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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

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.

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.