

The Tragic Beauty of Google+ - technologizer
http://techland.time.com/2013/05/16/the-tragic-beauty-of-google/

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hcarvalhoalves
Let me dispute the "beautiful" argument. I don't think Google does a good job
at UI at all:

<http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png>

My first impression after opening this was "WTF is going on here?". It's
floating panes atop floating panes, reinvented scrollbars, while the actual
content is sparse. The same kind of nonsense that put me off using GMail.

But hey, that's what you get when you cram a desktop inside a desktop. I bet
their new UIs work great on Chrome OS.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I find it interesting that Facebook actually had "beautiful" multi-column
content first, but people hated it (citation needed) because it was hard to
read while scrolling around. FB went back to having a single column on the
right and showing only static information on the left.

Now _after_ FB has corrected its mistake, G+ insists on repeating it...

~~~
Slackwise
Under the 'More' menu at the top of your G+ stream, there is a 'Stream layout'
widget that lets you switch from multi to single column.

Somewhat hidden, but at least it's there.

~~~
anotherevan
Oh thank-you, thank-you, Slackwise. You're my new best friend.

------
peterkelly
I've recently given up Facebook due to realising it was almost a complete
waste of my time, and I have the same feeling towards Google+.

With Facebook it was becoming that I'd log on each day and see a bunch of
irrelevant content from people I hadn't spoken to for years (and in some
cases, met only once or twice). Occasionally I'd end up having a meaningful
conversation but the signal-to-noise ratio was just ridiculously high. And
then there was the advertising and lack of concern for privacy etc. I could go
on.

It may be just me, but sitting down together for lunch or (if the person lives
elsewhere) chatting on phone or Skype seem much more pleasant and fruitful
modes of social interaction. And of course HN for reading interesting
discussions about topics of interest :)

~~~
henrikschroder
Facebook, Google+, and any other social network or electronic communication is
_what_ _you_ _make_ _it_. But you have to actively use the tools provided to
curate your experience.

I don't friend people on Facebook that I haven't met in real life. I de-friend
people if I'm no longer interested in what they post or what they do. I hide
or throttle down posts from people who have a high noise ratio.

In return, my Facebook feed is pretty enjoyable, and keeps me up to date on
what a bunch of people I _care_ about are doing in their lives. But it takes a
little bit of work on my side, it doesn't appear automatically, and if you're
indiscriminate about adding people as friends, your feed will be not be
enjoyable. Simply walking away from it instead of curating it is a lazy
solution.

~~~
lkozma
What you say is obviously true, but there must be some curve between the
effort needed to make it useful and the utility derived from it, based on
which some people can rationally decide that it is not worth it for them,
while others can decide the opposite. That doesn't make one of them lazy and
the other one stupid (although some people might be better or worse in
estimating the effort or the utility of the process) - notice that otherwise
the same generic argument could be made for anything:

"X is what you make of it ... walking away from it is a lazy solution." where
X could be nuclear weapons, hard drugs, etc. etc.

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cnahr
Journalists love to talk about how "beautiful" Google+ is -- first the mobile
apps, now the web interface. But you are posting this link here, on a picture-
free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to
Reddit or Metafilter.) "Beautiful" does not enable discussion, it enables
advertising.

Google+ vs Facebook misses the point. Having lots of random people chatting
about random things isn't very profitable, as Facebook discovered. There's no
point in emulating that. Instead, Google+ is the universal publishing &
commenting platform for the highly profitable Google advertising ecosystem.
Here's where Google talks to its actual G+ target audience:

<https://www.google.com/+/business/>

~~~
ergo14
You are wrong - there is plenty of discussion on g+.

~~~
cnahr
Not really, no. Most people post a couple of times and get few reactions
beyond one-liners, if that. Over time, fewer and fewer people who aren't
Google employees (1) bother posting anymore. Picture posts get by far the most
+1s and shares. Completely incomparable to the text-based discussion networks.

(1) As well as anyone promoting a business, I should add. I've seen a couple
of writers and lots of professional photographers using G+ for self-promotion.
That seems to work quite well for them, especially the photographers given how
image-heavy G+ is.

~~~
johnyzee
That's all true, but try the 'Communities' function for a given topic you are
interested in if you haven't already. I use Google+ for that exclusively,
after giving it up due to the same observations you made.

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johnchristopher
I still work and browse the internet with an asus eeepc 1000he and g+ is
barely usable on that machine. Javascript and html(5) are gobbling my CPU to
display images and snippets of text: typically post of maximum 3 lines and 7
displayed comments that are heavily dynamic for no real (imo) value for the
end-user. Before that ajax everywhere and like buttons non-sense it wouldn't
have been a problem.

The irritating point is that density of information hasn't changed that much.
On the whole I think it's a regression of the web.

~~~
snaky
Time to setup goodold Mutt and subscribe to good old mailing lists, if you
care about information density.

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danmaz74
"The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting."

So, Facebook feels more "warm, personal" to the author - and I would agree,
for the same reasons: On Facebook I share with my friends and family, while on
G+ I mostly deal with interesting people I don't know directly.

The funny thing is that Facebook _wants_ its users to interact more with
people (entities) they don't know, for good monetization reasons, and exactly
this could make Facebook much less warm and personal - and thus worse for its
current users. Incidentally, I just wrote a post exactly about this (from a
branding perspective): [http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-
monetiz...](http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetization-
clashes-with-branding/)

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rogerbinns
My problem with G+ is they keep making it harder to read content. The new
layout is terrible for that (arbitrary sized boxes in arbitrary alignments).
Newspapers have done that but there is human supervision for the content
(which is almost always longer than a few sentences) and the layout is human
supervised.

The irony is that there is a product specifically geared towards towards
reading productivity and following lots of sources. Google will be killing it
in two months (Google Reader).

~~~
Lewisham
You can turn it into single-column if you don't like the arbitrary-boxes.

~~~
johnyzee
First thing I did. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be available for the
Communities pages.

~~~
bockris
Home->Settings->Accessability checkbox should fix community pages

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apricot13
I have a _fairly_ good windows 7 machine. 64bit, 6gb. I opened g+ in chrome
and it crashed, twice.

There are pop overs everywhere I move my mouse, making it even slower! I have
a resolution of 1024x768 so everything is squished and hard to find/read.

I'll keep giving it a go, but I do wish they would add a 'lightweight'
version, like the html only gmail for us people without top of the line
machines that can run crazy amounts of javascript.

~~~
stack0v3erfl0w
For a lightweight version you can try the mobile version
<https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream>

------
alipang
Google plus is the Nokia Lumia of social networks. Solid, great looking and
not better enough than the incumbent to gain a significant market share.

~~~
paganel
It's been two years of putting "more wood behind fewer arrows" and all they
could come up with is a Pinterest-lookalike thingie. For an outsider like me
it's really, really frustrating, they have all this data and smart engineers
and all they can think about is winning every battle and not realizing that
they're losing the war.

And just to make sure, "the war" is not against Facebook, Microsoft or any
short-term, market-driven non-sense, "the war" and fight itself should be
related to trying to reach the Singularity, trying to make us (the human
species) less dependent on only one potential point of failure (this planet)
etc.

~~~
FireBeyond
Wait, your source of frustration with Google is that they're not doing enough
to move the human race to another planet in the near future?!?

I just want to make sure I understand what you are getting at, here.

~~~
paganel
Yeap, got that right, they have some of the smartest guys on the planet as
their employees and they fill up their time with what looks like gibberish.
You do have to think big.

------
pilooch
For the past month, I've been checking on G+ before Twitter and other media or
sources. Here is how I was dragged into it.

I had never used Facebook, and I had never used Google+. I guess I was too
busy with Emacs.

Then recently I had to hit Google+ to follow some community thread on the Deep
Learning channel, <https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725>

Somehow, the researchers from the field did settle there. Next I started
reading the Machine Learning community threads, then the C++ one, etc...
Eventually I did post to the Machine Learning community, and I saw the hits on
our website, a few hundreds every day, for a few days, not much, but I could
tell the right people were visiting, because they were spending way more time
than visitors from other sources.

So my current understanding is that G+ is worth for its communities, and the
targeted traffic it offers... my 2cents :)

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nmridul
Is there a way in G+ where we can follow only relevant topics from people we
follow ?

Say if someone I follow posts something which he tags something ("tech",
"travel" etc) and I can choose to follow only the posts that are tagged
"tech".

This is something I cannot figure out and if its there, I'm sure it will avoid
most of the clutter in G+.

~~~
johnyzee
The 'Communities' part of Google+ is pretty good for following particular
topics. It's the only reason I use Google+.

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dade_
I found Google+ great for collaborating with the maker community. The strength
is use cases that involve discovery of pictures (&diagrams) + discussion of
ideas/things, as the communities feature works well for this. Adafruit is
making great use of hangouts as well. However, I find that Twitter & Facebook
work much better than G+ as news feeds.

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methodin
I think a revelation I've had recently is that, in general, friends are boring
unless they are doing something of interest. The information I find on Google+
and other non-real-life endeavors from people outside my real-life bubble is
much more interesting, as a rule of thumb.

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perlpimp
there was a post that explained that what facebook did with timeline - put it
into 2 line, so that people would not ignore sponsored posts on their
timelines/feed. I wonder if google is trying to do the same. I find this feed
quite distracting - my eyes keep on dithering between those columns. I suspect
google is trying to do pretty much same thing as facebook.

It feels pinterest-y too, seems alot of social media sites have have had their
design converge into what pinterest has realized with theirs.

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heme
\- Facebook wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising.

\- Google also wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising.
However, Google also uses that information to provide useful tools such as
directions, search, etc.

\- I am much more likely to give Google my info because they give me all of
these extra useful tools. Facebook provides nothing except a place for my mom
to see photos of her grand kids. AS soon as she is on G+ I will be dropping
FB.

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chj
Didn't like G+ design. They really should copy twitter's style.

~~~
chrisvineup
I struggle to find the similarities you are talking about do you care to share
which bits you are referring to?

~~~
James_Duval
I think you have misread

>should

as

>shouldn't

although I find the parent comment equally baffling if I read it either way.

