

The Horror of setting up a Google+ account for my mom - _ankit_
https://plus.google.com/114289448591067978562/posts/2QoEnp3LyEH

======
PaulHoule
I've been a social media programmer since 2001 and personally I think Google+
needs a paper book to explain how to use it.

I always have people trying to get me to join them in hangouts and sometimes
it works, but often it takes me 10 or 15 minutes to get the invitation and
actually get into the hangout.

The funniest time was when it wanted me to update the software on my mac and
it gave me step-by-step instructions to open a terminal window and use the
command line to do the update.

I give Google credit for developing a sharing model that's different from the
Facebook and Twitter model, so that Google+ isn't just an imitation of it's
competitors. On the other hand, I dont know if I like sender-controlled
sharing... There are so many people that want to spam me with this or spam me
with that, and I'm not just talking about Nigerian spammers, I'm talking about
close friends, family members, C-level people at places I work with and so
forth. I'd rather see an intelligent social media platform that helps me pick
out what I want and what I need to know; Facebook comes closer to that.

~~~
lotharbot
I'd love to see good, simple two-way sharing control. I should be able to
decide who a post is visible to, and they should be able to decide what
proportion/type of my posts they want to see. G+ is better at the former while
FB is better at the latter; neither do the whole package very well.

------
jrockway
This article is a random list of annoyances, not a horror story about setting
up Google+. Ultimately, it sounds like the author's mom would prefer email to
Google+.

I think Google+ is a good tool for groups larger than families, like
companies. You might want to share things with your coworkers, but email
doesn't scale. So you can instead have a nice access-controlled internal
sharing site, and people that are interested in pictures of your CNC mill or
whatever can see them. ("Pages" are great for things like your cafeteria
posting menus or pictures of food.)

~~~
Renaud
The issue I have with G+ within companies is that it leaks to the public side.

You can switch off some parts of it so the content is visible only internally,
but your account picture, name, company you work for and the fact that you
have an account are visible to anyone on G+.

------
notbitter
Google has some inner conflict here. The marketing strategy is "more private
than Facebook" but the obvious way to measure the success of Google+ is by how
much oversharing people are doing. Optimize for that and you get pushy UX like
the one described. Hopefully they can figure out a more nuanced metric.

~~~
read_wharf
The network effect says that a person that's connected to five family members
is not as (measurably) valuable as someone connected to fifty people.

If you were Google, which would you rather sell to advertisers, correlations
between groups of five people of fifty?

~~~
dirtyaura
Hmm, is this backed by data?

I mean that is it known that in current social networks a life-time value of a
person that with 5 strong relationship ties is less valuable over time than a
person who has 50 very very weak ties (like most of my Google+ followers,
people who I don't know)

~~~
read_wharf
My conjecture on top of the general value of a more connected network.

What is Facebook's motivation for connecting people? Or Google's? Or
LinkedIn's.

A newspaper sold millions of individual pairs of eyeballs to advertisers. I
would think the large numbers of correlations available in a largely connected
network would be much more valuable than unconnectable individuals.

~~~
dirtyaura
But stronger ties could be more "sticky", i.e. it's harder to leave Facebook
than Twitter because people (in general) have stronger ties to people they are
connected in Facebook than in Twitter. Thus, life-time value of a stronger tie
for the service provider is larger. This seems common sense, but I'm
interested in if there's any kind of data what the ratio is. Inside a single
service, of course, as values are not directly comparable over the services
due to different business models)

------
dewitt
Hi _ankit_, sorry to read that you and your mom had troubles with her initial
Google+ experience. A few things sound like possible issues, and the whole
thing is valuable feedback, so I'll file a few bugs, and pass the post along
to our team. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

~~~
_ankit_
Thanks dewitt for the positive reply! It feels great to be heard.

------
ams6110
_she uses Google+ to stay in touch with other family members online ( < 10)_

What I don't understand is if you want to stay in touch with a small group of
close acquaintances/family why not use email? It's vastly easier to use than
any "social network"

~~~
_ankit_
A big part of staying in touch is _sharing photos_ , and _video calling_.
Especially, if you live far away from your family.

~~~
phwd
I once thought this but not again. Your family, at least the elders, would
more appreciate that you pick up the phone or send postal mail than use
technology.

You _think_ it's a big part but you are in fact making that personal
connection weaker.

At the very most in the world technology, email would suffice for your family.

~~~
bdunbar
_Your family, at least the elders, would more appreciate that you pick up the
phone or send postal mail than use technology._

Most of the elders in my family - talking people 65+ - have computers, use
Facebook, to keep in touch. Most of my mother's _friends_ are on Facebook for
that matter. They do appreciate a phone call, but for grand-baby pictures and
video, that's where the action is.

My mother is the exception. At the age of 70, she's never touched a computer.
She likely never will.

Anyway - my point is that my family is not exceptional, nor especially early-
adopting. We're pretty typical Americans, I think.

------
js4all
Those are valid points but Google has a different target.

The pages are designed to get the user to spend more time on G+.

------
sparknlaunch12
Google started their life with a simple UI that anyone could use. You simply
entered keywords into a textbox and hit the enter key.

Suddenly all their new stuff is too complicated. Google+ and Google Listen are
painful to use.

~~~
jrockway
And that still exists. Now Google has other products too, which you can use if
you want to, or not use if you don't want to.

~~~
sparknlaunch12
All true. However surely Google want to deliver an intuitive and easy to use
social media tool to their end users. I thought G+ is for the mass market -
maybe it isn't.

Google+ is definitely not intuitive and during their recent upgrade have
ripped off Facebook's profile and cover photo idea.

------
cfinke
And you can't page down using the spacebar anymore. That seems like a
fundamental feature of the modern Web browser that Google decided not to
support, and for what reason?

~~~
magicofpi
Wait, really? It seems to work for me (Safari 5.1.4 / Chrome 20.0.1096.1 on
Lion).

~~~
cfinke
Definitely broken for me in Firefox 11 and 12 on Lion.

------
bmelton
Without getting into the specific point-by-point refutation of this because,
some of it is valid, I must first wonder why it is that people assume that
every product should fit every person.

My first reaction is how horrible it would be to set up a Google+ account for
my dog. I mean, my dog doesn't even have hands! Pulling that back a little bit
though, it starts off with "my mom isn't big about the internet."

More to the point, there isn't actually any 'horror' in 'setting up a Google+
account for his mom'. By all accounts, the lack of horror in the actual
account setup tells me that it was probably a fairly trivial affair, or even,
uneventful. I was expecting something about real name guideline violations or
switching accounts being an issue, but that's not the case at all, it seems.

Perhaps the most legitimate complaint (to my ears, your mileage will vary) is
that there are non-circled posts added to your stream. The 'promoted' or 'hot'
posts or whatever could certainly do with a toggle permission or something for
the 'closed circle' types, and I actually thought that there was a way to keep
people's stuff out of your stream.

~~~
_ankit_
I agree that you can't have every product fit every person, but isn't one of
the primary selling points of Google+ that "you can have private conversations
with small groups of family and friends". I would personally think the
features and UX should be designed keeping that in mind.

Even saying so, a lot of the points I say there are potential usability issues
for everyone (at least for me they are). For example, the big banner ads for
mobile apps and Hangouts.

I agree, the title is a bit misleading. By "setup", I meant creating an
account _and_ simplifying the user interface, and explaining to my mom how to
start hangouts, share photos, etc.

~~~
bmelton
Perhaps that's my point of contention. I think that, for sharing to small
groups of individuals, G+ is the best platform around (though I haven't tried
EveryMe as they aren't on Android). I type a message, I type a group or two, I
hit enter. Done.

Sharing is simple.

Where it seems like your complaints lie are in getting too much information -
above and beyond what has been shared.

To me, I suppose that's small potatoes. I get the occasional distraction in my
stream, but Google's usually smart enough to make it relevant, and about half
the time I see something from outside of my circles, it ends up drawing me
into a conversation.

I am decidedly not your mom, and I don't mind it. Also, my stream is active
enough that those 'outsiders' ever take up any significant percentage of it,
so perhaps I'm unable to see it from her point of view, but I don't think that
showing me things I like, that I might otherwise have missed, is a 'problem'
that needs to be 'fixed'.

Again, just my opinion. Can I ask what other social networks your mom has
used, and how she found those, in comparison?

~~~
_ankit_
Yes, it does depend how one is using Google+. I primarily use it to interact
with small groups of friends and family who are using Google+ (which is not a
lot), which might be very different from how you use it.

Also, these views are all mine, what triggered them was the annoyances I came
across as I was trying to simplify the Google+ interface for my mom. I find
Google+ great for sharing links, photos and doing hangouts and I definitely
don't know of a better or simpler solution for private sharing among groups of
people. Like you said, it is really simple to share.

I do feel strongly about letting users easily opt out of getting too much
information. If I want to see what's trending, I can visit the Explore tab.
Like the left navigation, maybe it makes sense to let you hide stuff on the
right sidebar as well.

My main annoyance though is with the persistent adverts (the banners you see
on Explore, Hangout and Photos pages). And the "in your face" banner that you
cannot get rid of, if you have less than 10 people in Circles. The only way is
to add strangers to your Circles to get rid of it. Would it be too bad to have
a "X" icon on the top right to get rid of these?

