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I've found the G+ interface to be mostly unusable, so there's no way I would use it for anything serious.

by Retra 11y ago

ajkjk 11y ago
Same here. Regardless of how sensible their model was, I couldn't find a way to get myself to be willing to spend time on their UI. It was just bad. With something like Facebook rises up from being unknown, its UI was pretty much vouched for early on (otherwise someone else would have won out). Google didn't have to survive competition. They just picked a UI, and I'm sure they followed lots of good UI principles and had lots of experts, but it was completely unappealing. They also forced everything to integrate with G+ in really useless ways, which made me dislike it before even trying it. It didn't have any material problem in my life that it solved that would have made me put up with the UI. FB did: it was required for mainstream society, and it let me message my friends and others easily on the computer.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I believe the issues were more in terms of not being able to stage/market the product appropriately... If "Google+" was first an initiative to create a universal single sign-on across all their own product lines (OAuth/OpenID), to better unify "profiles" which they did some of but didn't push it... and allowed the individual communities to continue to grow on their own (YouTube, their Blog thing, etc)... actually kept reader and extended with their own comment system etc. By going that route, they could have made your "Google+ Profile" the center of your presence/contacts for the different social hubs. In the end, this is what happened anyway, at the cost of cannibalizing a few products, and alienating others, instead of doing the profile first, then offering "follows" across the sub-communities in a single interface later. I think google's engineers are/were skilled enough to go this route, which would have been less "pure" architecturally, but more organic and better received.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    I'm also still pissed that I can't have "tracker1" for my Google+ profile URL.. my old google profile was "tracker1" and half the first two pages of results on google search for "tracker1" are references to me.

I've found the G+ interface to be mostly unusable, so there's no way I would use it for anything serious.

by Retra 11y ago

I've found the G+ interface to be mostly unusable, so there's no way I would use it for anything serious.

ajkjk 11y ago

Same here. Regardless of how sensible their model was, I couldn't find a way to get myself to be willing to spend time on their UI. It was just bad. With something like Facebook rises up from being unknown, its UI was pretty much vouched for early on (otherwise someone else would have won out). Google didn't have to survive competition. They just picked a UI, and I'm sure they followed lots of good UI principles and had lots of experts, but it was completely unappealing. They also forced everything to integrate with G+ in really useless ways, which made me dislike it before even trying it. It didn't have any material problem in my life that it solved that would have made me put up with the UI. FB did: it was required for mainstream society, and it let me message my friends and others easily on the computer.

tracker1 11y ago
I believe the issues were more in terms of not being able to stage/market the product appropriately... If "Google+" was first an initiative to create a universal single sign-on across all their own product lines (OAuth/OpenID), to better unify "profiles" which they did some of but didn't push it... and allowed the individual communities to continue to grow on their own (YouTube, their Blog thing, etc)... actually kept reader and extended with their own comment system etc. By going that route, they could have made your "Google+ Profile" the center of your presence/contacts for the different social hubs. In the end, this is what happened anyway, at the cost of cannibalizing a few products, and alienating others, instead of doing the profile first, then offering "follows" across the sub-communities in a single interface later. I think google's engineers are/were skilled enough to go this route, which would have been less "pure" architecturally, but more organic and better received.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I'm also still pissed that I can't have "tracker1" for my Google+ profile URL.. my old google profile was "tracker1" and half the first two pages of results on google search for "tracker1" are references to me.