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Using Google without a Google+ profile

589 points by davidcgl 11y ago

try_sincerely 11y ago
"When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. " Why can't they for once be honest and say something like: "We wanted to get on the social network train, it did not work out". Just without these corporate lies about "connecting people"
- reagency 11y ago
  Does "social network" mean anything more than the other buzzwords you derided?
- Mahn 11y ago
  That's not how PR speak works :) And to be fair, Google+ does have a few million users doing their thing there, it won't be displacing Facebook anytime soon but it's not entirely dead weight for them, so whether it worked out or not is relative.
  - redwood 11y ago
    and what a liability those few million are now because they can't get rid of this thing without giving them a way out
danso 11y ago
The OP links to a corresponding YouTube blog post with more specifics about how the G+ rollback affects the YouTube service (as of today, YouTube comments will only show up on YouTube, and not on G+, and vice-versa): http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.... It also mentions improvements to the ranking system "that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube."...Is there a whitepaper or engineering blog post about their technical approach to this?
- djent 11y ago
  Ever since they integrated G+ with YouTube comments, I thought that the comment dislike button was just a placebo. I've never actually seen the score of a comment go down upon it being pressed. Has it actually been working the whole time?
thachmai 11y ago
Goodbye Google+. We hardly knew you.
colbyh 11y ago
Though not the end of G+, hopefully it will be the end of G+ as we know it. From day one G+ should have simply been a social mesh between the many (very) popular Google properties like YouTube, Play, Maps, etc. Making it a standalone application was their fatal mistake, and here's hoping Bradley can lead them towards becoming a social utility instead of a social platform.
- pjc50 11y ago
  social mesh between the many (very) popular Google properties like YouTube, Play, Maps Genuine question: what do the videos I view, the apps I install on my phone, and the locations I search for have in common? And what's "social" about any of those?
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    It's social because you get shown which pointless apps your relatives and friends installed and reviewed when you use Google Play :-)
- mcv 11y ago
  WTF? It's the exact opposite. Google+ as a standalone social network is fine. In fact, it's fantastic; far better and more usable than Facebook or Twitter. It's the integration with all the other stuff that's turning it into a mess.
bonaldi 11y ago
It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time. The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down. Kudos to them, but a lot of pain could have been avoided if they did all this listening back then, instead of waiting until their thing was clearly dead.
- beambot 11y ago
  Grumble grumble... Google Reader... grumble.
  - uniformlyrandom 11y ago
    The only social network from Google that had a chance... before they killed it off.
    - mkozlows 11y ago
      Google Reader never had many users. Feedly claims to have captured 80% of the Reader userbase when it shut down, and they have 15 million users. That is incredibly small by the standards of social networks, much smaller than even the pessimistic active-user estimates for G+.
      - lvs 11y ago
        Feedly probably isn't claiming those numbers with any basis in reality. In particular, many people made Feedly accounts in a hurry out of panic when the shutdown was announced. Having used both, I highly doubt users of Reader are still regular users of Feedly.
        deegles 11y ago
        I'm a former Reader user and now use Feedly. What do you use that's better than Feedly? I settled on it since it was "good enough" but I haven't invested the time to explore other options.
acqq 11y ago
Nice to read this, especially as I was quite annoyed with the "new" contacts management which gmail gives. It appears it tries to "combine" the email addresses you have to the same "person" entry not even allowing you to have two entries for the two addresses, no, they know the addresses belong to the same person and they won't let you. And all that combined with Plus. I hope that gets fixed.
amelius 11y ago
Honestly, I would be happier to use this product if it were not from Google. They already know too much.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  That's funny, because I've been thinking, "They already know so much already anyway." Probably how they were hoping/expecting people would act.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    I'm an Android user, they can already see my contacts, thus they can already deduce who I know. As someone on the internet, they can already crawl any publicly available data about me, including blog posts, tweets, forum posts, mailing list emails, and social network metadata like marital status, gender, etc. Google+, in theory, doesn't really tell them they don't already know, or can't easily figure out already, so it's purely value add.
    - theseatoms 11y ago
      Exactly my reasoning. Also an Android user. They're the most prolific internet crawlers anyway. The Pandora's box of my personal information is blown wide open (to them), so I'm just trying to contain the blast. They also have my search history, which is a better diary than I could ever purposefully write.
      - amelius 11y ago
        > so I'm just trying to contain the blast Information becomes more powerful when you connect all the dots together. Hence, it is better to divide information among services, so they all know a bit, but cannot decipher the "big picture".
    - fluidcruft 11y ago
      The difference is that Google+ seemed to go from a passive mostly private "collecting information about you so we can target ads" mode, to an intrusive "we're applying value judgments to you" and "broadcasting information about you to others" mode. It was just scary to do anything with them without researching the fuck out of every button press (and getting unclear and contradicting answers about what was going to happen). Lot's of flowery, content-less, lovey-dovey text on their landing pages explaining why you have to do XYZ and what the implications are, that then never were exactly what I understood them to be. It only takes being confused once to stop giving a shit what they are writing and never trusting them again. Whenever I read anything from them now, I always think they are sugar coating some new pain they've decided to inflict.
Zikes 11y ago
One very important change they can make on the G+ mobile app is to make the Share button open up the Share Intents menu, instead of just re-posting to my own G+ page. G+ can't very well grow without escaping its own echo chamber, can it? Let me post links to Twitter and such!
msandford 11y ago
Google's new motto: "Don't be evil, but only after trying really hard to be so, and then grudgingly accepting that perhaps your users have alternatives that they might avail themselves of, and capitulate" It's not as catchy, but perhaps a little more honest.
- chc 11y ago
  Your system of morality has an astonishingly low bar for "evil" if "requiring a Google+ account for access to a service" qualifies. I don't think something that harmless would go past "somewhat dickish" for most people. If that's evil, what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?
  - msandford 11y ago
    Is outing someone against their will and possibly ruining their life merely "somewhat dickish"? http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/ I'm not saying that annoying people by forcing G+/YT integration is evil. But presuming that an annoyance to you is an annoyance to all is faulty.
    - skj 11y ago
      There's a line to be drawn between "don't be evil" and "don't do evil". With such a huge organization, things slip through the cracks and accidents happen that result in bad things. But I find it hard to believe that Google decided to out someone.
      - pjc50 11y ago
        They were warned about the negative consequences of identity conflation, then built a system that did just that. They didn't "decide" to out someone, but they built a machine for outing people.
    - LLWM 11y ago
      No. It's not google's fault people are bigots.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
A surprisingly large number of FOSS developers (though mostly Linux developers in particular) use G+ and post interesting status updates on it. That's the extent to which I care about it.
- TillE 11y ago
  Also tabletop RPG people for some reason. It's a quick substitute for a blog, with better comment support than Tumblr.
  - mcv 11y ago
    It's the best RPG community on the internet. There's also a lot of political discussion, science/tech discussion, and it seems to be popular with photographers and various game developers. Google+ is being used by a lot of really interesting people with cool interests. The quality of content is very high. Well, it was, until Youtube got hooked into it. And all that in a very freeform manner, in a way that makes it easy to find people with similar interests. To me, it's the closest thing to usenet since usenet.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  It always felt a lot better than facebook and twitter except few outside of FOSS, certain photographers etc used it.
joeevans1000 11y ago
Thank god. However, the G+ debacle was a wake up call to the fact that at any point the use of my good ol' email account and search page could become an absolutely complicated mess, and completely out of my control.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Makes me glad in retrospect I never switched over to gmail. My email experience hasn't changed in a decade but it still works just fine and I never have to worry that some megacorporation is going to arbitrarily change it out from under me in order to better pursue their corporate goals.
helly 11y ago
To me, the UI of Google+ feels so bulky and slow. Everything seems to be out of place. It's a mystery to me, whom they are targeting. Does anybody like their UI? If so, what device are you using? What do you think of FB vs G+? I mainly use Firefox on the Desktop. And Facebook is somewhat ok. G+ feels completely out of sync.
- sidcool 11y ago
  I liked their mobile app UI. It was fluid and snazzy. The only issue was content and users.
- rayalez 11y ago
  Yes, I like their interface, design and functionality much more than I like fb. Now fb got little nicer, but a year ago it was a terrifying ugly mess. G+ is much nicer and more fun to use, in my opinion. I love circles, and communities, and how it's post can be somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.
bsimpson 11y ago
Interesting that his title is "VP Photos, Steams, and Sharing," eg, what Google+ originally tried to be.
unabst 11y ago
Many entrepreneurs should find this outcome encouraging. No, Google can't just steal your idea even with the full working product before them. Ironically, android was the best heist job from Apple, but it's success is arguably due to market factors, not product competition (they filled the market void Apple refused to sell to, and when directly competing they seem to still lose, like in China).
nogridbag 11y ago
I find it incredibly amusing and also very frustrating that all the top comments to this article are simply G+ re-shares that add absolutely no value to the comments section and simply more garbage the reader has to sift through in order to view legit comments. >>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that >>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable >>[another summary of the article I just read] This is also one of my major complaints with youtube. I find it hard enough just to follow a single youtube comment thread because: 1. Everyone appears to be speaking a dialect of english that is understandable seemingly to everyone but myself - some sort of strange mixture of 90's IRC speak with some klingon thrown in. 2. People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username. John Smith: That was a great video > Jane Smith: +Bubba I agree me: "who the heck is Jane talking to?" 3. Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares: John Smith: Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289 http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289 > John Smith's friend: I enjoyed that video </rant>
- Pxtl 11y ago
  > People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username. To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Maybe that's part of the reason I can never figure out what's going on when I follow someone's link to a conversation on Twitter.
    - smtddr 11y ago
      This is the bane of my existence when it comes to Twitter. Why are you even allowed to have 2 names anyway? The real one(the one in your url,.e.g. twitter.com/<realacctname>) and that $WHATEVER_STRING_YOU_WANT username? Idea, someone make an extension/greasemonkey that replaces all the free-form usernames with the actual account name so I can follow conversations without having to deal with all the mental bookkeeping of 2 names per user in conversational thread.
frik 11y ago
Hopefully they decouple G+ from Youtube for everyone. The G+ comments are somewhat unhelpful below a Youtube video. Before there were always discussions with answers, nowadays you see mainly "check out this video my friends on G+" kind of "trash" in the video comments.
dimbirol 11y ago
Using the google sign-up process was one of the most infuriating things and definitely one of my worst UI/UX experiences. In order to create a consistent online profile, it's ideal to choose a name which is available on all major social networks. Google is just not capable of offering a service like that: You can't check in advance if a given g+ or youtube name is available. If you sign up for a gmail-account, the new account newname@gmail.com doesn't mean you get youtube.com/newname or plus.google.com/+newname. A custom youtube name oddly gets created at /c/username and not youtube.com/username and I somehow had to switch profiles (I think between my youtube account, for which I signed up using my gmail-account and my g+-profile which was created when signing up for gmail?!) while logged in into youtube to make changes which was extremely confusing. Getting a custom g+url is even more difficult, as google adds some patronizing and suggests a name, which can not be edited. Why is it not possible to register a consistent name accross all google products with 1 signup process: a gmail-account, a youtube username, a g+ account? Creating a new page or signing up at any other social media site maybe takes 5 minutes, the "Google experience" took 1 afternoon (!) with not the desired result.
- wyclif 11y ago
  I agree this was a major problem, I have been using G+ off and on since the very beginning. It was annoying that I could not select an available username instead of the one Google thought I should use, and I wasn't happy that I couldn't use /c/myusername even though I knew it was available. No consistency whatsoever in the UI/UX. It should have been a cinch to sign in on the same username across all Google services. You're also correct that this is something you'd think a company like Google would be able to execute well on. Well, you guessed wrong...
devNoise 11y ago
For all the problems Google+ had, the one that irked me the most was not being all to merge/linked Google accounts. I had a gmail account and a Google Apps for Work account. Every time I would try to associate the 2nd email, I would get "is already associated with another Google Account" as the error. Even though I deleted the Google+ account on the 2nd email. Then somehow I would created a Google+ account again. I just as soon forget about it, but I'd like to have the google voice messages go to the Google Apps for Work email.
wyclif 11y ago
What does this mean for the evolution of Google+ as a product?
- Mahn 11y ago
  It sounds like they are keeping it around, but it will no longer be a layer across all Google products, just a standalone app for those who want it (as it should be).
Pxtl 11y ago
I honestly think G+ had some great ideas, but they just bungled too much. They were much too clever with YouTube - the whole "posting to your G+ feed is the same as commenting on the video" thing was a bone-headed idea. They're different intents, they should be handled differently. Let G+ handle both of those actions, but don't call them the same action. The nymwars thing was another one - when you try to sneak new social integration through the back-door like that, with a massive existing userbase? You can't be opinionated about it. You have to accept and work with all the existing workflow, and that includes allowing pseudonyms. I liked the idea of a unified social layer... hell, unified anything in Google's sprawling service map. But G+ had too many mistakes, and broke too many promises over and over and over again.
Animats 11y ago
They mean "Using Google with a Google account but without a Google+ profile", not "Using Google without a Google account". Google pushes really hard for people to be logged into Google. Google search results pages have a whiny banner ad if you don't log into Google. (And it won't go away if you have their cookies blocked.) Incidentally, Android phones work fine with no Google account. If you buy the phone new and unlocked, click "Later" when it asks for your Google account, and delete the "Google first time activation" app, they're fine.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  It's ironic that one of the features which originally motivated my switch to Google was the way they didn't seem to care whether I got an account or not. I've almost completely stopped using any of their services now that they're so pushy about getting you to log in. This includes Android phones: I don't know why people claim that they can't be used without a Google account, because I'm on my second, I've never put any Google account credentials into either one, and they've worked just fine. Can't use the app store, but I don't care about that anyway.
legohead 11y ago
This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+. Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google. Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"? If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.
- silverbax88 11y ago
  I wish they would just get it right, and let me create different accounts for the apps I want to use. I just want a YouTube account. No Gmail. No G+. No tying my adwords account to anything else unless I request it. This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.
  - colinbartlett 11y ago
    But we all know why they forced the unification of these accounts. So they can correlate our activity across services to "better serve us". (Read: serve us ads.)
    - silverbax88 11y ago
      Even if that is the goal (which is likely), it does not explain the need to force me to create accounts for applications I don't want, like Gmail. That's like going to a car dealership, buying a sedan and the dealership forces you to take five crates of crab apples with you at gunpoint.
dimbirol 11y ago
Why is this not a Google+-post?! Why should we use it if even google isn't using it? But maybe they tried signing up but failed getting a custom G+-url. We see that you registered google@gmail.com, but we can't let you use google.com/+google, why don't you use google.com/+google1425 and youtube.com/c/12868126nvesfz1761, which you can change to youtube.com/c/google6823_xw once you reach 500 subscribers.
- balladeer 11y ago
  Yes. This is exactly where I had kinda foresaw G+ was going down, either today or some other day in near future.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
onedev 11y ago
I'm so happy right now....and I don't even comment on YouTube. Quite irrational but hey, it is what it is.
pcx 11y ago
I guess, it is very important for a good company to learn. Great that they are setting an example. Google and MS fighting with renewed energy is great for our industry and sets a good example.
potency 11y ago
Finally! I've been shutting down the daily popup to convert my YouTube account into a Google+ Page for years. I had a feeling if I waited long enough, they'd stop asking. Hurray!
ori_b 11y ago
In other words: "Same as before, but you can opt out of the G+ feed."
gardnr 11y ago
I just tried to leave a comment on that blog post to commend them for finally listening to their users. I was prompted to "Upgrade to Google+" to leave a comment. >_<
rayalez 11y ago
I actually love g+ and was always rooting for it. Too bad it received so much hate for youtube commenting system and mandatory accounts and such. I always hoped people will turn around and switch to g+ - functionality and interface are so much nicer than in fb. I hate facebook and can't use it, but g+ is really nice, and has all the best features of fb/twitter/tumblr. I'm still rooting for it. This sounds like a sensible decision though.
a3n 11y ago
I'm not even sure I have a G+ profile, things were so confusing during the Name Wars (at which point I all but abaonded my G+).
balladeer 11y ago
It was with such extreme frustration that I had deleted everything on my Google+ profile after trying for 30 minutes to get the G+ URL of either <my first name>, or my <last name>, <or may first + last name>, or <part of my first name>. I stopped using it, made everything private - what I couldn't remove (at that time). All were available. Close to 2, or at least more than 1 year later - all those URLs are still available. But no, Google still thinks I must add a digit or two to that URL. I had forgotten that I have a G+ profile. I don't know anyone who uses this. I mean I don't know about others but why would I even want to use such a tool that is this effed up. While some might defend or even be kinder to G+ (well...) but I personally just can't accept a service this broken.
mangeletti 11y ago
I've been confused about Google+ for the longest time, wondering what reason there was for Google+ to exist in the first place, other than the (perceived) low cost of getting users (via marketing on their search page). What new value does Google+ add? Does anybody sign up for Google+ for reasons other than 1) Google Hangouts, or 2) accident? How is Google+ "quickly becoming a place where people engage..." and yet I don't know anybody who uses it? Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't really actively engage with people on Facebook, but everybody I know uses Facebook in some capacity and people talk about it from time to time. I've never heard a single person in my life talk about Google+, other than, "I think you have to have a Google+ account to..." (e.g., Hangouts).
- dannyr 11y ago
  Believe it or not, there's a lot of activity in my feed on Google+. Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't watch big Bang Theory and I don't know who does but it's been on for 7 seasons and their cast is the highest paid on TV.
  - mangeletti 11y ago
    Good point (re: Big Bang theory), and also I thought that show just came out last year... proves the point even more.
joesmo 11y ago
It's about time, though mostly for Google's sake. I personally don't care if I can't review apps or create YouTube channels or do anything that requires Google+ as the features that have required it are mostly useless or I have found alternatives. It is annoying that I would even be asked to review apps constantly, however, when I'm not signed up for the idiotic Google+. I actually wouldn't mind reviewing some apps, but not at the expense of having to start Google+. The Google+ fiasco has mainly hurt Google itself by making them lose all their customers who didn't sign up for Google+ from such features as well as the unfortunate developers who rely on good app ratings that they won't get now because Google essentially put up a nasty firewall around that system. Then again, there's nothing new about Google or Apple pushing its own woes onto developers, so I assume mobile developers have made their peace with the tactics of their industry.
realusername 11y ago
Can we talk a bit about Google Groups also ? Dear Google, please do something about Google groups... It's just unusable. Everytime I see a Google groups link I just don't click. The contrast is horrible, the padding is making 3/4 of the screen useless, it takes forever to load, when you click on something it's lagging again... And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something about it...
- arto 11y ago
  > And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something about it... This probably has to do with the ease of setting up or subscribing to a mailing list with Google Groups, even despite how its usability has devolved. There aren't any free mailing-list services that are as easy to get up and running with--partly, of course, because almost everyone already has a Google account, making it trivial to join a group. Still waiting for somebody to create a good mailing-list service based on "subscribe with GitHub" (i.e., OAuth) to take this all away from Google and crappy self-hosted Mailman both.
  - reagency 11y ago
    Yahoo Groups is still very popular.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tdkl 11y ago
Awesome. I had to re-enable the G+ account to add new Favorites on Youtube.
daxfohl 11y ago
git checkout master git merge --no-ff plus
eecks 11y ago
Finally!!
ytdht 11y ago
Maybe the government should split Youtube from Google and then Google+ would not be an issue... (maybe other services should stand on their own also)
ryandreming 11y ago
pretty sure that's what YouTube's founder was alluding to recently: http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080630/youtube-co-founder-wonders-why-the-fuck-comments-require-a-google http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080630/youtube-co-founder... they should've just listened to him
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  A couple of years ago. Not quite "recent". But yes.
faragon 11y ago
I stopped commenting/voting on YouTube since the mandatory G+ thing. I hope Google think it twice before playing that hard again.
zurn 11y ago
Does this mean privacy conscious people will be able to vote in the Android store?
amit_m 11y ago
Opening paragraph, the honest version: "When we launched Google+, we were scared of Facebook winning over the internet and knew how powerful the network effect is. So we decided on a douchebag move - abuse all of our monopolistic powers and superior engineering in order to shove a Facebook killer down our users' throat at maximum speed, integrating it with each and every google service in existence (whether it made any sense or not) and killing social features that actually work in exchange to experimental G+ social features that might work eventually. According to our analytics, it didn't work, so... Never mind."
rlu 11y ago
great so can I login with my youtube account now? I don't think I ever migrated it to a Google account (despite being asked to like a million times - would always say "later") and now I have no idea how to login to it.
pessimizer 11y ago
This is a great step. Now if they could just un-shit the Google Maps UI, they could approach the excellent usability of the Google of 5 years ago.
cmurf 11y ago
The part of Google+ I didn't like was certain compulsory behaviors that seemed to have nothing to do with Google+ itself. And I see those same problems still in Hangouts. For example, this completely batshit idea in Gmail, when I click on Hangouts Conversation icon (middle icon bottom left), and then click on the magnifying glass to search, type in "mom" and this fucking goddamn piece of shit displays everyone's mom and not my mom. Why the fuckballs would this thing show results of people I don't know, have no way of knowing, don't know any of the people they know, and yet not my own mom? At least give priority to my contacts? Shit like that, added with, you have to accept it mentality. It's what gets people deranged and they want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So this blog entry just demonstrates to me they don't get it still. Edit: Yes my mom is "mom" in my contacts. When I type in my sister's name, it does the same crap, it shows me everybody else with the same first name as my sister, but not my sister. WTF?
mentaat 11y ago
I love Google+ and am rooting for it. To me its a great mix of Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. What really hurt g+ was three things. First it became bloated with features which confused the average user. Second was the aggressive push by some at google (Vic?) esp. with youtube comment integration. This totally backfired with media and YT stars who were dragged kicking and screaming. And third, failure to consolidate multiple g+ profiles for people who have multiple google accounts. I've 6 g+ profiles but only use one. When someone wants to add me they search my name and are not sure which person to add. This is such a basic failure in user experience that I don't even know why g+ was launched without first anticipating and addressing this problem..smh
peeters 11y ago
Looks like they finally realized that Youtube comment sections are still an absolute cesspit, despite the real name policy.
isarat 11y ago
Plus will have lot of potential if they move away to make it as n identity service and a social network. They should invest more to create something similar to Google Now to streamline Google products experience.
friendzis 11y ago
> we’re well underway putting location sharing into Hangouts You can already share location on Hangouts, but it is deeply broken. Or do they mean "bring back Latitude"? Not long ago I had experience where I had to meet online friend, we were on the same route, just different directions. It all went like sharing our current location every 5 minutes (with increasing frequency towards meeting point) and still managed to miss each other, because "you said your car was grey, but its silver!". Live location sharing is necessary for many workflows and there are tons of apps for that with disputable trustworthiness.
imellyse 11y ago
Well, this is a right step. But I put question mark on the startegist of Google products they initiate step and move backward again and again. Google is only alive due to Google search engine it self. It's my opinion. Otherwise the way Google introduce things and all the time they are facing negative feedback on their new products. Buzz, Orkut, Google Glass (not that much penetrate in market) Hope Google will get some awesome minds now.
Aoyagi 11y ago
So these two [1][2] popular videos aren't actual any more, huh. Isn't Google one of the companies that keep talking about how they listen to the users? Does anyone at all believe them, or Microsoft for that matter, that they do such a thing? [1]https://youtu.be/ymkA1N3oFwg https://youtu.be/ymkA1N3oFwg [2]https://youtu.be/LTq8TrA3hb4 https://youtu.be/LTq8TrA3hb4
ironoxide859 11y ago
Google + murdered the Blogger community when it expected us to migrate there while at the same time forgoing our followers widget and Google Reader to keep in contact with others. As such, I've deleted my old Google + profile and started over with a new one. I enjoy sharing on the internet, but too many fragments tied together paints a picture of me I don't want to share.
rasz_pl 11y ago
cool story bro, but I still cant comment, clicking on text box pops up "what name do you want for your shiny new G+ profile?"

589 points by davidcgl 11y ago

"When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. " Why can't they for once be honest and say something like: "We wanted to get on the social network train, it did not work out". Just without these corporate lies about "connecting people"

reagency 11y ago
Does "social network" mean anything more than the other buzzwords you derided?
Mahn 11y ago
That's not how PR speak works :) And to be fair, Google+ does have a few million users doing their thing there, it won't be displacing Facebook anytime soon but it's not entirely dead weight for them, so whether it worked out or not is relative.
- redwood 11y ago
  and what a liability those few million are now because they can't get rid of this thing without giving them a way out

danso 11y ago

The OP links to a corresponding YouTube blog post with more specifics about how the G+ rollback affects the YouTube service (as of today, YouTube comments will only show up on YouTube, and not on G+, and vice-versa): http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.... It also mentions improvements to the ranking system "that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube."...Is there a whitepaper or engineering blog post about their technical approach to this?

djent 11y ago
Ever since they integrated G+ with YouTube comments, I thought that the comment dislike button was just a placebo. I've never actually seen the score of a comment go down upon it being pressed. Has it actually been working the whole time?

thachmai 11y ago

Goodbye Google+. We hardly knew you.

colbyh 11y ago

Though not the end of G+, hopefully it will be the end of G+ as we know it. From day one G+ should have simply been a social mesh between the many (very) popular Google properties like YouTube, Play, Maps, etc. Making it a standalone application was their fatal mistake, and here's hoping Bradley can lead them towards becoming a social utility instead of a social platform.

pjc50 11y ago
social mesh between the many (very) popular Google properties like YouTube, Play, Maps Genuine question: what do the videos I view, the apps I install on my phone, and the locations I search for have in common? And what's "social" about any of those?
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  It's social because you get shown which pointless apps your relatives and friends installed and reviewed when you use Google Play :-)
mcv 11y ago
WTF? It's the exact opposite. Google+ as a standalone social network is fine. In fact, it's fantastic; far better and more usable than Facebook or Twitter. It's the integration with all the other stuff that's turning it into a mess.

bonaldi 11y ago

It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time. The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down. Kudos to them, but a lot of pain could have been avoided if they did all this listening back then, instead of waiting until their thing was clearly dead.

beambot 11y ago
Grumble grumble... Google Reader... grumble.
- uniformlyrandom 11y ago
  The only social network from Google that had a chance... before they killed it off.
  - mkozlows 11y ago
    Google Reader never had many users. Feedly claims to have captured 80% of the Reader userbase when it shut down, and they have 15 million users. That is incredibly small by the standards of social networks, much smaller than even the pessimistic active-user estimates for G+.
    - lvs 11y ago
      Feedly probably isn't claiming those numbers with any basis in reality. In particular, many people made Feedly accounts in a hurry out of panic when the shutdown was announced. Having used both, I highly doubt users of Reader are still regular users of Feedly.
      - deegles 11y ago
        I'm a former Reader user and now use Feedly. What do you use that's better than Feedly? I settled on it since it was "good enough" but I haven't invested the time to explore other options.

acqq 11y ago

Nice to read this, especially as I was quite annoyed with the "new" contacts management which gmail gives. It appears it tries to "combine" the email addresses you have to the same "person" entry not even allowing you to have two entries for the two addresses, no, they know the addresses belong to the same person and they won't let you. And all that combined with Plus. I hope that gets fixed.

amelius 11y ago

Honestly, I would be happier to use this product if it were not from Google. They already know too much.

theseatoms 11y ago
That's funny, because I've been thinking, "They already know so much already anyway." Probably how they were hoping/expecting people would act.
- Zikes 11y ago
  I'm an Android user, they can already see my contacts, thus they can already deduce who I know. As someone on the internet, they can already crawl any publicly available data about me, including blog posts, tweets, forum posts, mailing list emails, and social network metadata like marital status, gender, etc. Google+, in theory, doesn't really tell them they don't already know, or can't easily figure out already, so it's purely value add.
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    Exactly my reasoning. Also an Android user. They're the most prolific internet crawlers anyway. The Pandora's box of my personal information is blown wide open (to them), so I'm just trying to contain the blast. They also have my search history, which is a better diary than I could ever purposefully write.
    - amelius 11y ago
      > so I'm just trying to contain the blast Information becomes more powerful when you connect all the dots together. Hence, it is better to divide information among services, so they all know a bit, but cannot decipher the "big picture".
  - fluidcruft 11y ago
    The difference is that Google+ seemed to go from a passive mostly private "collecting information about you so we can target ads" mode, to an intrusive "we're applying value judgments to you" and "broadcasting information about you to others" mode. It was just scary to do anything with them without researching the fuck out of every button press (and getting unclear and contradicting answers about what was going to happen). Lot's of flowery, content-less, lovey-dovey text on their landing pages explaining why you have to do XYZ and what the implications are, that then never were exactly what I understood them to be. It only takes being confused once to stop giving a shit what they are writing and never trusting them again. Whenever I read anything from them now, I always think they are sugar coating some new pain they've decided to inflict.

Zikes 11y ago

One very important change they can make on the G+ mobile app is to make the Share button open up the Share Intents menu, instead of just re-posting to my own G+ page. G+ can't very well grow without escaping its own echo chamber, can it? Let me post links to Twitter and such!

msandford 11y ago

Google's new motto: "Don't be evil, but only after trying really hard to be so, and then grudgingly accepting that perhaps your users have alternatives that they might avail themselves of, and capitulate" It's not as catchy, but perhaps a little more honest.

chc 11y ago
Your system of morality has an astonishingly low bar for "evil" if "requiring a Google+ account for access to a service" qualifies. I don't think something that harmless would go past "somewhat dickish" for most people. If that's evil, what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?
- msandford 11y ago
  Is outing someone against their will and possibly ruining their life merely "somewhat dickish"? http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/ I'm not saying that annoying people by forcing G+/YT integration is evil. But presuming that an annoyance to you is an annoyance to all is faulty.
  - skj 11y ago
    There's a line to be drawn between "don't be evil" and "don't do evil". With such a huge organization, things slip through the cracks and accidents happen that result in bad things. But I find it hard to believe that Google decided to out someone.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      They were warned about the negative consequences of identity conflation, then built a system that did just that. They didn't "decide" to out someone, but they built a machine for outing people.
  - LLWM 11y ago
    No. It's not google's fault people are bigots.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

A surprisingly large number of FOSS developers (though mostly Linux developers in particular) use G+ and post interesting status updates on it. That's the extent to which I care about it.

TillE 11y ago
Also tabletop RPG people for some reason. It's a quick substitute for a blog, with better comment support than Tumblr.
- mcv 11y ago
  It's the best RPG community on the internet. There's also a lot of political discussion, science/tech discussion, and it seems to be popular with photographers and various game developers. Google+ is being used by a lot of really interesting people with cool interests. The quality of content is very high. Well, it was, until Youtube got hooked into it. And all that in a very freeform manner, in a way that makes it easy to find people with similar interests. To me, it's the closest thing to usenet since usenet.
reitanqild 11y ago
It always felt a lot better than facebook and twitter except few outside of FOSS, certain photographers etc used it.

joeevans1000 11y ago

Thank god. However, the G+ debacle was a wake up call to the fact that at any point the use of my good ol' email account and search page could become an absolutely complicated mess, and completely out of my control.

marssaxman 11y ago
Makes me glad in retrospect I never switched over to gmail. My email experience hasn't changed in a decade but it still works just fine and I never have to worry that some megacorporation is going to arbitrarily change it out from under me in order to better pursue their corporate goals.

helly 11y ago

To me, the UI of Google+ feels so bulky and slow. Everything seems to be out of place. It's a mystery to me, whom they are targeting. Does anybody like their UI? If so, what device are you using? What do you think of FB vs G+? I mainly use Firefox on the Desktop. And Facebook is somewhat ok. G+ feels completely out of sync.

sidcool 11y ago
I liked their mobile app UI. It was fluid and snazzy. The only issue was content and users.
rayalez 11y ago
Yes, I like their interface, design and functionality much more than I like fb. Now fb got little nicer, but a year ago it was a terrifying ugly mess. G+ is much nicer and more fun to use, in my opinion. I love circles, and communities, and how it's post can be somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.

bsimpson 11y ago

Interesting that his title is "VP Photos, Steams, and Sharing," eg, what Google+ originally tried to be.

unabst 11y ago

Many entrepreneurs should find this outcome encouraging. No, Google can't just steal your idea even with the full working product before them. Ironically, android was the best heist job from Apple, but it's success is arguably due to market factors, not product competition (they filled the market void Apple refused to sell to, and when directly competing they seem to still lose, like in China).

nogridbag 11y ago

I find it incredibly amusing and also very frustrating that all the top comments to this article are simply G+ re-shares that add absolutely no value to the comments section and simply more garbage the reader has to sift through in order to view legit comments. >>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that >>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable >>[another summary of the article I just read] This is also one of my major complaints with youtube. I find it hard enough just to follow a single youtube comment thread because: 1. Everyone appears to be speaking a dialect of english that is understandable seemingly to everyone but myself - some sort of strange mixture of 90's IRC speak with some klingon thrown in. 2. People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username. John Smith: That was a great video > Jane Smith: +Bubba I agree me: "who the heck is Jane talking to?" 3. Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares: John Smith: Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289 http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289 > John Smith's friend: I enjoyed that video </rant>

Pxtl 11y ago
> People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username. To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Maybe that's part of the reason I can never figure out what's going on when I follow someone's link to a conversation on Twitter.
  - smtddr 11y ago
    This is the bane of my existence when it comes to Twitter. Why are you even allowed to have 2 names anyway? The real one(the one in your url,.e.g. twitter.com/<realacctname>) and that $WHATEVER_STRING_YOU_WANT username? Idea, someone make an extension/greasemonkey that replaces all the free-form usernames with the actual account name so I can follow conversations without having to deal with all the mental bookkeeping of 2 names per user in conversational thread.

frik 11y ago

Hopefully they decouple G+ from Youtube for everyone. The G+ comments are somewhat unhelpful below a Youtube video. Before there were always discussions with answers, nowadays you see mainly "check out this video my friends on G+" kind of "trash" in the video comments.

dimbirol 11y ago

Using the google sign-up process was one of the most infuriating things and definitely one of my worst UI/UX experiences. In order to create a consistent online profile, it's ideal to choose a name which is available on all major social networks. Google is just not capable of offering a service like that: You can't check in advance if a given g+ or youtube name is available. If you sign up for a gmail-account, the new account newname@gmail.com doesn't mean you get youtube.com/newname or plus.google.com/+newname. A custom youtube name oddly gets created at /c/username and not youtube.com/username and I somehow had to switch profiles (I think between my youtube account, for which I signed up using my gmail-account and my g+-profile which was created when signing up for gmail?!) while logged in into youtube to make changes which was extremely confusing. Getting a custom g+url is even more difficult, as google adds some patronizing and suggests a name, which can not be edited. Why is it not possible to register a consistent name accross all google products with 1 signup process: a gmail-account, a youtube username, a g+ account? Creating a new page or signing up at any other social media site maybe takes 5 minutes, the "Google experience" took 1 afternoon (!) with not the desired result.

wyclif 11y ago
I agree this was a major problem, I have been using G+ off and on since the very beginning. It was annoying that I could not select an available username instead of the one Google thought I should use, and I wasn't happy that I couldn't use /c/myusername even though I knew it was available. No consistency whatsoever in the UI/UX. It should have been a cinch to sign in on the same username across all Google services. You're also correct that this is something you'd think a company like Google would be able to execute well on. Well, you guessed wrong...

devNoise 11y ago

For all the problems Google+ had, the one that irked me the most was not being all to merge/linked Google accounts. I had a gmail account and a Google Apps for Work account. Every time I would try to associate the 2nd email, I would get "is already associated with another Google Account" as the error. Even though I deleted the Google+ account on the 2nd email. Then somehow I would created a Google+ account again. I just as soon forget about it, but I'd like to have the google voice messages go to the Google Apps for Work email.

wyclif 11y ago

What does this mean for the evolution of Google+ as a product?

Mahn 11y ago
It sounds like they are keeping it around, but it will no longer be a layer across all Google products, just a standalone app for those who want it (as it should be).

Pxtl 11y ago

I honestly think G+ had some great ideas, but they just bungled too much. They were much too clever with YouTube - the whole "posting to your G+ feed is the same as commenting on the video" thing was a bone-headed idea. They're different intents, they should be handled differently. Let G+ handle both of those actions, but don't call them the same action. The nymwars thing was another one - when you try to sneak new social integration through the back-door like that, with a massive existing userbase? You can't be opinionated about it. You have to accept and work with all the existing workflow, and that includes allowing pseudonyms. I liked the idea of a unified social layer... hell, unified anything in Google's sprawling service map. But G+ had too many mistakes, and broke too many promises over and over and over again.

Animats 11y ago

They mean "Using Google with a Google account but without a Google+ profile", not "Using Google without a Google account". Google pushes really hard for people to be logged into Google. Google search results pages have a whiny banner ad if you don't log into Google. (And it won't go away if you have their cookies blocked.) Incidentally, Android phones work fine with no Google account. If you buy the phone new and unlocked, click "Later" when it asks for your Google account, and delete the "Google first time activation" app, they're fine.

marssaxman 11y ago
It's ironic that one of the features which originally motivated my switch to Google was the way they didn't seem to care whether I got an account or not. I've almost completely stopped using any of their services now that they're so pushy about getting you to log in. This includes Android phones: I don't know why people claim that they can't be used without a Google account, because I'm on my second, I've never put any Google account credentials into either one, and they've worked just fine. Can't use the app store, but I don't care about that anyway.

legohead 11y ago

This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+. Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google. Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"? If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.

silverbax88 11y ago
I wish they would just get it right, and let me create different accounts for the apps I want to use. I just want a YouTube account. No Gmail. No G+. No tying my adwords account to anything else unless I request it. This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.
- colinbartlett 11y ago
  But we all know why they forced the unification of these accounts. So they can correlate our activity across services to "better serve us". (Read: serve us ads.)
  - silverbax88 11y ago
    Even if that is the goal (which is likely), it does not explain the need to force me to create accounts for applications I don't want, like Gmail. That's like going to a car dealership, buying a sedan and the dealership forces you to take five crates of crab apples with you at gunpoint.

dimbirol 11y ago

Why is this not a Google+-post?! Why should we use it if even google isn't using it? But maybe they tried signing up but failed getting a custom G+-url. We see that you registered google@gmail.com, but we can't let you use google.com/+google, why don't you use google.com/+google1425 and youtube.com/c/12868126nvesfz1761, which you can change to youtube.com/c/google6823_xw once you reach 500 subscribers.

balladeer 11y ago
Yes. This is exactly where I had kinda foresaw G+ was going down, either today or some other day in near future.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

onedev 11y ago

I'm so happy right now....and I don't even comment on YouTube. Quite irrational but hey, it is what it is.

pcx 11y ago

I guess, it is very important for a good company to learn. Great that they are setting an example. Google and MS fighting with renewed energy is great for our industry and sets a good example.

potency 11y ago

Finally! I've been shutting down the daily popup to convert my YouTube account into a Google+ Page for years. I had a feeling if I waited long enough, they'd stop asking. Hurray!

ori_b 11y ago

In other words: "Same as before, but you can opt out of the G+ feed."

gardnr 11y ago

I just tried to leave a comment on that blog post to commend them for finally listening to their users. I was prompted to "Upgrade to Google+" to leave a comment. >_<

rayalez 11y ago

I actually love g+ and was always rooting for it. Too bad it received so much hate for youtube commenting system and mandatory accounts and such. I always hoped people will turn around and switch to g+ - functionality and interface are so much nicer than in fb. I hate facebook and can't use it, but g+ is really nice, and has all the best features of fb/twitter/tumblr. I'm still rooting for it. This sounds like a sensible decision though.

a3n 11y ago

I'm not even sure I have a G+ profile, things were so confusing during the Name Wars (at which point I all but abaonded my G+).

balladeer 11y ago

It was with such extreme frustration that I had deleted everything on my Google+ profile after trying for 30 minutes to get the G+ URL of either <my first name>, or my <last name>, <or may first + last name>, or <part of my first name>. I stopped using it, made everything private - what I couldn't remove (at that time). All were available. Close to 2, or at least more than 1 year later - all those URLs are still available. But no, Google still thinks I must add a digit or two to that URL. I had forgotten that I have a G+ profile. I don't know anyone who uses this. I mean I don't know about others but why would I even want to use such a tool that is this effed up. While some might defend or even be kinder to G+ (well...) but I personally just can't accept a service this broken.

mangeletti 11y ago

I've been confused about Google+ for the longest time, wondering what reason there was for Google+ to exist in the first place, other than the (perceived) low cost of getting users (via marketing on their search page). What new value does Google+ add? Does anybody sign up for Google+ for reasons other than 1) Google Hangouts, or 2) accident? How is Google+ "quickly becoming a place where people engage..." and yet I don't know anybody who uses it? Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't really actively engage with people on Facebook, but everybody I know uses Facebook in some capacity and people talk about it from time to time. I've never heard a single person in my life talk about Google+, other than, "I think you have to have a Google+ account to..." (e.g., Hangouts).

dannyr 11y ago
Believe it or not, there's a lot of activity in my feed on Google+. Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't watch big Bang Theory and I don't know who does but it's been on for 7 seasons and their cast is the highest paid on TV.
- mangeletti 11y ago
  Good point (re: Big Bang theory), and also I thought that show just came out last year... proves the point even more.

joesmo 11y ago

It's about time, though mostly for Google's sake. I personally don't care if I can't review apps or create YouTube channels or do anything that requires Google+ as the features that have required it are mostly useless or I have found alternatives. It is annoying that I would even be asked to review apps constantly, however, when I'm not signed up for the idiotic Google+. I actually wouldn't mind reviewing some apps, but not at the expense of having to start Google+. The Google+ fiasco has mainly hurt Google itself by making them lose all their customers who didn't sign up for Google+ from such features as well as the unfortunate developers who rely on good app ratings that they won't get now because Google essentially put up a nasty firewall around that system. Then again, there's nothing new about Google or Apple pushing its own woes onto developers, so I assume mobile developers have made their peace with the tactics of their industry.

realusername 11y ago

Can we talk a bit about Google Groups also ? Dear Google, please do something about Google groups... It's just unusable. Everytime I see a Google groups link I just don't click. The contrast is horrible, the padding is making 3/4 of the screen useless, it takes forever to load, when you click on something it's lagging again... And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something about it...

arto 11y ago
> And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something about it... This probably has to do with the ease of setting up or subscribing to a mailing list with Google Groups, even despite how its usability has devolved. There aren't any free mailing-list services that are as easy to get up and running with--partly, of course, because almost everyone already has a Google account, making it trivial to join a group. Still waiting for somebody to create a good mailing-list service based on "subscribe with GitHub" (i.e., OAuth) to take this all away from Google and crappy self-hosted Mailman both.
- reagency 11y ago
  Yahoo Groups is still very popular.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tdkl 11y ago

Awesome. I had to re-enable the G+ account to add new Favorites on Youtube.

daxfohl 11y ago

git checkout master git merge --no-ff plus

eecks 11y ago

Finally!!

ytdht 11y ago

Maybe the government should split Youtube from Google and then Google+ would not be an issue... (maybe other services should stand on their own also)

ryandreming 11y ago

pretty sure that's what YouTube's founder was alluding to recently: http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080630/youtube-co-founder-wonders-why-the-fuck-comments-require-a-google http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080630/youtube-co-founder... they should've just listened to him

dredmorbius 11y ago
A couple of years ago. Not quite "recent". But yes.

faragon 11y ago

I stopped commenting/voting on YouTube since the mandatory G+ thing. I hope Google think it twice before playing that hard again.

zurn 11y ago

Does this mean privacy conscious people will be able to vote in the Android store?

amit_m 11y ago

Opening paragraph, the honest version: "When we launched Google+, we were scared of Facebook winning over the internet and knew how powerful the network effect is. So we decided on a douchebag move - abuse all of our monopolistic powers and superior engineering in order to shove a Facebook killer down our users' throat at maximum speed, integrating it with each and every google service in existence (whether it made any sense or not) and killing social features that actually work in exchange to experimental G+ social features that might work eventually. According to our analytics, it didn't work, so... Never mind."

rlu 11y ago

great so can I login with my youtube account now? I don't think I ever migrated it to a Google account (despite being asked to like a million times - would always say "later") and now I have no idea how to login to it.

pessimizer 11y ago

This is a great step. Now if they could just un-shit the Google Maps UI, they could approach the excellent usability of the Google of 5 years ago.

cmurf 11y ago

The part of Google+ I didn't like was certain compulsory behaviors that seemed to have nothing to do with Google+ itself. And I see those same problems still in Hangouts. For example, this completely batshit idea in Gmail, when I click on Hangouts Conversation icon (middle icon bottom left), and then click on the magnifying glass to search, type in "mom" and this fucking goddamn piece of shit displays everyone's mom and not my mom. Why the fuckballs would this thing show results of people I don't know, have no way of knowing, don't know any of the people they know, and yet not my own mom? At least give priority to my contacts? Shit like that, added with, you have to accept it mentality. It's what gets people deranged and they want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So this blog entry just demonstrates to me they don't get it still. Edit: Yes my mom is "mom" in my contacts. When I type in my sister's name, it does the same crap, it shows me everybody else with the same first name as my sister, but not my sister. WTF?

mentaat 11y ago

I love Google+ and am rooting for it. To me its a great mix of Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. What really hurt g+ was three things. First it became bloated with features which confused the average user. Second was the aggressive push by some at google (Vic?) esp. with youtube comment integration. This totally backfired with media and YT stars who were dragged kicking and screaming. And third, failure to consolidate multiple g+ profiles for people who have multiple google accounts. I've 6 g+ profiles but only use one. When someone wants to add me they search my name and are not sure which person to add. This is such a basic failure in user experience that I don't even know why g+ was launched without first anticipating and addressing this problem..smh

peeters 11y ago

Looks like they finally realized that Youtube comment sections are still an absolute cesspit, despite the real name policy.

isarat 11y ago

Plus will have lot of potential if they move away to make it as n identity service and a social network. They should invest more to create something similar to Google Now to streamline Google products experience.

friendzis 11y ago

> we’re well underway putting location sharing into Hangouts You can already share location on Hangouts, but it is deeply broken. Or do they mean "bring back Latitude"? Not long ago I had experience where I had to meet online friend, we were on the same route, just different directions. It all went like sharing our current location every 5 minutes (with increasing frequency towards meeting point) and still managed to miss each other, because "you said your car was grey, but its silver!". Live location sharing is necessary for many workflows and there are tons of apps for that with disputable trustworthiness.

imellyse 11y ago

Well, this is a right step. But I put question mark on the startegist of Google products they initiate step and move backward again and again. Google is only alive due to Google search engine it self. It's my opinion. Otherwise the way Google introduce things and all the time they are facing negative feedback on their new products. Buzz, Orkut, Google Glass (not that much penetrate in market) Hope Google will get some awesome minds now.

Aoyagi 11y ago

So these two [1][2] popular videos aren't actual any more, huh. Isn't Google one of the companies that keep talking about how they listen to the users? Does anyone at all believe them, or Microsoft for that matter, that they do such a thing? [1]https://youtu.be/ymkA1N3oFwg https://youtu.be/ymkA1N3oFwg [2]https://youtu.be/LTq8TrA3hb4 https://youtu.be/LTq8TrA3hb4

ironoxide859 11y ago

Google + murdered the Blogger community when it expected us to migrate there while at the same time forgoing our followers widget and Google Reader to keep in contact with others. As such, I've deleted my old Google + profile and started over with a new one. I enjoy sharing on the internet, but too many fragments tied together paints a picture of me I don't want to share.

rasz_pl 11y ago

cool story bro, but I still cant comment, clicking on text box pops up "what name do you want for your shiny new G+ profile?"