11 ms·

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

• 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.
          • sp332 11y ago
            NewsBlur is probably the best of the Reader replacements. http://newsblur.com/ http://newsblur.com/ https://twitter.com/newsblur https://twitter.com/newsblur
            • qznc 11y ago
              Not for me. There are so many different ways people use feed readers. Google reader was amazing in how many different workflows it supported.
              • alxndr 11y ago
                Since I never used the social aspects of Google Reader, Feedly wasn't my cup of tea; I have turned to Inoreader.
          • lewisl9029 11y ago
            I host my own TT-RSS instance: https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home Not as fancy as some of the commercial offerings, but I never need to worry about it getting killed off.
          • Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
            theoldreader I couldn't stand feedlys interface, and theoldreader is good enough.
        • nodivbyzero 11y ago
          I switched to http://digg.com/reader http://digg.com/reader
      • giovannibajo1 11y ago
        I always wonder what would be the active-user count for G++ without YouTube (i.e. every logged in Google user visiting a YouTube page is marked as an active G+ user if she scrolls down the page once).
        • dredmorbius 11y ago
          YouTube is about 40% of public G+ activity as I've measured it. Also Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting. https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...
      • dredmorbius 11y ago
        The number of active G+ accounts -- publicly posting in any given month -- is less than that. I and Eric Enge, he of Stone Temple Consulting, have independently estimated this based on G+ sitemap sampling. I pulled about 50k profiles off a single sitemap, Enge 500k from multiple. My pull was based on strong evidence that the profiles are randomly distributed through sitemaps. Both of us found ~6-12m publicly active profiles. Among my thoughts: the group of people really discussing things online just isn't that big. Reader was far more significant than Google realised. https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...
        • mkozlows 11y ago
          That is a bad definition of "active," particularly considering that the original selling point of G+ relative to Facebook was its privacy controls (circles). I know many people who post to G+, only a few of whom do so publicly.
          • dredmorbius 11y ago
            That is a bad definition of "active" Both Enge and I address both the definition of "active" and of "invisible" non-public activity. 1. We're limited to directly observable public actvity. Given the sitemaps providing a population of profiles to sample, that means looking at actual public posts. Anything else would be Making Shit Up, which I prefer not to do. 2. It's possible get some sense of non-public activity by looking at followers and views for profiles with and without public activity. Evidence is that profiles without public posts have about 4.3% of the activity of those with. That gives roughly 4% of the total G+ userbase, or about 95 million users. Again: showing activity at any time. That about doubles the active users count in total. (112 million + 95 million). It doesn't speak to recent activity, though. My initial G+ "public activity" analysis: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ Follow-up "active" public sharing accounts vs. "inactive" non-public-sharing accounts https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnKkfTNPKR https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...
  • Yhippa 11y ago
    Oh man did I have some great conversations about articles on Google Reader. My friends would share great articles to a common stream that we would fight over. It was so much fun because we could be honest without worrying about information leakage to friends, grandmas, and the public. I looked up some history behind Google+ on Wikipedia and it looks like Vic Gundotra was behind that (footnotes removed). > His responsibilities as Vice-President of Social included Google's social networking and identity service, Google+. He is widely believed to be the man behind Google+, and was responsible for the controversial removal of social features from Google Reader. Apart from Google+, he is widely credited for his contributions to early versions of Google Maps (application) and Google I/O. For it's time it was kind of the proto "news feed" for my group of friends.
    • wyclif 11y ago
      Yeah, I was also a huge Google Reader fan for those reasons. But Google couldn't leave it alone or admit that it was its own social network with its own identity and unique character. Then they killed it. It was one of their products I used every day on the desktop, to get my news. It seems there's something missing from BigCo's understanding of how social networks operate.
• uniformlyrandom 11y ago
  Well, they really hoped that would force people to use G+ more. It did not - so they understandably regrouped.
• mkozlows 11y ago
  They haven't thrown it away. It's still a shared Google Account For Everything. The distinction they're making now is that they're no longer requiring that account to be tied to a "G+ sharing stream" in a publicly exposed way, which was never the most essential part of anything for them.
  • nissehulth 11y ago
    Google Accounts were around long before Google+.
• AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  Honestly, I think the sticking point on most of it was the Real Name policy. Had they stopped the delusion from the outset that they could be a Facebook competitor and simply made Google+ a correlating landing page for your online persona, rather than your real identity, I think it would have worked. I wouldn't necessarily mind everyone knowing that AdmiralAsshat likes Black Sabbath music videos on Youtube, hangs out on C programming boards on G+, and comments on various political stories on Slate--I sometimes share my handles on various online media circles anyway. Having them all tied to a single login would not necessarily be a bad thing. It's not until they demand that they must know my real name to do so (combined with the fact that, being an Android user, Google knows my phone number and personal billing address) that the idea of Google+ suddenly looks toxic. This is a good step, although the well has already been poisoned.
  • mkozlows 11y ago
    G+ has not required a real name for a while now. The problem with a profile that spans unrelated services is that your persona on one shouldn't necessarily be tied to your persona on another; Google Accounts with different public-facing per-service personas are okay in a way that a single public-facing persona spanning all services isn't. But it's still an underlying single Google Account, so Google gets its unified view of what you do, which is what they care about.
    • theseatoms 11y ago
      > G+ has not required a real name for a while now. Which is why he said, "Had they stopped the delusion from the outset ... "
    • JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > The problem with a profile that spans unrelated services is that your persona on one shouldn't necessarily be tied to your persona on another; Google Accounts with different public-facing per-service personas are okay in a way that a single public-facing persona spanning all services isn't. G+ tried to solve this with Circles, but as far as I can tell, everything related to YouTube was assumed to be public on G+ because it was public on YouTube. G+ integration with everything seems like a massive failure of the Geek Social Fallacies: http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html .
• austenallred 11y ago
  They made product decisions, those were wrong, they tried to hold out, and now they're backing away from it. No company is immune to that cycle, not even Google.
  • dreamcompiler 11y ago
    I hope they eventually reach the same conclusion about the horrific monstrosity Google Maps has become.
• JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down. This isn't past-tense yet. Until this change, which isn't fully deployed yet (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.... , "in the coming weeks"), YouTube still requires a G+ account to comment or upload videos.
• mythz 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. Good example of Strong opinions, Weakly-held.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    No, you misunderstand that. Strong opinions, Weakly held refers to dropping your misguided opinion when the first evidence against it appears. Google held their strong opinion until their product was just about dead.
• anon3_ 11y ago
  It felt horribly invasive. I hope other sites learn from this and not jam social networks down people's throats.
• eevilspock 11y ago
  This is them finally admitting they were being evil. They put their empire and monopoly ambitions (defeat Facebook and dominate social networking as they do search and ads) ahead of the actual interests of their users.
  • Aloha 11y ago
    I see this as them admitting "hey, we tried to bring our users we thought was something really great, as it turns out, they didn't agree with us so much, so now we're not going to do that anymore."
    • have_faith 11y ago
      That comes across like marketing speak that does not in any way reflect the aggressiveness that Google tried to push G+ and it's features on google/youtube/misc google service users. I personally held back for about a year before youtube insisted I assign a blank G+ profile to my youtube account or I will lose my commenting prividges, so I lost the ability to comment until one day they just made me a profile anyway. I've personally lost a lot of respect for them and I know a lot of people that feel the same way. It went way beyond offering a new product to people to see if they liked it or not.
    • eevilspock 11y ago
      That's very generous of you. You can continue to believe that, or see that Google+ is a reaction to: - Facebook surpasses Google for proportion of users’ time, http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/facebook-surpasses-google-for-proportion-of-users-time-23282-Sep2010/ http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/facebook-surpasses-google-f... - Facebook surpasses Google as most visited site in US, http://www.livemint.com/Industry/ct3JSccQisManKjJ6qt43N/Facebook-surpasses-Google-as-most-visited-site-in-US.html http://www.livemint.com/Industry/ct3JSccQisManKjJ6qt43N/Face... - Prediction: Facebook Will Surpass Google In Advertising Revenues, http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/05/facebook-will-surpass-google/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/05/facebook-will-surpass-googl... - Facebook Readies 'People Targeting' To Take On Google In Advertising, http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-readies-people-targeting-take-google-advertising-1693635 http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-readies-people-targeting-tak... Has Google's search improved since the launch of Facebook? Not many people think so. Search results are loaded with spam, click-bait, content farm crap, and ever more Google's own stuff. Shouldn't a better search that found high quality results be where Google put its efforts, if it really cared about its users?
• Trufa 11y ago
  On the other hand, any big change done by google will be heavily criticized most likely, independent of whether they are "right" or "wrong", and to certain extent they will have to push through it to see if it's a positive change or a negative one.
• darklajid 11y ago
  I'm not sure. Admitted, I'm not a fan of Google and maybe a bit grumpy, but I read this blog entry as "Now everyone will need a G+ account, but it won't have a public profile". That said, the distinction between Google account G+ Account Google Profile is lost on me, I'm genuinely confused about the past and present state of these things. It feels like "G+ Accounts" are supposed to be the new "Google Accounts"? Like you could've had a Google Account without a Google Page or Google Profile or whatever that was called? I .. don't see what's changing. No reason to grab the pitchfork, but no reason for cheers or kudos either.
  • ljk 11y ago
    yeah.. kind of feels like they forced something so outrageous and now backed up a little and everyone's high-fiving each other...
  • Dylan16807 11y ago
    There are certain things that tried to force you to make a G+ page or they wouldn't activate, so maybe that's the main change?
  • blakeyrat 11y ago
    You aren't the only one. I have two Gmail addresses, and two YouTube channels. As far as I can tell, I have FIVE Google+ accounts (there may be more!): 1. Nickname email for friends 2. Real name email for family/jobs 3. A SECOND nickname account that somehow got created when I logged into YouTube one time 4. A SECOND real name account that somehow got created when I logged into YouTube some other time 5. The YouTube channel I shared with a friend, which has a Gmail account but inexplicably is only a single Google+ account unlike the two listed above I honestly have no idea why 3 & 4 exist. They seem to have gotten created at some point for some reason I never understood. In my eyes, the biggest problems with Google+ are: * It's CONFUSING AS HECK. Just figuring out what an account is, or why it got created, is way more effort than I care about * Their integration with YouTube was ridiculously not thought-out. Not in ANY way. They somehow seemed to think there was a 1:1 relationship users -> channels, when in reality it's a many:many relationship. Why did they think that? Why didn't anybody say, "uh, guys? A person can have more than one YouTube channel. And two people or more can run a single YouTube channel."