12 ms·

Google+ Is Walking Dead

160 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

joe_the_user 13y ago
Great, Hopefully they'll just end the push to make people unify account names across platforms. The efforts to make me unify my Youtube and my (inactive) Gmail accounts have been fricken annoying.
- ChrisClark 13y ago
  If you're not using your Gmail, just unify it. Nothing changes for you, and it's not annoying anymore. If you don't want a real name attached, create a Google+ Page with your current nickname and use that. Then nothing changes for you, or anyone following you. If I were Google, I'd like to move all my products under one account too.
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    So you are saying I should care about Google's convenience? I've never been to "my" G+ page and don't intend to go now. Google has annoyed me and it's their to solve that annoyance. I am the consumer, get used to it.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      I'm saying giving more than a passing thought to the particular backend that drives youtube comments is a complete waste of brainpower unless you happen to work on the thing.
    - ChrisClark 13y ago
      What I'm saying is that you seem to be very annoyed over something you can fix in about 5 minutes. If you choose not to fix it, you choose to remain annoyed. If you choose to keep getting annoyed, don't bother to complain about it. To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents, "All these new fangled social networks, we didn't need that when I was a kid, a rock and a stick, that was enough, now get off my lawn."
      - eitland 13y ago
        > To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents, Hehe To be fair though it took some time before it became apparent how simple to page thingy was. I delayed the YouTube switch for months myself.
      - joe_the_user 13y ago
        You don't understand. It is one thing that I can configure whatever through patience and knowledge. It is another being willing to configure stuff whenever some fool decides that they want to change a service around. I can dance but that doesn't mean I dance to someone else' tune.
- davb 13y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I, too, am against the push to integrate all of my services. This is the main thing that's pushed me towards Twitter and stopped me really getting into Google+. I don't use it for email, publishing mobile apps, hosting my virtual servers, etc. It's essentially disposable. I've been online long enough to have had several identities which have served me well in certain circles, at certain times of my life. Being able to selectively dump these when necessary has been a way of online life for me. When I decided the everything-tracking creep factor of Facebook was too much, I just deleted the account completely (well, as much as one can do). I wasn't concerned that it might take down my email, or my mobile app purchase history, or any other manner of service. It was quite painless. Google+ and the drive to integrate everything is leading to the erosion of identity compartmentalisation. I know I can create multiple Google accounts, one for each service and each identity. However managing all of these at once (with Google's multi account login features) has always been very cumbersome. More so than an account with each service provider. And I never trust that my activity isn't being correlated across my individual accounts.
notdonspaulding 13y ago
I'm ambivalent about the future of Google+. Eventually though, it would be nice if someone at Google figured out how to make multiple-account usage not suck rocks. Why can I not sign out of a single account? Why does the order in which I sign into my accounts matter for so many things?
- dm2 13y ago
  Try using Chrome's multiple profile feature. I use one for each Google account and it makes the multiple accounts issue much easier to manage. I also use LastPass across profiles and 2-way auth for both LastPass and Google accounts. If you want separate accounts just make one for YouTube (or whatever) then a separate one for Gmail.
  - scotchio 13y ago
    I second this. Chrome's multiple platform/profile feature is amazing [1]. I use it simply as as session manager [2] between work, personal, side-projects, etc. It greatly improved my development and browsing experience on the web. [1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en [2] http://scotch.io/bar-talk/leveraging-multiple-chrome-users-for-ultra-fast-session-swapping#reader-mode http://scotch.io/bar-talk/leveraging-multiple-chrome-users-f...
  - hatbert 13y ago
    Isn't that a major functionality regression? I mean, didn't we stop saying "This website best viewed in IE4 with screen resolution set to 800x600" a decade ago?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- rainedin 13y ago
  Multiple account use is borked. I was logged in under one account the other day, but wanted to leave a Youtube comment from another. But it just wasn't possible at the time. I gave up in the end. The UI is a disparate mess. I am not a fan of the one account rules all doctrine, especially when I can't switch to another with ease. I perceive myself as a competent web user, I've been surfing the web since Netscape on Win 3.1. Fail.
opendais 13y ago
Google+, as a login integration scheme and a way to unify policies across services, made sense. As a social network? Not so much. Google is a great company but community building isn't a core strength they have. Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+?
- tommi 13y ago
  > Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+? Yes. I don't believe it. Here's some random numbers (head counts in teams) - Core 50 - Ops 20 - Web 50 - Android 50 - Other mobile platforms 50 - Integrations to other products 150 - Technical writers, support etc 30 That's still only 400 employees. How would you allocate 1,200 employees to Google+?
  - a3n 13y ago
    Maybe some employees got counted more than once because of overlapping circles.
    - mikecb 13y ago
      I laughed.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    Hmm, here's some more random numbers: - Smiley faces: 642 employees - Frowney faces: 557 employees - Miley Cyrus collages : 1 employee If I add them up, I do indeed get 1,200 employees. I wonder why your random numbers and mine differ so much? EDIT: I'm not surprised there are 1,000 people on Google+, and I would wager you that that's not counting ANY Core, Ops, or Web ("Web" in the traditional sense). You're also forgetting to count Auto-Awesome Photos, Auto-Awesome Videos, the ability to search UNTAGGED images that have been uploaded to Google+ Photos... Those are fairly ambitious on their own.
- gdulli 13y ago
  "Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+?" Yes. Even more so in the context of the supposed freedom Google employees have to work on the team/product of their choosing. Though I only know that anecdotally and it may have been one of those benefits that got phased out as it conflicted with business reality.
adventured 13y ago
Google+ is Google's equivalent of Bing. Scenario: a company with a quasi monopoly - and more money than it knows what to do with accordingly - responds to a fast growing potential competitor by getting into a market it doesn't understand well, is miles behind (arguably so far behind the market has already decided the winner) and isn't well suited to compete in. See: IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook Primarily I'm curious to see what Facebook's Bing is going to be. With a now very profitable, soft monopoly in social (and the willingness to spend to keep it), it seems inevitable Facebook will follow a rhyming history.
- pconner 13y ago
  Oculus might be Facebook's "Bing."
  - mixedbit 13y ago
    Not really, because Oculus does not compete with anything done by any big player. It is a new territory for everyone.
    - Maarten88 13y ago
      It would surpise me if Sony and/or Microsoft would not be working on a competitor device, as an add-on for PS4/XBox.
      - evanmoran 13y ago
        Sony's project Morpheus was announced last month and is doing VR for PS4: http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-america-inc/2014/sony-computer-entertainment-announces-project-morp.shtml http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-com...
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    I can't imagine any way they would try to force facebook users into oculus. And it wasn't big money for them.
IvyMike 13y ago
The funny thing is I really like Google+. Of course I don't use it much because so few of my friends do, and that's the rub. But if I could magically move all my facebook friends to G+, I would.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  Most of my friends don't show up in my TED talks, in my Netflix Instant Watch, in my Amazon Instant Watch, in my TiVo programs, in my Hulu+, in my Reddit, in my HackerNews, in my CNN, in the sports I watch, in the New York Times. If I could magically get my friends to show up in those places, I would. Translation: LinkedIn is not Facebook is not Google+ is not any-other-media. LinkedIn, I use for people I know professionally. Facebook, I use for people I know... but probably not the ones I currently know professionally. Google+, I use very much like I used to use Google Reader and Blogger. I subscribe to interesting people, Communities, and Pages. The experience is MUCH nicer than following the same things on Facebook, in my opinion. I do actually think Reddit has a slight edge in presentation for subreddits, compared to Google+ Communities. But on the plus side (ha), Google+ communities tend to not have as many trolls in them, perhaps because they're not anonymous. Perhaps because the trolls just haven't arrived yet. I happen to also use Google+ as a massive backup of all of my photos.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    so is market segmentation a bug or a feature? its not clear, from the sound of it. right now seprate ecosystems support diversity (UI) and diversification (PI) and functional efficiency (sandboxing, signal/noize).
  - krisgenre 13y ago
    For everything that I share with my family ( photos, videos ), I use G+. When I don't care who sees my post, I usually use Facebook or twitter. One think I love the most is syncing my contacts and photos/videos with G+ on my Android phone.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I don't like G+. And I don't trust Google. I wanted to like G+. I tried really hard. And I used to like and trust Google. The G+ experience ruined both. In terms of negative brand equity, this has been a disaster for the company.
devindotcom 13y ago
The teams will apparently be building “widgets,”... Has there ever been a case of something called "widgets" succeeding by any real measure? Even in fiction or idiom?
- TillE 13y ago
  Well, most GUI libraries.
- dm2 13y ago
  iGoogle, DuckDuckHack, WordPress. Widget is a nice name that hasn't been abused and gets the point across to both technical and non-technical users. It's kind of like an addon or sometimes a labs feature. Not required by all users but available if needed.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  Heh, I stand corrected. I still don't like the word, though.
dm2 13y ago
I'd like to see Google+ converted to an iGoogle type homepage that could be 100% private and would have the option to completely disable the +1 buttons and tracking across websites. It could have customizable widgets, optional social media integration, and would be a main/start/homepage for Google account users. Google+ still has potential to be great (mainly because of their huge user database and Google name behind it) if they can successfully pivot and create something that is valuable, a Facebook clone forced onto people wasn't the greatest idea that Google has ever come up with.
- JPKab 13y ago
  I never understood why they went for the Facebook killer when they could've easily built a LinkedIn killer instead. LinkedIn is AWFUL. It's a giant spam factory with shit features, but I actually like a lot of their employees other projects.... Anyway, Google should have users upload their resume to Google +, and then have it be indexable and searchable through the Google front-end search. It's a natural extension of the "share with Circles" concept.
  - dm2 13y ago
    I agree completely about how sketchy LinkedIn seems. It feels like every action I do on LinkedIn is tracked and available for purchase. Then there was their, "send all of your email through our servers" app. A Google Professional/LinkedIn competitor would have been perfect for Google+. I would also be more willing to share with my friends and family on a site like that, so it would be a perfect LinkedIn/Facebook killer at the same time. Google+ just focused too much on sharing with friends/the world type site at a time when people are getting more cautious about sharing online and things being public. I do want a service very similar to LinkedIn but more trusted and less weird stats/data-mining, Google would be a good company to make that happen, but Google+ would need a major overhaul. (I know Google tracks everything too, but the whole "pay X dollars to see who viewed your profile" is when I made my decision to not support LinkedIn.
  - ProAm 13y ago
    What LinkedIn employee side projects do you follow?
simplemath 13y ago
User identity is at the core of Google's long term goal of Google "search" becoming the end all augmented reality AI assistant for humans everywhere. G+ was a halting step in this direction. If Page really wants people to allow Google to feature creep their entire lives, G will have to wage a PR war to convince people that not only can G be trusted to manage identity, but that "Don't Be Evil" is a primary ideological directive.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  It's interesting that no one has made a comparison with Microsoft's identity system (what used to be Passport, became Live and is now "your Microsoft account"). Passport started out well, then tanked, and the Microsoft account today just works across all Microsoft sites - from outlook.com to Windows Phone, Visual Studio, Skype and Windows 8 to Bing. Once the Passport mess settled nothing was really heard about identity at Microsoft again, and yet the little releases keep coming(ADFS 3, e.g.). To me, if Eric Schmidt, Vic, Google+ et al had a failing, it was that of not learning from others' mistakes (and consequent successes). Frankly, given that Kim Cameron works for Microsoft I'm amazed that anyone could use the word identity and not start by looking at how Microsoft does it.
  - simplemath 13y ago
    I actually like what G has done with chrome SSO and turning Chrome into the default dashboard for their apps. I've found myself actually using G+ more and more. Rolling Picasa into + is a really good strategy as well -" Oh hey, my GS4 auto - uploaded all these cool photos from last weekend, might as well share them" Ironically enough, I think G+ faced its own identity problem for too long and failed to get critical mass because of it. To me, the increasing convergence of chrome and android is a bigger deal than anything happening with +
    - Spearchucker 13y ago
      I agree with what you say. Still find it amusing that after the real name fiasco Google is left having to regain users' trust, whereas Microsoft did nothing to gain anyone's trust and yet people log into their operating system using a Microsoft account!
silverlight 13y ago
I hope that Hangouts will be sticking around long-term. Although WebRTC certainly helps in this area, Hangouts have quickly become the de-facto standard for mutli-person video chat. Not to mention a good chunk of our users use our app inside of Hangouts.
dasil003 13y ago
Google+ is in this weird place between Facebook and Twitter for me. I go to Twitter primarily for professional interaction, and Facebook primarily for personal interaction. Google on the other hand makes a ton of great services I like to use, but I don't want to curate circles there and I don't want some watered down feed of reddit-like linkbait. Google has done a pretty good job on the no-doubt extremely thorny problem of unifying accounts and multi-account login. I'm reasonably happy with that. I love Gmail, and Hangouts, and Android in general, but Google+ makes me want to blow my brains out every time they try to ram it down my throat. For the hundredth time, I don't want to "find friends" before I join an urgent Hangout I've just been invited to. The worst part is that they sacrifice their core strength to chase an unproven Facebook purely out of fear. Even if Facebook miraculously manages to crack social advertising in a way that eats Google's lunch (and given the questions around the value of Facebook advertising, that is a huge if), there's no hope for Google in trying to beat Facebook on their own terms. Frankly it's been an embarrassment for Google, and I hope they really have killed it as the central focus.
- wyclif 13y ago
  "An embarrassment for Google", really? Seriously? Google+ is actually designed far, far better than Facebook. And the implementation of communities and circles really gets social interaction right in ways that Facebook has not. Sure, Facebook has a much bigger user base. But I don't think Google+ sees itself as a direct competitor to FB. It's more of a tangential thing. I also think TechCrunch is hilariously off-base for writing that Google is dialing down Google+. I think all that stuff is pretty much clickbait.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Not the product per se, but the strategy.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform Er, Google announced that when they announced Google+, that it wasn't primarily a separate product but a social layer that would weave together all of Google's services. The Facebook-esque site has always been the tip of the G+ iceberg. (The Forbes article on the departure, interestingly, notes that the platform position has always been Google's position, but that the tech media never believed it [1].) [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-for-google-now-that-its-leader-has-suddenly-left/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-...
- Kequc 13y ago
  My understanding was that Google+ was primarily an identification platform. Up until that point your Gmail was considered your Google identity. Nobody it seems ever picked up on that and were focussed intently on spending all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for Google+ was above tepid. People would take seemingly any opportunity to call it down even though the service worked incredibly well on mobile and the company wasn't swamped with privacy allegations. It was just a small thing Google+, a free social platform attached to ones' Google identity. That so much controversy ended up surrounding something that I feel was really rather clever and innocuous will continue to surprise me for some time.
  - danudey 13y ago
    A lot of the hate I've seen for Google+ centred around being badgered constantly to 'use my real name' on things. YouTube was a particularly egregious example. Every time I logged in, it would say 'Hey, do you want to use your real name? How great would that be!' When I said no, it would reply with 'Hey, are you sure you want to not use your real name?', and if I then confirmed that no, I didn't want to, it would say 'Okay, well we'll ask you later then.' If they had just said that 'Okay, your Google profile is now called Google+, and your YouTube account attached to your Google Profile is now your Google+ profile, and you can go to your settings to complete the migration', it wouldn't have been so bad. What they didn't do is offer anyone any reason to change. All the benefits they hawked for YouTube's Google+ comment integration were actually such huge drawbacks that many top YouTubers turned off comments entirely. Unsurprisingly, YouTube comments had gone from the mindless, racist, misspelled prattling of the internet's ignorant masses to giant spam-filled, link-filled dumping grounds of (varyingly) penis enlargement spam and giant ASCII dicks, and YouTube comments went from bad to worse, a feat no one thought possible. It really feels like the decision was made for the YouTube team by someone else (Page? Gundotra?), and the YouTube team just had to roll with it, with their input being ignored and the Google+ team saying 'No it'll be great, don't worry, you'll see, everything is better with Google+!' To this day, people invite me by gmail address to threads, which I cannot leave unless I tie my Google account to a Google+ account so I can join the thread so I can leave the thread. The entire thing was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and everything that they wanted out of it could have been accomplished by providing value, rather than extrinsic rationalization.
kyrra 13y ago
It's a little sad I think. I like Google+'s overall interaction and how its used as a tool. I use Picasa to organize my photos and have it sync to my Google+ account. Google+ on my phone also auto-backs up all photos to G+. Google+'s initial focus of sharing data with smaller groups of people was nice as well. But Facebook and Twitter have a majority of the users already and G+ isn't better enough for people to move to it.
27182818284 13y ago
>What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Fantastic! The people who actually use Google+ don't use it like Facebook and it is misguided to try to think one will fight the other. (Nor do people use Facebook like Twitter. Nor do people use Facebook like they do LinkedIn or OKCupid) The Circles feature of Google+ makes it really easy to target only small groups. I most often now see Google+ used for posts that are set to private within a family. Thanksgiving plans shared just among a family. Your friends on Facebook don't care about that, but your siblings do, and Google+ makes it much easier than Facebook to maintain a circle for that sort of thing. You just create a Circle called Family, and after you use it a couple of times, Google defaults your posts to that circle. To the world it looks like you've never posted on Google+, but meanwhile you've been sharing pictures and funny jokes with your brothers and sisters every day And if you don't use Google+ this way, but most of your family has a Google+ account (is it possible to not have one anymore?) I'd highly recommend it for this sorta thing.
- npizzolato 13y ago
  You can do the same thing with Facebook lists. Not everything you share needs to be sent to everyone. And if you're making plans for a specific event, like Thanksgiving, that's kind of what Facebook events are designed to do. It also has the benefit of collecting all the event-related posts into a single location, something just sharing to a group of people wouldn't do. And yes, everyone might "have" a Google+ account, but if no one you care about ever checks it, then does it really matter?
- eitland 13y ago
  > To the world it looks like you've never posted on Google+, but meanwhile you've been sharing pictures and funny jokes with your brothers and sisters every day Exactly : not everyone is comfortable sharing everything with everyone on Twitter. Some are not even allowed to share publicly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- galonk 13y ago
  4-hour-old throwaway account says: "don't trust unnamed sources!"
  - briandh 13y ago
    Why must it be a throwaway account? Not everybody in tech has an HN handle.
- jshen 13y ago
  I'm not sure official sources are more trustworthy than unnamed sources on such matters. If G+ has an uncertain future the official source would never say that publicly, I.e. Would never tell the truth.
leke 13y ago
Google, you fucked up when you forced people to merge their youtube accounts.
- r00fus 13y ago
  That was simply the last straw. Honestly, the writing was on the wall once Google screwed up the pseudonym vs. real names response. The response should have been to simply allow pseudonyms (i.e., Google knows who you are logging in as, and can infer your identity very easily anyway) and to do as twitter and prevent mis-use of real names where appropriate.
subdane 13y ago
Google+ could still win by exploiting a simple heuristic: Don't be Facebook. Allow for privacy, allow for handles, integrate seamlessly with platforms that have traction already (including Facebook). Remember how Instagram let you take a photo and publish it to multiple services (Twitter, Flickr etc)? It was a free, useful tool that made your life easier and made you look great. It had a feed and following on top, but it wasn't clear in the beginning it would even be a social network on its own.
- wwweston 13y ago
  > Google+ could still win by exploiting a simple heuristic: Don't be Facebook. Allow for privacy, allow for handles I suppose the question is that they'd win, and whether or not it's worth as much to them to allow for privacy and handles.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - eitland 13y ago
      As of today it is brilliant and shows no sign of changing for the worse. You always knows who you share with, and they don't mess with permissions after the fact. Also there are clear notifications if something will be shared because of actions you take. E.g: you tag someone in a picture and it makes sure you are aware that this will share the photo or album with the person in question.
- pinaceae 13y ago
  problem is that privacy/anonymity runs counter to the core Google business with is advertising and collecting personal data. so for Google, they would need to find out what could be a defining feature that would move people off FB. whatsapp's killer was signing up via telephone number, from a smartphone. for business people there's LinkedIn, for coders GitHub, for teens there are SnapChat/etc. - Google would need to find an underserved target demographic and build something, anything unique. so far they have failed.
dkhenry 13y ago
The sad thing I think about with articles like this is that even though they discount the amount of people who really like and use G+ ( we exist I swear ) that unless _enough_ people like it runs the risk of being cancelled.
DannyBee 13y ago
FWIW: when it says " According to a source at Google, there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure." Given how many employees are on the mountain view campus, the attempt to portray office space reorgs in a place known to have serious office space constraints, as related to leadership changes, is silly. 1. There is always a new or being renovated building on campus It's just the way it is. 2. I would actually assume this is entirely not related to his departure. Teams at Google outgrow their space all the time, and people get moved around to accomodate expected growth plus real estate renovations of buildings, etc.
- 001sky 13y ago
  — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure. Seems clear enough.
  - argonaut 13y ago
    That's a classic journalism tactic. Mention some unsubstantiated innuendo, then qualify it so that you're technically in the clear.
    - ternaryoperator 13y ago
      Let's be clear: that's a tactic of yellow journalism. Good journalists don't string together unrelated facts unless they know there is a connection and can articulate it.
      - aragot 13y ago
        Same for the title. It's unsubstantiated. There are reorgs, but nothing in the article confirms that G+ is dead.
        001sky 13y ago
        The suspect <insert statement>, it is alleged. Nobody needs this explained to them. Similarly, I doubt anyone needs "walking dead" =|= "dead-dead" explained to them as a logical inequality. But if you do...here's an example for reference. Unless a firm has publicly announced that it is winding down, it is better to avoid labeling a fund as “walking dead.” Tagging a fund in this way has consequences. As in the case above, it can impact deal flow as companies seeking funding may think twice about approaching a firm believed to be in that category. It can hurt a firm’s prospects of being invited into syndicates and even potentially damage a firm’s existing syndicates. It can jeopardize relationships with current and prospective LPs if a forthcoming fund is even a notion among the firm’s GPs. Finally, and perhaps most troubling of all, it can even damage the prospects of portfolio companies backed by these supposed walking dead VCs. https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-rethink-walking-dead-vc-firms/ https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-rethi... Google clearly has skin in the game here if this narrative means that they will lose engineering talent from G+. Techcrunch clearly has skin in the game here as a scoop is equal to eyeballs. Luckily, google has PRs that make 10x what tech-crunch writers make. So surely any needed corrections will make there way through the noize. That being said, it would be great to keep the comments clean of superflous tit-for-tat inuendo accusations when the undelying conflicts of interest are pretty apparent and not overly subtle. Countering inuendo with facts seems plenty enough to counter-spin any un-substantiated points. And the original point here stands well enough alone. Don;t disrefard the TC qualification about the office relocation. That is a fair point and stands by itself--no drama needed.
randomstring 13y ago
So they killed Google Reader (and RSS with it) for nothing?
- tdicola 13y ago
  Ooph, twist the knife a little more. I'm still mad about Reader's death. At least Feedly has mostly replicated the simple interface and quick scanning of Reader.
fidotron 13y ago
This specific article doesn't make too much sense, however, the grand mix up of everything (most notably bringing Android in from the cold) is the real elephant in the room, not G+. G+ was just a symptom of typical big company soviet style central planning which now seems to be par for the course in what was, during the golden era of technology growth, a shining beacon of libertarianism inside and outside the organisation. Maybe Google x somehow does keep the magic spirit they used to have but there's a definite anti-user marketing droid led trend with everything from Hangouts to Maps that should be far more concerning than the G+ fallout. EDIT: To add, what always killed me about G+ was it wasn't the Googly answer to the problem. What they should have done to counter FB was to get behind something like Diaspora (i.e. an open source federated social platform, where they happen to offer hosting for free if that's what you want), and encouraged something like Persona as the ID system. Basically take the oxygen away from FB, and provide a boost to the "open web" which they can index in the normal manner.
- rpgmaker 13y ago
  I didn't ever join g+ but this comment is selling google way too short. Sure, they fucked up facebook-like "social" but they have gotten a lot of things right that most companies with their position and size would've missed. Who would've guessed 9 years ago that Maps would become such an integral part to their business?* To most people that seemed to be a cool pet project, just one of the many free goodies they provided. * There would've been a heck of a lot more startup mapping the world if many people had such foresight were things were going.
- lukesandberg 13y ago
  They did try that, it was called OpenSocial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial).
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Google tried the open-federated thing via OpenSocial, support for parsing XFN/FOAF markup in other Google properties, and a number of other initiatives -- and it didn't have any measurable impact. For that matter, it still is doing that in a different way with support for Schema.org markup across many Google products, which provides, in principle, a different way to do some of the event-sharing and other things people do through Facebook. The Googly answer to most things isn't doing one thing, its doing multiple things with different payoff timelines in parallel.
thibauts 13y ago
This is what happens when you build a product for yourself without any regards for what people actually want. G+ was forced down our throats in a bunch of different ways and I'm glad the plan didn't work out. Google probably won't do it, though it would be a great time to reconsider their global strategy and think about what can actually be brought to the people to make the information space better for everyone. I mean, actually.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago
  I would like to see more effort in a customized Google Now. Google will always need massive amounts of user data, that is a given because of how they make money. I want something for giving up some privacy, and a very effective customized Google Now assistant would work for me. The current Google Now is a decent first baby step.
yeukhon 13y ago
I am not a UX person and I am horrible with front-end. But the thing that kills Google+ and new Google product UX today is the awful UX. When I want to change a password, or look for option for two-factor auth, or getting app-specific password (if you've enabled two-factor I need to get specific app password for apps like thunderbird or iphone's Mail app) I would Google (yes, the search engine) "gmail password", "google+ password". That just shows me how awful the UX is. When I want to change my real name I do the same, then come to the conclusion that I have to click on "edit profile", click on the damn avatar in order to edit the real name, INSTEAD of changing it from some "general settings" page. I really like to mention Twitter's new UI is way better. I have a good UX with the new Twitter. This is something Google just don't seem to understand.
Zigurd 13y ago
Google+ is pretty, but behind the pretty face it's an execution botch. Except for lacking pseudonymity, the ideas were basically right. It was a pretty Twitter with fewer limits and better follower management. Conceptually not bad. But it seems to have stopped improving some time ago. Unlike, say, maps, which is awesome on the Web and awesomer on mobile devices. And every update gets better and better. The Android app trails the Web site in functionality. You would think, for example, that the implementation of circle management on a touch device would be more drag-drop than the Web interface. Noooo, it's a series of lists views. Where IS the FREAKING picture I just took? Since I got Glass, there's a third place. Plus the ones I have not yet found. Blogger integration was a terrible lost opportunity. In part because Blogger sucks, too. The world needs to move fluidly between Tweet-ish things and blog posts. G+ did not deliver on the fluidity. Sites could have used some social pixie dust, too. But no. When Google+ stuff shows up in my GMail, it just adds noise. Then, riding the wave of the Blogger success, they tried to drain the troll swamp at YouTube. Masterful allocation of resources and wise strategic move. Because both my current books are about Android, their primary social presence is on Google+. For one it seemed to work well. For the later one, not so much. Now is a good time to reassess and find a mixed solution that's first-tier in every category.
icantthinkofone 13y ago
They're doing all that stuff with Google+ but this one guy leaving means it's dead? Someone's writing out of both sides of their mouth. Interesting how I couldn't get the people in my business or my family to even look at G+ when it first came out but, this past week, my employees made a circles just for them and that's how I found out my wife and kids had all joined G+. I'm starting to see this everywhere, at least in the circles I run in, so it looks to me like things are looking up.
smegel 13y ago
Serious question: has Google done anything truly right since gmail?
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Not in my opinion. I was excited about Android before it was released, but once I saw the APIs and found out it was going to be an all java userland, I was bummed. Then I found out that it was difficult to get direct access to the file system on it. I was sad because I wanted to use it for a tiddlywiki:) After a while, I got excited that Motorola was going to make a particularly attractive one (the Droid), so I was going to try it out anyway - but suddenly the N900 was a thing and it was barely a choice. Before Android, I really thought that Google's shit didn't stink. I would have voted for Google for president. Afterwards it wasn't the same, and just went downhill from there. In retrospect, the only reason I thought gmail was so awesome was because they gave you POP3 access. I mean, the UI was clean and simple, but it wasn't much easier to use than any of the other webmail clients. I'm not saying that in order to criticize gmail: that's the best they could have done, because none of the other clients were that difficult to use. What I liked was the simple generosity that they showed by allowing me to download and send my mail without using their UI. I was entirely willing to let them read it all and target ads towards me during my searches in exchange. [Edit: to be truly honest, I was excited that their math might really offer me the products that I'd be interested in:) Seems so quaint now.] Then, Android. The choice of laying a Java VM over the underlying filesystem and kernel, and the choice to lock parts of the filesystem down and to fill the OS with opaque binaries and phones with closed drivers represented the opposite of the image of trust that had attracted me to them in the first place.[Edit: Ugh! I forgot about the proprietary headphone jacks.] I felt that before Android, Google trusted me to use their products, and I trusted them not to be evil. After Android, it occurred to me that Google did not trust me to use the phone I bought from them. Google Docs is pretty successful. Not super successful, but successful enough to put pressure on Microsoft, which is always good. Google revolutionized search in the style of Altavista, and beat them on the math. Then they went into email in the style of Yahoo and Microsoft, and offered a cleaner UI and a softer sell than either. Then they went after Doubleclick and kicked its ass with text ads then bought it as the coup de grace, went after Office, bought YouTube after they failed to beat it, and went after Facebook (who had gone after myspace and friendster), and went after Amazon in B2B, while repeatedly failing to beat it or Ebay in retail or payments. What I'm trying to say here is that Google hasn't given me anything that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere ever. The distinction that Google had was 1) being focused on the math (and therefore quality), 2) offering clean user interfaces and APIs, and 3) having a conscience. Two and three have gone to shit, and everybody has caught up on 1) - there's good math everywhere these days.
edoloughlin 13y ago
Does this mean we can have our '+' back for Google searches?
zmmmmm 13y ago
This really makes it sound like Vic was essentially fired. I wonder how much Facebook's recent success in monetizing mobile is at the root of this? For a long time the conventional wisdom was that there was no money in mobile at all and it was a huge problem. Now Facebook is killing it, and Google's answer seems to have missed the mark. Although this article is all loose rumors and speculation, if you piece it together the picture feels believable: Google is seriously worried their bet on G+ is wrong. Until Facebook starting doing big numbers Vic had the benefit of the doubt, but now that it's clear in stark numerical fashion that Facebook is actually increasing it's lead over Google it's causing a serious rethink. Personally I hope it does push Google to rethink G+. It doesn't take too much: step back a little, stop pushing it aggressively where it doesn't fit. Actively support pseudonimity - let people have their privacy AND their G+ cake and participate in multiple circles under different identities. Add APIs to let a 3rd party ecosystem develop. Encourage it. Yes Twitter wound it back but only after they were the undisputed leader. Fingers crossed.
- Lerc 13y ago
  In a nutshell. They should develop Google+ for the way that people would like to use it instead of developing it for the way that they would like people to use it. That goes for everything, Google or not.
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    Page wants to be Jobs and wants to be Facebook. They are playing catch-up in both cases. They want to say basically "we will tell you what you should like and what is nice and better for you, trust us". Well sometimes that works but often it doesn't. In this case it didn't work. I just got annoyed by G+. The realname thing, then being badgered about it. Every one of those annoying "invitations" turn me further away from it. Maybe I am just different or too contrarian, but that kind of sealed G+ in my head as "stay the fuck away from this annoying thing".
    - wyclif 13y ago
      Are you aware that you can use Google+ with non-real names? I see loads of them. Many people use a handle. Nobody who uses Google+ every day complains about Nymwars anymore, that's so 2011.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
The only thing that worries me here is Google Authorship. That seemed like a good idea, but with a dead G+ the concept needs some home
mattkevan 13y ago
The main problem I have with G+ whenever I try to use it I have the sneaky suspicion it's designed to benefit Google more than it does myself. It feels like the motivation behind it wasn't to build an insanely great social network but to maximise user value by tying web searches, emails, interests, social circles, documents, location and more to actual identifiable people. I can see how that information can be extremely useful to advertisers and therefore valuable to Google, but I do not see anything there that is worth spending time on when there are many better, less invasive alternatives.
kimonos 13y ago
Don't like Google+ either..
MisterMashable 13y ago
I was really surprised one day to find all my youtube comments on Google+ for all my friends to see. Try explaining away comments about a fart video, drunken bums, cock fighting or some other unfortunate mistake. Oh well (shrugs shoulders)
nogridbag 13y ago
Slightly OT, but my business google apps account was just upgraded to google+ and "hangouts". I found it a bit troubling that when starting a hangout via my brand new business google+ account, it named the hangout title with my throwaway personal gmail account I rarely use. I'm sure Google has the data to easily associate the two accounts, but they should not reveal this to the end users.
iLoch 13y ago
That's funny, I was under the impression something had to be alive before it could be "walking dead."
wyclif 13y ago
Thanks for the massive clickbait, Techcrunch!
novaleaf 13y ago
i just started using Google+ actively..... and I'm using it exactly like what techcrunch describes: as a platform, not a product. I use Picassa to sort my photos and post to google+ web albums for family to use. I use Google+ Hangouts for IM, and I am using Google+ itself for credentials (OAuth). The actual Google+ product, never use it. It's actually a good thing that they figure out usage patterns and adapt their strategy to reflect it.
programminggeek 13y ago
I don't care about the article, I'm here to make a design complaint. The page is a giant TC logo with an ad next to it, oversized menu navigation, a headline, and then A GIANT PICTURE that literally takes up my entire 13" laptop screen. All of this before I get to the actual article with actual content. Word of caution - not everyone browses the internet on dual 27" cinema displays or Retina MacBook Pros. Even still, oversized images do more to stroke the designer's ego than to truly enhance the communication of the content. For ad much as designers hate "Make the logo bigger", they have totally got onboard with oversized photos on blog post headers/featured images.
pkhamre 13y ago
If you play Ingress you know G+ is alive.
frozenport 13y ago
I used Goolge+ like an RSS reader but the new UI has too little density and I stopped going on it. Seems like Google thinks I'm a monkey with a low attention span.

160 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

Great, Hopefully they'll just end the push to make people unify account names across platforms. The efforts to make me unify my Youtube and my (inactive) Gmail accounts have been fricken annoying.

ChrisClark 13y ago
If you're not using your Gmail, just unify it. Nothing changes for you, and it's not annoying anymore. If you don't want a real name attached, create a Google+ Page with your current nickname and use that. Then nothing changes for you, or anyone following you. If I were Google, I'd like to move all my products under one account too.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  So you are saying I should care about Google's convenience? I've never been to "my" G+ page and don't intend to go now. Google has annoyed me and it's their to solve that annoyance. I am the consumer, get used to it.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    I'm saying giving more than a passing thought to the particular backend that drives youtube comments is a complete waste of brainpower unless you happen to work on the thing.
  - ChrisClark 13y ago
    What I'm saying is that you seem to be very annoyed over something you can fix in about 5 minutes. If you choose not to fix it, you choose to remain annoyed. If you choose to keep getting annoyed, don't bother to complain about it. To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents, "All these new fangled social networks, we didn't need that when I was a kid, a rock and a stick, that was enough, now get off my lawn."
    - eitland 13y ago
      > To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents, Hehe To be fair though it took some time before it became apparent how simple to page thingy was. I delayed the YouTube switch for months myself.
    - joe_the_user 13y ago
      You don't understand. It is one thing that I can configure whatever through patience and knowledge. It is another being willing to configure stuff whenever some fool decides that they want to change a service around. I can dance but that doesn't mean I dance to someone else' tune.
davb 13y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I, too, am against the push to integrate all of my services. This is the main thing that's pushed me towards Twitter and stopped me really getting into Google+. I don't use it for email, publishing mobile apps, hosting my virtual servers, etc. It's essentially disposable. I've been online long enough to have had several identities which have served me well in certain circles, at certain times of my life. Being able to selectively dump these when necessary has been a way of online life for me. When I decided the everything-tracking creep factor of Facebook was too much, I just deleted the account completely (well, as much as one can do). I wasn't concerned that it might take down my email, or my mobile app purchase history, or any other manner of service. It was quite painless. Google+ and the drive to integrate everything is leading to the erosion of identity compartmentalisation. I know I can create multiple Google accounts, one for each service and each identity. However managing all of these at once (with Google's multi account login features) has always been very cumbersome. More so than an account with each service provider. And I never trust that my activity isn't being correlated across my individual accounts.

notdonspaulding 13y ago

I'm ambivalent about the future of Google+. Eventually though, it would be nice if someone at Google figured out how to make multiple-account usage not suck rocks. Why can I not sign out of a single account? Why does the order in which I sign into my accounts matter for so many things?

dm2 13y ago
Try using Chrome's multiple profile feature. I use one for each Google account and it makes the multiple accounts issue much easier to manage. I also use LastPass across profiles and 2-way auth for both LastPass and Google accounts. If you want separate accounts just make one for YouTube (or whatever) then a separate one for Gmail.
- scotchio 13y ago
  I second this. Chrome's multiple platform/profile feature is amazing [1]. I use it simply as as session manager [2] between work, personal, side-projects, etc. It greatly improved my development and browsing experience on the web. [1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en [2] http://scotch.io/bar-talk/leveraging-multiple-chrome-users-for-ultra-fast-session-swapping#reader-mode http://scotch.io/bar-talk/leveraging-multiple-chrome-users-f...
- hatbert 13y ago
  Isn't that a major functionality regression? I mean, didn't we stop saying "This website best viewed in IE4 with screen resolution set to 800x600" a decade ago?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
rainedin 13y ago
Multiple account use is borked. I was logged in under one account the other day, but wanted to leave a Youtube comment from another. But it just wasn't possible at the time. I gave up in the end. The UI is a disparate mess. I am not a fan of the one account rules all doctrine, especially when I can't switch to another with ease. I perceive myself as a competent web user, I've been surfing the web since Netscape on Win 3.1. Fail.

opendais 13y ago

Google+, as a login integration scheme and a way to unify policies across services, made sense. As a social network? Not so much. Google is a great company but community building isn't a core strength they have. Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+?

tommi 13y ago
> Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+? Yes. I don't believe it. Here's some random numbers (head counts in teams) - Core 50 - Ops 20 - Web 50 - Android 50 - Other mobile platforms 50 - Integrations to other products 150 - Technical writers, support etc 30 That's still only 400 employees. How would you allocate 1,200 employees to Google+?
- a3n 13y ago
  Maybe some employees got counted more than once because of overlapping circles.
  - mikecb 13y ago
    I laughed.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  Hmm, here's some more random numbers: - Smiley faces: 642 employees - Frowney faces: 557 employees - Miley Cyrus collages : 1 employee If I add them up, I do indeed get 1,200 employees. I wonder why your random numbers and mine differ so much? EDIT: I'm not surprised there are 1,000 people on Google+, and I would wager you that that's not counting ANY Core, Ops, or Web ("Web" in the traditional sense). You're also forgetting to count Auto-Awesome Photos, Auto-Awesome Videos, the ability to search UNTAGGED images that have been uploaded to Google+ Photos... Those are fairly ambitious on their own.
gdulli 13y ago
"Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+?" Yes. Even more so in the context of the supposed freedom Google employees have to work on the team/product of their choosing. Though I only know that anecdotally and it may have been one of those benefits that got phased out as it conflicted with business reality.

adventured 13y ago

Google+ is Google's equivalent of Bing. Scenario: a company with a quasi monopoly - and more money than it knows what to do with accordingly - responds to a fast growing potential competitor by getting into a market it doesn't understand well, is miles behind (arguably so far behind the market has already decided the winner) and isn't well suited to compete in. See: IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook Primarily I'm curious to see what Facebook's Bing is going to be. With a now very profitable, soft monopoly in social (and the willingness to spend to keep it), it seems inevitable Facebook will follow a rhyming history.

pconner 13y ago
Oculus might be Facebook's "Bing."
- mixedbit 13y ago
  Not really, because Oculus does not compete with anything done by any big player. It is a new territory for everyone.
  - Maarten88 13y ago
    It would surpise me if Sony and/or Microsoft would not be working on a competitor device, as an add-on for PS4/XBox.
    - evanmoran 13y ago
      Sony's project Morpheus was announced last month and is doing VR for PS4: http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-america-inc/2014/sony-computer-entertainment-announces-project-morp.shtml http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-com...
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  I can't imagine any way they would try to force facebook users into oculus. And it wasn't big money for them.

IvyMike 13y ago

The funny thing is I really like Google+. Of course I don't use it much because so few of my friends do, and that's the rub. But if I could magically move all my facebook friends to G+, I would.

VikingCoder 13y ago
Most of my friends don't show up in my TED talks, in my Netflix Instant Watch, in my Amazon Instant Watch, in my TiVo programs, in my Hulu+, in my Reddit, in my HackerNews, in my CNN, in the sports I watch, in the New York Times. If I could magically get my friends to show up in those places, I would. Translation: LinkedIn is not Facebook is not Google+ is not any-other-media. LinkedIn, I use for people I know professionally. Facebook, I use for people I know... but probably not the ones I currently know professionally. Google+, I use very much like I used to use Google Reader and Blogger. I subscribe to interesting people, Communities, and Pages. The experience is MUCH nicer than following the same things on Facebook, in my opinion. I do actually think Reddit has a slight edge in presentation for subreddits, compared to Google+ Communities. But on the plus side (ha), Google+ communities tend to not have as many trolls in them, perhaps because they're not anonymous. Perhaps because the trolls just haven't arrived yet. I happen to also use Google+ as a massive backup of all of my photos.
- 001sky 13y ago
  so is market segmentation a bug or a feature? its not clear, from the sound of it. right now seprate ecosystems support diversity (UI) and diversification (PI) and functional efficiency (sandboxing, signal/noize).
- krisgenre 13y ago
  For everything that I share with my family ( photos, videos ), I use G+. When I don't care who sees my post, I usually use Facebook or twitter. One think I love the most is syncing my contacts and photos/videos with G+ on my Android phone.
dredmorbius 13y ago
I don't like G+. And I don't trust Google. I wanted to like G+. I tried really hard. And I used to like and trust Google. The G+ experience ruined both. In terms of negative brand equity, this has been a disaster for the company.

devindotcom 13y ago

The teams will apparently be building “widgets,”... Has there ever been a case of something called "widgets" succeeding by any real measure? Even in fiction or idiom?

TillE 13y ago
Well, most GUI libraries.
dm2 13y ago
iGoogle, DuckDuckHack, WordPress. Widget is a nice name that hasn't been abused and gets the point across to both technical and non-technical users. It's kind of like an addon or sometimes a labs feature. Not required by all users but available if needed.
devindotcom 13y ago
Heh, I stand corrected. I still don't like the word, though.

dm2 13y ago

I'd like to see Google+ converted to an iGoogle type homepage that could be 100% private and would have the option to completely disable the +1 buttons and tracking across websites. It could have customizable widgets, optional social media integration, and would be a main/start/homepage for Google account users. Google+ still has potential to be great (mainly because of their huge user database and Google name behind it) if they can successfully pivot and create something that is valuable, a Facebook clone forced onto people wasn't the greatest idea that Google has ever come up with.

JPKab 13y ago
I never understood why they went for the Facebook killer when they could've easily built a LinkedIn killer instead. LinkedIn is AWFUL. It's a giant spam factory with shit features, but I actually like a lot of their employees other projects.... Anyway, Google should have users upload their resume to Google +, and then have it be indexable and searchable through the Google front-end search. It's a natural extension of the "share with Circles" concept.
- dm2 13y ago
  I agree completely about how sketchy LinkedIn seems. It feels like every action I do on LinkedIn is tracked and available for purchase. Then there was their, "send all of your email through our servers" app. A Google Professional/LinkedIn competitor would have been perfect for Google+. I would also be more willing to share with my friends and family on a site like that, so it would be a perfect LinkedIn/Facebook killer at the same time. Google+ just focused too much on sharing with friends/the world type site at a time when people are getting more cautious about sharing online and things being public. I do want a service very similar to LinkedIn but more trusted and less weird stats/data-mining, Google would be a good company to make that happen, but Google+ would need a major overhaul. (I know Google tracks everything too, but the whole "pay X dollars to see who viewed your profile" is when I made my decision to not support LinkedIn.
- ProAm 13y ago
  What LinkedIn employee side projects do you follow?

simplemath 13y ago

User identity is at the core of Google's long term goal of Google "search" becoming the end all augmented reality AI assistant for humans everywhere. G+ was a halting step in this direction. If Page really wants people to allow Google to feature creep their entire lives, G will have to wage a PR war to convince people that not only can G be trusted to manage identity, but that "Don't Be Evil" is a primary ideological directive.

Spearchucker 13y ago
It's interesting that no one has made a comparison with Microsoft's identity system (what used to be Passport, became Live and is now "your Microsoft account"). Passport started out well, then tanked, and the Microsoft account today just works across all Microsoft sites - from outlook.com to Windows Phone, Visual Studio, Skype and Windows 8 to Bing. Once the Passport mess settled nothing was really heard about identity at Microsoft again, and yet the little releases keep coming(ADFS 3, e.g.). To me, if Eric Schmidt, Vic, Google+ et al had a failing, it was that of not learning from others' mistakes (and consequent successes). Frankly, given that Kim Cameron works for Microsoft I'm amazed that anyone could use the word identity and not start by looking at how Microsoft does it.
- simplemath 13y ago
  I actually like what G has done with chrome SSO and turning Chrome into the default dashboard for their apps. I've found myself actually using G+ more and more. Rolling Picasa into + is a really good strategy as well -" Oh hey, my GS4 auto - uploaded all these cool photos from last weekend, might as well share them" Ironically enough, I think G+ faced its own identity problem for too long and failed to get critical mass because of it. To me, the increasing convergence of chrome and android is a bigger deal than anything happening with +
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    I agree with what you say. Still find it amusing that after the real name fiasco Google is left having to regain users' trust, whereas Microsoft did nothing to gain anyone's trust and yet people log into their operating system using a Microsoft account!

silverlight 13y ago

I hope that Hangouts will be sticking around long-term. Although WebRTC certainly helps in this area, Hangouts have quickly become the de-facto standard for mutli-person video chat. Not to mention a good chunk of our users use our app inside of Hangouts.

dasil003 13y ago

Google+ is in this weird place between Facebook and Twitter for me. I go to Twitter primarily for professional interaction, and Facebook primarily for personal interaction. Google on the other hand makes a ton of great services I like to use, but I don't want to curate circles there and I don't want some watered down feed of reddit-like linkbait. Google has done a pretty good job on the no-doubt extremely thorny problem of unifying accounts and multi-account login. I'm reasonably happy with that. I love Gmail, and Hangouts, and Android in general, but Google+ makes me want to blow my brains out every time they try to ram it down my throat. For the hundredth time, I don't want to "find friends" before I join an urgent Hangout I've just been invited to. The worst part is that they sacrifice their core strength to chase an unproven Facebook purely out of fear. Even if Facebook miraculously manages to crack social advertising in a way that eats Google's lunch (and given the questions around the value of Facebook advertising, that is a huge if), there's no hope for Google in trying to beat Facebook on their own terms. Frankly it's been an embarrassment for Google, and I hope they really have killed it as the central focus.

wyclif 13y ago
"An embarrassment for Google", really? Seriously? Google+ is actually designed far, far better than Facebook. And the implementation of communities and circles really gets social interaction right in ways that Facebook has not. Sure, Facebook has a much bigger user base. But I don't think Google+ sees itself as a direct competitor to FB. It's more of a tangential thing. I also think TechCrunch is hilariously off-base for writing that Google is dialing down Google+. I think all that stuff is pretty much clickbait.
- dasil003 13y ago
  Not the product per se, but the strategy.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform Er, Google announced that when they announced Google+, that it wasn't primarily a separate product but a social layer that would weave together all of Google's services. The Facebook-esque site has always been the tip of the G+ iceberg. (The Forbes article on the departure, interestingly, notes that the platform position has always been Google's position, but that the tech media never believed it [1].) [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-for-google-now-that-its-leader-has-suddenly-left/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-...

Kequc 13y ago
My understanding was that Google+ was primarily an identification platform. Up until that point your Gmail was considered your Google identity. Nobody it seems ever picked up on that and were focussed intently on spending all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for Google+ was above tepid. People would take seemingly any opportunity to call it down even though the service worked incredibly well on mobile and the company wasn't swamped with privacy allegations. It was just a small thing Google+, a free social platform attached to ones' Google identity. That so much controversy ended up surrounding something that I feel was really rather clever and innocuous will continue to surprise me for some time.
- danudey 13y ago
  A lot of the hate I've seen for Google+ centred around being badgered constantly to 'use my real name' on things. YouTube was a particularly egregious example. Every time I logged in, it would say 'Hey, do you want to use your real name? How great would that be!' When I said no, it would reply with 'Hey, are you sure you want to not use your real name?', and if I then confirmed that no, I didn't want to, it would say 'Okay, well we'll ask you later then.' If they had just said that 'Okay, your Google profile is now called Google+, and your YouTube account attached to your Google Profile is now your Google+ profile, and you can go to your settings to complete the migration', it wouldn't have been so bad. What they didn't do is offer anyone any reason to change. All the benefits they hawked for YouTube's Google+ comment integration were actually such huge drawbacks that many top YouTubers turned off comments entirely. Unsurprisingly, YouTube comments had gone from the mindless, racist, misspelled prattling of the internet's ignorant masses to giant spam-filled, link-filled dumping grounds of (varyingly) penis enlargement spam and giant ASCII dicks, and YouTube comments went from bad to worse, a feat no one thought possible. It really feels like the decision was made for the YouTube team by someone else (Page? Gundotra?), and the YouTube team just had to roll with it, with their input being ignored and the Google+ team saying 'No it'll be great, don't worry, you'll see, everything is better with Google+!' To this day, people invite me by gmail address to threads, which I cannot leave unless I tie my Google account to a Google+ account so I can join the thread so I can leave the thread. The entire thing was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and everything that they wanted out of it could have been accomplished by providing value, rather than extrinsic rationalization.

kyrra 13y ago

It's a little sad I think. I like Google+'s overall interaction and how its used as a tool. I use Picasa to organize my photos and have it sync to my Google+ account. Google+ on my phone also auto-backs up all photos to G+. Google+'s initial focus of sharing data with smaller groups of people was nice as well. But Facebook and Twitter have a majority of the users already and G+ isn't better enough for people to move to it.

27182818284 13y ago

>What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Fantastic! The people who actually use Google+ don't use it like Facebook and it is misguided to try to think one will fight the other. (Nor do people use Facebook like Twitter. Nor do people use Facebook like they do LinkedIn or OKCupid) The Circles feature of Google+ makes it really easy to target only small groups. I most often now see Google+ used for posts that are set to private within a family. Thanksgiving plans shared just among a family. Your friends on Facebook don't care about that, but your siblings do, and Google+ makes it much easier than Facebook to maintain a circle for that sort of thing. You just create a Circle called Family, and after you use it a couple of times, Google defaults your posts to that circle. To the world it looks like you've never posted on Google+, but meanwhile you've been sharing pictures and funny jokes with your brothers and sisters every day And if you don't use Google+ this way, but most of your family has a Google+ account (is it possible to not have one anymore?) I'd highly recommend it for this sorta thing.

npizzolato 13y ago
You can do the same thing with Facebook lists. Not everything you share needs to be sent to everyone. And if you're making plans for a specific event, like Thanksgiving, that's kind of what Facebook events are designed to do. It also has the benefit of collecting all the event-related posts into a single location, something just sharing to a group of people wouldn't do. And yes, everyone might "have" a Google+ account, but if no one you care about ever checks it, then does it really matter?
eitland 13y ago
> To the world it looks like you've never posted on Google+, but meanwhile you've been sharing pictures and funny jokes with your brothers and sisters every day Exactly : not everyone is comfortable sharing everything with everyone on Twitter. Some are not even allowed to share publicly.

deleted 13y ago

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galonk 13y ago
4-hour-old throwaway account says: "don't trust unnamed sources!"
- briandh 13y ago
  Why must it be a throwaway account? Not everybody in tech has an HN handle.
jshen 13y ago
I'm not sure official sources are more trustworthy than unnamed sources on such matters. If G+ has an uncertain future the official source would never say that publicly, I.e. Would never tell the truth.

leke 13y ago

Google, you fucked up when you forced people to merge their youtube accounts.

r00fus 13y ago
That was simply the last straw. Honestly, the writing was on the wall once Google screwed up the pseudonym vs. real names response. The response should have been to simply allow pseudonyms (i.e., Google knows who you are logging in as, and can infer your identity very easily anyway) and to do as twitter and prevent mis-use of real names where appropriate.

subdane 13y ago

Google+ could still win by exploiting a simple heuristic: Don't be Facebook. Allow for privacy, allow for handles, integrate seamlessly with platforms that have traction already (including Facebook). Remember how Instagram let you take a photo and publish it to multiple services (Twitter, Flickr etc)? It was a free, useful tool that made your life easier and made you look great. It had a feed and following on top, but it wasn't clear in the beginning it would even be a social network on its own.

wwweston 13y ago
> Google+ could still win by exploiting a simple heuristic: Don't be Facebook. Allow for privacy, allow for handles I suppose the question is that they'd win, and whether or not it's worth as much to them to allow for privacy and handles.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - eitland 13y ago
    As of today it is brilliant and shows no sign of changing for the worse. You always knows who you share with, and they don't mess with permissions after the fact. Also there are clear notifications if something will be shared because of actions you take. E.g: you tag someone in a picture and it makes sure you are aware that this will share the photo or album with the person in question.
pinaceae 13y ago
problem is that privacy/anonymity runs counter to the core Google business with is advertising and collecting personal data. so for Google, they would need to find out what could be a defining feature that would move people off FB. whatsapp's killer was signing up via telephone number, from a smartphone. for business people there's LinkedIn, for coders GitHub, for teens there are SnapChat/etc. - Google would need to find an underserved target demographic and build something, anything unique. so far they have failed.

dkhenry 13y ago

The sad thing I think about with articles like this is that even though they discount the amount of people who really like and use G+ ( we exist I swear ) that unless _enough_ people like it runs the risk of being cancelled.

DannyBee 13y ago

FWIW: when it says " According to a source at Google, there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure." Given how many employees are on the mountain view campus, the attempt to portray office space reorgs in a place known to have serious office space constraints, as related to leadership changes, is silly. 1. There is always a new or being renovated building on campus It's just the way it is. 2. I would actually assume this is entirely not related to his departure. Teams at Google outgrow their space all the time, and people get moved around to accomodate expected growth plus real estate renovations of buildings, etc.

001sky 13y ago
— not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure. Seems clear enough.
- argonaut 13y ago
  That's a classic journalism tactic. Mention some unsubstantiated innuendo, then qualify it so that you're technically in the clear.
  - ternaryoperator 13y ago
    Let's be clear: that's a tactic of yellow journalism. Good journalists don't string together unrelated facts unless they know there is a connection and can articulate it.
    - aragot 13y ago
      Same for the title. It's unsubstantiated. There are reorgs, but nothing in the article confirms that G+ is dead.
      - 001sky 13y ago
        The suspect <insert statement>, it is alleged. Nobody needs this explained to them. Similarly, I doubt anyone needs "walking dead" =|= "dead-dead" explained to them as a logical inequality. But if you do...here's an example for reference. Unless a firm has publicly announced that it is winding down, it is better to avoid labeling a fund as “walking dead.” Tagging a fund in this way has consequences. As in the case above, it can impact deal flow as companies seeking funding may think twice about approaching a firm believed to be in that category. It can hurt a firm’s prospects of being invited into syndicates and even potentially damage a firm’s existing syndicates. It can jeopardize relationships with current and prospective LPs if a forthcoming fund is even a notion among the firm’s GPs. Finally, and perhaps most troubling of all, it can even damage the prospects of portfolio companies backed by these supposed walking dead VCs. https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-rethink-walking-dead-vc-firms/ https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-rethi... Google clearly has skin in the game here if this narrative means that they will lose engineering talent from G+. Techcrunch clearly has skin in the game here as a scoop is equal to eyeballs. Luckily, google has PRs that make 10x what tech-crunch writers make. So surely any needed corrections will make there way through the noize. That being said, it would be great to keep the comments clean of superflous tit-for-tat inuendo accusations when the undelying conflicts of interest are pretty apparent and not overly subtle. Countering inuendo with facts seems plenty enough to counter-spin any un-substantiated points. And the original point here stands well enough alone. Don;t disrefard the TC qualification about the office relocation. That is a fair point and stands by itself--no drama needed.

randomstring 13y ago

So they killed Google Reader (and RSS with it) for nothing?

tdicola 13y ago
Ooph, twist the knife a little more. I'm still mad about Reader's death. At least Feedly has mostly replicated the simple interface and quick scanning of Reader.

fidotron 13y ago

This specific article doesn't make too much sense, however, the grand mix up of everything (most notably bringing Android in from the cold) is the real elephant in the room, not G+. G+ was just a symptom of typical big company soviet style central planning which now seems to be par for the course in what was, during the golden era of technology growth, a shining beacon of libertarianism inside and outside the organisation. Maybe Google x somehow does keep the magic spirit they used to have but there's a definite anti-user marketing droid led trend with everything from Hangouts to Maps that should be far more concerning than the G+ fallout. EDIT: To add, what always killed me about G+ was it wasn't the Googly answer to the problem. What they should have done to counter FB was to get behind something like Diaspora (i.e. an open source federated social platform, where they happen to offer hosting for free if that's what you want), and encouraged something like Persona as the ID system. Basically take the oxygen away from FB, and provide a boost to the "open web" which they can index in the normal manner.

rpgmaker 13y ago
I didn't ever join g+ but this comment is selling google way too short. Sure, they fucked up facebook-like "social" but they have gotten a lot of things right that most companies with their position and size would've missed. Who would've guessed 9 years ago that Maps would become such an integral part to their business?* To most people that seemed to be a cool pet project, just one of the many free goodies they provided. * There would've been a heck of a lot more startup mapping the world if many people had such foresight were things were going.
lukesandberg 13y ago
They did try that, it was called OpenSocial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial).
dragonwriter 13y ago
Google tried the open-federated thing via OpenSocial, support for parsing XFN/FOAF markup in other Google properties, and a number of other initiatives -- and it didn't have any measurable impact. For that matter, it still is doing that in a different way with support for Schema.org markup across many Google products, which provides, in principle, a different way to do some of the event-sharing and other things people do through Facebook. The Googly answer to most things isn't doing one thing, its doing multiple things with different payoff timelines in parallel.

thibauts 13y ago

This is what happens when you build a product for yourself without any regards for what people actually want. G+ was forced down our throats in a bunch of different ways and I'm glad the plan didn't work out. Google probably won't do it, though it would be a great time to reconsider their global strategy and think about what can actually be brought to the people to make the information space better for everyone. I mean, actually.

mark_l_watson 13y ago
I would like to see more effort in a customized Google Now. Google will always need massive amounts of user data, that is a given because of how they make money. I want something for giving up some privacy, and a very effective customized Google Now assistant would work for me. The current Google Now is a decent first baby step.

yeukhon 13y ago

I am not a UX person and I am horrible with front-end. But the thing that kills Google+ and new Google product UX today is the awful UX. When I want to change a password, or look for option for two-factor auth, or getting app-specific password (if you've enabled two-factor I need to get specific app password for apps like thunderbird or iphone's Mail app) I would Google (yes, the search engine) "gmail password", "google+ password". That just shows me how awful the UX is. When I want to change my real name I do the same, then come to the conclusion that I have to click on "edit profile", click on the damn avatar in order to edit the real name, INSTEAD of changing it from some "general settings" page. I really like to mention Twitter's new UI is way better. I have a good UX with the new Twitter. This is something Google just don't seem to understand.

Zigurd 13y ago

Google+ is pretty, but behind the pretty face it's an execution botch. Except for lacking pseudonymity, the ideas were basically right. It was a pretty Twitter with fewer limits and better follower management. Conceptually not bad. But it seems to have stopped improving some time ago. Unlike, say, maps, which is awesome on the Web and awesomer on mobile devices. And every update gets better and better. The Android app trails the Web site in functionality. You would think, for example, that the implementation of circle management on a touch device would be more drag-drop than the Web interface. Noooo, it's a series of lists views. Where IS the FREAKING picture I just took? Since I got Glass, there's a third place. Plus the ones I have not yet found. Blogger integration was a terrible lost opportunity. In part because Blogger sucks, too. The world needs to move fluidly between Tweet-ish things and blog posts. G+ did not deliver on the fluidity. Sites could have used some social pixie dust, too. But no. When Google+ stuff shows up in my GMail, it just adds noise. Then, riding the wave of the Blogger success, they tried to drain the troll swamp at YouTube. Masterful allocation of resources and wise strategic move. Because both my current books are about Android, their primary social presence is on Google+. For one it seemed to work well. For the later one, not so much. Now is a good time to reassess and find a mixed solution that's first-tier in every category.

icantthinkofone 13y ago

They're doing all that stuff with Google+ but this one guy leaving means it's dead? Someone's writing out of both sides of their mouth. Interesting how I couldn't get the people in my business or my family to even look at G+ when it first came out but, this past week, my employees made a circles just for them and that's how I found out my wife and kids had all joined G+. I'm starting to see this everywhere, at least in the circles I run in, so it looks to me like things are looking up.

smegel 13y ago

Serious question: has Google done anything truly right since gmail?

pessimizer 13y ago
Not in my opinion. I was excited about Android before it was released, but once I saw the APIs and found out it was going to be an all java userland, I was bummed. Then I found out that it was difficult to get direct access to the file system on it. I was sad because I wanted to use it for a tiddlywiki:) After a while, I got excited that Motorola was going to make a particularly attractive one (the Droid), so I was going to try it out anyway - but suddenly the N900 was a thing and it was barely a choice. Before Android, I really thought that Google's shit didn't stink. I would have voted for Google for president. Afterwards it wasn't the same, and just went downhill from there. In retrospect, the only reason I thought gmail was so awesome was because they gave you POP3 access. I mean, the UI was clean and simple, but it wasn't much easier to use than any of the other webmail clients. I'm not saying that in order to criticize gmail: that's the best they could have done, because none of the other clients were that difficult to use. What I liked was the simple generosity that they showed by allowing me to download and send my mail without using their UI. I was entirely willing to let them read it all and target ads towards me during my searches in exchange. [Edit: to be truly honest, I was excited that their math might really offer me the products that I'd be interested in:) Seems so quaint now.] Then, Android. The choice of laying a Java VM over the underlying filesystem and kernel, and the choice to lock parts of the filesystem down and to fill the OS with opaque binaries and phones with closed drivers represented the opposite of the image of trust that had attracted me to them in the first place.[Edit: Ugh! I forgot about the proprietary headphone jacks.] I felt that before Android, Google trusted me to use their products, and I trusted them not to be evil. After Android, it occurred to me that Google did not trust me to use the phone I bought from them. Google Docs is pretty successful. Not super successful, but successful enough to put pressure on Microsoft, which is always good. Google revolutionized search in the style of Altavista, and beat them on the math. Then they went into email in the style of Yahoo and Microsoft, and offered a cleaner UI and a softer sell than either. Then they went after Doubleclick and kicked its ass with text ads then bought it as the coup de grace, went after Office, bought YouTube after they failed to beat it, and went after Facebook (who had gone after myspace and friendster), and went after Amazon in B2B, while repeatedly failing to beat it or Ebay in retail or payments. What I'm trying to say here is that Google hasn't given me anything that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere ever. The distinction that Google had was 1) being focused on the math (and therefore quality), 2) offering clean user interfaces and APIs, and 3) having a conscience. Two and three have gone to shit, and everybody has caught up on 1) - there's good math everywhere these days.

edoloughlin 13y ago

Does this mean we can have our '+' back for Google searches?

zmmmmm 13y ago

This really makes it sound like Vic was essentially fired. I wonder how much Facebook's recent success in monetizing mobile is at the root of this? For a long time the conventional wisdom was that there was no money in mobile at all and it was a huge problem. Now Facebook is killing it, and Google's answer seems to have missed the mark. Although this article is all loose rumors and speculation, if you piece it together the picture feels believable: Google is seriously worried their bet on G+ is wrong. Until Facebook starting doing big numbers Vic had the benefit of the doubt, but now that it's clear in stark numerical fashion that Facebook is actually increasing it's lead over Google it's causing a serious rethink. Personally I hope it does push Google to rethink G+. It doesn't take too much: step back a little, stop pushing it aggressively where it doesn't fit. Actively support pseudonimity - let people have their privacy AND their G+ cake and participate in multiple circles under different identities. Add APIs to let a 3rd party ecosystem develop. Encourage it. Yes Twitter wound it back but only after they were the undisputed leader. Fingers crossed.

Lerc 13y ago
In a nutshell. They should develop Google+ for the way that people would like to use it instead of developing it for the way that they would like people to use it. That goes for everything, Google or not.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Page wants to be Jobs and wants to be Facebook. They are playing catch-up in both cases. They want to say basically "we will tell you what you should like and what is nice and better for you, trust us". Well sometimes that works but often it doesn't. In this case it didn't work. I just got annoyed by G+. The realname thing, then being badgered about it. Every one of those annoying "invitations" turn me further away from it. Maybe I am just different or too contrarian, but that kind of sealed G+ in my head as "stay the fuck away from this annoying thing".
  - wyclif 13y ago
    Are you aware that you can use Google+ with non-real names? I see loads of them. Many people use a handle. Nobody who uses Google+ every day complains about Nymwars anymore, that's so 2011.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

The only thing that worries me here is Google Authorship. That seemed like a good idea, but with a dead G+ the concept needs some home

mattkevan 13y ago

The main problem I have with G+ whenever I try to use it I have the sneaky suspicion it's designed to benefit Google more than it does myself. It feels like the motivation behind it wasn't to build an insanely great social network but to maximise user value by tying web searches, emails, interests, social circles, documents, location and more to actual identifiable people. I can see how that information can be extremely useful to advertisers and therefore valuable to Google, but I do not see anything there that is worth spending time on when there are many better, less invasive alternatives.

kimonos 13y ago

Don't like Google+ either..

MisterMashable 13y ago

I was really surprised one day to find all my youtube comments on Google+ for all my friends to see. Try explaining away comments about a fart video, drunken bums, cock fighting or some other unfortunate mistake. Oh well (shrugs shoulders)

nogridbag 13y ago

Slightly OT, but my business google apps account was just upgraded to google+ and "hangouts". I found it a bit troubling that when starting a hangout via my brand new business google+ account, it named the hangout title with my throwaway personal gmail account I rarely use. I'm sure Google has the data to easily associate the two accounts, but they should not reveal this to the end users.

iLoch 13y ago

That's funny, I was under the impression something had to be alive before it could be "walking dead."

wyclif 13y ago

Thanks for the massive clickbait, Techcrunch!

novaleaf 13y ago

i just started using Google+ actively..... and I'm using it exactly like what techcrunch describes: as a platform, not a product. I use Picassa to sort my photos and post to google+ web albums for family to use. I use Google+ Hangouts for IM, and I am using Google+ itself for credentials (OAuth). The actual Google+ product, never use it. It's actually a good thing that they figure out usage patterns and adapt their strategy to reflect it.

programminggeek 13y ago

I don't care about the article, I'm here to make a design complaint. The page is a giant TC logo with an ad next to it, oversized menu navigation, a headline, and then A GIANT PICTURE that literally takes up my entire 13" laptop screen. All of this before I get to the actual article with actual content. Word of caution - not everyone browses the internet on dual 27" cinema displays or Retina MacBook Pros. Even still, oversized images do more to stroke the designer's ego than to truly enhance the communication of the content. For ad much as designers hate "Make the logo bigger", they have totally got onboard with oversized photos on blog post headers/featured images.

pkhamre 13y ago

If you play Ingress you know G+ is alive.

frozenport 13y ago

I used Goolge+ like an RSS reader but the new UI has too little density and I stopped going on it. Seems like Google thinks I'm a monkey with a low attention span.