

Google+ comes up short - gangadhargs
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/07/google_comes_up_short.html?cm_sp=most_widget-_-blog_posts-_-Google+%20Comes%20Up%20Short

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jaysonelliot
The author seems to be suffering from a classic case of confusing personal
anecdotes and preferences with actual insight and analysis.

He seems to have joined G+ with some sort of expectation that he'd find a
full-baked, revolutionary new site that would change his perception of social
networking. It's evident from his article, indeed his very first sentence,
that he doesn't think Facebook has any shortcomings that need to be overcome.

If you're starting from the position that "Facebook works just fine, I don't
need a better way to share things online," then yes, Google Plus is not
solving a problem for you.

There are a lot of people who just want to use the Internet to share family
pictures and funny jokes they've heard, and don't care about or understand
things like owning their data, controlling their privacy, or ensuring that
different sites and protocols are interoperable and predictable.

They won't rush to join G+, because they are fine where they are inside the
walled garden of Facebook, just like they were find inside AOL's walled garden
in the 1990s. Eventually, Google+ will be for them, but not right now.

I'd call that "early days," not "coming up short."

~~~
timr
_"If you're starting from the position that "Facebook works just fine, I don't
need a better way to share things online," then yes, Google Plus is not
solving a problem for you."_

Yes, exactly. And for the _vast majority_ of Facebook users, that's where
they're starting. And that's the guy's point. And he's absolutely right.
Google has an uphill climb with this one, because they're competing against
two established players who already do a great job of what they do.

 _"There are a lot of people who just want to use the Internet to share family
pictures and funny jokes they've heard, and don't care about or understand
things like owning their data, controlling their privacy, or ensuring that
different sites and protocols are interoperable and predictable._

The only people I hear complaining about Facebook and Twitter on privacy
grounds are the same people who complained that iPods were over-priced, that
Macs aren't open enough, that VHS was inferior to Beta, and that MP3 was going
to fall to Ogg Vorbis _any day now_. Could they be right? Sure. Do I think
that's likely? Not based on past experience. Realists know that "good enough"
carries the day -- especially when "good enough" is actually pretty darned
good.

Maybe Google+ will be a vastly better experience in a few years, but right now
it's clunky and awkward, and the payoff for using it is low. Literally
_everyone I care about_ is on Facebook, and if they make their groups feature
slightly more prominent and easy to use, they'll have matched Google+ feature
for feature. That's the point of the essay: to make a compelling alternative
to a strong competitor's product, you have to do a lot more than add a few
basic features.

~~~
jamesteow
" Literally everyone I care about is on Facebook"

Everyone I cared about was on Friendster and on Myspace too.

My favorite people who I'm friends with on Facebook tend to rarely post on
Facebook (if at all) or use Twitter as their main outlet.

I enjoy the social purge as my list get re-populated by my true friends of the
time and the quality of the content re-aligns with a better signal-to-noise
ratio.

On a side note: photo uploading is way better on G+. I've been extremely
unhappy about the re-encoding on Facebook which outputs my photos with less
quality (despite uploading at a high quality setting) where as Google retains
my original image and scales it according the browser size. That alone makes
my experience vastly better as nothing annoys me more than seeing friends use
my low-res photos of them as their profile photos when they should have access
to a high-res version.

------
cgranade
This article seems to basically be a giant troll... if you can't see what
problems Google+ claims to solve for a consumer, you aren't looking very hard.
As far as I can see, there's two giant issues that G+ addresses and one that's
arguably more important, but also more invisible.

1) It's not Facebook. Don't discount how much some people __loathe __FB as a
company, and (in my opinion) rightfully so! They've made a business out of
tricking users into accidentally over-sharing, they've engaged in some pretty
stunning acts of censorship, and keep changing the UI in drastic steps that
shock their existing userbase. (I have some sympathy with this last one, but
it is a widespread complaint, nonetheless.)

2) In G+, privacy controls are manifest and obvious. There's little
functionality in this realm that FB doesn't also offer, but it's not actively
hidden from users on G+, but rather promoted to a primary feature of the UI.

The other thing that I think G+ does right is to get away from the "one-size-
fits-all" model, under which every contact is a "friend". When you hear people
saying "they're my Facebook friend, but not a __real __friend," it's clear
that FB has flubbed it. G+, like Twitter and other such social media networks,
allows for asymmetric contacts, which really lets the user control how they
want to use the site.

Anyway, that's just my 2¢.

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abrahamsen
He might be right. Google+ may never challenge Facebook or Twitter.

This doesn't mean Google+ will be a failure though, because unlike what he
asserts, Google+ _does_ offer one thing they don't: A tight integration with
the Google services. Each of the various services used to have their own ways
of sharing, now (or soon) they will have the same interface, namely Google+.

People may still use Facebook to keep track of old acquaintances and twitter
to follow celebrities, but use Google+ to share photos from Picasa and their
Android phone with their family, share documents from Google Docs with their
colleagues, and Hangout with their friends. Which also explain why Google+ put
Circles first, the various services doesn't overlap that much.

Joshua Gans will most likely be an active user of Google+ because of one these
services, namely Google Search. Google Search is being tied to Google Profiles
through the rel=author tag. This will put his name and picture next to his
writings. The user clicking on them will go to his profile page. If he also
share links to his writings on Google+, these will be shown alongside his
profile. That will be hard to resist for any blogger.

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920)

TL;DR: Google+ mainly makes Google better. It has overlap in functionality
with both Facebook and Twitter, and make take marketshare from those, but that
is not the sole success criteria.

~~~
Andrex
Correct. People also need to realize Google+ isn't just the site you see when
you go to plus.google.com. It's a Google-wide initiative that affects almost
all of their properties. Truly, an improved version of Google.

------
pnathan
I got an invite on G+ this morning and logged in. Here are my thoughts...

I found it had a very very prominent user interface of "who sees my data", and
the 'circles' interface is very - IMO - obvious.

This is very reassuring: Google's obviously not trying to go the sketchy route
of "how much data can we send out to everyone unannounced", at least not at
the start. I left Facebook for that reason, and don't plan to _ever_ go back.

Although, I found it a little confusing about following. "I added so and so to
my following... I hope they didn't get an invite!!!!" Because that would be
awkward - I just want to see what some of the influential techies are doing
and perhaps to talk with them, not to "be friends" ala the
Facebook/Livejournal approach.

~~~
jaysonelliot
They'll see that you've placed them in a Circle, but it's no different than
following them on Twitter.

If someone is an influential techie on G+, they get lots of people following
them, and they won't even take a moment to consider whether it's someone
trying to be "friends."

That's one of the fundamental differences with G+. It's not like FB, forcing
you into an all-or-nothing approach to sharing.

~~~
pnathan
That's what I figured. It's like Dreamwidth in that respect; separating out
"people who read you" from "people you read".

------
icarus_drowning
Google+ solves a lot of issues. It is easy, rather than confusing, to set up
lists of friends, and using them is likewise easy, rather than frustrating.
Video chat that's free and easy to use (as opposed to easy to use but not
worth the expense in the case of Skype or incredibly expensive and
inordinately difficult to use in the case of many corporate IT solutions).

It doesn't solve _every_ need that Facebook doesn't, but it does address quite
a few of them.

------
yaix
>> Facebook provides "hyper-local news," allowing people to broadcast [...] to
their social circle [...]

Nope, FB allows people only to broadcast to their social network. That is what
G+ "solves for consumers". The "hyper-local news" becomes targeted, really
only to the social circle that's interested.

How ironic, that the author used the G+ term "social circle" to describe what
FB is doing.

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bpd1069
The author forgot to do one very important step, send out invites to people in
your closest circles that aren't on G+ yet.

~~~
akkartik
It's even more natural than that. On the first day I simply organized my
contacts and started sharing. Some of them are now on G+ and some are not, but
all of them get notified when I share something with them. And they can see it
in their inbox whether they signed up or not.

I don't think of it as a 'social network' I have to 'invite' people to. I
think of it as amplifying my sharing.

~~~
pkulak
That's what I did too. Of course, most of the links that people get in email
are broken... but it would be great if it worked!

~~~
akkartik
Can you forward one of the broken links? Agaram at google. Thanks!

~~~
laz
the unsubscribe link was 404ing for days and days

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_shane
The millions of people that have joined Google+ and the throngs of people that
have buzzed about it would beg to differ with the author who is obviously is
trolling.

Also, he conveniently omitted from the article the fact that he's a visiting
researcher at Microsoft. Possible conflict of interests?

------
kidmenot
Am I the only one thinking that this article is just a pile of bullshit?

\+ launched 12 days ago, isn't it a bit too early to talk about its defects?

~~~
resnamen
_Definitely_ too early to talk about a lack of network effect. Facebook didn't
start life preprogrammed with users; it was Myspace that had all the users and
content!

~~~
kidmenot
Yep.

As it happens all to often, many people write only because they have a
keyboard.

But that's not even surprising, if you consider that they probably are the
same people that, in real life, talk only because they happen to have a mouth.

------
btilly
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-llwYjxv8Y&feature=play...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-llwYjxv8Y&feature=player_embedded)
says what Google+ solves in a very entertaining way.

