10 ms·

A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

111 points by scottporad 12y ago

jcampbell1 12y ago
Maybe my history is wrong, but wasn't the social "feed" largely pioneered by ex-google employees (Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, etc)? IIRC, facebook was all about the "wall" before friendfeed. Google has already gotten real names and identity from Google+, but I can't help but think the key insight into social existed at google before anyone had talked about Google+. Google+'s big mistake is being too late. The product is perfectly fine.
stormbrew 12y ago
I don't really think this would have helped much, but I do think that it highlights a part of why G+ has not been a very big success. It just lacks a compelling use case to make you come back to it after you discover that it doesn't have Facebook's network effect. There's nothing it does that Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook don't do better, aside from look kind of googly and force you to pick which one of your 5 gmail/apps account identities you want to really use.
- pekk 12y ago
  If I had been able to selectively subscribe to technical content of posters rather than also hearing about their cats, there is no reason I would not be using it over Twitter and Facebook to catch up on people's microblogging/thoughts. I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument. But Plus is ultimately still a failure
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    Well, that's kind of exactly my point. Facebook does the "things happening in my friends' lives that are largely inane but relevant to me" thing far better than some give it credit for (going to great lengths to determine relevance based on real actions you take). Twitter does the "I want a mind dump of the people I admire from afar with no filters" thing much better. If Circles were the other way around -- a way to organize and categorize your thoughts for better consumption of other people -- I think that would have been better, and more along the lines of what you're talking about. If it had done it somewhat automatically that might have been even better. But one thing that always kept me unhappy with G+ was that managing my circles felt like painful busywork better left to a computer, and it was only for my own benefit. It feels like work to control who gets to see what, and it's amortized on the wrong end, so I never did it. I don't know that anyone really does. At any rate, no one's arguing people use facebook because of the people they don't want to hear from. That would be ludicrous.
onion2k 12y ago
It was actually a really good product, but the thing has had zero traction with real people. If no one uses a product then it's clearly providing no value. That's pretty much the definition of a bad product.
- samskeller 12y ago
  Not quite true. A good product can be poorly marketed/integrated and therefore never used.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  'no one' is an exaggeration. If only a few people use a product, it can still be a hidden gem. I'd say the later users drop out in a sales funnel, the less the value of the product - but when there aren't sufficiently many users coming into the funnel, other reasons could apply. I agree with OP on this though - Google simply didn't push enough features people actually want the most, and those that they pushed usually lacked polish.
- adwn 12y ago
  In the real world, the quality of a product isn't the only criterion influencing adoption/market share: There's also - price and cost (doesn't really apply here, though) - marketing and image - critical mass and network effects Therefore, your conclusion is invalid.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    Price and cost matter a great deal here. Although the price of G+ was zero, the cost quite high - the user's time. G+ was hard to understand for most people. Google tried to give it a language of it's own that took people effort to learn - groups were "Circles", chat was "Hangout", and so on. It didn't instantly click in the way that Facebook or Twitter does for most people. Given that, the value proposition for G+ wasn't good enough - the benefit from actually using it returned less value than the cost of the time to spend learning how. That's the number one thing for free products - the cost is never zero. Everything costs something, just not necessarily money. The image of the product was equally bad. Google rarely gave a clear picture of what G+ was actually for - it looked a lot like a social network, but Google's messaging was always "It's not a social network! We're not competing with Facebook!" They always told people what they weren't, rarely what they were. Frankly, I still don't know. That's ignoring the forced "G+ is your Google account" thing because many Google products could actually be used without G+; G+ was never your Google account. As for critical mass, if you haven't got that when you have 500 million users, you're obviously getting something very wrong. tl;dr G+ didn't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile spending time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't spend time with.
Kiro 12y ago
"Real people" don't use RSS.
rurounijones 12y ago
Big assumption that people who were not Google+ users would tolerate having to join it just to continue using Google Reader. A lot of people would have just been pissed off that "G+ is borging google reader just like it is everything else".
- gfodor 12y ago
  No joining necessary, they just move your reader account into G+ and slowly people start using it for more than an RSS reader.
  - nardi 12y ago
    You clearly (somehow) haven't had Google try to convert one of your Google accounts into a G+ account before, or you've forgotten. There's a whole process involving your real name, a picture, profile, importing contacts, etc., etc.
    - gfodor 12y ago
      Right I am saying strategically they should have figured out a way to skip all that and just get people using the platform for rss first
- 001sky 12y ago
  The author seems to think gmail would have had a seamless integration as well. http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-of-google/ http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-o... There seems to be cognitive dissonance on people's aversion to strategic opportunism.
  - scottporad 12y ago
    ha! i forgot that i wrote that blog post. you'd think that between that post and this one that i have some reason for caring that google+ succeed. i don't...i have no vested interest. i just annoys me when big companies with massive amounts of resources bungle stuff. it seems like with so much talent and money it would be easier to get stuff right.
eitland 12y ago
This makes the assumption that Google haters wouldn't have found some reason to hate Google anyway. Which is overly optimistic in my opinion.
- charlesism 12y ago
  As a Google-hater, I can confirm that. They could have invented an RSS reader that cures cancer, and I'd still hate them. The only thing they can do with Google+ that would make me happy is cave in its metaphorical skull with a falling piano.
- interpol_p 12y ago
  I really don't think it's "Google haters" who have caused Google to back away from G+ — it's the fact that people were indifferent about the service to begin with.
roryhughes 12y ago
YouTubers got really pissed off with Google+ comments, but that has calmed down now because really it's still just comments below a video. What that did though was it made people (who may never have even tried +) really annoyed with it. But for RSS, imagine if they forced people to read it on +, there would be uproar.
- anonymoushn 12y ago
  Having to open a new tab with an auto-playing video to see the comment someone replied to is not okay. Having to do it for every comment in a long thread is not okay. The only reason people have stopped talking about it is that talking about it accomplishes nothing; Google just wants their site to be shit.
plorg 12y ago
This is the way I've been using Facebook for years. Most of the publications I follow have FB pages to which they submit their most pertinent content (for small publications and individual authors this usually ends up being every story or post). I can skim what's new and get other recommendations from people that I know. With a little bit of work I can also filter down what I see to just the people whose opinions I care about. At least that's the way it worked for several years. Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.
- scottporad 12y ago
  I totally agree that Facebook is shooting themselves in the foot. Already we see publishers and brands moving away from Facebook to platforms (e.g. Twitter, Instagram) where all their content will be seen.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
    I know what you meant, but just pointing out that the average Twitter user certainly won't see all of the content of anything they follow.
sidcool 12y ago
In my cynical opinion, this is like blaming a raindrop for the flood.
oelmekki 12y ago
That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking. Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french. As for now, here are my options : - publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of - publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing - not publishing anything Sadly, it often comes to that last option. Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying. Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.
- pekk 12y ago
  This has always been the top problem with Google+ for me. Maybe I want to hear about your code or your religion but I really really don't have the time and energy to wade through your cats, politics, etc.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Yeah. For precisely this reason, I maintain two Twitter accounts: business me and personal me. It kills me that Google+'s Circles were only about privacy control, not targeted sharing.
  - richardwhiuk 12y ago
    You can share with only a specific circle.. - just set the To to the specific Circle....
bratsche 12y ago
If 100% of Google Reader users enthusiastically adopted Google+, would that have even come close to what they were hoping to ultimately get? That's probably a rounding error by Facebook's usage numbers.
- scottporad 12y ago
  I disagree. People who used Reader were early adopters and influencers. Perhaps it was only 8 million users from Reader, but they would have had a multiplier effect.
  - bratsche 12y ago
    Maybe. But many of us are early adopters on Google+, because many of us are early adopters of all kinds of technologies. How effective have any of us been? I've got a ton of connections on Google+, but they're mostly other software developers or enthusiasts. All my real friends who are actually on Google+ created accounts and then apparently forgot they had them and never post. Probably because I'm the only person they know who was using it, and as awesome as I am (jk), one person is not enough to get someone to use a social network.
    - mattlutze 12y ago
      Our early adoption tendencies pair with a tolerance to nerd out over multiple competing systems. Studies have in the past suggested the average smartphone user only uses a few (5, 6?) apps that they've downloaded with any sort of regularity, the idea being they just don't have the time, patience or desire to check in on 6 different social location-aware deal apps. Facebook is, generally, a better experience for a person that wants to keep up with their friends, because posting, discovering others' posts, organizing groups, having get-togethers in real life are quicker, simpler, easier for the general user. So they'll ignore Google+ because they don't need that second social network if Google+ comes in second. Which, for that persona, it really does.
    - pantalaimon 12y ago
      The thing is that g+ was pretty useless for early adopters because it lacked so many features - an obvious were events, it boggled my mind that Google had Google Calendar which syncs to every Android device, but g+ had no means of creating an event for almost a year.
emersonrsantos 12y ago
It's not that. Some people at Gogole said let's tell people we are changing. The same thing that makes Windows 8 and lots of great products go wrong. We just hate change. Change leads to frustation, to fight-or-flight reactions. That's why people seat at the same spot every day.
frik 12y ago
Google, please adopt RSS/Atom feeds (again) in your services.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tn13 12y ago
What % of internet users use RSS ?
- kh_hk 12y ago
  The future of RSS is finding a way to make users use it without knowing they are using it. Sadly, more and more platforms are abandoning RSS/atom (hello twitter) --they want no part on anything defined on an RFC that decentralizes and makes it easier to consume a service without entering their site. Other than that I guess XML. As of % of internet users that use RSS, count me in.
erikb 12y ago
It's good to have an opinion. Also I like short, focussed blog posts. But the assumption made is too simple to gain anything, neither for Google nor for the HN community. For instance, integrating product A into product B is a lot of work, additionally to maintaining each of the products separately. And to me it seems as if Google simply didn't want to maintain the software behind Reader anymore. This also means integrating it (more costs than just keeping it as it is) is not a valid option. Then it might not even have a positive influence, because there are likely many people who used G+ but not Reader (like me) and many users who used Reader and not G+. For those people the integration of a completely new tool is not different from adding X new features. And we all know that adding X new features does not improve any product, right?
fudged71 12y ago
People don't seem to understand that Google+ was used internally before launch as though it were Facebook; people only shared with their friends and family. But when the product was launched to the public, it was given a limited release, biasing it to the tech crowd, and they gave the ability to give posts "public" visibility. Well these two things quickly turned Google+ into Twitter rather than Facebook. Then they spent the next few years trying to fix the disaster they had caused. It would have been a great product if they thought through the launch. But they didn't.
- Leynos 12y ago
  I really wish they had just rolled with it and allowed it to grow as a new Twitter-like product. It still is from what I can see. The majority of people I follow are people I don't know outside of G+ who share publicly or to interest-based circles.
  - fudged71 12y ago
    The thing with it being a public social network is that many people want anonymity. It's clear that from the start they wanted this platform to also serve the basis of an identity service for the rest of google, so the public aspect completely screwed them over.
- NateDad 12y ago
  I was just thinking this. Google+ is much more like twitter, where you can follow people to see what they're saying, and there's not necessarily a reciprocal relationship. I also post publicly to Google+, like Twitter, and unlike Facebook where everything I post is private (and generally aimed towards family and RL friends). I think Google+ in general is totally fine. In general it's better than Facebook or Twitter.... I'm not sure why so many people seem to dislike it. The integration with other Google products doesn't bother me at all. I don't comment on youtube pretty much ever, and I don't mind the auto-cross posting when I post to my blogger blog.
captainmuon 12y ago
They should have given up trying to be the number one and building a walled garden. Rather, they should have opened up Google+. * Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface * * Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream * Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora) * Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature. * Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users. ---- *) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)
_random_ 12y ago
Does that man (Vic) have any noticeable achievements at all throughout his career? Why was he even chosen?
rwmj 12y ago
mixi.jp lets you follow RSS feeds. It wasn't enough to save mixi.
- rangibaby 12y ago
  What killed mixi was losing it's mixi-ness, unique features that made it a success in the first place in an attempt to be more like FB or Twitter. I know Facebook has the mixi "footprints" feature internally since it uses it to target "people you may know".
elleferrer 12y ago
I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.
- lutusp 12y ago
  > ... Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.
  - TheGunner 12y ago
    Can't agree with that, Google Reader was great but I'm very happy with what I'm getting from Feedly, I don't feel worse off
Semaphor 12y ago
The thing that made me barely use Google+ is the lack of a posting API. With FB, Twitter, etc. I can use one app to fill all of them with content. Can't do that with Google+ and only recently it started working for pages (which I have no need of).
soci 12y ago
The biggest problem for me is all the FAKE ACTIVITY you can find in the platform. I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there. I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive. I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile. All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too. We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.
- Kequc 12y ago
  > All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. I can explain this quote with this quote. > I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.
  - grkvlt 12y ago
    Yup. And there are a lot of people who blindly click 'follow' on any featured post, or blindly reply to featured content. Have a look at some of the responses to promoted or featured articles, a lot of them are used to seeing only their friends postings, and assume the content is addressed to them personally. This leads to a lot of confused replies. I think this shops the problem with combining a public forum with people publishing content to the world, and a social network of connected individuals talking to each other. Facebook is the latter, Twitter is the former, and Google+ seems to want to be both and is not succeeding. It may end up successful as one or the other, time will tell, it's too early to write it off, though.
xsace 12y ago
So much nonsense in this post. Google Reader users wanted Google Reader, not Reader in G+. That would have changed nothing at all. There's nothing like totally simple magic way to avoid fucking up G+.
Fuxy 12y ago
That's a good idea but the main reason google+ failed is a lot simpler than that it just alienated all the geeks and early adopters by forcing it down their throught too much. If they would have allowed it to grow naturally and wouldn't have forced people to use it whether they wanted to or not attempted to make it more user friendly and intuitive the would have succeeded.
neurobro 12y ago
I do agree it would have been logical and probably straightforward to integrate RSS into Google+, but to say it would have radically affected the success of the service is going too far. If anything, it would make RSS more compelling to those of us who never really liked the experience of any readers (Google Reader included). Personally, I see RSS as little more than food for web-robots to consume, metabolize, and excrete.
yeukhon 12y ago
This is just specualtion. There is no hard evidence that they are shifting a thousand talent to other things at once. In fact, in a previous discussion it was said that people were moving to a new building on the campus. Did the author just ASSUME that it was a sign of the changing. I do think Google is thinking about a new strategy, but when he says "Google is getting away from Google+" is just pure speculation. The real deal is that we have gap. There is a distance in using so many tools. I post it on Twitter but i want that to appear on FB but not G+. Or whatever. I have RSS feed. I have photos I want to share but not indexed or shared on Google Plus. This is sure something a startup can take on. But this is where social network companies are failing to do well BECAUSE they all want everyone to join their platform and ONLY their platform.
laichzeit0 12y ago
The problem is Facebook right now is like all technology that's "good enough". People don't stop using good enough technology just because something slightly better comes along. That ship has sailed.
gojomo 12y ago
Ah, but how could Google have avoided fumbling the opportunity they had back when Orkut was briefly the hottest, fastest social network, in 2004?
7952 12y ago
I don't think anything needs to be integrated into Google+. They need to integrate Google+ with the rest of the web. I have a photo on Google+ that I want to send to a friend on a dumb chat client or email. How do I do that using a single URL? I don't want to send someone an interactive sharing experience, just a URL. If they decide to use the platform for further communication that's great but you shouldn't have to.
neals 12y ago
This whole Google Reader thing has had me going "back" to Digg actually (I know, it's a new site and all). Digg.com/reader. I don't visit the rest of the site, but the reader is excellent.
kh_hk 12y ago
Tin foil hat mode ON Google never needed Google+ to be successful, it was just a means to complete their analytics and ad platforms with more data about the users by awkwardly signing them up. As Wave, it might also have led to the development of new internal processes (providing a band aid for things like youtube comments) and finally on Google's look and feel rebranding. Now Google has new ideas on how to feed the analytics and ad platforms with a line of futuristic projects that may or may not improve your daily life. Taking this with a grain of salt it might make sense. For Google to do what they do they need to know everything about their users and their environment, which closes the circle feeding the products that are giving the company value.
Eye_of_Mordor 12y ago
As soon as Google+ insisted on real names, they made me realize it was only a vehicle for selling my privacy (pretty much my only motive for leaving Facebook). Now interested in neither.
rainedin 12y ago
Summary: The author thinks Google+ could have been saved (or been electrified) if they had integrated Reader.
rainedin 12y ago
People on the post's comments are suggesting that RSS only has technical followers. Really we should be talking about feeds and subscriptions. Wording needs to be friendlier: add my friend's feed or follow Kate Bush. It doesn't matter what the technology is so much underneath. RSS and Atom are meaningless to the general public and only confuse matters. But I think they'd grok the idea of following an interest or person, or giving feedback to a post, a thing, or a happening.
sneak 12y ago
It's "build something people want", right? Let's do this from first principles. Twitter was successful early on because they never discouraged multiple, independent, throwaway accounts. Why doesn't Google let you manage an unlimited number of independent and unlinked first-class-citizen profiles under one Google Account, under any name you choose? They can still mine all the data because they know (and keep secret!) that it's all one person. Facebook and Twitter do this too, just with cookies instead of login credentials. People want to share lots of personal details on their social network. Facebook is wildly successful because they make it easy for people to do so - perhaps to the point of oversharing. Google could have dispensed with the whole "following"/"circles" nonsense and gone with the undirected, two-way-confirmed model (with group support) that doesn't confuse people not familiar with graph theory, or the twitter model of basically casual, unconfirmed, directed-graph subscription, independent of the underlying personal relationship. Either would have been fine - instead, the egghead googlers tried to solve both and ended up solving neither. Last but not least, pretending that I want Google+ (no, don't "ask me again later" you fucking cunt of a website) to infect all the other important basic utilities of the web that Google's huge pile of cash has bought their way into (YouTube of course first comes to mind, but Maps and Gmail and Search too) is blatantly disrespectful to their only true asset: their users. Even Zuckerberg doesn't pretend like he's doing us that much of a favor when Facebook once-again revises its default privacy controls downward... It's pretty simple, really. It's super tragic that Google has turned into such a monolith of a Big Company that it can't even execute on a simple vision without tons of management getting involved and figuring out, through endless meetings, how to make every single step of the experience as user-hostile as possible. It's not like they're incapable of making user-centric experiences anymore. Look at how great Maps is these days, or how Gmail's webmail has become completely untouchable the way Outlook/Exchange or Blackberries were in their heyday - both cases because they did exactly what their customers wanted. (Aside: Interestingly enough, Apple was doing this for a long time, and now with things like iAds and IAPs and carrier override of my ability to tether my phone, it seems like they are slowly beginning to fail to consider exactly why and how they got to their position as market leader. (The argument could also be made that they are serving multiple masters - carriers/developers versus end-users.) If they continue, as Google has, eventually their customers will be right to leave.) I imagine it will take a lot of smart Googlers leaving in utter frustration before Google-the-entity finally changes course.
admstockdale 12y ago
Keep it simple. There's no reason to overanalyze the failure. Ask someone why they're not on Google+. There response: "What's Google+?" If they know what it is: "Why would I use Google+? No one is on there. All my friends use x y or z." Google+ has a huge public perception and identity problem -- who is it for exactly? Why use it when there's other social media?
michaelochurch 12y ago
Google+ came in a time when social network fatigue was setting in (Facebook usage was declining in the US) but there still wasn't a clear sense of what people wanted in a social networking site. It was an uphill battle, and nearly unwinnable the way Google chose to take it on. Google Hangouts was, in my view, one of their biggest assets. It's a solid piece of technology. It was way better than its competitors. The problem is that they couldn't come up with a viable way to make it part of Google+, rather than a great standalone project. The vision was that people would spend time in Google+ and "hang out" with others who were available. I knew, off the bat, that that wouldn't happen without (at first) a context around which to structure a hangout. Board games are a great starting social context for early adopters, but since they're a cognitively upscale group, you need quality games, not Zyngarbage like Farmville. I thought that a focus on game quality (Real Games Initiative) could, even though it'd piss off counterparties like Zynga wanting to throw us our crap (because they didn't expect us to succeed) and still get preferential treatment, give people a context in which they'd actually get comfortable in G+, and then want to use it. Games were an area in which (circa 2011) Facebook was shitting the bed-- low-quality games and game spam were a primary driver of social network fatigue-- and I thought it was a great way to distinguish ourselves as cognitively upscale and attract early adopters and the more charismatic elements of the early majority. Maybe a quality Games product wouldn't have saved G+. It's too late to know for sure, and I'd guess that RNCH was a bigger problem, but I feel like that was a key battle that has been lost.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Reader and Blogger integration weren't the biggest failings of G+, but tying those particular products into the service could have helped it along. In particular, giving easier ways to follow specific items or topics of interest (via Reader) and allowing for more expressive and focused content (via Blogger). Truth is, G+ was mis-architected from the ground up, starting with Circles. Numerous abortive directions were taken (anyone remember "sparks"?). The real blunders, though, were in utterly mismanaging and misunderstanding what real community is, and how it is formed and fostered. Real Names, Nymwars, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all massive (and entirely avoidable) blunders. A large part of it was that Google had a very clear idea of what it wanted, but didn't much care for what its users' interests were. And when the users told them, they basically said "la la la la la, I can't hear you!". The underlying technology is solid. I wish the sites I use instead of G+ had the clusters, search depth, breadth, and speed, the reliability, and the performance of Google. They don't. But what they've got are much better UI, often other features which exceed G+, and above and beyond all else, VASTLY healthier communities and relations between the sites and those communities.
nashashmi 12y ago
There were other things that google could have done, but I agree not enabling RSS was a poor decision on Google's part. To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability. So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base. I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews. Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.
Zigurd 12y ago
Lack of product improvement hurt Google+ the most. Too many important things, like organizing pictures, work badly. Some things, like managing events, are just terrible and full of bugs. Neither have improved. There is no reason to hope. Contrast with Maps: Maps made Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every release. It is an execution failure.
ChrisArchitect 12y ago
can we all agree that social networks/platforms like this are not easy. They may have 'screwed it up' in most opinions but it's not because of pure stupidity -- there are a ton of challenges and complexities here. Some of the integrations, albeit only parts, have been brilliant and worked really well in my eyes..... getting G+ to cover so many of the google services is a tough one. But then questions about complex vs. simple and circles and the endless battle between common consumer-level users and power users......and the whole Open net vs closed.....wow.. see, it's not easy ! heh
anigbrowl 12y ago
Props to the mods for changing the title - can't stand bowdlerisms.

111 points by scottporad 12y ago

Maybe my history is wrong, but wasn't the social "feed" largely pioneered by ex-google employees (Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, etc)? IIRC, facebook was all about the "wall" before friendfeed. Google has already gotten real names and identity from Google+, but I can't help but think the key insight into social existed at google before anyone had talked about Google+. Google+'s big mistake is being too late. The product is perfectly fine.

stormbrew 12y ago

I don't really think this would have helped much, but I do think that it highlights a part of why G+ has not been a very big success. It just lacks a compelling use case to make you come back to it after you discover that it doesn't have Facebook's network effect. There's nothing it does that Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook don't do better, aside from look kind of googly and force you to pick which one of your 5 gmail/apps account identities you want to really use.

pekk 12y ago
If I had been able to selectively subscribe to technical content of posters rather than also hearing about their cats, there is no reason I would not be using it over Twitter and Facebook to catch up on people's microblogging/thoughts. I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument. But Plus is ultimately still a failure
- stormbrew 12y ago
  Well, that's kind of exactly my point. Facebook does the "things happening in my friends' lives that are largely inane but relevant to me" thing far better than some give it credit for (going to great lengths to determine relevance based on real actions you take). Twitter does the "I want a mind dump of the people I admire from afar with no filters" thing much better. If Circles were the other way around -- a way to organize and categorize your thoughts for better consumption of other people -- I think that would have been better, and more along the lines of what you're talking about. If it had done it somewhat automatically that might have been even better. But one thing that always kept me unhappy with G+ was that managing my circles felt like painful busywork better left to a computer, and it was only for my own benefit. It feels like work to control who gets to see what, and it's amortized on the wrong end, so I never did it. I don't know that anyone really does. At any rate, no one's arguing people use facebook because of the people they don't want to hear from. That would be ludicrous.

onion2k 12y ago

It was actually a really good product, but the thing has had zero traction with real people. If no one uses a product then it's clearly providing no value. That's pretty much the definition of a bad product.

samskeller 12y ago
Not quite true. A good product can be poorly marketed/integrated and therefore never used.
m_mueller 12y ago
'no one' is an exaggeration. If only a few people use a product, it can still be a hidden gem. I'd say the later users drop out in a sales funnel, the less the value of the product - but when there aren't sufficiently many users coming into the funnel, other reasons could apply. I agree with OP on this though - Google simply didn't push enough features people actually want the most, and those that they pushed usually lacked polish.
adwn 12y ago
In the real world, the quality of a product isn't the only criterion influencing adoption/market share: There's also - price and cost (doesn't really apply here, though) - marketing and image - critical mass and network effects Therefore, your conclusion is invalid.
- onion2k 12y ago
  Price and cost matter a great deal here. Although the price of G+ was zero, the cost quite high - the user's time. G+ was hard to understand for most people. Google tried to give it a language of it's own that took people effort to learn - groups were "Circles", chat was "Hangout", and so on. It didn't instantly click in the way that Facebook or Twitter does for most people. Given that, the value proposition for G+ wasn't good enough - the benefit from actually using it returned less value than the cost of the time to spend learning how. That's the number one thing for free products - the cost is never zero. Everything costs something, just not necessarily money. The image of the product was equally bad. Google rarely gave a clear picture of what G+ was actually for - it looked a lot like a social network, but Google's messaging was always "It's not a social network! We're not competing with Facebook!" They always told people what they weren't, rarely what they were. Frankly, I still don't know. That's ignoring the forced "G+ is your Google account" thing because many Google products could actually be used without G+; G+ was never your Google account. As for critical mass, if you haven't got that when you have 500 million users, you're obviously getting something very wrong. tl;dr G+ didn't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile spending time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't spend time with.

Kiro 12y ago

"Real people" don't use RSS.

rurounijones 12y ago

Big assumption that people who were not Google+ users would tolerate having to join it just to continue using Google Reader. A lot of people would have just been pissed off that "G+ is borging google reader just like it is everything else".

gfodor 12y ago
No joining necessary, they just move your reader account into G+ and slowly people start using it for more than an RSS reader.
- nardi 12y ago
  You clearly (somehow) haven't had Google try to convert one of your Google accounts into a G+ account before, or you've forgotten. There's a whole process involving your real name, a picture, profile, importing contacts, etc., etc.
  - gfodor 12y ago
    Right I am saying strategically they should have figured out a way to skip all that and just get people using the platform for rss first
001sky 12y ago
The author seems to think gmail would have had a seamless integration as well. http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-of-google/ http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-o... There seems to be cognitive dissonance on people's aversion to strategic opportunism.
- scottporad 12y ago
  ha! i forgot that i wrote that blog post. you'd think that between that post and this one that i have some reason for caring that google+ succeed. i don't...i have no vested interest. i just annoys me when big companies with massive amounts of resources bungle stuff. it seems like with so much talent and money it would be easier to get stuff right.

eitland 12y ago

This makes the assumption that Google haters wouldn't have found some reason to hate Google anyway. Which is overly optimistic in my opinion.

charlesism 12y ago
As a Google-hater, I can confirm that. They could have invented an RSS reader that cures cancer, and I'd still hate them. The only thing they can do with Google+ that would make me happy is cave in its metaphorical skull with a falling piano.
interpol_p 12y ago
I really don't think it's "Google haters" who have caused Google to back away from G+ — it's the fact that people were indifferent about the service to begin with.

roryhughes 12y ago

YouTubers got really pissed off with Google+ comments, but that has calmed down now because really it's still just comments below a video. What that did though was it made people (who may never have even tried +) really annoyed with it. But for RSS, imagine if they forced people to read it on +, there would be uproar.

anonymoushn 12y ago
Having to open a new tab with an auto-playing video to see the comment someone replied to is not okay. Having to do it for every comment in a long thread is not okay. The only reason people have stopped talking about it is that talking about it accomplishes nothing; Google just wants their site to be shit.

plorg 12y ago

This is the way I've been using Facebook for years. Most of the publications I follow have FB pages to which they submit their most pertinent content (for small publications and individual authors this usually ends up being every story or post). I can skim what's new and get other recommendations from people that I know. With a little bit of work I can also filter down what I see to just the people whose opinions I care about. At least that's the way it worked for several years. Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.

scottporad 12y ago
I totally agree that Facebook is shooting themselves in the foot. Already we see publishers and brands moving away from Facebook to platforms (e.g. Twitter, Instagram) where all their content will be seen.
- GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
  I know what you meant, but just pointing out that the average Twitter user certainly won't see all of the content of anything they follow.

sidcool 12y ago

In my cynical opinion, this is like blaming a raindrop for the flood.

oelmekki 12y ago

That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use. I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off. I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking. Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french. As for now, here are my options : - publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of - publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing - not publishing anything Sadly, it often comes to that last option. Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying. Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.

pekk 12y ago
This has always been the top problem with Google+ for me. Maybe I want to hear about your code or your religion but I really really don't have the time and energy to wade through your cats, politics, etc.
wpietri 12y ago
Yeah. For precisely this reason, I maintain two Twitter accounts: business me and personal me. It kills me that Google+'s Circles were only about privacy control, not targeted sharing.
- richardwhiuk 12y ago
  You can share with only a specific circle.. - just set the To to the specific Circle....

bratsche 12y ago

If 100% of Google Reader users enthusiastically adopted Google+, would that have even come close to what they were hoping to ultimately get? That's probably a rounding error by Facebook's usage numbers.

scottporad 12y ago
I disagree. People who used Reader were early adopters and influencers. Perhaps it was only 8 million users from Reader, but they would have had a multiplier effect.
- bratsche 12y ago
  Maybe. But many of us are early adopters on Google+, because many of us are early adopters of all kinds of technologies. How effective have any of us been? I've got a ton of connections on Google+, but they're mostly other software developers or enthusiasts. All my real friends who are actually on Google+ created accounts and then apparently forgot they had them and never post. Probably because I'm the only person they know who was using it, and as awesome as I am (jk), one person is not enough to get someone to use a social network.
  - mattlutze 12y ago
    Our early adoption tendencies pair with a tolerance to nerd out over multiple competing systems. Studies have in the past suggested the average smartphone user only uses a few (5, 6?) apps that they've downloaded with any sort of regularity, the idea being they just don't have the time, patience or desire to check in on 6 different social location-aware deal apps. Facebook is, generally, a better experience for a person that wants to keep up with their friends, because posting, discovering others' posts, organizing groups, having get-togethers in real life are quicker, simpler, easier for the general user. So they'll ignore Google+ because they don't need that second social network if Google+ comes in second. Which, for that persona, it really does.
  - pantalaimon 12y ago
    The thing is that g+ was pretty useless for early adopters because it lacked so many features - an obvious were events, it boggled my mind that Google had Google Calendar which syncs to every Android device, but g+ had no means of creating an event for almost a year.

emersonrsantos 12y ago

It's not that. Some people at Gogole said let's tell people we are changing. The same thing that makes Windows 8 and lots of great products go wrong. We just hate change. Change leads to frustation, to fight-or-flight reactions. That's why people seat at the same spot every day.

frik 12y ago

Google, please adopt RSS/Atom feeds (again) in your services.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tn13 12y ago

What % of internet users use RSS ?

kh_hk 12y ago
The future of RSS is finding a way to make users use it without knowing they are using it. Sadly, more and more platforms are abandoning RSS/atom (hello twitter) --they want no part on anything defined on an RFC that decentralizes and makes it easier to consume a service without entering their site. Other than that I guess XML. As of % of internet users that use RSS, count me in.

erikb 12y ago

It's good to have an opinion. Also I like short, focussed blog posts. But the assumption made is too simple to gain anything, neither for Google nor for the HN community. For instance, integrating product A into product B is a lot of work, additionally to maintaining each of the products separately. And to me it seems as if Google simply didn't want to maintain the software behind Reader anymore. This also means integrating it (more costs than just keeping it as it is) is not a valid option. Then it might not even have a positive influence, because there are likely many people who used G+ but not Reader (like me) and many users who used Reader and not G+. For those people the integration of a completely new tool is not different from adding X new features. And we all know that adding X new features does not improve any product, right?

fudged71 12y ago

People don't seem to understand that Google+ was used internally before launch as though it were Facebook; people only shared with their friends and family. But when the product was launched to the public, it was given a limited release, biasing it to the tech crowd, and they gave the ability to give posts "public" visibility. Well these two things quickly turned Google+ into Twitter rather than Facebook. Then they spent the next few years trying to fix the disaster they had caused. It would have been a great product if they thought through the launch. But they didn't.

Leynos 12y ago
I really wish they had just rolled with it and allowed it to grow as a new Twitter-like product. It still is from what I can see. The majority of people I follow are people I don't know outside of G+ who share publicly or to interest-based circles.
- fudged71 12y ago
  The thing with it being a public social network is that many people want anonymity. It's clear that from the start they wanted this platform to also serve the basis of an identity service for the rest of google, so the public aspect completely screwed them over.
NateDad 12y ago
I was just thinking this. Google+ is much more like twitter, where you can follow people to see what they're saying, and there's not necessarily a reciprocal relationship. I also post publicly to Google+, like Twitter, and unlike Facebook where everything I post is private (and generally aimed towards family and RL friends). I think Google+ in general is totally fine. In general it's better than Facebook or Twitter.... I'm not sure why so many people seem to dislike it. The integration with other Google products doesn't bother me at all. I don't comment on youtube pretty much ever, and I don't mind the auto-cross posting when I post to my blogger blog.

captainmuon 12y ago

They should have given up trying to be the number one and building a walled garden. Rather, they should have opened up Google+. * Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface * * Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream * Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora) * Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature. * Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users. ---- *) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)

_random_ 12y ago

Does that man (Vic) have any noticeable achievements at all throughout his career? Why was he even chosen?

rwmj 12y ago

mixi.jp lets you follow RSS feeds. It wasn't enough to save mixi.

rangibaby 12y ago
What killed mixi was losing it's mixi-ness, unique features that made it a success in the first place in an attempt to be more like FB or Twitter. I know Facebook has the mixi "footprints" feature internally since it uses it to target "people you may know".

elleferrer 12y ago

I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful community.

lutusp 12y ago
> ... Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google! So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement (Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.
- TheGunner 12y ago
  Can't agree with that, Google Reader was great but I'm very happy with what I'm getting from Feedly, I don't feel worse off

Semaphor 12y ago

The thing that made me barely use Google+ is the lack of a posting API. With FB, Twitter, etc. I can use one app to fill all of them with content. Can't do that with Google+ and only recently it started working for pages (which I have no need of).

soci 12y ago

The biggest problem for me is all the FAKE ACTIVITY you can find in the platform. I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there. I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive. I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile. All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too. We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.

Kequc 12y ago
> All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. I can explain this quote with this quote. > I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.
- grkvlt 12y ago
  Yup. And there are a lot of people who blindly click 'follow' on any featured post, or blindly reply to featured content. Have a look at some of the responses to promoted or featured articles, a lot of them are used to seeing only their friends postings, and assume the content is addressed to them personally. This leads to a lot of confused replies. I think this shops the problem with combining a public forum with people publishing content to the world, and a social network of connected individuals talking to each other. Facebook is the latter, Twitter is the former, and Google+ seems to want to be both and is not succeeding. It may end up successful as one or the other, time will tell, it's too early to write it off, though.

xsace 12y ago

So much nonsense in this post. Google Reader users wanted Google Reader, not Reader in G+. That would have changed nothing at all. There's nothing like totally simple magic way to avoid fucking up G+.

Fuxy 12y ago

That's a good idea but the main reason google+ failed is a lot simpler than that it just alienated all the geeks and early adopters by forcing it down their throught too much. If they would have allowed it to grow naturally and wouldn't have forced people to use it whether they wanted to or not attempted to make it more user friendly and intuitive the would have succeeded.

neurobro 12y ago

I do agree it would have been logical and probably straightforward to integrate RSS into Google+, but to say it would have radically affected the success of the service is going too far. If anything, it would make RSS more compelling to those of us who never really liked the experience of any readers (Google Reader included). Personally, I see RSS as little more than food for web-robots to consume, metabolize, and excrete.

yeukhon 12y ago

This is just specualtion. There is no hard evidence that they are shifting a thousand talent to other things at once. In fact, in a previous discussion it was said that people were moving to a new building on the campus. Did the author just ASSUME that it was a sign of the changing. I do think Google is thinking about a new strategy, but when he says "Google is getting away from Google+" is just pure speculation. The real deal is that we have gap. There is a distance in using so many tools. I post it on Twitter but i want that to appear on FB but not G+. Or whatever. I have RSS feed. I have photos I want to share but not indexed or shared on Google Plus. This is sure something a startup can take on. But this is where social network companies are failing to do well BECAUSE they all want everyone to join their platform and ONLY their platform.

laichzeit0 12y ago

The problem is Facebook right now is like all technology that's "good enough". People don't stop using good enough technology just because something slightly better comes along. That ship has sailed.

gojomo 12y ago

Ah, but how could Google have avoided fumbling the opportunity they had back when Orkut was briefly the hottest, fastest social network, in 2004?

7952 12y ago

I don't think anything needs to be integrated into Google+. They need to integrate Google+ with the rest of the web. I have a photo on Google+ that I want to send to a friend on a dumb chat client or email. How do I do that using a single URL? I don't want to send someone an interactive sharing experience, just a URL. If they decide to use the platform for further communication that's great but you shouldn't have to.

neals 12y ago

This whole Google Reader thing has had me going "back" to Digg actually (I know, it's a new site and all). Digg.com/reader. I don't visit the rest of the site, but the reader is excellent.

kh_hk 12y ago

Tin foil hat mode ON Google never needed Google+ to be successful, it was just a means to complete their analytics and ad platforms with more data about the users by awkwardly signing them up. As Wave, it might also have led to the development of new internal processes (providing a band aid for things like youtube comments) and finally on Google's look and feel rebranding. Now Google has new ideas on how to feed the analytics and ad platforms with a line of futuristic projects that may or may not improve your daily life. Taking this with a grain of salt it might make sense. For Google to do what they do they need to know everything about their users and their environment, which closes the circle feeding the products that are giving the company value.

Eye_of_Mordor 12y ago

As soon as Google+ insisted on real names, they made me realize it was only a vehicle for selling my privacy (pretty much my only motive for leaving Facebook). Now interested in neither.

rainedin 12y ago

Summary: The author thinks Google+ could have been saved (or been electrified) if they had integrated Reader.

rainedin 12y ago

People on the post's comments are suggesting that RSS only has technical followers. Really we should be talking about feeds and subscriptions. Wording needs to be friendlier: add my friend's feed or follow Kate Bush. It doesn't matter what the technology is so much underneath. RSS and Atom are meaningless to the general public and only confuse matters. But I think they'd grok the idea of following an interest or person, or giving feedback to a post, a thing, or a happening.

sneak 12y ago

It's "build something people want", right? Let's do this from first principles. Twitter was successful early on because they never discouraged multiple, independent, throwaway accounts. Why doesn't Google let you manage an unlimited number of independent and unlinked first-class-citizen profiles under one Google Account, under any name you choose? They can still mine all the data because they know (and keep secret!) that it's all one person. Facebook and Twitter do this too, just with cookies instead of login credentials. People want to share lots of personal details on their social network. Facebook is wildly successful because they make it easy for people to do so - perhaps to the point of oversharing. Google could have dispensed with the whole "following"/"circles" nonsense and gone with the undirected, two-way-confirmed model (with group support) that doesn't confuse people not familiar with graph theory, or the twitter model of basically casual, unconfirmed, directed-graph subscription, independent of the underlying personal relationship. Either would have been fine - instead, the egghead googlers tried to solve both and ended up solving neither. Last but not least, pretending that I want Google+ (no, don't "ask me again later" you fucking cunt of a website) to infect all the other important basic utilities of the web that Google's huge pile of cash has bought their way into (YouTube of course first comes to mind, but Maps and Gmail and Search too) is blatantly disrespectful to their only true asset: their users. Even Zuckerberg doesn't pretend like he's doing us that much of a favor when Facebook once-again revises its default privacy controls downward... It's pretty simple, really. It's super tragic that Google has turned into such a monolith of a Big Company that it can't even execute on a simple vision without tons of management getting involved and figuring out, through endless meetings, how to make every single step of the experience as user-hostile as possible. It's not like they're incapable of making user-centric experiences anymore. Look at how great Maps is these days, or how Gmail's webmail has become completely untouchable the way Outlook/Exchange or Blackberries were in their heyday - both cases because they did exactly what their customers wanted. (Aside: Interestingly enough, Apple was doing this for a long time, and now with things like iAds and IAPs and carrier override of my ability to tether my phone, it seems like they are slowly beginning to fail to consider exactly why and how they got to their position as market leader. (The argument could also be made that they are serving multiple masters - carriers/developers versus end-users.) If they continue, as Google has, eventually their customers will be right to leave.) I imagine it will take a lot of smart Googlers leaving in utter frustration before Google-the-entity finally changes course.

admstockdale 12y ago

Keep it simple. There's no reason to overanalyze the failure. Ask someone why they're not on Google+. There response: "What's Google+?" If they know what it is: "Why would I use Google+? No one is on there. All my friends use x y or z." Google+ has a huge public perception and identity problem -- who is it for exactly? Why use it when there's other social media?

michaelochurch 12y ago

Google+ came in a time when social network fatigue was setting in (Facebook usage was declining in the US) but there still wasn't a clear sense of what people wanted in a social networking site. It was an uphill battle, and nearly unwinnable the way Google chose to take it on. Google Hangouts was, in my view, one of their biggest assets. It's a solid piece of technology. It was way better than its competitors. The problem is that they couldn't come up with a viable way to make it part of Google+, rather than a great standalone project. The vision was that people would spend time in Google+ and "hang out" with others who were available. I knew, off the bat, that that wouldn't happen without (at first) a context around which to structure a hangout. Board games are a great starting social context for early adopters, but since they're a cognitively upscale group, you need quality games, not Zyngarbage like Farmville. I thought that a focus on game quality (Real Games Initiative) could, even though it'd piss off counterparties like Zynga wanting to throw us our crap (because they didn't expect us to succeed) and still get preferential treatment, give people a context in which they'd actually get comfortable in G+, and then want to use it. Games were an area in which (circa 2011) Facebook was shitting the bed-- low-quality games and game spam were a primary driver of social network fatigue-- and I thought it was a great way to distinguish ourselves as cognitively upscale and attract early adopters and the more charismatic elements of the early majority. Maybe a quality Games product wouldn't have saved G+. It's too late to know for sure, and I'd guess that RNCH was a bigger problem, but I feel like that was a key battle that has been lost.

dredmorbius 12y ago

Reader and Blogger integration weren't the biggest failings of G+, but tying those particular products into the service could have helped it along. In particular, giving easier ways to follow specific items or topics of interest (via Reader) and allowing for more expressive and focused content (via Blogger). Truth is, G+ was mis-architected from the ground up, starting with Circles. Numerous abortive directions were taken (anyone remember "sparks"?). The real blunders, though, were in utterly mismanaging and misunderstanding what real community is, and how it is formed and fostered. Real Names, Nymwars, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all massive (and entirely avoidable) blunders. A large part of it was that Google had a very clear idea of what it wanted, but didn't much care for what its users' interests were. And when the users told them, they basically said "la la la la la, I can't hear you!". The underlying technology is solid. I wish the sites I use instead of G+ had the clusters, search depth, breadth, and speed, the reliability, and the performance of Google. They don't. But what they've got are much better UI, often other features which exceed G+, and above and beyond all else, VASTLY healthier communities and relations between the sites and those communities.

nashashmi 12y ago

There were other things that google could have done, but I agree not enabling RSS was a poor decision on Google's part. To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability. So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base. I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews. Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.

Zigurd 12y ago

Lack of product improvement hurt Google+ the most. Too many important things, like organizing pictures, work badly. Some things, like managing events, are just terrible and full of bugs. Neither have improved. There is no reason to hope. Contrast with Maps: Maps made Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every release. It is an execution failure.

ChrisArchitect 12y ago

can we all agree that social networks/platforms like this are not easy. They may have 'screwed it up' in most opinions but it's not because of pure stupidity -- there are a ton of challenges and complexities here. Some of the integrations, albeit only parts, have been brilliant and worked really well in my eyes..... getting G+ to cover so many of the google services is a tough one. But then questions about complex vs. simple and circles and the endless battle between common consumer-level users and power users......and the whole Open net vs closed.....wow.. see, it's not easy ! heh

anigbrowl 12y ago

Props to the mods for changing the title - can't stand bowdlerisms.