
Google+ Thank you Google for breaking all my apps and extensions… - AndrewWarner
https://plus.google.com/116805285176805120365/posts/PZ1RG1QV1w7
======
ceejayoz
> Facebook never did stuff like this, never forced us to change layouts like
> this. They have given the users a transition period to use the new layout.

This is total bullshit. That's a fairly recent change for Facebook. For a long
time they rolled out changes to the UI without warning. Hell, they'd even
break _documented APIs_ frequently. Even "breaking" API changes only get 30
days warning, and that 30 day minimum window was set in _2011_ after developer
complaints!

Extensions based on specific HTML structure in a third-party service will
often break, and spectacularly so. It's not as if Google+ broke APIs without
warning - they redesigned a site. Google never asked anyone to write
extensions that change the look/function of Google+, and having done so
doesn't mean they owe you a thing.

~~~
djtidau
Google may not have asked anyone to write extensions for the platform, but a
not insignificant amount of people have and a community has been built around
those people. In many cases Google staff have gotten behind these extensions
and helped the community to flourish.

Mohamed has spent a very large amount of time developing extensions and
helping educate many other users on the platform, so when all that time has
been nullified by a single change you have to see why he is upset.

Google doesn't HAVE to do anything here, as you said, they didn't ask for this
community, but they have been more than happy to get behind it. It would have
been nice of them though, and a showing of community spirit and a real urge to
support developers on the platform more if they gave a little notice that
changes were coming that would adversely effect most currently active G+
extensions.

Given that they have been weathering a storm in relation to their official
API, generating a bit of rapport with developers of extensions would have gone
a long way.

~~~
ceejayoz
> Google may not have asked anyone to write extensions for the platform, but a
> not insignificant amount of people have and a community has been built
> around those people.

So? This is like gardening on someone else's land. If they decide they want to
build a shed there, it's their right, and whining "but I put so much work into
my garden!" is absurd.

> Mohamed has spent a very large amount of time developing extensions and
> helping educate many other users on the platform, so when all that time has
> been nullified by a single change you have to see why he is upset.

Reaching out to dozens or hundreds of folks who've built creaky extensions
based on exact HTML/JS structure would likely have slowed development of
actual, usual features and needed design changes. It's not as if G+ is the
leader in the space and able to rest on their laurels while others catch up.

~~~
untog
_So? This is like gardening on someone else's land. If they decide they want
to build a shed there, it's their right, and whining "but I put so much work
into my garden!" is absurd._

No it isn't. It's like creating a map to Google's free garden that they are
desperate for people to use. If they move the garden the map will be wrong.
It's their right to do so, but they're _desperately_ trying to get people to
use the garden, so you would think that they might try to reach out to the map
makers in advance.

------
dewitt
Hi all, DeWitt from the Google+ team here.

All of us sincerely appreciate developers building on the Google+ platform,
and we're excited to continue to develop and support our official API over at
<https://developers.google.com/+>. Please do join us over there, and let us
know what you'd like us to add or improve.

That said, we obviously can't support applications built on undocumented,
unofficial and internal surfaces, including those based on reverse-engineering
or scraping the Google+ user interface. Since we believe that's the case here,
we've reached out to the author and hope to clear the situation up quickly.

~~~
asto
When can we expect a read AND WRITE API to google+? You have to admit that the
current API isn't very useful or exciting, which is why people resort to such
things

~~~
Lewisham
This is plain wrong. No-one manipulating the DOM is because of read-only
restrictions. They're modifying the interface.

Read-only is a choice, and it's one G+ is willing to stick to (look back at
Vic Gundorota's posts about "curation").

------
nostromo
Apps I understand, but extensions? If you make an extension that messes with
the DOM of a website, it's well understood that it will break with every
redesign.

If that upsets you, you shouldn't be building extensions.

~~~
chime
Edit: I would appreciate some feedback/criticism instead of just down votes.

Let me explain it from the point of view of my users. My Chrome extension Plus
Minus is quite popular (
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pidkbnhjgdngcfcaik...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pidkbnhjgdngcfcaikoocdanfijkgdli)
) and has some pretty hard-core users. Before the new change, my extension
enabled users to mark posts as read (by collapsing them to one-line like most
email UI), allowed you to control which circles showed up in your stream, and
allowed numerous UI customizations (widen the stream, fade out the distracting
right sidebar etc.)

Last night at 1am I updated my extension because a minor G+ change broke it.
This morning I got flooded by notifications because the entire G+ UI changed
and my extension broke again. G+ users installed Plus Minus because they truly
felt G+ lacked some key features they found necessary. Plus Minus allowed
hiding users from specific circles before G+ made a feature to adjust per-
circle weight on the main stream. Try using the old or new G+ on a wide LCD
and notice the large empty spaces where content should be.

Users do not care if I'm not using the official API or directly making changes
to the DOM. They only care that my extension works well enough to improve
their G+ experience. The philosophical question here is whether a website
owner should encourage, discourage, or be ambivalent towards 3rd parties that
improve a user's experience via client-side plugins. Everyone supports data-
sharing via REST APIs, why not client-UI? Having a decent TOS for the UI API
(don't hide ads, don't auto-post etc.) should help keep it respectable.

Reddit has RES which drastically improves the user experience. I haven't seen
any official support for it, though neither have I seen any official
opposition. What I have seen are users who go ecstatic when they find out
about RES. Why doesn't reddit say how they feel about RES? Why don't they
support it via official UI-handles? Why can't G+, FB, and other large sites do
the same? Greasemonkey is too greasy. Why not officially encourage UI-
improvements?

To put it bluntly, I think I can significantly improve on the G+ interface for
a typical power-user because my incentives are vastly different from Google's.
I don't want the big Hangout feature all up in my face, regardless of how
amazing it is. I would rather see better/more content and filter it well. My
10k+ users feel the same. Should Google support me in any way? I don't expect
them to but it would be nice.

Just like Mohamed, I spent a considerable amount of my personal time on a free
extension to improve Google's social platform on Google's web browser. I have
nothing to gain from this except kind words from strangers. Yet I feel I have
helped G+ in a small way. When my extension does not work, I don't feel like
browsing G+. My users have said the same thing to me repeatedly, publicly. So
while 10k user is statistically negligible for Google, there are many
extensions out there and extension-loving power-users make a significant
portion of G+ early-adopters and frequent posters. Maybe Google no longer has
to worry about early-adopters and is going straight for the masses. Again, not
my right to judge. I'm just saying I spent a lot of effort on making a piece
of software loved by tens of thousands and instantly, it's all gone to waste.
Mohamed has 100x my users so I can understand his frustration.

~~~
Lewisham
Here is some criticism:

1\. Your extension overpromises to users its abilities. You are responsible
for that, not the users. You make no comment in your extension's description
that it relies on undocumented, unsupported DOM manipulation.

2\. The "fundamental question" has been answered many times over: website
owners are (rightfully) ambivalent to such extensions. If you want one, great,
but don't complain to us when it breaks. This is exactly what Mohamed is
doing.

3\. Even a million users is insignificant to G+, so it is fallacious to say
that you or Mohamed "helped" G+. You optimized it for a certain subset of
users.

It's decently obnoxious and entitled to think that Google should be beholden
to people doing things without any contract, or even any _offer_ , of support.
This is pretty much the same rabble-rabble-rabble that appeared when Kevin
Rose shut down Oink: "I used your service, you owe me." Except it's "I wrote
an extension, you owe me." Google doesn't owe you anything, and it certainly
doesn't owe unsupported extensions knowledge that would otherwise be under
NDA.

------
kogir
I imagine they haven't released official APIs yet because they want to retain
the freedom to change things at will while they explore the product space.
Makes sense to me.

Transition periods, documentation, and warnings all take time and effort that
might be better spent on the relatively new product.

Until they endorse a way to access Google+ with an API, anything you do is at
your own risk.

~~~
freehunter
I thought this same thing when I read it the post. Last I heard, people were
complaining that Google didn't release any APIs for Google+. Now someone is
complaining that these unreleased APIs are broken?

Hacking doesn't mean "I got it right", it means "I got it, right?" You don't
depend on hacks to get you through your release, you depend on hacks to get
you through the night. And make no mistakes, writing _any_ application around
unreleased APIs is hacking. Thousands of hours down the drain and hundreds of
thousands of users with a broken experience... seems like there should be a
lessons-learned here, and it's not all on Google's part. Google doesn't have
to notify developers of anything if Google's stance is "we don't support third
party development yet".

------
mattkruse
Commented on G+, cc: here...

As the developer of one of the most popular Facebook customizers (Social Fixer
/ <http://SocialFixer.com> ), I call your bluff.

Facebook is the wild west. Their code is bloated and overly-complex, their
approaches to UI designs are truly insane, and writing any kind of Facebook-
customizing app is incredibly difficult. I think Google has been way more
supportive of developers than Facebook.

The bottom line is, they offer a site and for many reasons (support,
consistent brand image, etc), they want the same UI for all users. So they
aren't going to explicitly support extensions that let users change how their
sites work, fragmenting their users into lots of different UI's that might
conflict and cause problems that are impossible for them to debug. And both
Facebook and Google are huge operations, with much bigger goals than you know
of. Tweaks to the UI are probably not even on their radar.

If this is your first UI redesign to endure, I say welcome to the club! I've
had my stuff break on a regular basis as Facebook randomly tosses out new UI
changes (and not even to everyone at the same time!). And they do it ALL THE
TIME. That's the game we play. Frustrating, certainly, but also very
challenging. It forces you to write better, more robust, more DOM-agnostic
code, and pushes you to solve problems in better, more efficient ways.

If you don't like it, opt out and stop doing it. IMO, whining about it is kind
of lame.

------
alexchamberlain
The author is absolutely dolally. You have no right to change Google's UI, and
certainly no right to complain in such a way when they change it. Fine, you
might not like it and feedback to Google, but complaining they changed without
filling in Form A1 through Z12 is just backward.

------
simonw
The last thing the Google+ team needs is to have to think about breaking one
of dozens of unofficial extensions every time they tweak their HTML.

------
nekitamo
Is it only me, or does the above link crash Safari on the iphone? Been
noticing that a lot with google+ links...

------
mohamedmansour
People should really read my post carefully before commenting. I have posted a
lot in the comments.

~~~
Lewisham
Except all your comments amount to "They should have told us/me that they were
doing this beforehand" which is akin to either "They should retard iteration
in order to tell me to change my unsupported extension" or "They should
release things that are under NDA to me so I can change my unsupported
extension", neither of which seem valid to me.

------
loverobots
Been reading a lot of "Google {banned me from adsense, adwords, ruined
rankings, stopped product I had based my app on, increased prices
astronomically...}" lately.

~~~
asto
They're all completely different issues. Anyone who has a ground-level view of
adsense will know that their fraud detection/prevention system is broken.
Legitimate users find themselves booted and scammers get away. The scammers
who don't get away purchase accounts (illegally) and continue business because
they're scammers and aren't particularly concerned about the law.

This, on the other hand is about a guy who built "extensions" on top of
google+ and used its public interface in a way that was not intended by the
google+ developers and got stung when they made a change. The author is over-
reacting to something that isn't really a malicious action by Google.

------
redwood
Google+ is to social as MSN Search was to Search. Ugghh

Perhaps they need to re-brand to a bing equivalent at the very least.

