
The Mounting Minuses at Google+ - ssclafani
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204653604577249341403742390.html
======
rryan
Google+ fills a void for me most similar to a mix between Twitter and HN. The
discussions are what makes it shine.

Why doesn't this happen on Facebook or Twitter? Here's what I think:

For most people, Facebook is just the wrong context for intellectual
discussions.

Similarly, Twitter's medium and user interface are too limiting to have
quality discussions since there is no centralized concept of a post. It's just
a sea of tweets, retweets and reply tweets that you have to track if you want
to follow the discussion.

A lot of my real-world friends are on G+ but that's really only an ancillary
benefit to me because I can direct share things to my friends in 1-click from
anywhere on the web (e.g. with the +1 Chrome extension). G+ would still have
value to me without them, honestly.

~~~
gms
That's fine, but realise that intellectual discussions are a niche use case.

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lukifer
I still have yet to hear a compelling reason why Google+ offers real value.
The experience sucks compared to FaceBook, without even factoring in FB's
existing adoption rate and the resulting network effects. The branding is
confusing; people think of Google for finding stuff, not socializing. And the
marketing is pushy, shoving +1s everywhere, which holds no appeal to the
regular people who click the "Like" button on their friend's Farmville plot.

Google is making the mistake of fighting the last war. FaceBook may not own
the social graph forever, but even Google can't unseat them with a frontal
assault. People often compare the situation to FaceBook's conquest over
MySpace, but they forget that the MySpace user experience was pure shit. As
long as the FaceBook experience isn't terrible, there isn't much reason for
them to leave.

~~~
lomegor
First of all, you are comparing apple to oranges. Google+ is not a direct
competition to Facebook and there are many ways all three (including Twitter)
can coexist.

Lastly, the Facebook user experience is really horrible. That's one of the top
reasons I don't use it. Menus are not ordered, options are hidden, many parts
are not explained nor documented, top search works different depending which
page you are one, etc. And even though my grandma uses it, most of the times,
she's posting on other people's walls things she wanted to share with other
people, or not posting on walls when she is trying to communicate with my
brother. The experience is just too complicated.

~~~
DarkShikari
_First of all, you are comparing apple to oranges. Google+ is not a direct
competition to Facebook_

No matter how much they are claimed to solve different problems, they work in
the same way and occupy a similar brain space. Facebook is already well above
and beyond the level of time sink that many people are willing to accept.
Their user numbers are already starting to drop in many countries because many
people -- even ordinary users -- eventually run out of patience.

Given Facebook is already wearing peoples' patience thin, it's unlikely many
people really want to give full engagement to both sites at once. People just
don't have the time, and after you've spent 30 minutes on Facebook, do you
really want to go over to Google+ and repeat the same process again?

It's kind of like trying to play multiple similar MMORPGs (say, WoW and LOTRO)
at the same time; they occupy the same sort of brain space, so when you're
bored with one, you probably don't want to go play the other. But maybe you
can actively enjoy two different experiences; say, World of Tanks and EVE at
the same time... or Facebook and Twitter.

Google+ could hypothetically win out against Facebook, but it's unlikely that
they can seriously coexist with a large overlap in users. Most likely, Google+
will end up like other social networking services like Orkut; very popular
among some particular groups (Brazillians, in the Orkut case), but very
lacking in penetration outside of that, due to the network effect.

~~~
samstave
I have never had a facebook account. I never will. I have had a G+ account for
many months and I dont use it at all. Literally zero time per week.

There are too many distractions online, I don't watch TV at all either, but I
just don't have the brain space for the following peoples feeds.

I had scoble on my follow list on G+ when I first joined, and I had to drop
him because he just produced way too much crap I didnt have time or interest
to read.

Between my family, friends, reddit and HN, I have way too much content than I
know what to do with.

Aside from this - it detracts from my attempts to dedicate time to learning
new things.

I am very close to dropping reddit and HN and only watching Kahn and other
online trainings.

------
lomegor
Every time one of these articles come out, my Google+ stream fills with this
stories. In fact, I read it first on Google+ than on Hacker News.

If you are on Google+, and you participate, you will notice that it's a big
success. I'm not saying this because I love Google, I'm saying it because it's
almost the only social network I feel compelled to use.

~~~
ScottWhigham
"If you are on Google+, and you participate, you will notice that it's a big
success."

Can you explain that more? I'm on G+ and I participate but I have seen no
evidence that "it's a big success."

~~~
lomegor
What I meant is that it's a product that's here to stay. Maybe I went too far
with the word _big_ , but it's a success in that it has gained enough momentum
to be really useful to a large amount of people.

------
yason
A marking difference is that Facebook asks "What's on your mind?" and Google+
asks "Share what's new...".

G+ isn't really a social network, it's an extension to my Google profile and
Google account. I would like to use it as my social network but it's lacking a
couple of crucial things.

The reason it's suited for almost sharing news only and as an ad-hoc blogging
service is because it doesn't allow you to actually be in touch with people
like Facebook does. Unlike in Facebook, in G+ you can't post to the equivalent
of people's wall and you can't send short messages such as on Facebook.
There's email but it's not available with all my contacts, and G+ chat only
works with a select few people, and there's always a barrier in writing an
ordinary email.

Surprisingly, addressing a single person privately or publically is the only
thing that I need from Facebook. I don't use anything else on Facebook so I
could probably switch to G+ with most of my friend base if G+ had those.
Surely the user interface is _much better_ on Google side, Facebook is
absolutely horrific.

~~~
magicalist
Agreed. There were suggestions early on that you can just make a post limited
to one person (instead of a circle or public), but for some reason that feels
really awkward even though it's easy to do. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe
because it ends up in the same stream as everything else?

~~~
brohee
The main issue with posting to only one person is that the person doesn't know
it is actually private, at least it didn't have any marking the last time I
tried. The feature would be perfect if there was a message saying "this post
have been shared with you exclusively, your replies will only be seen by the
original poster".

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robertp
G+ is absolutely a ghost town on everything except SEO, photography & tech
news.

The company I work does womens fashion marketing for bigger e-commerce sites
retailers and designers. I was researching over the weekend to find any
designer on G+ and couldn't find anything. There are some active bloggers but
most get no +'s or the profiles havent been updated since 4 or 5 months ago.

From my 2 or so hours of research trying to find any thread of activity, most
women sharing content are definitely not doing it on Google plus.

~~~
lomegor
May I recommend
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao1OX3UN25EvdHR...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao1OX3UN25EvdHRWR3lwWXQ0a0RhWnFuWml5RnJHdkE&hl=en_US#gid=0)
or <http://www.recommendedusers.com/>?

There are many kinds of different people on Google+. Some came from twitter,
but many of them are just new to the social scene are starting to get popular.

------
magicalist
I've found the (somewhat public-facing) science and (academic) math content
and discussion to be great on google+. Not being more popular might hurt the
service long term if it gets shut down, but I really enjoy it right now, so I
don't particularly care.

Facebook I use mostly to keep up with family members and friends getting
married and having kids, which is fine. Twitter continues to be a great
pseudo-rss feed, streaming in tons of content in such easily digestible bite-
sized pieces (but every time I try to figure out the course of conversation
between other people I remember why I _hate_ their interface). Google's plan
may have been to be all things to all people and they haven't been able to,
but it's good for me right now for finding interesting stories and very
interesting people to talk with and learn from in the niches I care about. The
interface is designed for back and forth conversation, and the signal to noise
ratio is such that I actually enjoy it. Again, for now, why would _I_ care
about more than that?

> _While Intel gets dozens of responses to its posts on Google+ Ms. Walter
> said the company has nine million "fans" on Facebook and gets thousands of
> comments there._

This (and the trending-twitter-content/youtube-comment quality of the
thousands of comments you get on those posts) is exactly the problem with
public discussions on Facebook. Really it's a problem that no social network
has been able to solve as it scales up as far as I know. 100s of millions of
people are going to cause serious tragedies of the commons, of course, but we
also get the growing pains of reddit and, to a lesser extent, HN. Hopefully
google+ can maintain it's comfortable minuses for a little while longer.

------
citricsquid
If I want to post publicly to my "followers" (people I don't know) I use
Twitter, if I want to post to my friends I use Facebook, for me and almost
everyone else I've spoken to Google+ offers no value. I still don't understand
what Google was thinking with +, it offers _nothing_ to most people. The only
good feature is hangouts which could easily be a separate product.

I have around 150 friends on Facebook and I see a new time line "story" every
2 or 3 minutes (average). I follow 40 or so people on Twitter and see about 1
tweet per 15 minutes (average) and on Google+ I have 44 people in circles and
there are only 3 people that actually post anything, it averages at 1 post to
my "feed" per day. It's abysmal.

~~~
untog
_If I want to post publicly to my "followers" (people I don't know) I use
Twitter, [...] I still don't understand what Google was thinking with +_

How about publicly post long form content to your followers? Because G+ excels
in that, and both Facebook and Twitter fail at it. There's a network effect
problem, for sure, but it does have a purpose in the situation you outline.

~~~
xxbondsxx
Tumblr and other blogging platforms integrate into Facebook, and can drive a
ton of traffic to your long-form content from there with short story previews
or thumbnails. It's not the most seamless transition, but the functionality
exists

~~~
wyclif
The problem with Tumblr is that it's down a lot. I use it, but it suffers from
reliability issues and has for a long time.

------
1010011010
G+ is much more engaging _for me_ than either facebook or twitter.

This article feels like it's shilling for facebook.

"It turns out Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival
Facebook Inc., which is preparing for a massive initial public offering.'

------
dredmorbius
Among the most compelling positives about G+ for me is that it's not Facebook.

Among the most compelling negatives about G+ for me is that ... it's the
emergent evil face of Google.

Nothing has changed my view of the company as much as it's exceptionally ham-
handed dealings with real identities, real names, pseudonyms, and the like,
particularly as expressed by Schmid and Gundotra (with an honorable mention to
Horowitz) in the past six or eight months.

~~~
marshallp
It's the lesser of two evils. Would you rather facebook (rumored to deal with
the CIA/Palantir), or shudder - the government, be the internet's identity
provider. In fact, unless Larry and Sergey crash in their planes I don't
believe google will actually ever turn evil.

~~~
dredmorbius
Diaspora.

My own familiarity with social networks gives me a strong hope that some sort
of social networking interchange protocol can be established which will enable
the sort of sharing and disclosure (among friends and common interest groups)
we've come to love, while limiting the exploitation by advertisers, spammers,
scammers, and surveillance entities many of us have come to dislike intensely.

I see Diaspora as a very significant development to this end.

------
bcantrill
I was initially very excited about G+ because Twitter continues to be such a
disappointment, but I find that I'm using Twitter more than ever (and, it
should be said, disliking it more than ever). It has become clear to me that
-- like the transition from black-and-white to color television -- the winning
replacement for Twitter will be the one that doesn't force the world to choose
overnight. To that end (and apologies if this obvious observation has already
been made): could Google not allow me to associate my Twitter stream with G+
such that my tweets automatically show up as G+ posts? This would allow for
the advantages of G+ (namely, discussion and follow-up) without me having to
abandon Twitter followers -- and would allow me to gradually increase my use
of G+ over time. Clearly this is technologically trivial, and if there is a
legal reason that this isn't done, it seems to me that it should be
circumventable. So is there a reason this hasn't been done? (Or perhaps it
has?) Or maybe my fervent hope for a Twitter replacement has clouded my
thinking, and this kind of bridge wouldn't be the panacea that it seems?

~~~
k-mcgrady
1\. Why do you use Twitter if you dislike it so much? (I'm actually curious)
2\. Syndicating your tweets across multiple networks would annoy people - and
you would probably lose followers. The most annoying thing I see on Facebook
is a stream of someones tweets. People tend to tweet a lot. They also tend to
update their Facebook status a lot. But G+ is different. People post less and
their is more discussion. Allowing tweet syndication would ruin that. You can
however easily share your G+ posts to twitter (although not automatically)
using one of several Chrome extensions.

~~~
bcantrill
I use Twitter primarily because of the network effect -- and secondarily
because of the benefits of the 140-character narrative. (In particular, this
allows for a much higher density view than I get with G+.) As for syndicating
across multiple networks: I don't really see how I would lose Twitter
followers -- and if I lose G+ followers over it, then G+ was probably never
meant to be (at least for me). But I think you raise the essential question:
is G+ meant to be different or better? And if better, how am I to migrate from
Twitter (or FB) without having to manage two social networks?

~~~
k-mcgrady
I think it's meant to be different, not better (or at least that is how it is
right now). It allows the follower model of Twitter but with the long form
post ability (+profiles/photos) of Facebook. For me they are all best used
separately: Facebook for friends & family; twitter for news/content that won't
instigate discussions; Google+ for blog post style content and discussions.

------
tissarah
How is G+ different? What does it do better? Here's what I want to see:
Facebook took media, Google+ should take mobile. It seems to me that it is a
positioning problem.

Facebook has made big moves recently to be the place to share all media (news
papers, music, movies, tv etc) through their announced partnerships. Sharing
media is something we've been waiting for and users have been doing themselves
for years. For all the complaints, privacy concerns, user experience changes
-- it seems to be going quite well.

However, Facebook's mobile apps have been atrocious. They are just recently
approaching usable. How long did we have to wait for an iPad version of the
Facebook app? Considering how often and how long people access Facebook from
mobile devices it is astonishing that the mobile experience is what it is.
Where is the innovation?

Google has an army of Android devices -- just take mobile and make the most
awesome, seamless, integrated mobile experience ever. Partner with everything
that's cool in the physical world. Social people get out and do things.
Google+ should bridge the gap between offline and online social experiences.
Android android android.

------
jamie
That sound you hear is a giant checkbook opening in the direction of Pintrest.
The parallels with Google Video and Youtube shouldn't be lost on anyone.

~~~
cromwellian
Actually, it's the sound of Rupert Murdoch directing his properties on an
anti-Google crusade.

~~~
urdnot
I was going to say, it sure seems like News Corp beating the old drum.

------
AllenKids
Last time I checked G+ my feed looks like a mix of photo gallery and Google
fan club.

It is really really weird. All social groups have circle-jerky tendency, none
is as apparent at the scale as G+

~~~
ragmondo
I couldn't be bothered to type it but now you have I'll add "me too". I even
added a post entitled "Google+ test" (or something like that) and a paragraph
about how I wasn't sure exactly how it was better than twitter or facebook.
And I posted a few grumbles about Android phones (real grumbles, not just
anti-fanboi stuff)..... And all I saw in my stream were Googlers posting
pictures being praised by there 5000+ followers.

------
mackyinc
I cant even think of a reason myself why to join G+. Right now, Facebook
offers almost everything I would have need.

------
jacques_chester
So, because it wasn't instantly successful, it's a failure?

I remember thinking about MySpace that, with 80 million users, nobody would
ever catch up. Boy was I wrong.

~~~
dredmorbius
You and Rupert both.

I hear he bought a paper once, too ....

------
leeoniya
the problem is simple: no one wants to maintain multiple social accounts.

if all my friends migrated exclusively to G+, it would be fine, i would as
well. but for that to happen, all of their friends would need to migrate...and
so on.

i deleted my g+ account a week ago because no one has only a g+ account,
everyone on g+ is ALSO on FB. as long as there continues to be a significant
majority of content posted to FB (in my case over 90%), i have absolutely no
desire to waste even more time being faux-social on an additional network. i
have a real life as i am sure most people do.

i would need the equivalent of google reader to aggregate my social feeds so
that i can stay sane. until that happens, "no thanks".

~~~
zalew
> the problem is simple: no one wants to maintain multiple social accounts.

I'm a FB refugee and G+ is the first social network I don't have to maintain.
It's just there. I use other G products anyway so I don't think about using or
not using it, if having the account is really worth it. And circles are so
damn easy I don't care about adding even whole public circles I wouldn't
normally friend/follow on any other network - they are there, I don't share
with them, I can read them once per month and their existence doesn't bother
me, if I realize I don't read them, I can drop a whole circle 4000 people at
once with two clicks. And it's usability is disobliging, especially comparing
to FB.

~~~
leeoniya
if G+ has 90 million users, and FB has 900 million users. statistically, only
1/10th of your FB contacts would be on G+ without the help of warm-market
recruitment.

if you happen to find yourself in a situation where 95% of your friends are
either exclusively or primarily on G+, you are likely a rare exception and
don't need to weigh a choice between following 95% of what your friends share
and the freedom from "maintaining" a social account.

i am very specific about what i want to share and what i dont. for that to
happen, yes you need to explicitly post and not post. i hate the whole "share
everything implicitly" concept. to be honest, beyond the FB feed of my tight
circle of friends, i don't use it for anything else.

~~~
zalew
Not following 95% of what my "friends" share was a decision I made way
earlier. So I really don't mind that on G+ I have 10-15 daily posts from
people I know IRL, not 650. And if facebookers came to G+, certainly over half
of them would land in a separate circle of IRL people I'm not interested in
reading for various reasons. Most of the mentioned problems with G+ are
problems I don't have.

~~~
leeoniya
i don't FB friend people that i don't talk to IRL at least once every 6
months. in fact, i actively unfriend stale contacts every year (probably about
10% each time). i'm usually at around 75 contacts. so my "friends" are without
quotes and actually those who i do care to follow.

------
psipwnage
The problem with Google+ is that people inside Google saw the things that were
going wrong with it and the executive team didn't listen. A lot of them were
punished. People were fired over RN advocacy, and the person who tried to save
the Games product from failure had a manager push him out through various
abuse-of-process tactics enabled by their ludicrous "perf" system.
(Interesting fact: Google has two weeks every year where nothing gets done
because everyone-- not just managers-- has to drop everything and write
performance reviews.)

Google now has _huge_ internal morale problems because of Google+ and the
culture is falling to pieces. That, in my opinion, is why it will never
succeed.

~~~
lomegor
Wow, really? Can you provide a source for that claims? Maybe it's in the
article but I didn't see it.

------
damian2000
Everyone knows G+ is using better and cleaner tech than facebook or twitter,
but social networks are defined by, and made vastly more valuable by their
total network size and so facebook with its billions of users will probably be
on top for some time to come.

------
Metapony
The ONE thing that I loathe G+ for is that they did away with the just-about-
a-standard @username and replaced it with +username. That's as lame as a .biz
domain. No one is going to use it if you have to translate your post into
googlese.

------
schwuk
Google+ has one draw for me - hangouts with extras. The rest I ignore.

------
marshallp
This is hit piece by rupert murdoch, who has some kind of insane grudge
against google, which is funny when you think about - grandpa telling the kids
to get off his lawn.

