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Lots of posts in this thread are trying to find a "reason" for why G+ isn't beating FB. I think they're overlooking the obvious: Good Enuf + Path Dependency = Inertia. Simply put, the most amazing social network the world has ever seen, that executed perfectly on every front, is not going to suddenly displace FB. It's like asking why no one disrupted Windows pre-Web/pre-Mobile. Was it because alternative operating systems sucked?

IMHO, the big chance anyone had to disrupt FB was a paradigm shift away from social news feeds. That paradigm shift arrived with photo sharing and messaging on mobile, where increasingly people were just sharing pictures and text messages privately. However, Zuckerberg saw that one coming and acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to head off any disruption.

That shouldn't stop people from trying to innovate. But we should not regard being smaller than the leader as a failure. I use G+, Twitter, and FB, but I have the best conversations on G+. Twitter discussions are an exercise in frustration, and I find the signal/noise on FB to be worse.

There's a benefit sometimes to having a smaller audience.




You're leaving off a few additional factors:

1. Repeated self-sabotage. On multiple fronts, G+ actively dissuaded large, initially positive, early-adoptor groups.

2. Founding cohort. Googlers were OK, as were the early techies. Google's position as the world's leading ad agency meant that marketing types, particularly the sub-breed known as SEO, were a large initial cohort. Until users learned to block them on site, this was a net negative.

3. Fighting users' interests. There were several use-cases, but one that many sought was a long-form content posting space. Google+ supports this in some ways (posts can be quite long), but offered far too little by way of preview. One of my few heeded suggestions: to insert a word count on post previews.

4. Forced mergers of unrelated products. I really don't want random people off the Web popuulating my email contacts, or writing to my calendar, or tracking my YouTube views. I and I don't want my personal and private online activities broadcast to co-workers, family, friends, and others. I don't want to have G+ nags following me across all other Google properties, and actively sought out alternatives to Search, Maps, and other tools simply to no have a Persistent Red Dot appear everywhere I went.

Abysmal search (no search when the product was first launched), abysmal filtering, abysmal response to privacy, abysmal record of unilaterally joining up multiple independent accounts against users' express wishes. Abysmal experience in locking people out of all of their Google services for perceived misdeeds on a single one. This was a massive shitshow from start to finish.


And yet, even if all of those hadn't occurred, do you really think it likely people would switch en-mass? What would be the benefit? Circles? What is the major pain point of Facebook that another social network would solve so convincingly to cause their users to bear the costs of switching?

That have been dozens of other networks launched besides G+, none of them have garnered significant traction. Only mobile chat products that utilize phone numbers and contacts to build a network have really made a dent.

The vast majority of users of G+ never experienced blocking, didn't care about nymwars, etc. These are edge-user complaints. It causes distress in early adopters and the technorati but is meaningless to most people.

If you look at WhatsApp and Instagram, it turns out the majority of Facebook's users didn't care about 90% of their features. They just want to share photos and sent short messages.

My point is, those who are deeply about these things focus on edge case features that make a ton of difference to them, but are invisible to most people. Hell, I've rarely used Facebook search to search for anything other than a Contact. I suspect most people don't use the Search feature much, or lists, or groups, and all of the other dials and knobs.

Much of the world's communications by average people now runs on WhatsApp, iMessenger, WeChat, LINE, etc, because the use case for most people is not to be a public persona with a subscriber base, to conduct arguments and discussions with them.


Technical features don't make your network. Technical failures can break them.

Community is what matters, and founding cohort is hugely significant. Group personality is established early, and can often veer off in unexpected (and frequently unwanted) directions. I've just mentioned my recent Imzy experiences, an interesting concept in several ways, but with some exceptionally poor dynamics interacting with a quite volatile userbase (at least in part).

Google's Circles were a fuckup from the start, and that was apparent from the first "you're holding it wrong" arguments and flamewars coming both from those following people and those castigating their followers. Distribution, topic, notification, and source are all different concepts, Google+ tried squishing them into a single conceptual model. That model didn't fit reality. And it wasn't reality that broke as a consequence. I think it's Larry Wall who's observed that you cannot simplify a complex state simply by ignoring its complexity. That complxity will out, and it's going to be ugly.

You're probably right about the vast majority of G+ users not caring about blocking and nymwars, because the vast majority of users never publicly posted to the site. Only about 6% of users have every written a public post, something I and Stone Temple Consulting independently verified by sampling actual profiles (I ran 50k, STC 500k, see STC's "Hard Numbers" blog post for a solid breakdown).

On the other hand, if you did use G+ heavily, blocking matters a hell of a lot, because otherwise you've got a bunch of annoying fucks in your face, and Nymwars was critical to the participation of many, quite a few of whom are what made G+ interesting, to the small extent that it actually is. Not offering those features may not have direct effects, but it does have indirect effects, often profound.

In the Imzy instance, the lack of blocking (which I wanted to use), and the presence of pervasive anonymous posting (which interests me little -- a few nyms are largely sufficient, though I might occasionally use a throwaway) had a tremendous impact on the tenor of discussion. Such that I quite simply feel it would be a major risk to me to continue to use the site. Something I quite rarely feel. I certainly won't be inviting others there. This despite some nice technical features.

I agree, actually, that most conversation is small-scale. We're effectively creating an impromptu, softly-defined conversation space here, for a one-on-one discussion. David Weinberger, commenting on Reddit a year or so back, quipped "Conversation doesn't scale very well." For the types of discussions I'm most interested in, a group of 6 to 60 seems pretty good, maybe a few more than that in a good crowd with solid direction from the top. My Imzy experience is contrasted directly with dang's moderation here on HN -- one of those "antisocial techie spaces", which frankly achieves vastly better results than the "kinder, gentler Reddit" Imzy claims it wants to be.

Where I'll disagree with you strongly is that the people who focus on edge cases are invisible. They may not be apparent, but their presence or absence is quite tangible.

G+ offered the promise of being Usenet 3.0, and had (and still has) a number of first-generation Usnetters, several of whom I follow. Peter da Silva (who created Usenet 2.0), Karl Aurbach (one of the very first Arpanet team), Lauren Weinstein, and others. But quite a few people I'd really hoped would participate, and followed with anticipation, opted out. Pretty much the whole Boing Boing crew, notably Cory Doctorow, though Xeni Jardin posted for a while. Jonathan Zittrain. Lawrence Lessig, who posted for a bit then left. Etc.

Ello saw a similar initial groundrush with Quinn Norton, Merideth L. Patterson, Clay Shirky, and Paul Mason (the journalist) active early. Even jwz showed up -- to tell us that we'd all discover the importance of the social graph soon enough. There's a small little group there, and I enjoy the interactions, which are also refreshingly healthy. But it's not what I'd hoped for. Great place for art and poetry, and there are some local heros -- Ksenia Anske, if you like Russian-American authors, and Trenton Lee Tiemeyer, a gifted poet. I really like their content.

But critical mass on diverse topics, not.

I've looked into where that does happen, and the answers, in general:

* Wordpress. Far and away the winner. Long-form, complex content favours blogs. Whodathunkit. The problems though are engagement and discovery, issues that SocMed platforms address.

* Reddit. Large and very high s/n, by my measure. Not quite the quality of blogs in terms of posts (though that can happen), but a far richer conversation.

* Metafilter. Tiny by Internet standards, but an astounding s/n.

* Facebook. Sheer mass has its advantages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

HN also does well, though within a somewhat limited scope. The reasons have little to do with the technical capabilities, and may have a great deal to do with lacking features. The resulting conversational level is high though.


my twitter news feed is hands down the most enriching feed i have. it beats hacker news, reddit, and instagram. it obviously beats facebook, which is normally trash, but that is deactivated at the moment.

twitter is indeed bad for conversations, but it is excellent to get a feed of what's what, as long as you are following the right people. i am pretty selective in who i follow and it leads to a pretty high quality feed, at least in my opinion.

also, where else are you going to get one of your idols (fumito ueda) to like a tweet/post of yours? haha.


>it is excellent to get a feed of what's what, as long as you are following the right people

social network people discovery shouldn't be work, twitter is. have one but don't really use it anymore for the same reason. it's just exhausting constantly curating your feed


Let us not overlook that online incumbents are cemented by massively overzealous copyright and network access laws. One of the internet's great promises -- mobility -- is neutered by things like the CFAA and unreasonable interpretations of copyright. If these laws were fixed, companies like Facebook would have to compete on the merit of their platform instead of simply keeping people around by holding their data and personal networks hostage.


This is also why Android still is winning over various better designed competitors. It's a clunky security nightmare with performance issues, but changing to another platform requires changing how you use your device, maybe finding different apps, etc.


You're like the only person I know who is a Windows Phone fanboy. Perhaps you missed the part where none of the competitors were open source, or cheap to license, and shipped years later (Windows Phone in 2010, Android in 2008). The world is flooded with Android for the same reason it's flooded with Linux now, and not Windows kernel devices.

Perhaps if Ballmer had stopped trying to make OS licensing a profit center on mobile, history would have been different.


Not really a fanboy, just... finally no longer fighting with my phone. It's faster, it's more secure, it's supported properly by the developer. I'd honestly probably rather an Ubuntu phone or a Tizen phone or something, but Windows is the only third option I currently have on my carrier.

And there's plenty of open source options out there now too, but it requires people step away from the coddled embrace of the existing monopolist.


Using a non-Google ecosystem phone is trivial. Hundreds of millions of people do it. I've lived on Chinese Android phones, it wasn't hard. In China, instead of being "coddled" by Facebook/Google/et al, you are "coddled" by BAT - Baidu/Alibaba/Tencent. Apps like WePay are indispensable, ergo, as long as your phone runs WePay, you can do lots of stuff.

Arguing for more Android forks is really a counter to your complaints about security issues, since it will result in even more fragmented updating schedules, given carrier control. It also contradicts your usual pimping of Windows Phone, complaining about Google's "monopoly" on Android, but supporting a monopolist (Microsoft) who won't even open source their OS.


Honestly, between the possibility of Microsoft open sourcing Windows and Google open sourcing Google Apps, I'd give ten times the odds to Microsoft. Microsoft is on the path of being more open from where they were. Google is on the path of being more closed then they were.

This here wasn't persay an argument for more Android forks. As I said, Android is buggy and insecure. I'd rather many of the other open source options like Tizen or Ubuntu Touch get a chance to thrive. My view on Android itself is simple: As long as Google is incapable of updating it's own software, it's a joke. A literal joke.


Every so often I decide whether or not I should bother engaging your posts thinking perhaps you have moderated your obsessive fixation and bias against Google, and I'm continually disappointed.

One could easily claim my bias is obvious, given my employer, but outside that, there are simply facts that can be independently measured and verified by anyone by simply measuring amount of code, projects, shipped as open source by each company.

While Microsoft should absolutely be commended for their turn around in recent times given their new CEO, the fact reminds, Google not only continues to ship more open source projects every year, but has actually been more open, not less, recently. And that doesn't even count the huge number of external commits that Googlers make to other open source projects that are not owned by Google. To say that Microsoft getting better than Google at openness is completely lacking in evidence, and only by bias and political spin can it be seen otherwise.

As of right now, Google open source enables IHVs to make products and take them to market, saving enormous development costs, by forking Android or parts of it, or forking Chromium. Or taking V8 (as nodejs did) to spawn an entire development ecosystem. There's a thriving industry of startups and development ecosystem that exists because of these contributions. Right now, I can't go make say, a new wearable, IoT device, phone, or TV, and bootstrap it quickly by taking parts of Windows, but you can see tons of Kickstarter projects that do that with Google code, without involving any formal arrangement with Google, i.e. "permissionless" development.

When cheap devices in India or China enable the worlds poor to get online by using Microsoft source, then maybe your statements can hold water.




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