

Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa - Kabweza
http://www.techzim.co.zw/2012/05/why-its-hard-to-use-google-plus-in-africa/
I don’t use Google+ much. It’s not that Google plus is a ghost town. No. There’s a flurry of activity from the people I follow - Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Googlers in Africa, and Robert Scoble. The decision for me boils down to one practical thing; page load speed.
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simondlr
I'm from South Africa. I'm not sure if they cache Google+ here (I know they
cache YouTube) or use a CDN, but I've found Google+ to do exactly this. It's
slow, and sometimes stuff just doesn't load (especially images).

It's strange, because Google+ is the first social network I've seen that
actually promotes itself on my campus (large installs with lifesize Angry
Birds).

~~~
JonnieCache
Just out of interest, what _is_ the life size of an angry bird?

~~~
windsurfer
I would assume roughly the same size as a pig.

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joeyh
I'm not in Africa, but I do have slow (dialup) internet in the US, and every
G+ link is a nightmare.

About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive
timeout in its SSL.

When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of
sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until
some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be read.

I suspect there is also javascript that times out or fails to gracefully
handle failure to load some resources. I've never seen the flashy bling that
people were talking about when G+ launched.

Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web
caching.

To give some idea of how slow it is, I've had a single G+ page loading the
entire time I typed this. Still consists of a white-on-white page.

I have, in some instances, needed to ssh to a fast remote server, and read G+
via w3m when there was a link I really wanted to read.

In contrast, when I click on a HN page, it comes up with very little
discernable delay. The rare times I go to facebook, it may take it a minute to
come up, but it always loads.

Around 5% of the US population still uses dialup.

~~~
jonknee
> Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web
> caching.

The assets cache just fine, SSL or not.

~~~
joeyh
I'm referring to my web proxy cache, not the browser's cache. I use polipo to
cache, it does a number of things that makes dialup web browsing pretty fast.
<http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/>

~~~
18pfsmt
Have you considered using Squid to cache everything (even over SSL)? You will
have to install certs, but I think that may be the best route (especially if
your OS is *nix). I am planning on doing this at my friend's cabin this summer
where satellite internet is all they have.

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kristianc
The point about Facebook is well made. I'm glad that Facebook have taken the
decision (thus far at least) not to overload their core UX with JS effects.
This means that it is nearly always very easy to use FB.

By contrast, it always feels like it takes twice as long as it should to tweet
and use G+, because the UX has been designed to be "beautiful." And I'm in
Europe - I can only imagine it is an order of magnitude worse in some of
Africa.

~~~
magicalist
clearly you don't have timeline yet...

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klausa
You could argue that core UX for Facebook is news feed, rather then profile
pages.

~~~
kristianc
I agree (I don't spend much time looking at my own Timeline after all), but
hopefully Timeline isn't a sign of things to come.

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franze
i'm currently in bolivia, and well, lets say, the internet isn't always very
fast or reliable. not only is the G+ website unusable (takes ages to load,
breaks in between), but also the (right hand side top) widget thingy on search
and gmail does not work. it shows (again and again) some red/urgent numbers
displaying that something important has happened -> click -> nothings turns
up. (and if it for once works, it's not important, just another random person
added me to a circle).

fb loads fast, works perfectly - and after i resized my pictures to 480 to 360
i can even upload them.

my personal opinion is, that any website/app that implements it's scrollbars
via JS has to much JS.

~~~
esrauch
The scrollbars are just styled using CSS, it's not exactly a huge payload.

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asto
It's not just Google+, by the way. All of Google's services are noticeably
slower after they switched to the new look that Google's changing everything
to. Bad move in my opinion. We don't care if the pages are very pretty,
Google. We just want what we want.

~~~
toemetoch
You can check with Chrome, Ctrl+Shift+I, then Audits and reload/Run.

A few years ago they started promoting best practices [0] and after following
it + checking with Audit/pagespeed I got performance increases. Now it seems
they abandoned their own best practices. Running an audit on a google page
results in a lot of red/orange bullets.

[0] [https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-
practices/rule...](https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-
practices/rules_intro)

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rowanseymour
In Rwanda here - can't say I notice much difference between Google+ and
Facebook. The Facebook website is significantly more usable than the Facebook
Android app which doesn't work at all... but I think that applies the world
over.

~~~
yardie
I'm in europe and the Facebook app is equally worthless here. I've gone back
to using the website instead of the iOS version (now used exclusively for
uploading photos).

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vibrunazo
> Maybe providing a ‘Google+ Lite’?

Have you tried the mobile website? Is it any better?

<http://m.google.com/app/plus>

~~~
3pt14159
On my 18 megabit connection it took 4 seconds to load into my chrome browser
running on my Ubuntu desktop computer. BUT it does load much, much faster
after caching is done.

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sparknlaunch12
For those living in large US and European cities we take our internet speed
for granted. I am assuming that it's not google to blame but rather local
infrastructure?

~~~
rmc
Depends what you mean by "local infrastructure". Up until recently east Africa
dint have a fiber link to the rest of the internet, it was all satilite.
Forget last miles, this is the last 1000 miles.

~~~
deathwarmedover
For those interested in the current and planned undersea cable infrastructure,
there's a good SVG diagram on Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cable_map18.svg>

~~~
rowanseymour
That's out of date. Try <http://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-
cables/> which has cables planned up to 2014

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tbundy
Must say, hadn't noticed the heavy UI, but now that I think about it, a bit
ridiculous that Gmail still has a loading bar.

Can't comment on Google Plus, I kept my account for about 2 days. Not terrible
or anything, the value proposition just wasn't there for me.

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mossplix
and again SouthAfrica != Africa

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_djo_
In what sense, out of interest?

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thebluesky
The article is actually about Zimbabwe, not South Africa.

I think what he means is that the title is excessively general "Why it's hard
to love Google Plus in Africa". It's a bit like writing about the trouble you
are having getting a fast Internet connection in Guatemala and then saying
"North America" has connectivity issues. Different countries in Africa are
very different from each other. It's like generalizing across Cambodia and
Japan because they are on the same continent. Big difference...

~~~
_djo_
Fair enough, I agree that the author was guilty of the kind of continent-wide
generalisations that's always misleading.

I was just a bit confused by the parent post's reference to South Africa,
which was a bit off-topic as the author is from Zimbabwe. My assumption was
that there were two possible explanations, that the post's author confused
South Africa with Southern Africa, or that they considered South Africa to be
so much of an outlier in this regard (which it isn't) that the submissions
from South Africans weren't relevant. Either explanation would be wrong and
worth correcting.

~~~
Kabweza
I'm the author.

Indeed Zimbabwe is not representative of all Africa. However, Zimbabwe
actually has better internet that most African countries. At least it's in the
top 10 of 54 countries on the continent according to Ookla
(<http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/>)

If Zimbabwe's internet is bad enough to cause users problems loading Google+,
It's likely worse in the majority of the countries on the continent.

Generalising therefore was not meant to paint the picture that all Africa is
the same, but that Google (if they read this) need to have a strategy that
takes into account the poor internet quality the bulk of Africa has.

~~~
rowanseymour
Here in Rwanda we keep hearing how we have the 3rd fastest internet in Africa
according to Ookla, but it's kinda nonsense because Ookla measures speed to
the nearest Ookla server. In Rwanda the internal infrastructure is great and
there's an Ookla server in Kigali so it thinks we have great internet. But
that doesn't take into account the connection to the rest of the world which
isn't so great.

