18 ms·

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 competi

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 .
  - dpark 11y ago
    That's an interesting read, but I fail to see how it has anything to do with Google+.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Google thinks it knows how people's social "circles" interact. But any attempt to make people make "public" G+ posts just because content is public elsewhere hits several of the Geek Social Fallacies, notably 4 ("Friendship Is Transitive") and 5 ("Friends Do Everything Together").
      - dpark 11y ago
        That's a bit of a stretch. I don't think that's the justification Google used nor do I think that's the problem that people had with it. The real issue was that Google was forcing the link between Google+ and YouTube along with the real name baggage. Most people had a pseudonymous name on YouTube and Google decided that everyone should suddenly attach their inane YouTube comments to their real names where potential employers and relatives and anyone else could easily associate the two. This isn't really an issue of friends, because most of the people you'd be concerned about finding your random YouTube comments are not friends. It's also not an issue of Google failing to understand this. Google understood the issue, but they denied and ignored it, choosing to force this on people regardless because they felt it was strategically useful to do so.
pachydermic 11y ago
Eh I'm not sure about that. I think the real problem is that it was clunky and made people mess with something that they had no interest in using. It was a weirdly forcing move which reminded everyone how much power Google wields in this kind of user/company relationship. People are probably generally okay with how that works, but only if they aren't made painfully aware of it (kind of like DRM - just look at Steam for an example of that).
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Right. If they'd made it an option to tie together all of your accounts and combine activity across everything, some people would love it and adopt it. But make it mandatory, and even some of the people who might otherwise like it will reject it just because they're being forced.
  - skynetv2 11y ago
    my youtube username is exactly the same as my real name but I refuse to let youtube show my "real name". never caved in.
bad_user 11y ago
The Nymwars is why Google+ lost, but they'll never admit it.
- mkozlows 11y ago
  Facebook has, and has long had, a real name policy. If you want a reason why Facebook succeeded and G+ didn't, you'll need something that's actually different between them.
  - netrus 11y ago
    Less than half of my friends use their (full)real name at facebook
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      Are you from Europe, out of curiosity? Anecdotally that seems to be way more common there than in the U.S., for some reason.
      - ldng 11y ago
        I think we European might care a bit more about our privacy. Just a bit, not that much more, but a bit. That way you're less "discoverable" by a complete stranger. I guess it's cultural. And I'm pretty sure that if FB tried to enforce real name in Europe they would loose quite a lot of accounts.
        RegW 11y ago
        FB do try. I took me several attempts to create an account with an obviously bogus name. In the end I had to share a name with 312 other bogus people.
  - AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
    What you post on Facebook, however, is not visible to the public unless you explicitly make it so. There's a world of difference between what John Smith writes on his Facebook wall and is visible to only people whom John Smith has explicitly deemed to be friends of John Smith, vs. a public Youtube comment that was once authored by user LordofPants, but thanks to G+ real name policy is now known to the public world as John Smith. Facebook was designed from the outset to be an online platform for your real-life friends. G+ should have been an online platform for your online friends, but then it mandated that all of your online friends must now need to know your real-life name.
hyperpallium 11y ago
Why did they need real names anyway? If they build a profile based on your browsing and social graph to show you ads, what does it matter who you actually are, so long as you have those interests? Like a node in a graph being distinguished only by the arcs connecting it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gherkin0 11y ago
  I think the use of real names was identified as one of the reasons for Facebook's success[1], so they just copied that. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/myspace-quietly-begins-encouraging-users-to-use-their-real-names/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/myspace-quietly-begins-enco...
  - wmeredith 11y ago
    Cargo culting at its finest. Google is really smart about a lot of different things, but they know fuck-all about social. They were just going through the motions.
  - reagency 11y ago
    Real Names policy was the brainchild of a 40-yr-old multi-millionare who was an expert in cultivating his personal brand and image, and knows not donsay anythig embarrassing online. Why would you care to use Google+ in any other way, he thought.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Facebook's lesson to Google should have been one of caution for forcing real names since Facebook is pathetic at telling if a name is real or not. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-real-name-policy-suspends-native-americans http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-r... Once again, if your verification of real names excludes a whole group's conventions, you have failed hard.
  - IshKebab 11y ago
greggman 11y ago
You might be right but Facebook succeeded dispite the exact same real name policy. It's hard to look at Facebook's success with that policy and then claim it was obvious google would fail with it. The better question is why did Facebook get away with it?
- osconfused 11y ago
  IMO. The problem for Google with real names was people who didn't want to be associated with their real names and already were deeply dependent on Google for the their phone / email. I recall the transgender outing articles [1]. Regardless of whether is was user error or not, it highlights that Google had a different hill to climb than Facebook regarding real name policies. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/
- lmm 11y ago
  That wasn't Facebook's policy. Facebook removed fake name accounts when users complained, but "The Friendly Monster" was around my university for a good six months, and a friend with a less obvious fake name has kept her account to this day. Google+ aggressively and preemptively went after fake names, and even caught some real names by mistake.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    Funnily, I have been using my fake name on Google and on Facebook ever since about 2008/2009. So far nobody has caught on or deleted my account. To make matters more fun, I use my fake name more often online and in real life than I do the name on my ID. Reality is funny that way. Yes, I'm an outlier.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    My experience with Facebook is a bit different. They were pretty aggressive in suspending Native American accounts with traditional names (e.g. Yellow Bird). http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-real-name-policy-suspends-native-americans http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-r...
- 11y ago
balladeer 11y ago
Seeing some of the extremely stupid limitations they put on G+, right since the beginning, I doubt they were even thinking of beating or equalling Fb without actually have lost their faculties.
Twirrim 11y ago
Besides that, the other most significant thing was the lack of open API for it. They fail to understand that people at the time wanted to consume it in their own way (and still do, to some extent). At the time G+ came to exist people loved it. They wanted the conversations like that. They liked the circles idea (at the time Twitter didn't have lists or any such concept), and it's still better than what the other social media services have. But to use it you only had the choice of the G+ app, or the website, which wasn't how people were consuming social media. They were using things like TweetDeck to connect to multiple services so that they could consume their social media stream, especially businesses. https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX (Steve Yegge's rant still seems to apply 3 years later)
- ankushnarula 11y ago
  Yes - the lack of G+ API was a big mistake not just for consumption but also for publication. However, both Twitter and FB had lists long before G+ was even a thing. Twitter has done little/nothing to promote the list functionality other than to increase the 500 member limit on lists. FB went head to head with G+ Circles by enhancing the FB list functionality to include standard lists and school/workplace lists.
  - AndrewDucker 11y ago
    Yup. I wasn't going to stop posting on FB, and I wasn't going to write everything multiple times. Being able to feed from FB to G+ would have at least meant I could be active on both sites. As it was I had to pick one, and FB had a lot more of my friends on it.
tacone 11y ago
It will take them a fair bit to recover from the real name enforcement. People got sick of that. I, for instance, after the second or third time Youtube tried to (literally) trick me into allowing it to display my real name, decided to log out permanently. Now I have another browser totally dedicated to GMail, and use my normal one for the rest of my surfing, Google Search and Youtube included. This raises the entry barrier to use many Google services quite a bit, since I'm logged out more often than not.
- pmontra 11y ago
  I also use a separate browser to log into Google for those customers that use Google Docs. Email is in Thunderbird with my own accounts, but I have a gmail account for YouTube and Gdocs (and Android, Analytics, ). I'll be happy to be able to have the option to separate the accounts of all Google properties as if they were from different companies. I don't need to share data among them and I don't log into them anyway unless I really need to do something (example: tell gmail to forward me invitations to share documents). Not the most common setup, that's sure.
azernik 11y ago
Hmmm. In hindsight, maybe a better policy would have been to make Real Name a shareable piece of information like any other - decide if you want it public, or only visible to some of your circles, etc. And then they could have done really cool shit like displaying references to you with your real name only to people authorized to know it, and with your handle to others.

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 .
- dpark 11y ago
  That's an interesting read, but I fail to see how it has anything to do with Google+.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Google thinks it knows how people's social "circles" interact. But any attempt to make people make "public" G+ posts just because content is public elsewhere hits several of the Geek Social Fallacies, notably 4 ("Friendship Is Transitive") and 5 ("Friends Do Everything Together").
    - dpark 11y ago
      That's a bit of a stretch. I don't think that's the justification Google used nor do I think that's the problem that people had with it. The real issue was that Google was forcing the link between Google+ and YouTube along with the real name baggage. Most people had a pseudonymous name on YouTube and Google decided that everyone should suddenly attach their inane YouTube comments to their real names where potential employers and relatives and anyone else could easily associate the two. This isn't really an issue of friends, because most of the people you'd be concerned about finding your random YouTube comments are not friends. It's also not an issue of Google failing to understand this. Google understood the issue, but they denied and ignored it, choosing to force this on people regardless because they felt it was strategically useful to do so.

pachydermic 11y ago

Eh I'm not sure about that. I think the real problem is that it was clunky and made people mess with something that they had no interest in using. It was a weirdly forcing move which reminded everyone how much power Google wields in this kind of user/company relationship. People are probably generally okay with how that works, but only if they aren't made painfully aware of it (kind of like DRM - just look at Steam for an example of that).

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Right. If they'd made it an option to tie together all of your accounts and combine activity across everything, some people would love it and adopt it. But make it mandatory, and even some of the people who might otherwise like it will reject it just because they're being forced.
- skynetv2 11y ago
  my youtube username is exactly the same as my real name but I refuse to let youtube show my "real name". never caved in.

bad_user 11y ago

The Nymwars is why Google+ lost, but they'll never admit it.

mkozlows 11y ago
Facebook has, and has long had, a real name policy. If you want a reason why Facebook succeeded and G+ didn't, you'll need something that's actually different between them.
- netrus 11y ago
  Less than half of my friends use their (full)real name at facebook
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    Are you from Europe, out of curiosity? Anecdotally that seems to be way more common there than in the U.S., for some reason.
    - ldng 11y ago
      I think we European might care a bit more about our privacy. Just a bit, not that much more, but a bit. That way you're less "discoverable" by a complete stranger. I guess it's cultural. And I'm pretty sure that if FB tried to enforce real name in Europe they would loose quite a lot of accounts.
      - RegW 11y ago
        FB do try. I took me several attempts to create an account with an obviously bogus name. In the end I had to share a name with 312 other bogus people.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  What you post on Facebook, however, is not visible to the public unless you explicitly make it so. There's a world of difference between what John Smith writes on his Facebook wall and is visible to only people whom John Smith has explicitly deemed to be friends of John Smith, vs. a public Youtube comment that was once authored by user LordofPants, but thanks to G+ real name policy is now known to the public world as John Smith. Facebook was designed from the outset to be an online platform for your real-life friends. G+ should have been an online platform for your online friends, but then it mandated that all of your online friends must now need to know your real-life name.

hyperpallium 11y ago

Why did they need real names anyway? If they build a profile based on your browsing and social graph to show you ads, what does it matter who you actually are, so long as you have those interests? Like a node in a graph being distinguished only by the arcs connecting it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gherkin0 11y ago
I think the use of real names was identified as one of the reasons for Facebook's success[1], so they just copied that. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/myspace-quietly-begins-encouraging-users-to-use-their-real-names/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/myspace-quietly-begins-enco...
- wmeredith 11y ago
  Cargo culting at its finest. Google is really smart about a lot of different things, but they know fuck-all about social. They were just going through the motions.
- reagency 11y ago
  Real Names policy was the brainchild of a 40-yr-old multi-millionare who was an expert in cultivating his personal brand and image, and knows not donsay anythig embarrassing online. Why would you care to use Google+ in any other way, he thought.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Facebook's lesson to Google should have been one of caution for forcing real names since Facebook is pathetic at telling if a name is real or not. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-real-name-policy-suspends-native-americans http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-r... Once again, if your verification of real names excludes a whole group's conventions, you have failed hard.
- IshKebab 11y ago

greggman 11y ago

You might be right but Facebook succeeded dispite the exact same real name policy. It's hard to look at Facebook's success with that policy and then claim it was obvious google would fail with it. The better question is why did Facebook get away with it?

osconfused 11y ago
IMO. The problem for Google with real names was people who didn't want to be associated with their real names and already were deeply dependent on Google for the their phone / email. I recall the transgender outing articles [1]. Regardless of whether is was user error or not, it highlights that Google had a different hill to climb than Facebook regarding real name policies. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/
lmm 11y ago
That wasn't Facebook's policy. Facebook removed fake name accounts when users complained, but "The Friendly Monster" was around my university for a good six months, and a friend with a less obvious fake name has kept her account to this day. Google+ aggressively and preemptively went after fake names, and even caught some real names by mistake.
- Swizec 11y ago
  Funnily, I have been using my fake name on Google and on Facebook ever since about 2008/2009. So far nobody has caught on or deleted my account. To make matters more fun, I use my fake name more often online and in real life than I do the name on my ID. Reality is funny that way. Yes, I'm an outlier.
- protomyth 11y ago
  My experience with Facebook is a bit different. They were pretty aggressive in suspending Native American accounts with traditional names (e.g. Yellow Bird). http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-real-name-policy-suspends-native-americans http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/16/facebook-r...
11y ago

balladeer 11y ago

Seeing some of the extremely stupid limitations they put on G+, right since the beginning, I doubt they were even thinking of beating or equalling Fb without actually have lost their faculties.

Twirrim 11y ago

Besides that, the other most significant thing was the lack of open API for it. They fail to understand that people at the time wanted to consume it in their own way (and still do, to some extent). At the time G+ came to exist people loved it. They wanted the conversations like that. They liked the circles idea (at the time Twitter didn't have lists or any such concept), and it's still better than what the other social media services have. But to use it you only had the choice of the G+ app, or the website, which wasn't how people were consuming social media. They were using things like TweetDeck to connect to multiple services so that they could consume their social media stream, especially businesses. https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX (Steve Yegge's rant still seems to apply 3 years later)

ankushnarula 11y ago
Yes - the lack of G+ API was a big mistake not just for consumption but also for publication. However, both Twitter and FB had lists long before G+ was even a thing. Twitter has done little/nothing to promote the list functionality other than to increase the 500 member limit on lists. FB went head to head with G+ Circles by enhancing the FB list functionality to include standard lists and school/workplace lists.
- AndrewDucker 11y ago
  Yup. I wasn't going to stop posting on FB, and I wasn't going to write everything multiple times. Being able to feed from FB to G+ would have at least meant I could be active on both sites. As it was I had to pick one, and FB had a lot more of my friends on it.

tacone 11y ago

It will take them a fair bit to recover from the real name enforcement. People got sick of that. I, for instance, after the second or third time Youtube tried to (literally) trick me into allowing it to display my real name, decided to log out permanently. Now I have another browser totally dedicated to GMail, and use my normal one for the rest of my surfing, Google Search and Youtube included. This raises the entry barrier to use many Google services quite a bit, since I'm logged out more often than not.

pmontra 11y ago
I also use a separate browser to log into Google for those customers that use Google Docs. Email is in Thunderbird with my own accounts, but I have a gmail account for YouTube and Gdocs (and Android, Analytics, ). I'll be happy to be able to have the option to separate the accounts of all Google properties as if they were from different companies. I don't need to share data among them and I don't log into them anyway unless I really need to do something (example: tell gmail to forward me invitations to share documents). Not the most common setup, that's sure.

azernik 11y ago

Hmmm. In hindsight, maybe a better policy would have been to make Real Name a shareable piece of information like any other - decide if you want it public, or only visible to some of your circles, etc. And then they could have done really cool shit like displaying references to you with your real name only to people authorized to know it, and with your handle to others.