
Bradley Horowitz Is Now Running Google+ - dredmorbius
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/01/bradley-horowitz-is-now-running-google/
======
AVTizzle
Memory of the exact context escapes me, but somewhere a few months ago here on
HN, a user shared an idea of how Google+ could have leveraged their massive
Google Reader user base to create a publisher's dream social network.

The argument was super compelling and I remember thinking it would have made
complete sense, but instead ended up with the nightmare that became Google+,
and a ton of pissed off former-users of Reader.

*EDIT: Found it: [http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-go...](http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-google-could-have-avoided-fing-up-google/)

"Google could have avoided angry Reader users and given Google+ a massive
boost by simply integrating Reader into Google+.

Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though
it were another user in G+. Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into
circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.

If Google would have done that G+ would have taken off like wildfire and
nobody would have ever looked back. I have no idea why they didn’t, but for
some reason the lost potential has irritated me for a year. And, here we are
now, with the whole effort going down the tubes.

What a waste."

Makes sense to me...

~~~
Chevalier
Absolutely baffling. I currently use G+ as a newsfeed for publications with a
G+ presence (which is most of them), but it's been a long time coming and
still lacks for significant user interaction with stories. There's no reason
why Google couldn't have figured out some way to import existing RSS feeds.

That embrace would probably have killed off RSS within a couple years anyway,
since native G+ posts have more attractive window dressing, but the move would
have been a dead simple way to build an instant, passionate userbase that
could have taken advantage of G+'s commenting and sharing features while
providing a meta-view of how users like to sort sources into Circles.

G+ could easily have been marketed as Reader 2.0, married to Facebook 2.0 for
social, Instagram 2.0 for advanced photo features, and Dropbox 2.0 for
hoarding. I have no idea how Google dropped the ball at the endzone.

~~~
jay_kyburz
No to mention they could have integrated the office suite as well (docs,
spreadsheets, presentations), oh and TV with youtube.

Then you haves News, Social, Photo, Video, Files, and Office too. Add some
games and there is pretty much everything anybody does on a computer.

~~~
pantalaimon
Heck they took more than a year to integrate their calendar into g+.

Facebook's events are one of it's great features, but it took Google ages to
implement them, despite already having a calendar that's synced with every
Android phone.

------
evo_9
Funny thing I grew up in Michigan and in the 80's Brad played guitar in a
signed indie band called Spahn Ranch. I was briefly their manager mainly
because I had an Atari ST and a laser printer and helped out creating stickers
for shows, and occasional digital artwork projected up behind them while they
played. We toured the East cost around 90 play a festival in Pittsburg along
with a few random shows along the way. They regularly opened for bands like
Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, and one particularly interesting night, His
Name Is Alive. After that particular show we all went back to Brad's house and
hung out, an impromptu acoustic session broke out, with Brad playing guitar
while Spahn Ranch's amazing vocalist Bob Sterner (RIP) sang without the aid of
any amplifications. If you have ever sat in a room and hear someone naturally
sing like that then you know how magical that can be. After they played the
two women from His Name Is Alive took up the acoustic and played a few of
their songs as well. It was a night I'll never forget.

It was a fun time for sure, Brad was always a very impressive guy. A
practicing Krishna, he always seemed to have his head here and in 'another
realm' so to speak; when you talked to him (back then at least) he had this
rather intimidating look in his eyes like wheels were constantly turning in
the background, solving who knows that computer or religious quandary caught
his attention that day. I lost touch with Brad around his MIT days and only
recently because of the passing of our mutual friend Bob Sterner been back in
touch with him.

Here's a sample song that's a good representation of their
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJMkwuL05t4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJMkwuL05t4)

Entire Album:
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spahn+ranch+thi...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spahn+ranch+thickly+settled)

Best of luck Brad, how things have changed since those heady U of M days when
Brad was _just_ a unique guitarist for an Detroit indie band.

Edit: better representative track.

~~~
simi_
Different band?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahn_Ranch_%28band%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahn_Ranch_%28band%29)

~~~
xentronium
Judging from a quick investigation, Thickly Settled LP is of Brad Horowitz
band.

[http://phoenixhairpins.blogspot.ru/2014/01/spahn-ranch-
thick...](http://phoenixhairpins.blogspot.ru/2014/01/spahn-ranch-thickly-
settled-lp.html) (Brad Horowitz mentioned in the post)

------
jay_kyburz
I find it so frustrating to watch Google fuck-up social. Pulling photos and
communications into their own group is clearly conceding defeat. Google's
social initiatives are already too splintered.

I wish they had some somebody who could cut through all the politics and read
tape and build a really great, unified, product.

The first thing on my hit list - Material Design. It's just bad. It's too
spread out, the animations detract from the experience, and every ui element
just seems flaky. ARRG!

~~~
martythemaniak
It was the senseless need for a unified product that is the source of their
social screw up. If they concentrated on making great products which fit
together, people would naturally start to use then together without having to
be shoved.

~~~
jay_kyburz
No no, unified is important, but if you are going to put all your eggs in one
basket it had better be good. And hey, you don't have to get it right the
first time, but it needs to grow and evolve as you see the weaknesses.

I totally agree that g+ should not have been shoved into every google product,
instead it should have been a place you could go to access every google
product.

I'm still convinced that the power of facebook is there is one url for
everything an everyday person needs from the internet. People want one website
that has everything.

~~~
dredmorbius
_Enabling_ unified is fine. _Enforcing it_ , as Google did, _against users '
express wishes_, isn't.

When my G+ and YouTube accounts were merged I ended up with (or as) the three
top stories on HN (I've got a screenshot on Imgur somewhere, linked from my
subreddit).

In December Google created a new "myaccounts.google.com" site where it's
possible to manage Google accounts, including adding or removing services.
While I can remove my YouTube account (there's nothing on it but history), it
won't stay removed, thoughct that's in the cards. IOW: Google seem to be
taking steps to disaggregate their offerings.

Several of the bigger blunders of G+ have revolved around both identity and
bundling / tying. #nymwars, forced calendar integration (look up Robert
Scoble's rant), the YouTube Anschluss. This is what Microsoft tried in the
1990s. Eventually people rebelled.

You cannot force someone to like you.

People want convenience, yes. But it doesn't mean it's got to be the same
website for all of us -- I'd _really_ like to see federated services solved.

~~~
sounds
Looking at your subreddit +/\- 2 months of the May "all your YouTube are
belong to G+" announcement, there doesn't seem to be any screenshot. Can you
post a link?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1qsnks/dont_lo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1qsnks/dont_look_now_but_three_top_stories_on_hacker_news/)

[https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg)

------
tdicola
If Google is back into separate services can we get Reader turned back on
please?

~~~
akkartik
As a google employee, I wouldn't use Reader now even if it magically came
back. Fool me once, etc., etc. In fact, I wouldn't use _any_ third-party
service. I have the skills, and readers are easy to build; there's just no
reason to outsource this particular product.

(Here's what I've been using for the past year:
[http://imgur.com/a/kT3NN](http://imgur.com/a/kT3NN). Sources:
[https://github.com/akkartik/spew](https://github.com/akkartik/spew))

~~~
puzzlingcaptcha
I will latch on to this commend to recommend [http://tt-rss.org/](http://tt-
rss.org/) which I have been running since the demise of GReader and have been
very happy with it. Performant with a _huge_ number of feeds, able to share
arbitrary items in your own public RSS feed, decent android client and
wonderfully abrasive support forums. screenshot:
[http://i.imgur.com/I7YLePz.png](http://i.imgur.com/I7YLePz.png)

------
eitally
Things to fix:

Need a richer text/post editor that also allows inline images & albums.

Need easier post/comment editing (a la Facebook).

Android/G+ photo autobackup is great, but god help you if you ever want or
need to access those photos. The current method of manually moving a max of
500 at a time into other albums is a non-starter, especially if you had set
auto-backup to also backup other local image folders from your mobile devices
(Whatsapp/Telegram, photo editors, etc).

The client is waaaaaaay too heavy. G+ is unusable on a Chromebook if you have
Gmail and more than one or two other tabs open.

The half-assed merging of Picasa web albums into G+ was aggressively user-
unfriendly. There are a lot of us who still use the quite excellent Picasa
desktop app for light photo editing and album management. The G+ album
viewer/browser is horrifically bad.

Photo commenting is pretty much broken. You can comment, but it's pretty
antisocial, unlike imgur/instagram/facebook.

A lot of content houses & brands don't publish to G+, or if they do, it's
half-assed secondary crap that seems to just be bots posting links. Very few
seem to interact with the G+ community.

The Hangouts integration is heavy & crappy compared to the nice and light fb
chat integration, and almost no one seems to know about video chat, much less
the ability to (in some countries) dial phones via Hangouts.

The idea of Communities is a good one, but it operates as sort of the opposite
of Usenet. If someone leaves a community or deletes their account (granted,
this may be a bigger problem for Google Apps for Work customers) all their
content goes with them.

As other commenters have noted, G+ seems to have been created with the mission
statement of being everything to everyone, but in the process it has alienated
many and broken a lot. I suggest focusing on fixing the discrete parts and
only then deciding whether it makes sense to integrate them.

I, for one, am thankful to at least be able to use my Google/G+ credentials to
login to a bunch of common sites now, so it has that going for it.

------
Chevalier
I wish Horowitz the best... but it looks like Google is starting to break up
G+ into separate photos/streams (newsfeeds)/Hangouts sections, and I really
hope they avoid that.

I'm downvoted every time I say so, but combining photos with social MAKES
SENSE. There are exactly three things anyone wants to do with photos -- we
want to hoard them, we want to organize/enhance them, and we want to share
them. G+ addresses the photo question better than anyone else on the market.
There are improvements to be made -- starting with deduplication and better
integration with GDrive so I don't pay twice for the same storage -- but G+ is
a fundamentally excellent idea.

Combining that photo/social experience with the newsfeed aspects of Facebook
ALSO makes sense. In the absence of popular adoption, G+ is still a pretty
excellent newsfeed if you follow publications with a G+ presence. It's also a
fantastic place to tap into the personal musings of Silicon Valley's best and
brightest, though tech is admittedly one of the only niches with a presence on
G+. Tied in with the fantastic implementation of Circles, it's pretty easy to
switch between newsfeeds and share posts with only those I want to see my
thoughts.

\- - - - -

That said, G+ HAS failed so far despite technical excellence and fantastic
user experience. The operative idea here is "so far"... there's no reason why
G+ can't be the network of choice of the next generation, and given the
ecosystem benefits, it's hard to imagine digital natives NOT choosing Google
products to organize and share their lives.

Horowitz, if you read this, target young women. Give them a place to
organize/enhance/share their photos in a safe, private environment. Instagram
did this (at least to the extent of enhancing/sharing their photos), and as
always, the men followed. Just make it dead simple to dump a disorganized mess
of redundant photos into GDrive that will then be automatically sorted,
tagged, and enhanced. Suggest Circles based on their frequent contacts in
Gmail. Give Hangouts better, more intuitive sticker options and play up the
videochat features (which very few people seem to know about). Run ads where
young people publish an invitation on G+, split the dinner tab via GWallet,
pick up German guys via GTranslate, share their photos in a group post on G+,
and track their progress the night before on GMaps.

All the pieces are already in place, they just need one last shove to make
life easy for the average user. Nobody wants to deduplicate and sort their
photos by date or location. Nobody wants to juggle photos between hard drives
or try to figure out how many photos their limited cloud storage can still
handle. Just let users dump their photos on an unlimited, subsidized GDrive
subscription with full confidence that they'll be sorted, organized, enhanced,
and ready to share without any further work on their part.

~~~
viraptor
> combining photos with social MAKES SENSE

I'm not sure this makes sense for everyone. There are so many different uses
for photos/social, that I don't think there's any single way that `makes
sense`. All services have a slightly different way of sharing, but I'd say
there are some specific themes here:

\- photos as messages (like instagram)

\- photos as art (like old flickr)

\- photos as galleries (g+, new flickr)

\- photos as... memories? current events? sharable stuff? (like facebook,
twitter)

I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social. People
share galleries with family / friends - many of who aren't even on the same
platform and don't want to be.

~~~
reitanqild
> I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social.

They make very much sense with social as long as social doesn't have to mean
"share publicly".

~~~
rspeer
For photos, you need a story for how to do something that's equivalent to
"share publicly" without the implications that that usually comes with on a
social network.

There are photos on G+ that I'd like to show my family. This is "public" from
G+'s point of view, because I'm not going to make them log into G+.

Nothing goes wrong if other people see these photos too; however, I don't want
people who have me in their G+ circles to get notified that I'm now "sharing"
these photos that they have no interest in, and I don't want some boring
photos to represent me on my "feed".

This use case worked on Picasa, but G+ broke it.

Right now I find the extremely concealed download link and e-mail them. This
is not how a photo product should work.

~~~
reitanqild
Totally agree with you.

What I meant isn't that any product gets it right ATM but rather that there
isn't a good technical or, I guess, social reason for why galleries couldn't
be a killer social feature. It seem there are a few economic/marketshare etc
reasons though.

------
robgibbons
He said: "It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to
be positive improvements"

I read: "It's important to me that you don't think of this as a bad thing"

------
Animats
It might be a nice gesture to send him a sympathy card.

------
thescrewdriver
My condolences.

------
kmfrk
What did he do?

