8 ms·

TechCrunch covered Vic Gundotra's departure badly

184 points by MattCruikshank 12y ago

Worst of all, their article is being quoted as a "Report."

MattCruikshank 12y ago
Worst of all, their article is being quoted as a "Report."
deleted 12y ago
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smackfu 12y ago
The power of media: connect facts in a way that shows a story that people want to be true, and it might just cause it to happen.
nailer 12y ago
Social is a flavor enhancer, like salt. It's a great flavor enhancer, but you don't want to eat it on it's own. Social + news = Facebook wall Social + location = Foursquare Social + YouTube = Better YouTube comments. Sorry, but it does Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't. Social + Maps = Seeing that my friend goes to this restaurant and likes it. Social + video calling = A phone directory and avatars. FB Platform is the biggest thing FB produce. But their most widely end user app is wall, which sits on their platform. As someone who never, ever, logs into plus.google.com, I still know I use gplus all the time from finding new cafes in London. It's a super great flavor enhancer.
- paul_f 12y ago
  Essentially "social" is a feature, not a product.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    Comments would be the feature. Social is just an adjective.
- m0nty 12y ago
  > like salt. It's a great flavor enhancer I wish there were a way to get my food unsalted. > Now that they have the platform they need, they're pushing social integration into all of their features, literally pushing people who know how to do social into every nook and cranny of Google And "literally" pushing users into adopting it, regardless. I prefer the TechCrunch interpretation (G+ is dead) because for one brief moment, I had hope -- but I suspect OP is more correct.
- bruceboughton 12y ago
  >> Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't. This is where Google have gone wrong. I don't want my search results to be affected by signals from my friends. They don't search for the same things as me. I want my search results to be ranked with signals from other relevant people... and I don't know who these people are. Google got it right first time around. PageRank captures the link juice from these relevant people. C# bloggers linking to open source projects. F1 fans linking to interesting articles. Apple bloggers linking to rumours. Google+ puts the onus on me to decide who is relevant and I don't know. Using this as signal for searching is making me do Google's job.
  - ithkuil 12y ago
    yep, it would be nice at least if you could decide which circles contain relevant people to your interests (including ∅)
  - RivieraKid 12y ago
    > Social + Search Yeah, I've never understood why Google was stressing social search so much, there's almost zero value in that.
    - rokhayakebe 12y ago
      Every decision you make is affected by others; if not your friends & family, your colleagues, people who share a similar interest, etc... Perhaps no one has nailed it yet, but Search is Social.
      - RivieraKid 12y ago
        > Every decision you make is affected by others That's not true. But every decision you make is affected by your mood. They should add an option to select your mood to the top right corner of every Google website. > Search is Social What does that even mean? This sounds like some stupid, mindless, PR crap.
  - 12y ago
- dfc 12y ago
  video calling + Social = A phone directory and avatars. video calling - Social = Animated selfies
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > Social + Maps = Seeing that my friend goes to this restaurant and likes it. How would that be relevant to me? I want to know that someone who likes other restaurants I like goes to this restaurant and likes it. I don't care what restaurants my friend likes. We're not friends on the basis of liking the same restaurants.
  - hagbardgroup 12y ago
    A lot of 'work' friends may have garbage taste in restaurants. Exactly.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    While I agree with you that it's more interesting to get recommendation based on similar users, most people have a reasonable idea how their friends tastes in various things mesh with their own. I know that a particular friend of mine is equally picky about his steaks as me, for example, and I'd trust a recommendation of steak houses from him. Being able to attach a particular name to recommendations helps them attach a level of trust to the recommendation that regular users might be less inclined to attach to "anonymous" recommendations. If they're smart, they'll also consider similarity in tastes when deciding which of your friends recommendations to emphasise (especially if more than one of your friends have clashing ratings of the same places). Social recommendations also helps you "break out" of the filter bubble. E.g. Amazon has a very specific view of what I like to read, and so on. But people who know me will occasionally be able to provide me with other impulses that leads me to try something entirely new that is very different from what Amazon will recommend to me based on what I've read in the past.
  - unreal37 12y ago
    What if all they did was mark the restaurants your friends have liked, not changed the search results order? So it's just an attribute. It could have SOME value.
- espadrine 12y ago
  Social + YouTube = comments. Whether they are good depends on the implementation and design. In this particular case, the fact that G+ posts appeared as YouTube comments meant that every comment of a viral G+ video post showed up in YouTube as a series of introductions to the video, instead of… well… comments on it. Here is a quick example, although it isn't by far the most striking; it is the first I had around. http://i.imgur.com/LCMxwuN.png http://i.imgur.com/LCMxwuN.png
rmthompson 12y ago
I'm going to be honest, until TechCrunch's article, I had thought that Google+ was already done. I haven't heard a single compelling reason to use it outside hangouts, but hangouts is not Google+. So as much as I hate to agree with TechCrunch, they see the writing on the wall.
- hablahaha 12y ago
  I've been trying to get my friend's to use Google+ since we all spend so much time in Hangouts and Gmail (where you can see the G+ notifications). Hangouts is probably the best part of the "G+ revolution", and they really dropped the ball on the integration with G+ (I can't have an event attached to a hangout, etc.) as well as developer relations for building cool apps with Hangouts Chat (not just video). I hope that this means a more focused and deliberate shift to focusing on Hangouts. Hangouts video is great and chat is good, but could be so much better.
- DatBear 12y ago
  300 million monthly active users... what a dead product.
  - mkr-hn 12y ago
    I'm honestly not sure what to think. I post pictures that got a lot of great feedback on other places to Google+. Google+ reports that these pictures get hundreds of views, but almost no one +1s, shares, or comments.
  - rmthompson 12y ago
    I'm curious as to the definitions. Before I turned it off, I would see little notifications. I'd click them, and delete, or block someone. Is that active?
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    That number is inflated by adding YouTube users, which was a kind of social network with it's own kind of audience (notoriously trollish in some ways) before the shotgun wedding to G+. My follower growth has slowed. The first product page I put on Google+ (a book about Android) got many followers quickly. Same with my personal page. The second time I put up a product page for a book, the response was much attenuated, and my follower growth has been slow and low quality. It wasn't great quality on Facebook either, but it was much faster. Maybe I need to see how well product pages would do on LinkedIn.
thrillgore 12y ago
TechCrunch has always been a rag publication. They do good articles like their recent piece on the SF rent, but the amount of useful signals are flooded by the low effort noise.
- gchokov 12y ago
  Absolutely. They start to look like a mass-media, trying to generate hypes and sensations, which pretty often are done in a very cheap way. And once you start and point out this in the comments below the article, they say "you don't get the irony". Okay, thank you smarts.
- fixermark 12y ago
  Unfortunately. TechCrunch is one of the very few media outlets that I can say I've put in my mental spamfilter. They flipped my bozo bit years ago due to the number of times their reporting on situations I'm close to has deviated breathlessly from the on-the-ground reality of the situation. I actually read and enjoyed their recent article on San Francisco housing... But the responsible thing for me to do next is to follow up via alternate information sources if I want to know more, because I can't trust TC to relay the facts without narrative distortion. They are very good storytellers who allow the crafted narrative to outstrip the reality too often for my taste.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    The TechCrunch of today is a lot different than the TechCrunch of years ago, due to the editorial shakeups.
deleted 12y ago
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paganel 12y ago
> literally pushing people who know how to do social into every nook and cranny of Google. Maybe I'm missing something, but who are those people at Google? Or is this tongue-in-cheek writing? And yes, Google has missed the train on both WhatsApp (mentioned in the article) and Instagram (not mentioned).
galago 12y ago
Facebook's breakup of the big blue app into messaging and perhaps in the near future other specialty apps seems like part of the same phenomenon. Google+ is actually ahead of that curve because the Google identity is only becoming more important to their ecosystem, regardless of how one interacts with it.
- bruceboughton 12y ago
  Google is ahead of Facebook? Ha ha ha ha...
  - MattCruikshank 12y ago
    On some things, yes, very much so. I'll just use my Facebook browser on my Facebook phone running Facebook Operating System to Facebook search for job openings where I can post my resume that I wrote in Facebook Docs, and hope the recruiter will send me a Facebook email or leave a Facebook voicemail. After that, I'll open up Facebook maps to find a take-out restaurant my friends reviewed, then I'll rent some Facebook movies my friends recommended. Or maybe I'll talk a walk, if Facebook Now says the weather is good where I am. While I'm walking, maybe I can record a video of the loons on my lake again, and post it to Facebook video. Oh, I better Facebook Keep a reminder to myself to pick up some milk. My identity was subtly integrated into each of those things.
EGreg 12y ago
I have to agree with Matt - the hitpiece article is crap and smacks of how TC gleefully wrote about Yahoo's demise every time it could a few years back.
autokad 12y ago
gotta agree more with techcrunch than a groupthink former employee from google. google+ is something people these days joke about, like that service you're forced to sign up to but nobody uses. yes, they are integrating features to collect data across their platforms, but essentially google+ as something people come to like facebook is the walking dead.
- wambotron 12y ago
  I haven't heard joking about G+ any more than I have about FB. FB is where you go to have your grandma and aunt write weird messages. G+ is where you go to share photography and travel logs. Sure, people do each of those things on both platforms, but g+ is in no way 'dead' or even close to it just because you don't personally use it.
  - smacktoward 12y ago
    That's how dire G+'s uptake has been: people don't even care about it enough to make jokes about it.
  - thescrewdriver 12y ago
    The only time I ever see G+ being used is for random geek blog posts on HN from time to time. Virtually everyone I know is on FB.
    - wambotron 12y ago
      That's the thing: the people on G+ seem to use it more as a professional networking tool (like LinkedIn without recruiter spam and more flexibility on what you post). I don't have any friends on G+, but I also don't WANT or NEED them on it. I use it to keep up on some tech stuff and look at photos. Facebook and G+, while both being "social networks," function totally differently. Whether google wanted it to be a direct competitor or not, it's just filling a different niche.
RivieraKid 12y ago
TC is mostly right. The usual motivation for making new products is to satisfy users' needs, to make their lives better. Google didn't make Google+ to give value to consumers. They made it because they feared Facebook.* Without Facebook, there would be no Google+. That's the fundamental problem – Google+ provides value only to a minority of Google users – why force it down everyone's throats? As Steve Yegge said: "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful." Google still doesn't understand social and people. Facebook is successful because it feeds on (or exploits?) specific psychological needs. Technology and user interface are secondary factors. * To be more specific, I think that the #1 reason they've built Google+ was to extract friend lists (social graph), because they've thought that this data can improve their other products. Their line of thinking was "If Facebook has social data and we don't, they'll be able to make a better search engine or an ad network." They've seen this as a big threat to their core business. But making a product just to exctract data is doomed to fail.
- bad_user 12y ago
  Facebook is successful because it is successful. Google+ can serve the same psychological needs, unfortunately it's third in a market in which Facebook and Twitter happened first.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Facebook itself was third to market in social networking, after Friendster and MySpace. The latter was heavily entrenched and very successful when Facebook started unseating it. G+ definitely suffered by coming to market after FB and Twitter, but that's not the whole of the story. More specifically, it came to market after Facebook and Twitter, without doing anything fundamentally different, better, or more useful than Facebook or Twitter. (Circles, the putative differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a solution to the standard social networking UX.) Late entrants can sometimes win; Google and Facebook were pretty far from the first movers in their respective markets. The key is that late entrants need to be significantly better than anyone who's come before them. G+ was not.
smacktoward 12y ago
> They just said that they no longer consider social to be a separate unit, but now will be potentially integrated to everything they do. How is that the same thing as giving up on social? A product that is everybody's second priority is nobody's first priority. You can see how this plays out in practice by looking at this other bit from the TC article: "One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of 'required' Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates." Assuming this is true, it tells you everything you need to know about G+'s current position in the Google portfolio: it's been demoted from something strategic, something fundamental, to an optional add-on. You can argue whether that's a good move or not (I think it is), but you can't really argue that it's not a step down. Because going from "this is part of what it means to be a Google product" to "this is something useful we'll let individual units decide whether to use or not" is definitely a step down.
- garfij 12y ago
  You could also argue it's the difference between "dogmatic adherence" and "strategic application". At this point G+ is already integrated into all the major components of their platform. While I agree this is a good move, I don't necessarily see it as a step down. Requiring all new products to immediately integrate could be a major speed bump in development, so I can see how if G+ is not truly needed in the product, that it makes sense to allow for not requiring it.
  - shadowmint 12y ago
    Well, since 'nothing is wrong! its fine! google+ all the things' has been the dogmatic adherance for the last what? 3 years? ... you have to acknowledge that at the very least this is an admission their previous practice was stupid and harmful. ...which is a good change.
- mathattack 12y ago
  "One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of 'required' Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates." This is huge. I wonder if there will be less pressure for people to use it similar to Facebook.
zaidf 12y ago
There are a lot of reasons to attack TechCrunch, but their Google+ coverage isn't one of them. If you've friends at google, you know almost everything reported by TC rings true. For example, an ex YouTuber friend of mine told me a long time ago how pissed him and other YouTubers were at google+ being shoved down their throats to inflate Plus metrics.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Honestly? Unifying the commenting systems was a great idea. Having every Google application sport its own commenting system is unnecessary balkanization. The problem is that Google+ came into that space from being a Facebook clone instead of being a comment platform. G+ should have been designed and built as a replacement for Disqus instead of a replacement for Facebook, and then it would've gone much better for Youtube/Blogger et al. For example, a Disqus-replacement would have obviously known that "Real names" was a terrible idea and the host of the comment thread (the Youtube page or whatnot) needs to have a lot of control over moderation.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
    I think that YouTube comments have become unusable. I used to read through the comments and lol at the arguments whilst listening to music, voting various things up and down as I went. But now the comments seem to come in no order, often aren't relevant and when I've tried to vote something, the music stops and it starts taking me to another page. I've never waited to see where it's taking me mind.
  - zaidf 12y ago
    Here's an example of how YouTube comments suck: if you post a video on your google+ with a comment like "hey guys watch this", that post appears as a comment on that video's page. So now you have a bunch of comments on videos saying "Just found this cool video" or "you have to watch this"...something that makes no sense to the typical viewer.
    - Pxtl 12y ago
fidotron 12y ago
I'm more embarrassed for the Xooglers and people still oblivious to the fact Google is rapidly turning into Microsoft, in the PG essay sense, with the exception that in some emerging areas they do still look dangerous. The recent FB numbers are going to have been a very nasty awakening to a lot of them. The defensiveness around any Google related criticism is utterly incredible.
minimaxir 12y ago
> Did your editor write the "walking dead" headline without reading the article? The authors of the article are both the co-head editors of TechCrunch.
danielrpa 12y ago
I don't know why some in tech community hate facebook (and thus automatically love Google+), but in my opinion Google+ had a terrible interface and nobody I know ever used it - I find Facebook much, much better (not to mention that everybody I care about is there). Despite liking Google, I find Google+ a trainwreck - it was time for Google to either get out of this business of competing with Facebook or completely revamping Google+. It seems that they chose the former.
Grue3 12y ago
I don't care if it's true or not, I want to believe. No need to rain on my parade. But most importantly, does the blog author work at Google, or has connections that are more reliable than the ones Techcrunch has? I feel like this is pretty important to know in regards to who I should believe.
- leorocky 12y ago
  It's a badly written article by someone who has no additional information. I have no idea how it got to the top of HN but I wouldn't be worried. I'm pretty sure Google+ is dead now in the way that Google Reader was dead for years before they finally shut it down.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Articles which portray TechCrunch in a negative light tend to get lots of upvotes. Hacker News really, really doesn't like TC for some reason.
    - leorocky 12y ago
      I remember this being the reason: http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-read-every-morning/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is...
      - 001sky 12y ago
        It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting. Ah, dont forget to label this (2008) ;D
- MattCruikshank 12y ago
  I used to work at Google, as stated in the last line of the article. I'm not getting any information from Googlers that isn't publicly visible.
mfish 12y ago
"What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform... Oh, okay, that makes some sense. They have created the features necessary to integrate Google+ into everything they do from now on. Makes sense. " If G+ was originally intended to be a platform, rather than a product, this would make sense. And I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but it seems to me that everything points to them wanting this to be a facebook-killing product...not a platform on which to build other things.
rbanffy 12y ago
If anyone ever read Google+ as a website like Facebook, they were getting it completely wrong. Google+'s core objective has always been to add social functionality to every Google product. Google+ is plumbing.
- mpg33 12y ago
  > If anyone ever read Google+ as a website like Facebook, they were getting it completely wrong. Most people do this and that isn't their fault... it's Google's.
panzerboy 12y ago
Next thing you know, they bring Google Reader back...
deleted 12y ago
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MattCruikshank 12y ago
Let me be very clear: Anyone is welcome to conclude that Google+ is dead. Facebook still exists as a company. You personally don't use it. You don't like the font. Whatever... I don't think it's dead. I use Google+ every day, and I'm looking forward to more of it. But if a news site is going to make a conclusion, the arguments they use should be logical. I assert that TechCrunch's specific arguments are not good ones.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Buzz users loved that too and used it every day. Until Google unceremoniously shot it through the head.
- DanBlake 12y ago
  Its cool you willingly use it. You are in the minority. The vast, vast, vast minority. That is why its the walking dead.
- unreal37 12y ago
  You're awfully upset about this. Why is that? You used to work at Google. Were you on the Google+ team?
  - MattCruikshank 12y ago
    I'm okay with people believing G+ is dead if they want to. But this is a news article concluding G+ is dead, based on stated arguments. Except the arguments are lousy. Lousy journalism is bad for everyone.
gwern 12y ago
On MR the other day I saw a good post mention that one way to look at an argument is to see whether the author is taking the attitude 'can I believe this?' or 'must I believe this?' It's clear OP is the latter.
ajsharp 12y ago
While I may agree with the sentiment, this meta-piece is just as speculative (moreso, actually) than the original TC piece.
stutsmansoft 12y ago
Am I wrong for hoping TechCrunch is right? I feel like any interaction I have with Google services, I'm defending myself against getting an unwanted G+ account.
_pmf_ 12y ago
> They just said that they no longer consider social to be a separate unit, but now will be potentially integrated to everything they do. Considering that being integrated into everything was one of the core problems of Google+, I fail to see how this is a smart move.
Twirrim 12y ago
People actually expect decent journalism from Techcrunch? Huh. They've been barely keeping it above the gutter several for years.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
Perhaps relevant: the Silicon Valley drama reminds me of the TV show "Peyton Place" that was on when I was a teenager. I try to limit my time reading the news (and then a sample of international news) and TV, but this drama fills in the need to waste a little time on melodrama.
snowwrestler 12y ago
If Google Plus is now just going to be shorthand for social features and data integration, then it seems to me that "Google Plus" s basically dead. Because you don't need a product name and a product team for social features and data integration. Those are just things that anyone includes when building products these days. On any other web platform this set of functionality is just called having an account. For example Amazon has had social features (reviews and forums) and data integration for years, but they did not call it Amazon Plus. It's just part of the service. Likewise, I expect Google to just start talking about Google Accounts eventually. It's already sort of tortured to force Google Plus nomenclature into everything, like managing brand YouTube channels for instance. And, behind all of this, I think companies are realizing that social graph data is not as valuable as they once thought it was, because it's constructed self-consciously. We all make decisions about friend requests carefully now. It's become so fraught with stress that people are now flocking to anonymous social tools. I can tell you that my relationships embodied on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter, etc do NOT accurately reflect the real-life state of my social relationships. And I bet the same is true for you.
- 001sky 12y ago
  Those are just things that anyone includes when building products these days. --Exactly
dkrich 12y ago
From "Trust Me I'm Lying": "When you see "We're hearing reports" know that reports could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message board posts, or worse. When you see "Sources tell us..." know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention. When you see "which means" or "meaning that" or "will result in" or any other kind of interpretation or analysis know that the blogger who did it likely has absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly, wildly off the mark, because there aren't any consequences." That unattributed sources are cited no fewer than ten times in this post is laughable. Yet people still read TechCrunch because it's not exciting to admit that "we don't really have any clue what is going on because we don't work at Google and have to rely on some flimsy sources."
akennberg 12y ago
2010: > Schmidt: Our view of social is a little different than what everyone has been writing. we want our core products to get better from social information. > We are trying to add a social component [to google's core products] to make them even better. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-social-layer-emerge/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-socia...
001sky 12y ago
This is a useful piece of writing. Underlying it, however, is some kind of strange "status anxiety" that is all-to-prevalent in Silicon Valley. Nobody wants to be given the "scarlet letter" of failure ("G+"!) on their resume...? Understandable. Its also understandable to be ~annoyed when the media circus feels the need to pontificate on the "family politics" of any large/insular organization. That being said, the majority of the points here don't seem to be controversial enough (on either side) to get too worked up over. At a Macro-level, G+ had a big narrative of power-accretion and increasing centrality (for several years). This is now being un-wound. Whether you want to call that: (1) Failure; (2) engineered obsolescence; or (3) success! seems to matter less than the underlying story remains the same. Where power/influence (and hence: status) was once accreting to a brand (G+) it is now dissapating. This is such a non-event, that it should just be considered like any other documentary on the Discovery Channel. It has been highly edited for our viewing/entertainment pleasure, but at the of the day...on the african savanna...life & death go on hand in hand for predator and prey...some times its ugly and messy...but it is just the nature of the 'circle of life'.

184 points by MattCruikshank 12y ago

Worst of all, their article is being quoted as a "Report."

MattCruikshank 12y ago

Worst of all, their article is being quoted as a "Report."

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

smackfu 12y ago

The power of media: connect facts in a way that shows a story that people want to be true, and it might just cause it to happen.

nailer 12y ago

Social is a flavor enhancer, like salt. It's a great flavor enhancer, but you don't want to eat it on it's own. Social + news = Facebook wall Social + location = Foursquare Social + YouTube = Better YouTube comments. Sorry, but it does Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't. Social + Maps = Seeing that my friend goes to this restaurant and likes it. Social + video calling = A phone directory and avatars. FB Platform is the biggest thing FB produce. But their most widely end user app is wall, which sits on their platform. As someone who never, ever, logs into plus.google.com, I still know I use gplus all the time from finding new cafes in London. It's a super great flavor enhancer.

paul_f 12y ago
Essentially "social" is a feature, not a product.
- threeseed 12y ago
  Comments would be the feature. Social is just an adjective.
m0nty 12y ago
> like salt. It's a great flavor enhancer I wish there were a way to get my food unsalted. > Now that they have the platform they need, they're pushing social integration into all of their features, literally pushing people who know how to do social into every nook and cranny of Google And "literally" pushing users into adopting it, regardless. I prefer the TechCrunch interpretation (G+ is dead) because for one brief moment, I had hope -- but I suspect OP is more correct.
bruceboughton 12y ago
>> Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't. This is where Google have gone wrong. I don't want my search results to be affected by signals from my friends. They don't search for the same things as me. I want my search results to be ranked with signals from other relevant people... and I don't know who these people are. Google got it right first time around. PageRank captures the link juice from these relevant people. C# bloggers linking to open source projects. F1 fans linking to interesting articles. Apple bloggers linking to rumours. Google+ puts the onus on me to decide who is relevant and I don't know. Using this as signal for searching is making me do Google's job.
- ithkuil 12y ago
  yep, it would be nice at least if you could decide which circles contain relevant people to your interests (including ∅)
- RivieraKid 12y ago
  > Social + Search Yeah, I've never understood why Google was stressing social search so much, there's almost zero value in that.
  - rokhayakebe 12y ago
    Every decision you make is affected by others; if not your friends & family, your colleagues, people who share a similar interest, etc... Perhaps no one has nailed it yet, but Search is Social.
    - RivieraKid 12y ago
      > Every decision you make is affected by others That's not true. But every decision you make is affected by your mood. They should add an option to select your mood to the top right corner of every Google website. > Search is Social What does that even mean? This sounds like some stupid, mindless, PR crap.
- 12y ago
dfc 12y ago
video calling + Social = A phone directory and avatars. video calling - Social = Animated selfies
thaumasiotes 12y ago
> Social + Maps = Seeing that my friend goes to this restaurant and likes it. How would that be relevant to me? I want to know that someone who likes other restaurants I like goes to this restaurant and likes it. I don't care what restaurants my friend likes. We're not friends on the basis of liking the same restaurants.
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  A lot of 'work' friends may have garbage taste in restaurants. Exactly.
- vidarh 12y ago
  While I agree with you that it's more interesting to get recommendation based on similar users, most people have a reasonable idea how their friends tastes in various things mesh with their own. I know that a particular friend of mine is equally picky about his steaks as me, for example, and I'd trust a recommendation of steak houses from him. Being able to attach a particular name to recommendations helps them attach a level of trust to the recommendation that regular users might be less inclined to attach to "anonymous" recommendations. If they're smart, they'll also consider similarity in tastes when deciding which of your friends recommendations to emphasise (especially if more than one of your friends have clashing ratings of the same places). Social recommendations also helps you "break out" of the filter bubble. E.g. Amazon has a very specific view of what I like to read, and so on. But people who know me will occasionally be able to provide me with other impulses that leads me to try something entirely new that is very different from what Amazon will recommend to me based on what I've read in the past.
- unreal37 12y ago
  What if all they did was mark the restaurants your friends have liked, not changed the search results order? So it's just an attribute. It could have SOME value.
espadrine 12y ago
Social + YouTube = comments. Whether they are good depends on the implementation and design. In this particular case, the fact that G+ posts appeared as YouTube comments meant that every comment of a viral G+ video post showed up in YouTube as a series of introductions to the video, instead of… well… comments on it. Here is a quick example, although it isn't by far the most striking; it is the first I had around. http://i.imgur.com/LCMxwuN.png http://i.imgur.com/LCMxwuN.png

rmthompson 12y ago

I'm going to be honest, until TechCrunch's article, I had thought that Google+ was already done. I haven't heard a single compelling reason to use it outside hangouts, but hangouts is not Google+. So as much as I hate to agree with TechCrunch, they see the writing on the wall.

hablahaha 12y ago
I've been trying to get my friend's to use Google+ since we all spend so much time in Hangouts and Gmail (where you can see the G+ notifications). Hangouts is probably the best part of the "G+ revolution", and they really dropped the ball on the integration with G+ (I can't have an event attached to a hangout, etc.) as well as developer relations for building cool apps with Hangouts Chat (not just video). I hope that this means a more focused and deliberate shift to focusing on Hangouts. Hangouts video is great and chat is good, but could be so much better.
DatBear 12y ago
300 million monthly active users... what a dead product.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  I'm honestly not sure what to think. I post pictures that got a lot of great feedback on other places to Google+. Google+ reports that these pictures get hundreds of views, but almost no one +1s, shares, or comments.
- rmthompson 12y ago
  I'm curious as to the definitions. Before I turned it off, I would see little notifications. I'd click them, and delete, or block someone. Is that active?
- Zigurd 12y ago
  That number is inflated by adding YouTube users, which was a kind of social network with it's own kind of audience (notoriously trollish in some ways) before the shotgun wedding to G+. My follower growth has slowed. The first product page I put on Google+ (a book about Android) got many followers quickly. Same with my personal page. The second time I put up a product page for a book, the response was much attenuated, and my follower growth has been slow and low quality. It wasn't great quality on Facebook either, but it was much faster. Maybe I need to see how well product pages would do on LinkedIn.

thrillgore 12y ago

TechCrunch has always been a rag publication. They do good articles like their recent piece on the SF rent, but the amount of useful signals are flooded by the low effort noise.

gchokov 12y ago
Absolutely. They start to look like a mass-media, trying to generate hypes and sensations, which pretty often are done in a very cheap way. And once you start and point out this in the comments below the article, they say "you don't get the irony". Okay, thank you smarts.
fixermark 12y ago
Unfortunately. TechCrunch is one of the very few media outlets that I can say I've put in my mental spamfilter. They flipped my bozo bit years ago due to the number of times their reporting on situations I'm close to has deviated breathlessly from the on-the-ground reality of the situation. I actually read and enjoyed their recent article on San Francisco housing... But the responsible thing for me to do next is to follow up via alternate information sources if I want to know more, because I can't trust TC to relay the facts without narrative distortion. They are very good storytellers who allow the crafted narrative to outstrip the reality too often for my taste.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  The TechCrunch of today is a lot different than the TechCrunch of years ago, due to the editorial shakeups.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

paganel 12y ago

> literally pushing people who know how to do social into every nook and cranny of Google. Maybe I'm missing something, but who are those people at Google? Or is this tongue-in-cheek writing? And yes, Google has missed the train on both WhatsApp (mentioned in the article) and Instagram (not mentioned).

galago 12y ago

Facebook's breakup of the big blue app into messaging and perhaps in the near future other specialty apps seems like part of the same phenomenon. Google+ is actually ahead of that curve because the Google identity is only becoming more important to their ecosystem, regardless of how one interacts with it.

bruceboughton 12y ago
Google is ahead of Facebook? Ha ha ha ha...
- MattCruikshank 12y ago
  On some things, yes, very much so. I'll just use my Facebook browser on my Facebook phone running Facebook Operating System to Facebook search for job openings where I can post my resume that I wrote in Facebook Docs, and hope the recruiter will send me a Facebook email or leave a Facebook voicemail. After that, I'll open up Facebook maps to find a take-out restaurant my friends reviewed, then I'll rent some Facebook movies my friends recommended. Or maybe I'll talk a walk, if Facebook Now says the weather is good where I am. While I'm walking, maybe I can record a video of the loons on my lake again, and post it to Facebook video. Oh, I better Facebook Keep a reminder to myself to pick up some milk. My identity was subtly integrated into each of those things.

EGreg 12y ago

I have to agree with Matt - the hitpiece article is crap and smacks of how TC gleefully wrote about Yahoo's demise every time it could a few years back.

autokad 12y ago

gotta agree more with techcrunch than a groupthink former employee from google. google+ is something people these days joke about, like that service you're forced to sign up to but nobody uses. yes, they are integrating features to collect data across their platforms, but essentially google+ as something people come to like facebook is the walking dead.

wambotron 12y ago
I haven't heard joking about G+ any more than I have about FB. FB is where you go to have your grandma and aunt write weird messages. G+ is where you go to share photography and travel logs. Sure, people do each of those things on both platforms, but g+ is in no way 'dead' or even close to it just because you don't personally use it.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  That's how dire G+'s uptake has been: people don't even care about it enough to make jokes about it.
- thescrewdriver 12y ago
  The only time I ever see G+ being used is for random geek blog posts on HN from time to time. Virtually everyone I know is on FB.
  - wambotron 12y ago
    That's the thing: the people on G+ seem to use it more as a professional networking tool (like LinkedIn without recruiter spam and more flexibility on what you post). I don't have any friends on G+, but I also don't WANT or NEED them on it. I use it to keep up on some tech stuff and look at photos. Facebook and G+, while both being "social networks," function totally differently. Whether google wanted it to be a direct competitor or not, it's just filling a different niche.

RivieraKid 12y ago

TC is mostly right. The usual motivation for making new products is to satisfy users' needs, to make their lives better. Google didn't make Google+ to give value to consumers. They made it because they feared Facebook.* Without Facebook, there would be no Google+. That's the fundamental problem – Google+ provides value only to a minority of Google users – why force it down everyone's throats? As Steve Yegge said: "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful." Google still doesn't understand social and people. Facebook is successful because it feeds on (or exploits?) specific psychological needs. Technology and user interface are secondary factors. * To be more specific, I think that the #1 reason they've built Google+ was to extract friend lists (social graph), because they've thought that this data can improve their other products. Their line of thinking was "If Facebook has social data and we don't, they'll be able to make a better search engine or an ad network." They've seen this as a big threat to their core business. But making a product just to exctract data is doomed to fail.

bad_user 12y ago
Facebook is successful because it is successful. Google+ can serve the same psychological needs, unfortunately it's third in a market in which Facebook and Twitter happened first.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Facebook itself was third to market in social networking, after Friendster and MySpace. The latter was heavily entrenched and very successful when Facebook started unseating it. G+ definitely suffered by coming to market after FB and Twitter, but that's not the whole of the story. More specifically, it came to market after Facebook and Twitter, without doing anything fundamentally different, better, or more useful than Facebook or Twitter. (Circles, the putative differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a solution to the standard social networking UX.) Late entrants can sometimes win; Google and Facebook were pretty far from the first movers in their respective markets. The key is that late entrants need to be significantly better than anyone who's come before them. G+ was not.

smacktoward 12y ago

> They just said that they no longer consider social to be a separate unit, but now will be potentially integrated to everything they do. How is that the same thing as giving up on social? A product that is everybody's second priority is nobody's first priority. You can see how this plays out in practice by looking at this other bit from the TC article: "One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of 'required' Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates." Assuming this is true, it tells you everything you need to know about G+'s current position in the Google portfolio: it's been demoted from something strategic, something fundamental, to an optional add-on. You can argue whether that's a good move or not (I think it is), but you can't really argue that it's not a step down. Because going from "this is part of what it means to be a Google product" to "this is something useful we'll let individual units decide whether to use or not" is definitely a step down.

garfij 12y ago
You could also argue it's the difference between "dogmatic adherence" and "strategic application". At this point G+ is already integrated into all the major components of their platform. While I agree this is a good move, I don't necessarily see it as a step down. Requiring all new products to immediately integrate could be a major speed bump in development, so I can see how if G+ is not truly needed in the product, that it makes sense to allow for not requiring it.
- shadowmint 12y ago
  Well, since 'nothing is wrong! its fine! google+ all the things' has been the dogmatic adherance for the last what? 3 years? ... you have to acknowledge that at the very least this is an admission their previous practice was stupid and harmful. ...which is a good change.
mathattack 12y ago
"One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of 'required' Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates." This is huge. I wonder if there will be less pressure for people to use it similar to Facebook.

zaidf 12y ago

There are a lot of reasons to attack TechCrunch, but their Google+ coverage isn't one of them. If you've friends at google, you know almost everything reported by TC rings true. For example, an ex YouTuber friend of mine told me a long time ago how pissed him and other YouTubers were at google+ being shoved down their throats to inflate Plus metrics.

Pxtl 12y ago
Honestly? Unifying the commenting systems was a great idea. Having every Google application sport its own commenting system is unnecessary balkanization. The problem is that Google+ came into that space from being a Facebook clone instead of being a comment platform. G+ should have been designed and built as a replacement for Disqus instead of a replacement for Facebook, and then it would've gone much better for Youtube/Blogger et al. For example, a Disqus-replacement would have obviously known that "Real names" was a terrible idea and the host of the comment thread (the Youtube page or whatnot) needs to have a lot of control over moderation.
- GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
  I think that YouTube comments have become unusable. I used to read through the comments and lol at the arguments whilst listening to music, voting various things up and down as I went. But now the comments seem to come in no order, often aren't relevant and when I've tried to vote something, the music stops and it starts taking me to another page. I've never waited to see where it's taking me mind.
- zaidf 12y ago
  Here's an example of how YouTube comments suck: if you post a video on your google+ with a comment like "hey guys watch this", that post appears as a comment on that video's page. So now you have a bunch of comments on videos saying "Just found this cool video" or "you have to watch this"...something that makes no sense to the typical viewer.
  - Pxtl 12y ago

fidotron 12y ago

I'm more embarrassed for the Xooglers and people still oblivious to the fact Google is rapidly turning into Microsoft, in the PG essay sense, with the exception that in some emerging areas they do still look dangerous. The recent FB numbers are going to have been a very nasty awakening to a lot of them. The defensiveness around any Google related criticism is utterly incredible.

minimaxir 12y ago

> Did your editor write the "walking dead" headline without reading the article? The authors of the article are both the co-head editors of TechCrunch.

danielrpa 12y ago

I don't know why some in tech community hate facebook (and thus automatically love Google+), but in my opinion Google+ had a terrible interface and nobody I know ever used it - I find Facebook much, much better (not to mention that everybody I care about is there). Despite liking Google, I find Google+ a trainwreck - it was time for Google to either get out of this business of competing with Facebook or completely revamping Google+. It seems that they chose the former.

Grue3 12y ago

I don't care if it's true or not, I want to believe. No need to rain on my parade. But most importantly, does the blog author work at Google, or has connections that are more reliable than the ones Techcrunch has? I feel like this is pretty important to know in regards to who I should believe.

leorocky 12y ago
It's a badly written article by someone who has no additional information. I have no idea how it got to the top of HN but I wouldn't be worried. I'm pretty sure Google+ is dead now in the way that Google Reader was dead for years before they finally shut it down.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Articles which portray TechCrunch in a negative light tend to get lots of upvotes. Hacker News really, really doesn't like TC for some reason.
  - leorocky 12y ago
    I remember this being the reason: http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-read-every-morning/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is...
    - 001sky 12y ago
      It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting. Ah, dont forget to label this (2008) ;D
MattCruikshank 12y ago
I used to work at Google, as stated in the last line of the article. I'm not getting any information from Googlers that isn't publicly visible.

mfish 12y ago

"What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform... Oh, okay, that makes some sense. They have created the features necessary to integrate Google+ into everything they do from now on. Makes sense. " If G+ was originally intended to be a platform, rather than a product, this would make sense. And I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but it seems to me that everything points to them wanting this to be a facebook-killing product...not a platform on which to build other things.

rbanffy 12y ago

If anyone ever read Google+ as a website like Facebook, they were getting it completely wrong. Google+'s core objective has always been to add social functionality to every Google product. Google+ is plumbing.

mpg33 12y ago
> If anyone ever read Google+ as a website like Facebook, they were getting it completely wrong. Most people do this and that isn't their fault... it's Google's.

panzerboy 12y ago

Next thing you know, they bring Google Reader back...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

MattCruikshank 12y ago

Let me be very clear: Anyone is welcome to conclude that Google+ is dead. Facebook still exists as a company. You personally don't use it. You don't like the font. Whatever... I don't think it's dead. I use Google+ every day, and I'm looking forward to more of it. But if a news site is going to make a conclusion, the arguments they use should be logical. I assert that TechCrunch's specific arguments are not good ones.

davidgerard 12y ago
Buzz users loved that too and used it every day. Until Google unceremoniously shot it through the head.
DanBlake 12y ago
Its cool you willingly use it. You are in the minority. The vast, vast, vast minority. That is why its the walking dead.
unreal37 12y ago
You're awfully upset about this. Why is that? You used to work at Google. Were you on the Google+ team?
- MattCruikshank 12y ago
  I'm okay with people believing G+ is dead if they want to. But this is a news article concluding G+ is dead, based on stated arguments. Except the arguments are lousy. Lousy journalism is bad for everyone.

gwern 12y ago

On MR the other day I saw a good post mention that one way to look at an argument is to see whether the author is taking the attitude 'can I believe this?' or 'must I believe this?' It's clear OP is the latter.

ajsharp 12y ago

While I may agree with the sentiment, this meta-piece is just as speculative (moreso, actually) than the original TC piece.

stutsmansoft 12y ago

Am I wrong for hoping TechCrunch is right? I feel like any interaction I have with Google services, I'm defending myself against getting an unwanted G+ account.

_pmf_ 12y ago

> They just said that they no longer consider social to be a separate unit, but now will be potentially integrated to everything they do. Considering that being integrated into everything was one of the core problems of Google+, I fail to see how this is a smart move.

Twirrim 12y ago

People actually expect decent journalism from Techcrunch? Huh. They've been barely keeping it above the gutter several for years.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

Perhaps relevant: the Silicon Valley drama reminds me of the TV show "Peyton Place" that was on when I was a teenager. I try to limit my time reading the news (and then a sample of international news) and TV, but this drama fills in the need to waste a little time on melodrama.

snowwrestler 12y ago

If Google Plus is now just going to be shorthand for social features and data integration, then it seems to me that "Google Plus" s basically dead. Because you don't need a product name and a product team for social features and data integration. Those are just things that anyone includes when building products these days. On any other web platform this set of functionality is just called having an account. For example Amazon has had social features (reviews and forums) and data integration for years, but they did not call it Amazon Plus. It's just part of the service. Likewise, I expect Google to just start talking about Google Accounts eventually. It's already sort of tortured to force Google Plus nomenclature into everything, like managing brand YouTube channels for instance. And, behind all of this, I think companies are realizing that social graph data is not as valuable as they once thought it was, because it's constructed self-consciously. We all make decisions about friend requests carefully now. It's become so fraught with stress that people are now flocking to anonymous social tools. I can tell you that my relationships embodied on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter, etc do NOT accurately reflect the real-life state of my social relationships. And I bet the same is true for you.

001sky 12y ago
Those are just things that anyone includes when building products these days. --Exactly

dkrich 12y ago

From "Trust Me I'm Lying": "When you see "We're hearing reports" know that reports could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message board posts, or worse. When you see "Sources tell us..." know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention. When you see "which means" or "meaning that" or "will result in" or any other kind of interpretation or analysis know that the blogger who did it likely has absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly, wildly off the mark, because there aren't any consequences." That unattributed sources are cited no fewer than ten times in this post is laughable. Yet people still read TechCrunch because it's not exciting to admit that "we don't really have any clue what is going on because we don't work at Google and have to rely on some flimsy sources."

akennberg 12y ago

2010: > Schmidt: Our view of social is a little different than what everyone has been writing. we want our core products to get better from social information. > We are trying to add a social component [to google's core products] to make them even better. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-social-layer-emerge/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-socia...

001sky 12y ago

This is a useful piece of writing. Underlying it, however, is some kind of strange "status anxiety" that is all-to-prevalent in Silicon Valley. Nobody wants to be given the "scarlet letter" of failure ("G+"!) on their resume...? Understandable. Its also understandable to be ~annoyed when the media circus feels the need to pontificate on the "family politics" of any large/insular organization. That being said, the majority of the points here don't seem to be controversial enough (on either side) to get too worked up over. At a Macro-level, G+ had a big narrative of power-accretion and increasing centrality (for several years). This is now being un-wound. Whether you want to call that: (1) Failure; (2) engineered obsolescence; or (3) success! seems to matter less than the underlying story remains the same. Where power/influence (and hence: status) was once accreting to a brand (G+) it is now dissapating. This is such a non-event, that it should just be considered like any other documentary on the Discovery Channel. It has been highly edited for our viewing/entertainment pleasure, but at the of the day...on the african savanna...life & death go on hand in hand for predator and prey...some times its ugly and messy...but it is just the nature of the 'circle of life'.