

TechCrunch covered Vic Gundotra's departure badly - MattCruikshank
http://mattcruikshank.blogspot.com/2014_04_01_archive.html
Worst of all, their article is being quoted as a &quot;Report.&quot;
======
smacktoward
_> They just said that they no longer consider social to be a separate unit,
but now will be potentially integrated to everything they do. How is that the
same thing as giving up on social?_

A product that is everybody's second priority is nobody's first priority.

You can see how this plays out in practice by looking at this other bit from
the TC article:

"One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of
'required' Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become
de rigueur for most product updates."

Assuming this is true, it tells you everything you need to know about G+'s
current position in the Google portfolio: it's been demoted from something
strategic, something _fundamental,_ to an optional add-on.

You can argue whether that's a good move or not (I think it is), but you can't
really argue that it's not a step down. Because going from "this is part of
what it means to be a Google product" to "this is something useful we'll let
individual units decide whether to use or not" is definitely a step down.

~~~
Pxtl
To me, the distinction depends on whether they allow non-plus social
integration. That is, if I can leave comments on X and that comment exists
_outside_ of the Google Plus infrastructure? Then Plus is dead.

Otherwise? Plus is fine. That's the question. Is it "G+ is no longer
mandatory" or is it "Commentary/messages can go outside of G+".

The former means G+ is alive and well. The latter means it's dead.

~~~
Yhippa
How do you feel the same way about websites that require you to use Facebook,
Disqus, or Livefyre to comment on the site? Do you choose not to participate
if they require one of those?

~~~
barrkel
I participate on Disqus, but only on economics and tech blogs. Effectively,
I've compartmentalized my Disqus identity to a particular persona (not much
different to my HN one).

I don't comment on any website using Facebook. Actually, I have FB completely
blocked in my primary browser, so I never even see any assets served up by
facebook.com or fbcdn.net etc. If there is a Facebook comment section, I don't
see it.

It's a matter of identity and overlaps in facades.

In real life I behave differently in business meetings, in pub chats with
coworkers and other people in the industry, at college friend meetups, at
secondary school friend meetups, at family meetups. I'm effectively different
people with different shared culture for all these people. Comments I make in
one context will not translate, and in some cases may even offend, in one of
the other contexts because it will rely on the culture shared with that group
- especially when the culture was created when I was much younger.

This is why wider web Facebook identity is abhorrent to me, just as much or
almost more so than Google+ unified identity. The straw that broke the back of
Google+ for me was Youtube comments. When I couldn't leave a comment on a
silly cat video without wondering if it was showing up to my business
contacts, I deleted my Google+ profile so that I could break the link with my
YT account. I couldn't find any other way to break the link, and Google+'s
benefits, such as they are, weigh so little with me that I would, and have,
give them up in a heartbeat in order to be able to make another pseudonymous
comment on YT.

So the question to me is more subtle than non-mandatory Google+ integration
meaning Google+ is dead. Non-integration of Google+ with YT is all positive,
as far as I'm concerned. And more deeply, for people who live more of their
lives online (rather than especially older relatives who mostly use the
internet to keep in contact with family and close friends), the idea of a
single unified identity for the internet is fundamentally a non-starter. So
any move from Google to make it non-mandatory is actually the only workable
way forward.

------
RivieraKid
TC is mostly right.

The usual motivation for making new products is to satisfy users' needs, to
make their lives better. Google didn't make Google+ to give value to
consumers. They made it because they feared Facebook.* Without Facebook, there
would be no Google+. That's the fundamental problem – Google+ provides value
only to a minority of Google users – why force it down everyone's throats?

As Steve Yegge said: "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term
thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful
because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful."

Google still doesn't understand social and people. Facebook is successful
because it feeds on (or exploits?) specific psychological needs. Technology
and user interface are secondary factors.

* To be more specific, I think that the #1 reason they've built Google+ was to extract friend lists (social graph), because they've thought that this data can improve their other products. Their line of thinking was "If Facebook has social data and we don't, they'll be able to make a better search engine or an ad network." They've seen this as a big threat to their core business. But making a product just to exctract data is doomed to fail.

~~~
bad_user
Facebook is successful because it is successful. Google+ can serve the same
psychological needs, unfortunately it's third in a market in which Facebook
and Twitter happened first.

~~~
jonnathanson
Facebook itself was third to market in social networking, after Friendster and
MySpace. The latter was heavily entrenched and very successful when Facebook
started unseating it.

G+ definitely suffered by coming to market after FB and Twitter, but that's
not the whole of the story. More specifically, it came to market after
Facebook and Twitter, without doing anything fundamentally different, better,
or more useful than Facebook or Twitter. (Circles, the putative
differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a solution to the standard
social networking UX.)

Late entrants can sometimes win; Google _and_ Facebook were pretty far from
the first movers in their respective markets. The key is that late entrants
need to be significantly better than anyone who's come before them. G+ was
not.

~~~
RivieraKid
> Circles, the putative differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a
> solution to the standard social networking UX.

+1 I like what Yishan Wong (ex-Facebook executive) said about circles:

"if it represents the leading edge of thought regarding social networking
within Google ... that seem to indicate that Google's ability to design and
deploy a successful social networking product is further behind than
previously thought"

------
zaidf
There are a lot of reasons to attack TechCrunch, but their Google+ coverage
isn't one of them. If you've friends at google, you know almost everything
reported by TC rings true. For example, an ex YouTuber friend of mine told me
a long time ago how pissed him and other YouTubers were at google+ being
shoved down their throats to inflate Plus metrics.

~~~
Pxtl
Honestly? Unifying the commenting systems was a great idea. Having every
Google application sport its own commenting system is unnecessary
balkanization.

The problem is that Google+ came into that space from being a Facebook clone
instead of being a comment platform. G+ should have been designed and built as
a replacement for Disqus instead of a replacement for Facebook, and then it
would've gone much better for Youtube/Blogger et al. For example, a Disqus-
replacement would have obviously known that "Real names" was a terrible idea
and the host of the comment thread (the Youtube page or whatnot) needs to have
a lot of control over moderation.

~~~
zaidf
Here's an example of how YouTube comments suck: if you post a video on your
google+ with a comment like "hey guys watch this", that post appears as a
_comment_ on that video's page. So now you have a bunch of comments on videos
saying "Just found this cool video" or "you have to watch this"...something
that makes no sense to the typical viewer.

~~~
actionscripted
It's even worse for the content creator. Over the last two weeks a video I put
on YouTube spiked to millions of views and trying to track the comments is
insane.

You get an email about activity, you see activity on the YouTube comments, you
see activity through G+ notifications -- and none of it makes sense.

Did this action occur on G+? YouTube? Is this a reply to something somewhere
else? What the hell is going on?

I don't mind G+ integration at all, and I think it's a good step forward, but
it is simply not working well on services like YouTube at the moment and
impedes use.

Also, spam control for comments is just broken. Scroll down, hover, maybe the
yellow "review spam comments" box appears and maybe it doesn't. I found it
interesting that G+ shares were very, very frequently marked as spam.

~~~
Pxtl
That perfectly shows

a) why G+ integration was a great idea, and

b) how thoroughly Google screwed up the implementation of that great idea.

If somebody comments on your Youtube post? You want to know about it. If
somebody posts it to their public G+ page? You want to know about it. If
somebody comments on that G+ post? You want to know about it.

Giving you a single place to drink that fire-hose of information? Great idea!

Intertwingling all those concepts together into a single mixed-up unfilterable
slurry of commenting? Holy crap no wrong don't do that.

------
nailer
Social is a flavor enhancer, like salt. It's a great flavor enhancer, but you
don't want to eat it on it's own.

Social + news = Facebook wall

Social + location = Foursquare

Social + YouTube = Better YouTube comments. Sorry, but it does

Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my
friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't.

Social + Maps = Seeing that my friend goes to this restaurant and likes it.

Social + video calling = A phone directory and avatars.

FB Platform is the biggest thing FB produce. But their most widely end user
app is wall, which sits on their platform.

As someone who never, ever, logs into plus.google.com, I still know I use
gplus all the time from finding new cafes in London. It's a super great flavor
enhancer.

~~~
bruceboughton
>> Social + Search = Knowing that when I search for a thing, I mean the one my
friend likes, not the similarly named one he doesn't.

This is where Google have gone wrong. I don't want my search results to be
affected by signals from my friends. They don't search for the same things as
me.

I want my search results to be ranked with signals from other relevant
people... and I don't know who these people are.

Google got it right first time around. PageRank captures the link juice from
these relevant people. C# bloggers linking to open source projects. F1 fans
linking to interesting articles. Apple bloggers linking to rumours.

Google+ puts the onus on me to decide who is relevant and I don't know. Using
this as signal for searching is making me do Google's job.

~~~
bad_user
I wanted to say exactly that. My friends are not like me. Even the friends I
have that are software developers are not interested in the same things. Heck,
even the people I work directly with aren't interested in the same things.

> _I want my search results to be ranked with signals from other relevant
> people... and I don 't know who these people are._

This is were you're partially wrong. Personally I know many people that I'd
like to be included in my search ranking as signals. The problem is - those
people are only a subset of the people that I follow on Twitter or Google+.

The problem with "Follow" or "Add as Friend" or whatever these social networks
are calling it - is that some people are more interesting than others. Some
people I follow simply because they are my friends. While other people I
follow because I'm interested in whatever they've got to say. And this is the
problem that Google should solve.

~~~
digisth
I wonder if adding an "authoritativeness/trust" rank to each user you follow
would help with this. Whenever you'd add someone on a social network, you'd be
asked to choose a number between 1-5 or something that tells the SN's
recommendation system how much weight they should be given when choosing
stories to show you or whatever.

------
fidotron
I'm more embarrassed for the Xooglers and people still oblivious to the fact
Google is rapidly turning into Microsoft, in the PG essay sense, with the
exception that in some emerging areas they do still look dangerous.

The recent FB numbers are going to have been a very nasty awakening to a lot
of them. The defensiveness around any Google related criticism is utterly
incredible.

------
thrillgore
TechCrunch has always been a rag publication. They do good articles like their
recent piece on the SF rent, but the amount of useful signals are flooded by
the low effort noise.

~~~
fixermark
Unfortunately. TechCrunch is one of the very few media outlets that I can say
I've put in my mental spamfilter. They flipped my bozo bit years ago due to
the number of times their reporting on situations I'm close to has deviated
breathlessly from the on-the-ground reality of the situation.

I actually read and enjoyed their recent article on San Francisco housing...
But the responsible thing for me to do next is to follow up via alternate
information sources if I want to know more, because I can't trust TC to relay
the facts without narrative distortion.

They are very good storytellers who allow the crafted narrative to outstrip
the reality too often for my taste.

~~~
minimaxir
The TechCrunch of today is a _lot_ different than the TechCrunch of years ago,
due to the editorial shakeups.

------
snowwrestler
If Google Plus is now just going to be shorthand for social features and data
integration, then it seems to me that "Google Plus" s basically dead. Because
you don't need a product name and a product team for social features and data
integration. Those are just things that anyone includes when building products
these days.

On any other web platform this set of functionality is just called having an
account. For example Amazon has had social features (reviews and forums) and
data integration for years, but they did not call it Amazon Plus. It's just
part of the service.

Likewise, I expect Google to just start talking about Google Accounts
eventually. It's already sort of tortured to force Google Plus nomenclature
into everything, like managing brand YouTube channels for instance.

And, behind all of this, I think companies are realizing that social graph
data is not as valuable as they once thought it was, because it's constructed
self-consciously. We all make decisions about friend requests carefully now.
It's become so fraught with stress that people are now flocking to anonymous
social tools.

I can tell you that my relationships embodied on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google
Plus, Twitter, etc do NOT accurately reflect the real-life state of my social
relationships. And I bet the same is true for you.

~~~
001sky
_Those are just things that anyone includes when building products these
days._

\--Exactly

------
autokad
gotta agree more with techcrunch than a groupthink former employee from
google.

google+ is something people these days joke about, like that service you're
forced to sign up to but nobody uses.

yes, they are integrating features to collect data across their platforms, but
essentially google+ as something people come to like facebook is the walking
dead.

~~~
wambotron
I haven't heard joking about G+ any more than I have about FB.

FB is where you go to have your grandma and aunt write weird messages. G+ is
where you go to share photography and travel logs. Sure, people do each of
those things on both platforms, but g+ is in no way 'dead' or even close to it
just because you don't personally use it.

~~~
thescrewdriver
The only time I ever see G+ being used is for random geek blog posts on HN
from time to time. Virtually everyone I know is on FB.

~~~
wambotron
That's the thing: the people on G+ seem to use it more as a professional
networking tool (like LinkedIn without recruiter spam and more flexibility on
what you post). I don't have any friends on G+, but I also don't WANT or NEED
them on it. I use it to keep up on some tech stuff and look at photos.

Facebook and G+, while both being "social networks," function totally
differently. Whether google wanted it to be a direct competitor or not, it's
just filling a different niche.

------
001sky
This is a useful piece of writing. Underlying it, however, is some kind of
strange "status anxiety" that is all-to-prevalent in Silicon Valley. Nobody
wants to be given the "scarlet letter" of failure ("G+"!) on their resume...?
Understandable. Its also understandable to be ~annoyed when the media circus
feels the need to pontificate on the "family politics" of any large/insular
organization. That being said, the majority of the points here don't seem to
be controversial enough (on either side) to get too worked up over. At a
Macro-level, G+ had a big narrative of power-accretion and increasing
centrality (for several years). This is now being un-wound. Whether you want
to call that: (1) Failure; (2) engineered obsolescence; or (3) success! seems
to matter less than the underlying story remains the same. Where
power/influence (and hence: status) was once accreting to a brand (G+) it is
now dissapating. This is such a non-event, that it should just be considered
like any other documentary on the Discovery Channel. It has been highly edited
for our viewing/entertainment pleasure, but at the of the day...on the african
savanna...life & death go on hand in hand for predator and prey...some times
its ugly and messy...but it is just the nature of the 'circle of life'.

------
danielrpa
I don't know why some in tech community hate facebook (and thus automatically
love Google+), but in my opinion Google+ had a terrible interface and nobody I
know ever used it - I find Facebook much, much better (not to mention that
everybody I care about is there).

Despite liking Google, I find Google+ a trainwreck - it was time for Google to
either get out of this business of competing with Facebook or completely
revamping Google+. It seems that they chose the former.

------
dkrich
From "Trust Me I'm Lying":

" _When you see "We're hearing reports" know that reports could mean anything
from random mentions on Twitter to message board posts, or worse.

When you see "Sources tell us..." know that these sources are not vetted, they
are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.

When you see "which means" or "meaning that" or "will result in" or any other
kind of interpretation or analysis know that the blogger who did it likely has
absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor
did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly,
wildly off the mark, because there aren't any consequences."_

That unattributed sources are cited no fewer than ten times in this post is
laughable. Yet people still read TechCrunch because it's not exciting to admit
that "we don't really have any clue what is going on because we don't work at
Google and have to rely on some flimsy sources."

------
paganel
> literally pushing people who know how to do social into every nook and
> cranny of Google.

Maybe I'm missing something, but who are those people at Google? Or is this
tongue-in-cheek writing?

And yes, Google has missed the train on both WhatsApp (mentioned in the
article) and Instagram (not mentioned).

------
minimaxir
> _Did your editor write the "walking dead" headline without reading the
> article?_

The authors of the article are both the co-head editors of TechCrunch.

------
rbanffy
If anyone ever read Google+ as a website like Facebook, they were getting it
completely wrong. Google+'s core objective has always been to add social
functionality to every Google product. Google+ is plumbing.

~~~
mpg33
> If anyone ever read Google+ as a website like Facebook, they were getting it
> completely wrong.

Most people do this and that isn't their fault... it's Google's.

------
mfish
"What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be
considered a product, but a platform... Oh, okay, that makes some sense. They
have created the features necessary to integrate Google+ into everything they
do from now on. Makes sense. "

If G+ was originally intended to be a platform, rather than a product, this
would make sense. And I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but it seems to me
that everything points to them wanting this to be a facebook-killing
product...not a platform on which to build other things.

------
akennberg
2010:

> Schmidt: Our view of social is a little different than what everyone has
> been writing. we want our core products to get better from social
> information. > We are trying to add a social component [to google's core
> products] to make them even better.

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-
socia...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/details-on-the-google-social-layer-
emerge/)

------
stutsmansoft
Am I wrong for hoping TechCrunch is right?

I feel like any interaction I have with Google services, I'm defending myself
against getting an unwanted G+ account.

------
ajsharp
While I may agree with the sentiment, this meta-piece is just as speculative
(moreso, actually) than the original TC piece.

------
galago
Facebook's breakup of the big blue app into messaging and perhaps in the near
future other specialty apps seems like part of the same phenomenon. Google+ is
actually ahead of that curve because the Google identity is only becoming more
important to their ecosystem, regardless of how one interacts with it.

~~~
bruceboughton
Google is ahead of Facebook?

Ha ha ha ha...

~~~
MattCruikshank
On some things, yes, very much so.

I'll just use my Facebook browser on my Facebook phone running Facebook
Operating System to Facebook search for job openings where I can post my
resume that I wrote in Facebook Docs, and hope the recruiter will send me a
Facebook email or leave a Facebook voicemail. After that, I'll open up
Facebook maps to find a take-out restaurant my friends reviewed, then I'll
rent some Facebook movies my friends recommended. Or maybe I'll talk a walk,
if Facebook Now says the weather is good where I am. While I'm walking, maybe
I can record a video of the loons on my lake again, and post it to Facebook
video. Oh, I better Facebook Keep a reminder to myself to pick up some milk.

My identity was subtly integrated into each of those things.

------
Grue3
I don't care if it's true or not, I want to believe. No need to rain on my
parade.

But most importantly, does the blog author work at Google, or has connections
that are more reliable than the ones Techcrunch has? I feel like this is
pretty important to know in regards to who I should believe.

~~~
leorocky
It's a badly written article by someone who has no additional information. I
have no idea how it got to the top of HN but I wouldn't be worried. I'm pretty
sure Google+ is dead now in the way that Google Reader was dead for years
before they finally shut it down.

~~~
minimaxir
Articles which portray TechCrunch in a negative light tend to get lots of
upvotes. Hacker News really, really doesn't like TC for some reason.

~~~
leorocky
I remember this being the reason:

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-
is...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-
read-every-morning/)

~~~
001sky
_It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard
about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly
helpful, thoughtful and interesting._

Ah, dont forget to label this (2008) ;D

------
mark_l_watson
Perhaps relevant: the Silicon Valley drama reminds me of the TV show "Peyton
Place" that was on when I was a teenager.

I try to limit my time reading the news (and then a sample of international
news) and TV, but this drama fills in the need to waste a little time on
melodrama.

------
_pmf_
> They just said that they no longer consider social to be a separate unit,
> but now will be potentially integrated to everything they do.

Considering that being integrated into everything was one of the core problems
of Google+, I fail to see how this is a smart move.

------
gwern
On MR the other day I saw a good post mention that one way to look at an
argument is to see whether the author is taking the attitude ' _can_ I believe
this?' or ' _must_ I believe this?' It's clear OP is the latter.

------
EGreg
I have to agree with Matt - the hitpiece article is crap and smacks of how TC
gleefully wrote about Yahoo's demise every time it could a few years back.

------
rmthompson
I'm going to be honest, until TechCrunch's article, I had thought that Google+
was already done. I haven't heard a single compelling reason to use it outside
hangouts, but hangouts is not Google+. So as much as I hate to agree with
TechCrunch, they see the writing on the wall.

~~~
DatBear
300 million monthly active users... what a dead product.

~~~
Zigurd
That number is inflated by adding YouTube users, which was a kind of social
network with it's own kind of audience (notoriously trollish in some ways)
before the shotgun wedding to G+.

My follower growth has slowed. The first product page I put on Google+ (a book
about Android) got many followers quickly. Same with my personal page. The
second time I put up a product page for a book, the response was much
attenuated, and my follower growth has been slow and low quality. It wasn't
great quality on Facebook either, but it was much faster. Maybe I need to see
how well product pages would do on LinkedIn.

~~~
mkr-hn
I started when G+ launched. 5500+ circlings, 2500+ to my first product page.
Now I'm lucky if I get a single comment or +1. Meanwhile, I have 81 friends on
Facebook and 10 followers, and it's a rare post that doesn't get comments and
likes.

------
panzerboy
Next thing you know, they bring Google Reader back...

------
smackfu
The power of media: connect facts in a way that shows a story that people want
to be true, and it might just cause it to happen.

------
Twirrim
People actually expect decent journalism from Techcrunch?

Huh. They've been barely keeping it above the gutter several for years.

------
MattCruikshank
Let me be very clear:

Anyone is welcome to conclude that Google+ is dead. Facebook still exists as a
company. You personally don't use it. You don't like the font. Whatever...

I don't think it's dead. I use Google+ every day, and I'm looking forward to
more of it.

But if a news site is going to make a conclusion, the arguments they use
should be logical.

I assert that TechCrunch's specific arguments are not good ones.

~~~
unreal37
You're awfully upset about this. Why is that?

You used to work at Google. Were you on the Google+ team?

~~~
MattCruikshank
I'm okay with people believing G+ is dead if they want to.

But this is a news article concluding G+ is dead, based on stated arguments.

Except the arguments are lousy.

Lousy journalism is bad for everyone.

