6 ms·

I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform, and back to standalone solutions similar to thei

I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform, and back to standalone solutions similar to their offerings from the pre-Google+ days. A bit off-topic: I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that. Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!"). Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.

aaron-lebo 11y ago
What are some of the parts of G+ that you particularly like?
- aesthetics1 11y ago
  Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other. Even if I can't answer the phone (in a meeting, didn't hear it go off) she can take a look and see where I am. Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out. Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory. Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.
  - chime 11y ago
    > Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other... iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.
    - erichurkman 11y ago
      And the 'notify me when…' feature is pretty handy for departure times from work or school.
  - rconti 11y ago
    IMO, hangouts is infuriatingly bad. It's way too keystroke-intensive to sign in and sign out of accounts in the iOS app; the Chrome app (plugin?) thing is terrible and the functionality seems to change every other week. I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.
  - sorenjan 11y ago
    Looks like location sharing is being moved from Google+ soon too [1], and the auto awesome features in Google+ photos are still available in Google Photos. I use Google+ mainly to share photos, they're already there backed up from my phone, so it's convenient. [1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-play-services-v7-8-makes-significant-progress-on-new-location-sharing-feature-improves-smart-lock-features-and-more/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-...
  - georgemcbay 11y ago
    Like a lot of things that wound up clumsily rolled into Google+ location sharing actually existed pre-Google+ in the form of Latitude (which came out of Dodgeball originally). And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    I find circles very hard to understand compared to Facebook's "friendship model". If I add you as a friend and you accept, you can see my entire profile, and interact with it and I can the same with yours. Very straight forward. If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?
serve_yay 11y ago
The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit. This is what I find so irritating about Google+, it's everywhere it doesn't need to be. Comparisons to things like Twitter and FB fall flat for this reason.
- jlebar 11y ago
  I'm not excusing this -- it annoys me too -- but you can set up a user style [1] to hide this element. [1] e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
  - micampe 11y ago
    I did that for a while to hide the random “notifications” from people I had never heard about that appeared every other day on google.com. I had to change the custom style so many times because they changed the ids/classes every other week that now I just logged out of my Google account to not see it.
    - aiiane 11y ago
      There's a better way now. Click the notifications bell and then in the popup, click on the gear icon - you can check and uncheck boxes to customize which Google products show notifications there.
  - justicezyx 11y ago
    The comment is not about solving the problem, it is about "there are so many problems, this is one of them"...
- hobarrera 11y ago
  > The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit. I've only seen this printed in google search and google plus, not on any other website. Maybe it's an extension of yours? If it's google search you're complaining about, just log out, or use something like DDG.
pnathan 11y ago
I actually have really enjoyed the UI for G+. I think it's really a technically excellent platform that has totally failed to execute well on the userbase side.
- aesthetics1 11y ago
  I absolutely agree. If my memory serves me correctly, it was the first Google app to feature "cards" -- which has obviously made its way to almost every other IP that Google owns. The UI is slick, and it felt very fresh when it debuted.
  - ecspike 11y ago
    Your memory is correct. Lots of UI features debuted in Google+ first before hitting other Google properties.
- newscracker 11y ago
  I like the UI for G+, especially for the posts and comments. I don't like the design of the menus though. On a comparative scale, Facebook is ugly and mostly cluttered. Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.
- kaonashi 11y ago
  Perhaps if they allowed it to grow organically rather than trying to shove it down everyone's throats, it may be a different story.
tdicola 11y ago
Can they bring Google Reader back now? I'm still bitter about it being killed to focus on Google+. Now that Google+ is dead in the water it makes the decision to kill Reader even worse.
- jonursenbach 11y ago
  Why? Reader was in maintenance mode for years, and companies that appeared when it disappeared have gone above and beyond what they offered. See: Feedly.com
  - tdicola 11y ago
    Feedly has improved a lot but it still doesn't display feeds as densely as Reader did and I feel a lot slower getting through a lot of feeds. Searching for articles was fantastic on Google Reader, but with Feedly it never works. Maybe I need to pay to enable search? Ultimately search 'just worked' on Google Reader and never works for me on Feedly. If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
    - sosborn 11y ago
      > it didn't need new features or major work That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.
    - berberous 11y ago
      Do you use Feedly? Are you in "Title Only" mode? It's pretty dense -- I might be misremembering, but I'm not sure how Google could have been denser. I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
    - tw04 11y ago
      Feedly may have improved it's layout since I last tried it (admittedly it's been over a year). But, of all the companies to come up with what I found to be the best replacement: reader.aol.com I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform Way to predict the past. Google's been doing that for years; its been widely noticed since Hangouts was spun out.
vowelless 11y ago
> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!"). I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.
- aesthetics1 11y ago
  I think that's an interesting observation, and I agree. I feel that the FB posts are just as annoying and unwanted as those FW: FW: FW:... emails of yesteryear.
Lazare 11y ago
> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat. Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing. Odd.
- ectoplasm 11y ago
  That makes sense to me, once the novelty wears off, broadcasting stuff about yourself to everyone you know is not so fun.
- justuk 11y ago
  About a week ago I decide to look through all my friends' profiles and decide whether Facebook was worth keeping. It made me realise how much of their posts never made it to the wall (or whatever it's called) - bear in mind I only have about 50 people on there with a third are posting nothing. I ended up permanently deleting the account as it's just not worth it.
- newscracker 11y ago
  Apart from the privacy issues, one thing I really despise in Facebook is search. It literally sucks! Unlike Gmail, Facebook is built as a platform where information goes to die a quick death. In groups, as on web forums, a big drag is people asking the same questions again and again. Searching for information even by admins who would like to help people out is cumbersome and difficult due to the way Facebook search works (or doesn't work). I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
  - Lazare 11y ago
    Yep. I mean... We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of. ...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools. I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird. Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.

aaron-lebo 11y ago

What are some of the parts of G+ that you particularly like?

aesthetics1 11y ago
Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other. Even if I can't answer the phone (in a meeting, didn't hear it go off) she can take a look and see where I am. Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out. Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory. Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.
- chime 11y ago
  > Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other... iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.
  - erichurkman 11y ago
    And the 'notify me when…' feature is pretty handy for departure times from work or school.
- rconti 11y ago
  IMO, hangouts is infuriatingly bad. It's way too keystroke-intensive to sign in and sign out of accounts in the iOS app; the Chrome app (plugin?) thing is terrible and the functionality seems to change every other week. I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.
- sorenjan 11y ago
  Looks like location sharing is being moved from Google+ soon too [1], and the auto awesome features in Google+ photos are still available in Google Photos. I use Google+ mainly to share photos, they're already there backed up from my phone, so it's convenient. [1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-play-services-v7-8-makes-significant-progress-on-new-location-sharing-feature-improves-smart-lock-features-and-more/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-...
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  Like a lot of things that wound up clumsily rolled into Google+ location sharing actually existed pre-Google+ in the form of Latitude (which came out of Dodgeball originally). And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  I find circles very hard to understand compared to Facebook's "friendship model". If I add you as a friend and you accept, you can see my entire profile, and interact with it and I can the same with yours. Very straight forward. If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?

serve_yay 11y ago

The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit. This is what I find so irritating about Google+, it's everywhere it doesn't need to be. Comparisons to things like Twitter and FB fall flat for this reason.

jlebar 11y ago
I'm not excusing this -- it annoys me too -- but you can set up a user style [1] to hide this element. [1] e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
- micampe 11y ago
  I did that for a while to hide the random “notifications” from people I had never heard about that appeared every other day on google.com. I had to change the custom style so many times because they changed the ids/classes every other week that now I just logged out of my Google account to not see it.
  - aiiane 11y ago
    There's a better way now. Click the notifications bell and then in the popup, click on the gear icon - you can check and uncheck boxes to customize which Google products show notifications there.
- justicezyx 11y ago
  The comment is not about solving the problem, it is about "there are so many problems, this is one of them"...
hobarrera 11y ago
> The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit. I've only seen this printed in google search and google plus, not on any other website. Maybe it's an extension of yours? If it's google search you're complaining about, just log out, or use something like DDG.

pnathan 11y ago

I actually have really enjoyed the UI for G+. I think it's really a technically excellent platform that has totally failed to execute well on the userbase side.

aesthetics1 11y ago
I absolutely agree. If my memory serves me correctly, it was the first Google app to feature "cards" -- which has obviously made its way to almost every other IP that Google owns. The UI is slick, and it felt very fresh when it debuted.
- ecspike 11y ago
  Your memory is correct. Lots of UI features debuted in Google+ first before hitting other Google properties.
newscracker 11y ago
I like the UI for G+, especially for the posts and comments. I don't like the design of the menus though. On a comparative scale, Facebook is ugly and mostly cluttered. Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.
kaonashi 11y ago
Perhaps if they allowed it to grow organically rather than trying to shove it down everyone's throats, it may be a different story.

tdicola 11y ago

Can they bring Google Reader back now? I'm still bitter about it being killed to focus on Google+. Now that Google+ is dead in the water it makes the decision to kill Reader even worse.

jonursenbach 11y ago
Why? Reader was in maintenance mode for years, and companies that appeared when it disappeared have gone above and beyond what they offered. See: Feedly.com
- tdicola 11y ago
  Feedly has improved a lot but it still doesn't display feeds as densely as Reader did and I feel a lot slower getting through a lot of feeds. Searching for articles was fantastic on Google Reader, but with Feedly it never works. Maybe I need to pay to enable search? Ultimately search 'just worked' on Google Reader and never works for me on Feedly. If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
  - sosborn 11y ago
    > it didn't need new features or major work That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.
  - berberous 11y ago
    Do you use Feedly? Are you in "Title Only" mode? It's pretty dense -- I might be misremembering, but I'm not sure how Google could have been denser. I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
  - tw04 11y ago
    Feedly may have improved it's layout since I last tried it (admittedly it's been over a year). But, of all the companies to come up with what I found to be the best replacement: reader.aol.com I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform Way to predict the past. Google's been doing that for years; its been widely noticed since Hangouts was spun out.

vowelless 11y ago

> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!"). I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.

aesthetics1 11y ago
I think that's an interesting observation, and I agree. I feel that the FB posts are just as annoying and unwanted as those FW: FW: FW:... emails of yesteryear.

Lazare 11y ago

> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat. Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing. Odd.

ectoplasm 11y ago
That makes sense to me, once the novelty wears off, broadcasting stuff about yourself to everyone you know is not so fun.
justuk 11y ago
About a week ago I decide to look through all my friends' profiles and decide whether Facebook was worth keeping. It made me realise how much of their posts never made it to the wall (or whatever it's called) - bear in mind I only have about 50 people on there with a third are posting nothing. I ended up permanently deleting the account as it's just not worth it.
newscracker 11y ago
Apart from the privacy issues, one thing I really despise in Facebook is search. It literally sucks! Unlike Gmail, Facebook is built as a platform where information goes to die a quick death. In groups, as on web forums, a big drag is people asking the same questions again and again. Searching for information even by admins who would like to help people out is cumbersome and difficult due to the way Facebook search works (or doesn't work). I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
- Lazare 11y ago
  Yep. I mean... We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of. ...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools. I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird. Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.