don't have time to maintain more than one social network. The situation reminds me of enterprise vendor apps that my employer uses. Overall a particular app may have its warts, but it covers most use cases alright so that we aren't tempted to go to a competing app.
trhway 13y ago
Real Names is the best illustration of how Google tried to copy FB instead of offering a better one. "Circles"? only sound of it is already too high-brow for average Joe. Have you heard a taxi driver using word "circle" to describe his taxi driving buddies?
- amaks 13y ago
  AFAIK the real names policy is largely not in effect anymore, contrary to Facebook?
  - 13y ago

dgregd 13y ago

> There are very real reasons why "average" people need alternate identities online. However alternate identities also allow for click fraud things and so on. We don't know exactly why Google guys wanted so much to eliminate faked identities.

sjs382 13y ago

For me, the number one problem of Google+ was that many who were excited to try it, couldn't (for over a year, if I recall?). We were a 2nd-class-citizens with a Google Apps account, rather than a Gmail account.

timothya 13y ago
It was in the invite-only stage for less than 3 months.
- npizzolato 13y ago
  You say that like it's a short amount of time. Three months is more than enough time for hype to build, peek, and wither, which can -- and did, I would agrue -- kill a social network.
  - timothya 13y ago
    I don't disagree; I think that slow rollouts of large products make sense from a technical standpoint (you can make sure that nothing breaks down at the large scale, and fix problems before they become a big issue), but I think that invite-only betas which last weeks or months can often hurt product uptake. I was just clarifying that the invite-only stage didn't last more than a year.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    A slow and phased community development worked really, really well for Facebook. Remember: it was deployed into a world already dominated by MySpace and with multiple rivals. Slower, with a solid core community, would have been far better for G+ IMO. It opened up too fast. Not only didn't it have a gelled community, but there were far too many UI / feature glitches and omissions. Many of which persist to this day.
    - npizzolato 13y ago
      But Facebook had a rather ingenious strategy for their slow rollout. They rolled out an entire college at the same time, so once Facebook was available for you, it was also available to a significant part of your friend group (the lifeblood of a social network). Google+ however just released slowly to a random set of people, so some people could get on, but none of their friends were there.

eitland 13y ago

The easy nym fix is to create a "page" with your handle. The "page" can post, comment on YouTube etc. Not heavily advertised though, I only became aware of it when I had to give up my old YouTube account. You can easily switch between main account and nym account and you only need one password.

Macha 13y ago
This was created a few months after they got forceful about merging people's YT and G+ accounts (maybe one month before they turned off non-G+ comments?)
dredmorbius 13y ago
That "easy nym fix" still requires storing your real ID with Google. That's a non-starter for many of us, as it's still available: to hackers, national security, subpoena processes, etc. See Bruce Schneier's recent Stanford talk.
- eitland 13y ago
  Agreed. There are cases where this is not enough. For me (who are aware of the possibility of having multiple personas but is totally comfortable with national security 2014 edition to know about it ) and most ordinary people (who happily upload all their stuff to Facebook anyway) the current solution seems like a good and user friendly alternative. If the fact that Google needs to know who their customers are isn't acceptable then people need to find other services. Google can pinpoint us pretty much anyway they are just being upfront about it in my opinion.
- Shooti 13y ago
  Actually it doesn't. You don't need a G+ Profile to connect a Youtube channel to a G+ Page. That's the crux of the whole problem, G+ is so heavily associated with being a social network connected to real identity that having it manage the profile system is untenable.

scriptproof 13y ago

Maybe the argument is right, but Eric Schmidt was replaced by Larry Page on April 4, 2010 and G+ was launched on September 20, 2011. So the former can not be responsible for how G+ works. What he failed was to not have created a social network sooner.

zmmmmm 13y ago

I completely agree with you, but don't forget one other hugely important decision wrt to G+ that was controversial at the time: the refusal to release a full fledge API. To this day, the only real client for Google+ is the one made by Google. We've all come to accept it at this point, but back then Google was a company entirely built around the concept of APIs for all their services. No matter what the service, you could integrate with it. G+ was really the first time ever that they said "no, API for you". Had Google skated around the identity issue AND enabled an ecosystem of 3rd party APIs similar to how Twitter developed, I think G+ would own the entire social network ecosystem by now. Instead, they've got a small piece of the pie, which some will claim is more valuable because it is full of "real identities" and completely controlled by Google, but to my mind is far less value because it intersects only a tiny cross section of society who use it.

alttab 13y ago
The same cross section of society that has already given Google their most meaningful data.
dredmorbius 13y ago
The lack of external access to G+ remains a massive pain point. I'm fucking thrilled by the ubiquitous RSS integration at reddit -- it's pretty amazing. For G+ I've got to go to the damned site (which is a browser bloat pig) to follow stuff. Which I avoid if at all possible. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_rss_feeds_postpend_rss_to_url/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_r...

InclinedPlane 13y ago

When you come in as a secondary competitor, especially with something like a social network that is utterly dependent on network effect, you have to avoid making even small mistakes and you need several big advantages over the competition. G+ failed on both accounts. Mostly it was just another facebooky thing, and the few missteps they made turned out to actually be rather big ones. Nevertheless, I think the biggest problem google made with g+ is thinking that it was necessary at all. Social can be important but not every major tech company needs their own brand of facebook, it's just not necessary from any perspective, even a business one. Microsoft made the same mistake when they tried to out-google google. That sort of thing is dumb, and indicative of excess vanity. Let google be google, let facebook be facebook. If you think you actually have a better product offering that overlaps with some other company, great, put it out there. But don't set it as your google to stand toe to toe product wise with all the other tech giants. Concentrate on your own strengths, don't try to be something you're not.

Pxtl 13y ago

I agree. Google + came out at the right time, maybe a little late, but it had some solid ideas - the idea of Google building a consistent social layer across their entire space was great. The problem was that they screwed up so very much with it. It was far too opinionated, and at the same time obsessively asked permission for every agonizing detail. They soft-pedaled it and then backtracked on the promises implicit in this soft-pedaling. Just such a complete mess. To me, the big failure was (1) failing to let users properly manage their identity with pseudonym-anonymous aliases and whatnot and (2) failing to let content-posters manage their spaces. Let Bloggers and YouTubers and whatnot have better control of the moderation of their comment threads.