
How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users - okrasz
http://blog.cloudorado.com/2013/07/how-google-have-lost-opportunity-to-get.html
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voyou
If they found a _good_ way of incorporating RSS into Google+, that would
certainly be an incentive to use Google+; but just adding RSS feeds to a
circle in Google+, as this article suggests, would be terrible. Google+ (like
Facebook and Twitter) works on a "forget by default" system, where, if you
don't consciously make a choice to save an item for reading later, it gets
lost off the bottom of the feed. Replacing Google Reader with that would be a
bit like replacing a DVR with a system that broadcasts all your favourite TV
shows at once.

I think if I wanted to disrupt social networking, I'd work on something like a
DVR for social media shares (or, perhaps, a more socially-integrated service
like Pocket), which allows you to specify certain content as content you don't
want to miss.

~~~
lnanek2
Actually, when I visit various discussion communities on Google Plus, it has a
count of the unread posts in the various areas of the community. So they have
read tracking in Google Plus, although not in the default display of the main
feed. Not sure Google wants people reading outside content anyway, though,
compared to interacting inside a locked in Google Plus community. They are
pretty anti-standards lately.

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downandout
This is a good idea. However, one thing I have learned from unsuccessfully
pitching good ideas to very successful people/businesses is that the more
successful they are, the less their decisions will make sense to outside
observers. This is largely because their resources allow them to have
different motivations for doing or not doing things than virtually anyone
else.

Telling a wealthy person that you can make them alot of money, or in this
case, telling a business that has hundreds of millions of users how to save a
few million of them, isn't necessarily compelling to them. A company like
Google has the luxury of deciding that a few million users aren't worth
keeping for whatever reason, even though dismissing that number of users for
_any_ reason sounds absurd to most of us.

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tomkarlo
There's an assumption here that doing this would result in a material number
of users for Google+. But I'm not sure it would: it's reasonably safe to
assume that everyone using Google Reader knows about G+, and is either using
it already or has decided to not use it. At best, what's proposed would
convert some percentage of that latter group (maybe) over to using G+. It
_might_ be a couple million users if everything plays out well. It's probably
less.

That sounds like a lot, but at the scale G+ and FB are competing, a few
million (possible) users isn't worth allocating dev resources for. They're
looking for things that move tens, or hundreds of millions of users. Some
opportunities are just too small to pursue.

~~~
sbarre
My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.

Even if only 50% of those migrated over to Google+, if they had found a way to
cleanly incorporate RSS feeds into their interface, that's probably a non-
trivial amount of users, especially if they are checking multiple times a day,
and sharing news/information from their RSS out to readers.

It's not just about users, it's also about activity..

~~~
tomkarlo
6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of
millions of users. And 50% is a wildly optimistic percentage for how
additional G+ users you'd create.

Let's say they have 12M monthly active users; a large percentage of those are
probably already G+ users (let's call it 50%.) A large percentage of the
remainder have deliberately decided they don't want to use G+, so you'd be
doing pretty damn well to convert 10-20% of them over.

So that's only 600K-1.2M MAU in a "best case" outcome. You're just not going
to be able to sell that as being worth allocating a half-dozen engineers to
pursue building a new product. It's not even close.

~~~
nwilliams
>6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of
millions of users.

In the use case of a type of site where cascading network effects are of
paramount importance, 6M engaged users is _huge_.

~~~
tomkarlo
Yeah, but you're assuming they'd be engaged. If they don't like G+ and they're
just using it as a news reader, that's pretty much the opposite of engaged,
from a social network perspective.

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rogerbinns
My problem is that G+ is unreadable. Every iteration they make it harder and
harder to actually read the content. I completely gave up on their Android app
for that reason. Most recently they switched the web site to arbitrary sized
blocks in a 2d random layout using images wherever possible instead of
truncated text. It is true that newspapers do this, but at least they have
more readable content in each block. I had to switch G+ to single column view
to at least make heads or tails of what is going on.

Reader was focussed on reading content and did a good job of that. Virtually
every pixel on the screen was about reading content. Here is what G+ does with
actual reading content highlighted in yellow
[http://i.imgur.com/ASKMSRv.png](http://i.imgur.com/ASKMSRv.png)

Reader used to be the first tab in my first browser window. This meant I
always had a tab open at Google and it was a single click to get into G+. Now
I have to consciously choose to go to G+ which happens rarely.

~~~
patrickdavey
Totally, my new homepage is my online RSS reader of choice. I doubt I'm alone
there.

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Kapura
If Google had announced the end of reader, but allowed you to integrate the
RSS feeds into Google+, all the nerds would have just complained that Google
was killing a good product to try and bolster a shitty one (not that I think
G+ is shitty). It's always easy after the fact to say that Google could have
done this to ease the passing of Reader, but face facts: There's nothing you
can do on the internet where people won't complain. Deprecating Reader in
favour of g+ would have been a cheap replacement at best, and at worst it
could have been viewed as poisoning the water so you'll have to drink Fanta.

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Shank
This makes the assumption that Google's goal with Google+ is just to syndicate
content, something that clearly isn't the case. They want content created
specifically for Google+ - if they wanted a firehose of data they certainly
had the capability and time to allow third-parties to put data into the
stream.

Whether or not Google's goal is to create a social network or get more users
is up for debate, but this certainly wasn't simply overlooked.

~~~
Yhippa
I'm thinking you're on the right path. Instead of just adding passive feeds to
Google+ and you clicking through I imagine that Google wants content creators
to sign up for Google+ accounts and either create content there or post it
there.

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bla2
Reader had ~single digit millions monthly actives, very likely less than ten
million ([http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-
have](http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have)). It's just
not that many people (which is why Reader got cancelled after all).

~~~
gwern
> very likely less than ten million ([http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-
> does-Google-Reader-have](http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-
> Reader-have)).

How did you get 'likely less than ten million' out of a Quora comment saying
'ten _s_ of millions'?

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cyanbane
While I agree it is an interesting idea as someone who uses Google+ a decent
amount I would not have wanted non-user contexts mixed in anymore than what is
already there (these are already present for a lot of brands etc). I am
already starting to get annoyed with the "What's Hot" elements and such inside
Google+ I would rather have more subscribed human content that algo picked or
rss generated.

I think that moving that into its own interface _within_ Google+ would have
been a great idea though.

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danrik
This makes the assumption that these users were using the Reader web
interface. I'd bet a good number were using it simply as a sync backend.

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mindcrime
I don't know how well it would have worked for Google (or not), but,
personally, I am very, very "+1" on RSS feeds in social network streams as a
general concept. No, you don't get the exact same experience that you get with
a "conventional" RSS feed reader, but when your news stream can have arbitrary
RSS/Atom delivered content, it opens up a lot of options.

This is why I was so happy that we _just_ got RSS feed subscriptions
incorporated into Quoddy[1] - our enterprise social network product. So many
things that you might be interested in can be syndicated via RSS / Atom - new
documents posted to a document management system, new customer records posted
to a CRM system, etc. Personally I'm more excited about this feature than
almost anything we've done lately.

What will be interesting, will be exploring how to utilize UI elements to give
a user the ability to get the "best of both worlds" and view their content in
a fashion akin to the way Google Reader (or other readers) work, OR view it
"in stream" ala a G+ or Facebook style news stream. When you take a step back
and look at it, in many ways, a "wall" or "stream" isn't that different than
an "inbox", and one wonders if you can't find a neat way to collapse _all_ of
this "stuff" (email, rss feeds, social "status updates", etc.) into one
interface.

Anyway, call me bullish on syndication, but I almost feel like we need a song
titled _You Can 't Stop RSS_ set to the tune of Twisted Sister's _You Can 't
Stop Rock and Roll_.[2]

[1]:
[https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy/tree/prhodes](https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy/tree/prhodes)

[2]:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaehBH7DtR4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaehBH7DtR4)

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alan_cx
I see the logic, but given recent spying revelations, I saw it as a perfect
opportunity to move further away from google and US based services, and
certainly not an opportunity to get closer and more integrated. If I had a
shred of trust left in both google and the USA's ability to protect and
respect my data, I might have tried a G+ RSS solution. Nothing short of
massive legislative change in the US would even begin to help me want to use
such a service.

All a bit of a shame how this has turned out TBH. Although, the whole thing
has caused me to educate myself and seek out alternatives rather then just
dumbly sign up for things assuming there was little to be concerned about.

Sadly, just more drip, drip away from the US and towards using things like
encryption and doing my own thing.

Come on American, what the hell happened? :(

~~~
mcintyre1994
Wasn't the Reader announcement before the NSA scandal though? It seems that
most people who would make the switch would have done so before that came out.

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webwanderings
With the lack of options available in Google+ to adjust the UI, I would not
want to move my RSS over to G+. Rather, they could have expanded Google News
to transition the feeds over.

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jrkelly
It's not just the number of users. It's that people who were heavy Reader
users are particularly valuable nodes in a network like Google+. They are more
likely to draw other people to Google+ than the average user since they curate
more content than the average user.

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fleitz
Another way to get millions of google+ users, stop plastering ads for it all
over Google properties and instead make it useful.

No I don't want to use + on Youtube, no I don't want my search Google+
enabled. On the average week I probably get 5 or 6 requests to do something
related to Google+. Worst of all most of the requests are modal dialogues that
interrupt the flow of what I wanted to do.

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GigabyteCoin
After reading the title, I thought this was going to relate back to Google's
involvement with the NSA spying program.

Think about it... what facebook user in their right mind would ditch facebook
for google+ now?

They're both in bed with the NSA, and if that doesn't bother you (privacy
concerns) you would probably never want to leave facebook in the first place.

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galactus
Many users would have seen that as another instance of google trying to shove
google+ down their thoats.

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bobbles
Make people sign up to G+ to use android. Bam! millions of users

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humanspecies
Google better go back to basics.

They need to work on real honest not ad-driven search again.

Search quality is dwindling(I don't need 2 billion amazon and ebay listings on
search results, Google!).

Months ago when I used duckduckgo I'd bounce right back to Google. Today I can
use DDG without regrets.

