
What Killed Google+ And What Can Save It - dredmorbius
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevefaktor/2014/05/01/what-killed-google-and-what-will-save-it/
======
Marazan
"Real Names" Killed Google+ from the day it opened

Everyone was desperate to get the hell away from Facebook - but the
psychotically idiotic "Real Names" policy - making pretty much every single
mistake from [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/) was a total killer.

~~~
andrewl-hn
Yeah, and unlike Facebook, Google was surprisingly bad at "real names". There
were tons of stories about the people who either couldn't sing up - or even
worse - got their accounts suspended and thus lost access to their email -
because their name wasn't real enough for Google's taste.

~~~
twistedpair
FWIW, I've got an interesting name and FB insisted I send them a copy of my
driver's license to open and account. Funny thing, since there are thousands
of FB user's with that name. G+ didn't give me any such problem. So, "real
name" isn't that much of a problem on G+, especially given the number of cats
that have accounts.

------
hahainternet
Wasn't forbes respectable at some point? Is this how far things have fallen?

> Guy Kawasaki released a 208 page book about it. You should be able to build
> your own Honda Accord in 196 pages.

What.

There's not a single valid point in the entire article, the most laughable
part is the 'open source the code!' argument.

~~~
dmoy
Yea, I don't really agree with the trend of big, reputable news places having
such an increasing number of random blog posters. There's a big difference
between Forbes proper and Forbes random-poorly-researched-blog-article (same
goes for other places as well).

Then again you can also raise the same question when the more traditional
columnists start spewing random ideas about fields in which they have no
expertise...

~~~
differentView
Whenever I read news articles about things I know well, I wonder how much
misinformation I am getting about everything else.

------
voidlogic
Come on if you're going to claim Google Plus is dead you better provide
evidence, like statistics. I use Google+ everyday and am very happy with it, I
only see its use increasing day by day. When I need to talk to family or
friends I go on Facebook, but when I want to learn about new things I go on
Google Google+.

~~~
zaidf
I drink a cola called _Blah Cola_. It doesn't mean that _Blah Cola_ isn't
dead. In a literal sense of the word it isn't; but for practical purposes,
Blah Cola is dead compared to Coca Cola and Google+ is dead compared to
Facebook.

~~~
Aqueous
Except it's more like if several hundred million other people and I drink "
_Blah Cola_." Even if Google Plus only has 10% of the active users of Facebook
- fuck, even 5%, even 1% - that's still millions of people who are using it
actively. So yeah - "dead."

Note: There's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off brands
of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name. And it's
not because nobody buys them.

~~~
zaidf
That several hundred million people claim is a hoax. It's part of the reason
for Vic's departure: instead of _actually_ increasing engagement of Google+,
he forced top performing google properties like YouTube to integrate Plus,
just so he can claim a portion of YouTube traffic as google+ traffic. It's the
kind of shit only an exec from Microsoft would pull.

To date Google+ hasn't actually released a clear engagement metric such as how
many people have made a post in the past 30 days.

 _Note: There 's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off
brands of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name.
And it's not because nobody buys them._

You're proving me correct by arguing that Plus is equivelent to Supermarket
cola. That's an epic failure for google. They launched Plus to become a
competitor to Facebook the same way Pepsi competes with Coke. You're conceding
that Plus is no Pepsi - and that makes it as good as dead.

~~~
hahainternet
> To date Google+ hasn't actually released a clear engagement metric such as
> how many people have made a post in the past 30 days.

So when they do, you'll claim that Youtube comments don't count right?

~~~
barrkel
Of course they don't count. People commenting on youtube videos are there
because of YT's content, not because of +.

------
suprgeek
Strike One: When G+ opened up to the world, they decided to take an "invite"
approach. While this might have been cool for the first few days, there were
too few invites and this nonsense just lasted far too long. Not really the
"networking" roll out.

Strike Two: Combine the "Real Names Policy" and forcefeed G+ to youtuber's who
want to comment. No body saw the obvious problem with that? Some may not want
a LOL on a Cat video be one search away from their real name. Plus (!) it was
rolled out badly - some people began to get locked out of Gmail over this.

Strike Three: Why is the UI so complicated to integrate Hangouts? Who does UI
design? I still get Hangout Notifications from two previous companies.

~~~
iMiiTH
It was pretty much all because of this.

It took far too long to get an invitation, and you had to be 18 or older to
use it. Facebook exploded first by being used by kids still in Elementary and
High School. They initially cut out an absolutely major demographic, and
people lost interest after a couple days.

~~~
saurik
What is so silly is that they already had existing experience of the
"invitation only" feature destroying a launch: Wave; I had a ton of friends at
the time who were really excited about Wave, but they could almost never use
it because there was at least one person they might want to involve in the
discussion who didn't yet have access. It just seems like such a beginner-
level misunderstanding of the value of networked products: even video games,
which are classically purchased per user, have been moving in a direction
where "if you own this game and your friends don't they will still be able to
play it with you". I wish I understood the reason Google keeps doing this: it
isn't like I really imagine that Google (of all companies) absolutely needs
these invitation buffers to help them scale the system out (maybe for Wave,
but not for G+), to the point where they have existential risk that the whole
project will fail. (Am I simply misremembering how the G+ invite process
worked, due to the way Wave worked? Were you guarantee access if you could get
invited by a friend?)

------
at-fates-hands
"But what Google actually built was a fancier Reddit – a place to have
interesting discussions with strangers with less anonymity, trolling, and
nudity."

Actually it isn't. Reddit's information is incredibly well organized. If you
want to be in the loop on something, there's probably a sub reddit that has a
ton of people talking about it.

My G+ feed is an orgy of ads, huge images, and irrelevant posts. Some people
and companies I follow are a firehose of information that is a pain in the ass
to sort through. I thought I could use it as a sort of rss feed, but I was
wrong.

The only reason I'm on Facebook is for my college friends, and Twitter I just
use to post development and programming stuff and use as an RSS feed. Beyond
that, social media does nothing for me. Since G+ started, its been useless for
me.

~~~
saraid216
Have you considered using the Circles feature, so that you aren't always
receiving posts from "some people and companies"?

------
mark_l_watson
G+ is now my favorite "social" site because some of the people in my circles
post interesting stuff, and G+ is set up to handle long conversations via
comments.

A little off topic but the most excellent open source Discourse discussion web
app has many of the features of G+ and I am curious how it would scale. (I set
up a public instance yesterday at
[http://mythingsofinterest.com/](http://mythingsofinterest.com/) if you
haven't tried Discourse, and want to try it). BTW, Discourse is also an
example of a nicely written Ember.js/Rails app (uses Postgres and also Redis
for caching).

------
dep_b
It was kind of weird to see it declared dead as I saw a slow trickle of
acceptance of G+ around me and more and more people started to post
interesting stuff on it now and then.

Facebook for the more personal stuff, Twitter for reading and posting news and
opinions and G+ more like a Facebook for nerd stuff in the middle.

I really wish they would stop pushing those random stories about people I
don't know and I don't care about or topics that might seem interesting to me
because some stupid algorithm thinks so, like Armin van Buren. I hate Armin
van Buren with all my guts and I don't want to see his shitty face randomly
popping up. Thank you.

------
rektide
Google has kept tight control over the product. Where-as Twitter grew from a
diverse range of different products doing different things with the API and
progressed towards a more authoritarian model, Google+ has been tightly
controlled and normalized an experience. There's less room in the Google+
ecosystem for interesting things to work their way in.

There is a Moments API for external applications to post specialized content
into the feed, and there is a read-api giving an Activity Streams centric
feed.

Conversely, perhaps it's that we're less likely as a civilization to try to
push things to interesting uses. Quake1, Quake2 and Unreal Tournament mark an
exemplary period where dabblers came along and tried to push the systems,
tried to find interesting and creative twists. Twitter was similarly buoyed
into popularity, but today we see polished, final games- games are no longer
moddable, would-be hackers simply license and leverae the engine, not a
complete game to hack from, and like we see movements and projects such as
IndieWeb, Tent.io, app.net, Salmon, ad-infinitum saying we must do it
ourselves, rather than focusing on creating a rich dynamic around something
that is.

Suffice it to say, my view is that anything that attempts to stand alone is
bound by very low limits, and I'm not sure where G+ needs to go to overcome
it's limits of being merely itself.

~~~
cubancigar11
> games are no longer moddable

I don't think that is true - success of Skyrim (or other TES series) stand in
direct contrast. FPS are indeed non-moddable nowdays but FPS have been done to
death and only the franchises (like Modern Warfare, CoD, Crysis) are making
enough money.

~~~
rektide
A bunch of content packs isn't really pushing the bounds. That you end with a
discussion of money and survivability of the FPS somewhat drives the point
home of how different our views are: an open system doesn't necessarily
attract commercial value, it attracts eccentric purposes. AirQuake wasn't made
for money, it was made because someone wanted to take something known and
explore. Conversely, CoD and MW might be fighting for life because it's only
the same commercial hacks doing the same thing to death and not letting other
people come in and muck around with shitty barely working mods. Not that
people necessarily still do wide-scale show up and start building mutators,
anymore: most would rather get paid by the hacks to do "blockbusters."

As per Gibson: "The street find's it own uses for things," and it's that
ability of the street to do so that gives long renewing interest into the
thing. Either let oneself be reborn again and again, or die of certain
irrelevancy.

~~~
cubancigar11
Skyrim mods are more than content packs. There is one that converts it into a
3D platformer, one that converts it into a puzzle game and one that converts
it into an FPS by giving everyone a gun.

At some point you have to consider the fact that there really isn't much left
to do in FPS. When Quake and HL came we were still in infancy. While CS
survived every other mod died a horrible death in neglect. People now _know_
what sucks. And what doesn't has been honed to perfection and there really
isn't much left to do anymore.

If you want to see modding don't look at FPS, look at Minecraft.

------
reactor
Who said Google+ was killed?

~~~
differentView
I use G+ far more than Facebook, though I am seeing more and more Facebook-
like posts on my G+. Not sure if that's good or bad...

~~~
pgrote
What do you use it for? The social aspect, photos?

~~~
mikecb
I use it for photos because it's amazing. I can upload RAWs and they turn out
at least as well as I can do them by hand, plus the auto-awesome thing makes
great extras (the pano's are pretty great).

Increasingly following experts and communities like I do on twitter and
reddit. For some topics it's becoming the best place.

------
the_watcher
The Star Wars geek in me has to correct his spelling of Tatooine. While
Tataouine is a city in Tunisia, but given context (his mention of a dive bar
consisting of characters from every solar system - obviously Mois Eisley), he
clearly meant the desert world and first planet in the binary star system
Tatoo, home of Anakin and Luke Skywalker.

------
PeterWhittaker
tl;dr of this my comment: G+ never died, it leveled out and waited. Now that
users are looking for real alternatives to FB, those of my generation plus-or-
minus one are heading to G+. Expect G+ to grow over the next while as FB
declines.

Skipping past the HN echo chamber of agreeement that Google+ is indeed
dead....

I've not used G+ much as I find it too Pinterest-y in style, just too hard for
my linear, "tell me what's new" mind to navigate. Lately, I've been far too
busy to use FB, which, with SocialFixer installed, is a reasonable platform
for seeing what's new in my social circles.

Most of the time, should I have have something to post, I post it to FB; if it
is particularly geeky, I also post it to G+.

This morning, after quite some time away from both, the number of friends,
business associates, and acquaintances awaiting me on G+ was staggering. More
and more people from my most of social circles are joining G+, except those
who are either social-network-impaired or facebook-diehard.

My guess is that they are wondering what social network might be for them, now
that FB has changed one too many times and made it all that much more evident
that we the users are there to be consumed.

Most of my generation plus-or-minus-one won't head to Instagram, etc., these
are for the young folk. Expect to see more of us middle agers on G+.

------
nkoren
While I'd be interested in seeing a serious postmortem (pre-mortem? trans-
mortem?) of Google+, this flippant piece isn't the article to do it.

~~~
twistedpair
The TWTR and FB earning's calls in the last few weeks have shown how their
growth rates continue to collapse. Where are the X is dying articles for them?
TWTR's price is down by nearly 50% and below the IPO price, is it dying? Then
again, since G+ doesn't have to publish numbers, we cannot compare apple to
apples.

------
dalek2point3
this is more a description of Google+ as the author sees it rather than what
"killed" it or what could save it. I do agree with the general point that it
seems to be a place for geeks, but that could be because the author / myself
are geeks and we hang out around other geeks. hardly reassuring "evidence".

------
fredgrott
Better idea for Forbes..just come out and encourage Google to buy
twitter..than at least we would get a forbes article that comes close to
having some actual points in the article.

------
jackboggler
ITT: Desperate google employees trying to pretend G+ isn't dead.

It's dead, gone. And it's killing the youtube comments section which now looks
like fabricated conversations.

------
dredmorbius
Steve actually makes a pretty good case for the dynamic and problems facing
G+. I think he buries one problem, that for many people, G+ marked a major
turn in perception of the company. Just as Microsoft long ago became the
software you had to use rather than the software you chose to use, Google has
become the Internet company you have to use, and G+ the social network it
forced you into. And the fact that this happened under the watch of a former
Microsoft executive is possibly not entirely coincidental.

The bigger problem, and one that's hitting pretty much all the social sites
lately, is the post-Snowden era and the realization that large, centralized
stores of pervasive personal information facilitating what Bruce Schneier
calls "bulk surveillance" may not be a good thing. It's hitting all the social
sites now, and even Zuck's trying to change his tune at F8

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russi...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russian.html)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-at-
facebook-f...](http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-at-
facebook-f8-2014-4)

(though I don't think he'll succeed:
[http://redd.it/24h6or](http://redd.it/24h6or)).

There's a lot else going on -- many mis-steps along the G+ pathway (Real
Names, #nymwars, the War on Words, the YouTube Anschluss, total failure to
grasp community dynamics, and more.

And I also say, entirely without irony, that there's been a great exchange
going on at Steve's G+ post on this topic, including most of what I've touched
on here, and a word or 2000 from yours, truly:

[https://plus.google.com/+SteveFaktor/posts/Lj3NBBUV8pa](https://plus.google.com/+SteveFaktor/posts/Lj3NBBUV8pa),

Also, for those who're inclined to think Steve's inherently biased, Mike Elgan
, who's ... let's just say, unabashed adoration of G+ usually leaves me short
of appetite, in his most recent TWiT podcast questions Google's participation
and engagement numbers, and comments on the immense unpopularity of the forced
YouTube / G+ integration, as well as the toes crushed by Vic during his tenure
with the company.

[https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/](https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGNtepAbNY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGNtepAbNY&feature=youtu.be&t=4m22s)

------
yeukhon
_There was no API. They had no choice but to rely entirely on Google’s vision
and internal developers._

This is usually among the top criticisms of G+. I think it has a fair point.
But a quick search says the first API announcement was on Step 15, 2011, about
three months after G+'s initial launch. But the main problem could have been
that the G+ API is not very powerful (disclaimer: I have never used the API),
based on this: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/dont-expect-a-full-
readwrit...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/dont-expect-a-full-readwrite-
google-api-anytime-soon-google-doesnt-want-to-disrupt-something-magical/)

 _But what Google actually built was a fancier Reddit_

The word _fancier_ is overrated. I rarely go to Reddit, but HN's appearance is
similar to Reddit's. Simple layout fills with a table of rows of topics. G+ is
like Facebook's newsfeed in a photo gallery style which is actually ugly and
unfriendly (the ordering is such an awkward thing to adopt to). Humans, well,
at least I, don't like G+'s feed layout.

 _Google hastily re-routed all its services through the Google+._

This is true. Most people have heard enough Youtube comedian and tumblr
bloggers complaining about the whole G+ integration. I hate the fact that I
would post Youtube comments to my public G+ when the two were first annexed.

 _That’s why I think the company should open source the code and seed it with
cash and several developers. Give it the freedom that loyal power users
deserve. It could become the next Mozilla (Firefox). And Google can still
benefit from the data it generates._

I am not sure if he is serious about open sourcing G+ or G+ API or what? There
is no way you can ever open source G+ because G+ is not a single software that
you can _git /hg clone_ down to your desktop and then start compiling like you
can do with Firefox. G+ is not built with celery, ruby on rails. The stack is
so complex. Unless he's promoting Richard Stallman (RMS)'s idea that we should
just have an open platform where ever can log into Google's server and start
hacking (anaology to his mention of someone logging into his computer and
start checking out his mail directory). That would be nice if I can use the
API to build "Extensions" and anyone who sees my page can actually make use of
it.

Flexible layout is actually problematic for some people. Remember the days of
Xanga, MySpace and today's Tumblr? You can layout your entire page yourself,
but because everyone has some insanely different like/taste of layout, some
profiles have the most accessible layout (missing back-forth arrows, or font
too small, etc). Facebook allowed some minimal customization in the past
(changing the order of how your sidebar will look like to you and visitors).

My rants:

1\. Simple, please

Google needs to make G+ simple. I don't want a fancier look. I want a dead
simple newsfeed. Facebook's newsfeed is not very bad to be honest. It may have
some spams and sponsored ads, but afterall, the feed is linear and easy to
scroll and stop reading.

I always tell people that I hate using G+ because G+ settings are so
complicated. Stop making things so complicated.

2\. Don't let strangers follow me!

Why would you even allow strangers to "add me to their circle" and start
watching me when I don't watch them to follow me? Most of these strangers are
not even real people.

3\. G+ notification is annoying and yet not working all the time

The notification is so buggy. I would miss invites and I won't see the missing
notifications. In fact, the integration with Gmail is so lame that if someone
left me a message or I missed a hangout I will not receive any notification at
all from Gmail's interface. I would have to click on the "Chats" mail folder
on Gmail to find out missed conversation.

~~~
reitanqild
On 2.: you decide who you share with. People can follow you but they won't see
anything you don't share with them.

~~~
yeukhon
While it is true, the fact that someone can actually "follow you" and "add you
to a circle" is really really weird. I may be making a hypocritical point
since I am also a tumblr user and my public one is actually followed by
strangers too, but something down in my guts suggests that knowing strangers
is adding me to a circle is just really really weird.

