
A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+ - scottporad
http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-google-could-have-avoided-fing-up-google/
======
oelmekki
That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target
usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to
use.

I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to
publishing, it always feels a bit off.

I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a
french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to
open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.

Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always
hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I
publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for
something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most
of people following me won't understand french.

As for now, here are my options :

\- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding
the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of

\- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that
does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing

\- not publishing anything

Sadly, it often comes to that last option.

Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed :
we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we
can write content without fearing to be annoying.

Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a
good thing.

~~~
tiziano88
You can easily create Google+ "pages" to solve exactly this problem. They have
the added bonus of not requiring "real names", so you could be using a
pseudonym or something if you wanted

~~~
dredmorbius
"Pages" were never (and still aren't) communicated well. The name, for
starters, sucks.

They seem to have been created for marketing purposes. Using them to topically
divide my posts ... never occurred. Literally, until the past day or so.

------
captainmuon
They should have given up trying to be the number one and building a walled
garden. Rather, they should have opened up Google+.

* Allow users to post to Facebook and Twitter from their interface *

* Show posts from other services (blogs, facebook, twitter, picasa) in your public-facing stream

* Offer this kind of syndication also with open standards (a la Diaspora)

* Give users a public home page they can customize & filter (a mixture of Myspace and a microblog) where they can cultivate an online identity. I think this would be a killer feature.

* Allow users to have "derived identities". I might log in with my verified personal account, but then I can create a second pseudonymous identity that I can use to interact with certain users.

\----

*) That might be tricky, since Facebook & co. would try to stop it legally technically. A company like Google could try to fight for their right to do syndication legally, they could lobby for laws forcing large social networks to syndicate, or they could try to circumvent it technically. (Facebook allows users to post via a web browser. When you post something via Google+ to Facebook, make Chrome very theatrically open a new Window, navigate to Facebook, and post stuff there manually, not via API. If Facebook complains, say they are discriminating against some browsers or something.)

------
fudged71
People don't seem to understand that Google+ was used internally before launch
as though it were Facebook; people only shared with their friends and family.
But when the product was launched to the public, it was given a limited
release, biasing it to the tech crowd, and they gave the ability to give posts
"public" visibility. Well these two things quickly turned Google+ into Twitter
rather than Facebook.

Then they spent the next few years trying to fix the disaster they had caused.
It would have been a great product if they thought through the launch. But
they didn't.

~~~
Leynos
I really wish they had just rolled with it and allowed it to grow as a new
Twitter-like product. It still is from what I can see. The majority of people
I follow are people I don't know outside of G+ who share publicly or to
interest-based circles.

~~~
fudged71
The thing with it being a public social network is that many people want
anonymity.

It's clear that from the start they wanted this platform to also serve the
basis of an identity service for the rest of google, so the public aspect
completely screwed them over.

------
bratsche
If 100% of Google Reader users enthusiastically adopted Google+, would that
have even come _close_ to what they were hoping to ultimately get? That's
probably a rounding error by Facebook's usage numbers.

~~~
scottporad
I disagree. People who used Reader were early adopters and influencers.
Perhaps it was _only 8 million_ users from Reader, but they would have had a
multiplier effect.

~~~
bratsche
Maybe. But many of us are early adopters on Google+, because many of us are
early adopters of all kinds of technologies. How effective have any of us
been? I've got a ton of connections on Google+, but they're mostly other
software developers or enthusiasts. All my real friends who are actually on
Google+ created accounts and then apparently forgot they had them and never
post. Probably because I'm the only person they know who was using it, and as
awesome as I am (jk), one person is not enough to get someone to use a social
network.

~~~
mattlutze
Our early adoption tendencies pair with a tolerance to nerd out over multiple
competing systems. Studies have in the past suggested the average smartphone
user only uses a few (5, 6?) apps that they've downloaded with any sort of
regularity, the idea being they just don't have the time, patience or desire
to check in on 6 different social location-aware deal apps.

Facebook is, generally, a better experience for a person that wants to keep up
with their friends, because posting, discovering others' posts, organizing
groups, having get-togethers in real life are quicker, simpler, easier for the
general user.

So they'll ignore Google+ because they don't need that second social network
if Google+ comes in second.

Which, for that persona, it really does.

------
nashashmi
There were other things that google could have done, but I agree not enabling
RSS was a poor decision on Google's part.

To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his
rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of
attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed
Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's
position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a
single thing about interoperability.

So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on
chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability
was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+.
G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was
gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major
chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the
subscriber base.

I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature
that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I
have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts
to Android App reviews.

Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook.
I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is
to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot
foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy
flaws too.

------
erikb
It's good to have an opinion. Also I like short, focussed blog posts. But the
assumption made is too simple to gain anything, neither for Google nor for the
HN community. For instance, integrating product A into product B is a lot of
work, additionally to maintaining each of the products separately. And to me
it seems as if Google simply didn't want to maintain the software behind
Reader anymore. This also means integrating it (more costs than just keeping
it as it is) is not a valid option. Then it might not even have a positive
influence, because there are likely many people who used G+ but not Reader
(like me) and many users who used Reader and not G+. For those people the
integration of a completely new tool is not different from adding X new
features. And we all know that adding X new features does not improve any
product, right?

------
plorg
This is the way I've been using Facebook for years. Most of the publications I
follow have FB pages to which they submit their most pertinent content (for
small publications and individual authors this usually ends up being every
story or post). I can skim what's new and get other recommendations from
people that I know. With a little bit of work I can also filter down what I
see to just the people whose opinions I care about. At least that's the way it
worked for several years.

Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't
pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google
had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have
been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.

~~~
scottporad
I totally agree that Facebook is shooting themselves in the foot. Already we
see publishers and brands moving away from Facebook to platforms (e.g.
Twitter, Instagram) where all their content will be seen.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
I know what you meant, but just pointing out that the average Twitter user
certainly won't see all of the content of anything they follow.

------
kh_hk
Tin foil hat mode ON

Google never needed Google+ to be successful, it was just a means to complete
their analytics and ad platforms with more data about the users by awkwardly
signing them up.

As Wave, it might also have led to the development of new internal processes
(providing a band aid for things like youtube comments) and finally on
Google's look and feel rebranding.

Now Google has new ideas on how to feed the analytics and ad platforms with a
line of futuristic projects that may or may not improve your daily life.

Taking this with a grain of salt it might make sense. For Google to do what
they do they need to know everything about their users and their environment,
which closes the circle feeding the products that are giving the company
value.

------
stormbrew
I don't really think this would have helped much, but I do think that it
highlights a part of why G+ has not been a very big success. It just lacks a
compelling use case to make you come back to it after you discover that it
doesn't have Facebook's network effect. There's nothing it does that Twitter,
LinkedIn, or Facebook don't do better, aside from look kind of googly and
force you to pick which one of your 5 gmail/apps account identities you want
to really use.

~~~
pekk
If I had been able to selectively subscribe to technical content of posters
rather than also hearing about their cats, there is no reason I would not be
using it over Twitter and Facebook to catch up on people's
microblogging/thoughts.

I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't
care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was
for me always a ludicrous argument.

But Plus is ultimately still a failure

~~~
stormbrew
Well, that's kind of exactly my point. Facebook does the "things happening in
my friends' lives that are largely inane but relevant to me" thing far better
than some give it credit for (going to great lengths to determine relevance
based on real actions you take). Twitter does the "I want a mind dump of the
people I admire from afar with no filters" thing much better.

If Circles were the other way around -- a way to organize and categorize your
thoughts for better consumption of _other people_ \-- I think that would have
been better, and more along the lines of what you're talking about. If it had
done it somewhat automatically that might have been even better.

But one thing that always kept me unhappy with G+ was that managing my circles
felt like painful busywork better left to a computer, and it was only for my
own benefit. It feels like _work_ to control who gets to see what, and it's
amortized on the wrong end, so I never did it. I don't know that anyone really
does.

At any rate, no one's arguing people use facebook because of the people they
don't want to hear from. That would be ludicrous.

------
dredmorbius
Reader and Blogger integration weren't the biggest failings of G+, but tying
those particular products into the service could have helped it along. In
particular, giving easier ways to follow specific items or topics of interest
(via Reader) and allowing for more expressive and focused content (via
Blogger).

Truth is, G+ was mis-architected from the ground up, starting with Circles.
Numerous abortive directions were taken (anyone remember "sparks"?).

The real blunders, though, were in utterly mismanaging and misunderstanding
what real community is, and how it is formed and fostered. Real Names,
Nymwars, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all massive (and
entirely avoidable) blunders.

A large part of it was that Google had a very clear idea of what _it_ wanted,
but didn't much care for what its users' interests were. And when the users
told them, they basically said "la la la la la, I can't hear you!".

The underlying technology is solid. I wish the sites I use instead of G+ had
the clusters, search depth, breadth, and speed, the reliability, and the
performance of Google. They don't. But what they've got are _much_ better UI,
often other features which exceed G+, and above and beyond all else, _VASTLY_
healthier communities and relations between the sites and those communities.

------
soci
The biggest problem for me is all the FAKE ACTIVITY you can find in the
platform. I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to
publish anything there.

I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was
managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate
the community was alive.

I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in
another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored
by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile.

All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of
them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account
was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we
end up having some of those followers too.

We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer.
Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best
restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were
we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the
google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our
company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.

~~~
Kequc
> All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of
> them had a real person behind them.

I can explain this quote with this quote.

> I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish
> anything there.

~~~
grkvlt
Yup. And there are a lot of people who blindly click 'follow' on any featured
post, or blindly reply to featured content. Have a look at some of the
responses to promoted or featured articles, a lot of them are used to seeing
only their friends postings, and assume the content is addressed to them
personally. This leads to a lot of confused replies.

I think this shops the problem with combining a public forum with people
publishing content to the world, and a social network of connected individuals
talking to each other. Facebook is the latter, Twitter is the former, and
Google+ seems to want to be _both_ and is not succeeding. It _may_ end up
successful as one or the other, time will tell, it's too early to write it
off, though.

------
rurounijones
Big assumption that people who were not Google+ users would tolerate having to
join it just to continue using Google Reader.

A lot of people would have just been pissed off that "G+ is borging google
reader just like it is everything else".

~~~
gfodor
No joining necessary, they just move your reader account into G+ and slowly
people start using it for more than an RSS reader.

~~~
nardi
You clearly (somehow) haven't had Google try to convert one of your Google
accounts into a G+ account before, or you've forgotten. There's a whole
process involving your real name, a picture, profile, importing contacts,
etc., etc.

~~~
gfodor
Right I am saying strategically they should have figured out a way to skip all
that and just get people using the platform for rss first

------
Zigurd
Lack of product improvement hurt Google+ the most. Too many important things,
like organizing pictures, work badly. Some things, like managing events, are
just terrible and full of bugs. Neither have improved. There is no reason to
hope.

Contrast with Maps: Maps _made_ Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer
delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every
release.

It is an execution failure.

------
roryhughes
YouTubers got really pissed off with Google+ comments, but that has calmed
down now because really it's still just comments below a video. What that did
though was it made people (who may never have even tried +) really annoyed
with it. But for RSS, imagine if they forced people to read it on +, there
would be uproar.

~~~
anonymoushn
Having to open a new tab with an auto-playing video to see the comment someone
replied to is not okay. Having to do it for every comment in a long thread is
not okay. The only reason people have stopped talking about it is that talking
about it accomplishes nothing; Google just wants their site to be shit.

------
Semaphor
The thing that made me barely use Google+ is the lack of a posting API.

With FB, Twitter, etc. I can use one app to fill all of them with content.
Can't do that with Google+ and only recently it started working for pages
(which I have no need of).

------
7952
I don't think anything needs to be integrated into Google+. They need to
integrate Google+ with the rest of the web. I have a photo on Google+ that I
want to send to a friend on a dumb chat client or email. How do I do that
using a single URL? I don't want to send someone an interactive sharing
experience, just a URL. If they decide to use the platform for further
communication that's great but you shouldn't have to.

------
elleferrer
I have to agree with you Scott, Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the
legion of Google Reader users. I really miss Google Reader. I want it back,
Google!

But integrating Google Reader and Google+ would have made an easy peasy way to
share content and socially connect with similar Google+ users. If that
happened back then, I'm sure Google+ today would have been a successful
community.

~~~
lutusp
> ... Google missed a HUGE opportunity with the legion of Google Reader users.
> I really miss Google Reader. I want it back, Google!

So do I, for a number of reasons including that its nominal replacement
(Feedly) sucks. But I can see this from Google's perspective -- they couldn't
monetize the fact that they had such a large and loyal following. In other
words, they had a top rating without a bottom line.

~~~
TheGunner
Can't agree with that, Google Reader was great but I'm very happy with what
I'm getting from Feedly, I don't feel worse off

------
yeukhon
This is just specualtion. There is no hard evidence that they are shifting a
thousand talent to other things at once. In fact, in a previous discussion it
was said that people were moving to a new building on the campus. Did the
author just ASSUME that it was a sign of the changing.

I do think Google is thinking about a new strategy, but when he says "Google
is getting away from Google+" is just pure speculation.

The real deal is that we have gap. There is a distance in using so many tools.
I post it on Twitter but i want that to appear on FB but not G+. Or whatever.
I have RSS feed. I have photos I want to share but not indexed or shared on
Google Plus. This is sure something a startup can take on. But this is where
social network companies are failing to do well BECAUSE they all want everyone
to join their platform and ONLY their platform.

------
anigbrowl
Props to the mods for changing the title - can't stand bowdlerisms.

------
Eye_of_Mordor
As soon as Google+ insisted on real names, they made me realize it was only a
vehicle for selling my privacy (pretty much my only motive for leaving
Facebook). Now interested in neither.

------
rainedin
People on the post's comments are suggesting that RSS only has technical
followers.

Really we should be talking about feeds and subscriptions. Wording needs to be
friendlier: add my friend's feed or follow Kate Bush. It doesn't matter what
the technology is so much underneath. RSS and Atom are meaningless to the
general public and only confuse matters. But I think they'd grok the idea of
following an interest or person, or giving feedback to a post, a thing, or a
happening.

------
jcampbell1
Maybe my history is wrong, but wasn't the social "feed" largely pioneered by
ex-google employees (Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, etc)?

IIRC, facebook was all about the "wall" before friendfeed. Google has already
gotten real names and identity from Google+, but I can't help but think the
key insight into social existed at google before anyone had talked about
Google+. Google+'s big mistake is being too late. The product is perfectly
fine.

------
neurobro
I do agree it would have been logical and probably straightforward to
integrate RSS into Google+, but to say it would have radically affected the
success of the service is going too far.

If anything, it would make RSS more compelling to those of us who never really
liked the experience of any readers (Google Reader included). Personally, I
see RSS as little more than food for web-robots to consume, metabolize, and
excrete.

------
admstockdale
Keep it simple. There's no reason to overanalyze the failure. Ask someone why
they're not on Google+. There response: "What's Google+?" If they know what it
is: "Why would I use Google+? No one is on there. All my friends use x y or
z." Google+ has a huge public perception and identity problem -- who is it for
exactly? Why use it when there's other social media?

------
gojomo
Ah, but how could Google have avoided fumbling the opportunity they had back
when Orkut was briefly the hottest, fastest social network, in 2004?

------
Fuxy
That's a good idea but the main reason google+ failed is a lot simpler than
that it just alienated all the geeks and early adopters by forcing it down
their throught too much.

If they would have allowed it to grow naturally and wouldn't have forced
people to use it whether they wanted to or not attempted to make it more user
friendly and intuitive the would have succeeded.

------
rainedin
Summary: The author thinks Google+ could have been saved (or been electrified)
if they had integrated Reader.

------
emersonrsantos
It's not that. Some people at Gogole said let's tell people we are changing.
The same thing that makes Windows 8 and lots of great products go wrong.

We just hate change. Change leads to frustation, to fight-or-flight reactions.
That's why people seat at the same spot every day.

------
tn13
What % of internet users use RSS ?

~~~
kh_hk
The future of RSS is finding a way to make users use it without knowing they
are using it.

Sadly, more and more platforms are abandoning RSS/atom (hello twitter) --they
want no part on anything defined on an RFC that decentralizes and makes it
easier to consume a service without entering their site. Other than that I
guess XML.

As of % of internet users that use RSS, count me in.

------
ChrisArchitect
can we all agree that social networks/platforms like this are _not_ easy. They
may have 'screwed it up' in most opinions but it's not because of pure
stupidity -- there are a ton of challenges and complexities here. Some of the
integrations, albeit only parts, have been brilliant and worked really well in
my eyes..... getting G+ to cover so many of the google services is a tough
one. But then questions about complex vs. simple and circles and the endless
battle between common consumer-level users and power users......and the whole
Open net vs closed.....wow.. see, it's not easy ! heh

------
laichzeit0
The problem is Facebook right now is like all technology that's "good enough".
People don't stop using good enough technology just because something slightly
better comes along. That ship has sailed.

------
neals
This whole Google Reader thing has had me going "back" to Digg actually (I
know, it's a new site and all). Digg.com/reader. I don't visit the rest of the
site, but the reader is excellent.

------
onion2k
_It was actually a really good product, but the thing has had zero traction
with real people._

If no one uses a product then it's clearly providing no value. That's pretty
much the definition of a bad product.

~~~
adwn
In the real world, the quality of a product isn't the only criterion
influencing adoption/market share: There's also

\- price and cost (doesn't really apply here, though)

\- marketing and image

\- critical mass and network effects

Therefore, your conclusion is invalid.

~~~
onion2k
Price and cost matter a great deal here. Although the price of G+ was zero,
the cost quite high - the user's time. G+ was hard to understand for most
people. Google tried to give it a language of it's own that took people effort
to learn - groups were "Circles", chat was "Hangout", and so on. It didn't
_instantly_ click in the way that Facebook or Twitter does for most people.
Given that, the value proposition for G+ wasn't good enough - the benefit from
actually using it returned less value than the cost of the time to spend
learning how. That's the number one thing for free products - the cost is
_never_ zero. Everything costs something, just not necessarily money.

The image of the product was equally bad. Google rarely gave a clear picture
of what G+ was actually for - it looked a lot like a social network, but
Google's messaging was always "It's not a social network! We're not competing
with Facebook!" They always told people what they weren't, rarely what they
_were_. Frankly, I still don't know. That's ignoring the forced "G+ is your
Google account" thing because many Google products could actually be used
without G+; G+ was never your Google account.

As for critical mass, if you haven't got that when you have 500 million users,
you're _obviously_ getting something very wrong.

tl;dr G+ didn't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile spending
time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't spend time
with.

~~~
adwn
> _the cost quite high - the user 's time_

That's a good point. I still don't really "get" Google+, and I find it
somewhat counterintuitive.

> _tl;dr G+ didn 't provide enough value to users to make it worthwhile
> spending time with the product, ergo it was a bad product that people didn't
> spend time with._

I was challenging your "few users ==> bad product" line of reasoning in
general, not necessarily the statement "Google+ is a bad product". Sorry, I
should have been more clear on this.

Still, I stick to my point that there are more factors influencing the market
share of a product than its pure quality. Even if I made a better Facebook
clone, I wouldn't gain any noteworthy market share.

~~~
onion2k
That's a fair point. I really just drawing a distinction between accounts and
users. G+ had hundreds of millions of accounts but _relatively_ few users,
certainly a single digit percentage of total accounts. That's a strong
indicator that people aren't coming back after their initial experience or
that they're signing up to something they don't want in the first place.
Neither is a sign of a good product.

------
xsace
So much nonsense in this post. Google Reader users wanted Google Reader, not
Reader in G+.

That would have changed nothing at all. There's nothing like totally simple
magic way to avoid fucking up G+.

------
sidcool
In my cynical opinion, this is like blaming a raindrop for the flood.

------
frik
Google, please adopt RSS/Atom feeds (again) in your services.

------
eitland
This makes the assumption that Google haters wouldn't have found some reason
to hate Google anyway. Which is overly optimistic in my opinion.

~~~
interpol_p
I really don't think it's "Google haters" who have caused Google to back away
from G+ — it's the fact that people were indifferent about the service to
begin with.

------
sneak
It's "build something people want", right?

Let's do this from first principles.

Twitter was successful early on because they never discouraged multiple,
independent, throwaway accounts. Why doesn't Google let you manage an
unlimited number of independent and unlinked first-class-citizen profiles
under one Google Account, under any name you choose? They can still mine all
the data because they know (and keep secret!) that it's all one person.
Facebook and Twitter do this too, just with cookies instead of login
credentials.

People _want_ to share lots of personal details on their social network.
Facebook is wildly successful because they make it easy for people to do so -
perhaps to the point of oversharing. Google could have dispensed with the
whole "following"/"circles" nonsense and gone with the undirected, two-way-
confirmed model (with group support) that doesn't confuse people not familiar
with graph theory, or the twitter model of basically casual, unconfirmed,
directed-graph subscription, independent of the underlying personal
relationship. Either would have been fine - instead, the egghead googlers
tried to solve both and ended up solving neither.

Last but not least, pretending that I want Google+ (no, don't "ask me again
later" you fucking cunt of a website) to infect all the other important basic
utilities of the web that Google's huge pile of cash has bought their way into
(YouTube of course first comes to mind, but Maps and Gmail and Search too) is
blatantly disrespectful to their only true asset: their users. Even Zuckerberg
doesn't pretend like he's doing us _that_ much of a favor when Facebook once-
again revises its default privacy controls downward...

It's pretty simple, really. It's super tragic that Google has turned into such
a monolith of a Big Company that it can't even execute on a simple vision
without tons of management getting involved and figuring out, through endless
meetings, how to make every single step of the experience as user-hostile as
possible.

It's not like they're incapable of making user-centric experiences anymore.
Look at how great Maps is these days, or how Gmail's webmail has become
completely untouchable the way Outlook/Exchange or Blackberries were in their
heyday - both cases because they did exactly what their customers wanted.

(Aside: Interestingly enough, Apple was doing this for a long time, and now
with things like iAds and IAPs and carrier override of _my_ ability to tether
_my_ phone, it seems like they are slowly beginning to fail to consider
exactly why and how they got to their position as market leader. (The argument
could also be made that they are serving multiple masters -
carriers/developers versus end-users.) If they continue, as Google has,
eventually their customers will be right to leave.)

I imagine it will take a lot of smart Googlers leaving in utter frustration
before Google-the-entity finally changes course.

~~~
prof_hobart
> Aside: Interestingly enough, Apple was doing this for a long time,

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I'm not sure I agree with this.

Apple have had some pretty famous "We know what's best for you" stances in
their history - one button mouse, original Mac keyboard with no cursor keys,
original iPod only working with Macs, very limited array of products
configurations, no licencing of MacOS to non-Apple computers, iPhone apps only
available through their app store etc etc. Some of those have eventually
changed, but (apart from maybe the iPods being Mac-only) they haven't
typically restricted the success of those products.

If anything, the darkest days of their history were probably at the point when
they were offering a vast array of products and configurations in an attempt
to give users exactly what they thought they wanted.

------
Kiro
"Real people" don't use RSS.

------
_random_
Does that man (Vic) have any noticeable achievements at all throughout his
career? Why was he even chosen?

------
rwmj
mixi.jp lets you follow RSS feeds. It wasn't enough to save mixi.

~~~
rangibaby
What killed mixi was losing it's mixi-ness, unique features that made it a
success in the first place in an attempt to be more like FB or Twitter. I know
Facebook has the mixi "footprints" feature internally since it uses it to
target "people you may know".

------
michaelochurch
Google+ came in a time when social network fatigue was setting in (Facebook
usage was declining in the US) but there still wasn't a clear sense of what
people wanted in a social networking site.

It was an uphill battle, and nearly unwinnable the way Google chose to take it
on.

Google Hangouts was, in my view, one of their biggest assets. It's a solid
piece of technology. It was way better than its competitors. The problem is
that they couldn't come up with a viable way to make it part of Google+,
rather than a great standalone project. The vision was that people would spend
time in Google+ and "hang out" with others who were available. I knew, off the
bat, that that wouldn't happen without (at first) a context around which to
structure a hangout. Board games are a great starting social context for early
adopters, but since they're a cognitively upscale group, you need _quality_
games, not Zyngarbage like Farmville.

I thought that a focus on game quality (Real Games Initiative) could, even
though it'd piss off counterparties like Zynga wanting to throw us our crap
(because they didn't expect us to succeed) and still get preferential
treatment, give people a context in which they'd actually get comfortable in
G+, and then want to use it. Games were an area in which (circa 2011) Facebook
was shitting the bed-- low-quality games and game spam were a primary driver
of social network fatigue-- and I thought it was a great way to distinguish
ourselves as cognitively upscale and attract early adopters and the more
charismatic elements of the early majority.

Maybe a quality Games product wouldn't have saved G+. It's too late to know
for sure, and I'd guess that RNCH was a bigger problem, but I feel like that
was a key battle that has been lost.

