
What did Google+ get right? - eitland
https://write.as/eriki/what-did-google-get-right
======
AndrewStephens
I was an early proponent of G+ when it first opened. I loved the idea of
Circles and their implementation of Groups was really good. I didn't love the
UI, which I found bland, but the functionality was well thought out. For a
while I used it as my primary social media site but Facebook was entrenched
even back then and nobody I knew used G+.

I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing useful
features for the web at large - walled sites like Facebook should be
considered the enemy, not something to emulate. If I was Google I would be
providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network
that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale)
that would be easy for third-parties to integrate.

Instead they killed Google Reader and made G+ and youtube just as much as a
walled garden as Facebook.

~~~
carl8
> If I was Google I would be providing ... a loose social network that
> encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale)
> that would be easy for third-parties to integrate.

They did. It was called OpenSocial, which originally released in late 2007,
and was implemented by MySpace and others to compete against the Facebook
platform (also released in 2007). I remember when I first looked at its
complex XML documentation, that it was much easier just to use the Facebook
API.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial)

~~~
nl
OpenSocial was a standard for "widget" which could be hosted on a site. I
don't think it was ever used on Plus, but it was available on iGoogle.

That was more for games than for the type of links the OP was talking about
though.

OTOH Google did a lot of work around things like PubSubHubbub to get cross
site links working.

------
erikig
Circles

Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles.
Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo
sticky.

~~~
notatoad
I think Circles was a great example of what Google+ got wrong. If you are an
alien species observing human interaction, you'll notice that it really is how
people interact, they have different circles of friends or contacts that they
might want to share things with, and a "circles" feature is a great way to
organize your social network.

What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize
all their friends into circles. Our social circles are not hard-edged and
fixed, they're fuzzy and context-dependent.

~~~
jyrkesh
> What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly
> categorize all their friends into circles.

I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for
about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town.

I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the
categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the
game on the flat news feed problem.

~~~
notatoad
The obvious solution to me is an intelligent algorithm that decides which of
the content in your feed you'll be most interested in and surfaces that for
you. And this is exactly what facebook is trying to do. It's obviously a
difficult problem though, and they make the wrong call a lot of the time.

~~~
vannevar
A really key piece of information missing from that algorithm is your
relationship with the people posting. Sure, an algorithm could infer that, but
right now they're terrible at it. Why not just let people specify their
relationship and how often they want to see content from someone? Facebook's
problem from a user perspective is that the ideal social network for users
looks nothing like the ideal social network for maximum profitability, which
is what they're trying to build. FB's only hope for the future is to use
marketing to convince people that they actually _want_ its brand of dystopia.

------
Sniffnoy
Some of this could also be "What did LiveJournal (and therefore also its
clones) get right?" Oddly LiveJournal seems to always get left out of these
discussions, even though it had more features than many later sites (Facebook,
Twitter, etc). There's good reason to avoid LiveJournal _itself_ these days,
but the clone sites still live (e.g. Dreamwidth).

~~~
k__
Wasn't LJ just a blogging platform?

I used it in early 2000 and was blown away by what MySpace offered compared to
LJ.

~~~
Sniffnoy
I mean, you had your friends page, which aggregated all the posts from people
you'd added as friends (this was a one-way thing, it didn't require the other
person's agreement). You could also make posts locked so that only your
friends, or specific subsets, could see them. (Later it became possible to
separate these two different functions of adding someone as a friend, although
a little troublesome. On Dreamwidth these are entirely separate functions,
with the "friends page" now called the "reading page"; you "subscribe" to
people to add them there, and you "give access" to people to let them read
your locked posts.) People can also set up "communities" that people can join
and post to. And of course people had profiles where they could write a little
bit about themselves, and you could see their friend lists (or these days on
Dreamwidth, subscription lists and access lists).

Seems to me it basically resembles the later "social networking" sites in
features (and outdoes them except possibly Google+), just the tone was more
focused on long-form blogging.

I guess the one thing lacking that people these days would expect was that you
couldn't easily upload pictures and such (that was a paid feature IIRC;
haven't checked how that works on Dreamwidth). But if you ignore that...

------
jcousins
I scrolled through my long dead plus profile before I nuked it a few weeks
ago. The main thing I noticed is that I posted a broad spectrum of things
there from all the hobbies and interests in my life. When I moved to twitter
my profile became almost two dimensional - mostly about two topics of interest
and nothing in between. Lots of quips and no longform posts. Although I do
like being able to curate my feed and my own posts down to a very limited set
of topics, I also miss the way I could discover new things on Plus and, long
before that, Stumbleupon. It was easier to break out of my echo chamber. I
don't have a modern day tool to fill that role (would love to hear some
options if anyone has suggestions)

------
40dslf
The website felt slow and bloated performance-wise, despite the design being
simple. YouTube feels like that now too.

~~~
unilynx
And Google Cloud console. And Gsuite Admin. And Gmail. Well, maybe the latter
isn't simple anymore

~~~
TheHypnotist
They seem to have lost sight on a big part of what made them attractive to
begin with.

~~~
k__
It's funny because Google has this guy, I think he's called Alex Russel,
running around and telling the world which websites are too slow and how to
improve web performance.

Somehow the rest of Google seems to ignore him.

------
jameshart
Increasingly seems that what Google got right was _getting the heck out of the
social networking arms race before the 2016 election season_.

~~~
dbbk
They still have YouTube.

------
arkitaip
It's only now that I use Twitter on a daily basis that I realize the problem
of having a single feed for your private life, work, hobbies, etc. It just
doesn't work and is one of the main reasons why I unfollow people. I think the
underlying functionality of circles and collections are a must but maybe they
can be implemented in a better and easier to use way.

~~~
smacktoward
I think of the underlying problem as "the metadata delusion."

We programmers look at difficulties users have dealing with large volumes of
data and think, aha! I can solve this by giving them ways to add metadata to
those data, so it can be more easily browsed/filtered/faceted/whatever. (We
think that because programmers have an analytical cast of mind, which we then
extrapolate from -- this would be useful for _me_ , we figure, therefore it
would be useful for _anyone._ ) So we build these elaborate systems for
storing and managing metadata, and then build elaborate UIs to expose those
systems to the user.

Our system goes out to the users, and as long as those users are people like
us -- analytical types -- it works OK. But then it goes out beyond that to a
general audience, and suddenly we discover a new problem: namely that _most
users don 't want to add metadata_ and simply will not do it, even if by doing
so they could realize huge productivity gains. It doesn't matter how useful
the metadata would be to them, to them adding metadata is _work_ , and worse,
it's _nerd work_ of a kind they feel fundamentally uncomfortable with and
unequipped to deal with. So they just don't do it. And they _won 't_ do it, no
matter how hard you try to sell them on it.

That was the problem with "circles" in G+: not that it was a bad idea to let
people split up their feeds, but that having multiple feeds required them to
_add metadata_ (creating circles, naming them, adding people to them,
periodically removing people from them, etc.), and people just didn't want to
do that. So they didn't.

It's not impossible to build systems that categorize data to make it more
comprehensible, but if you want them to work, they have to do so in some way
that _doesn 't put the burden on the user_ to keep everything correctly
tagged/categorized/faceted/whatever. Because they just will not do that, no
matter how many carrots you dangle.

~~~
sethhochberg
It seems to be working for Instragram, but they implemented the simplest
possible thing for stories - you can have your "everyone" group, or your
"close friends" group. No custom labels, no additional groups, just those two
and thats it. I see quite a few friends who never even participated on G+ or
similar making use of it.

~~~
smacktoward
Yeah, that's a good example: if you _must_ have the user add metadata, keep it
as simple as you possibly can. "You have exactly two buckets, everything goes
in one or in the other" is about as simple a metadata system as you can get.

------
dredmorbius
I've yet to write a definitive post mortem (still in the thick of the Google+
Exodus, see:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/](https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/)), but
most treatments I've seen miss substantial points.

G+ was endlessly frustrating, and yet still compelling.

The features many list were _not_ part of the site for much its life: it
launched without Search, Communities, or Collections. It morphed several
times, significantly: May 2012 and 2013, the November 2013 YouTube forced
integration, and several generally lesser ones after the site was in clear
decline.

The low-friction interaction with notifications, and search capabilities,
along with all-but-unlimited-length text posts, were strengths. As was
underlying platorm stability.

The user cohort, yes, small, but geeky and academic, was a strength. (The SEO
marketing contingent not so much.)

Noise, poor filters and organisational capabilities, and unwanted and
intrusive integrations were downsides. Overall management was abysmal, likely
for numerous reasons.

And yet I'd found it useful, within limits.

------
judge2020
The only thing I give to Google is its security. Search HN for just Google[0]
and the threads are all things regarding the company's decisions/politics:
shutting down products, abusing their Chrome monopoly, Google Play, etc.
Meanwhile, you can search for Facebook [1] and all of the top stories are
related to infosec/data breaches, actual crimes like the research VPN
(although Google also did this, be it more transparently), etc.

I'm not saying Google is perfect, they did have the Google+ API leak. You can
hate Google for their decisions all the same as being able to hate FB for
their infosec (or, better yet, hate both of them for the ad targeting) but I'd
rather have my data stored by Google instead of FB.

0:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google)

1:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook)

------
eclipseo76
But where will I be able to read Linus words? That was my only use of Google+.

------
discordance
Since they killed Google Reader because of G+, my question is now that G+ is
officially dead, can they bring back Google Reader?

~~~
zamadatix
I'm sure they won't bring something back based on one of many the rumors of
why they closed it.

------
electriclove
Reverse chronological list of all posts that I am interested in with no
'helpful' filtering/automated curation/suggested content.

Oh wait, I don't think Google+ had that..

------
Defcon6
A nice post about a really well built social community that got lost because
most social media users crave Likes/attention. I can tell you that all your
points are good points and I don’t have a BUT neither :) Facebook, insta and
Whatsapp make it way too easy for people to use their platforms. Most people
take the easiest root and all their friends are there too. For 5 years I’m
trying to get people to stop using Whatsapp and step over to Signal. Everyone
tells me, that they don’t know anyone on Signal. The same goes for G+ On G+ I
had like 20,000 followers on just one type of collection of photos. The people
followed it because they where interested in the subject.

Facebook connects people and people are nosy, they want attention and want to
see what others are doing. G+ didn’t have that.

------
mcv
This article misses a couple of important strengths of Google+:

* The combination of Events and Hangouts was magical. This was great for planning open online meetups, games on hangouts, and tons of other things.

* Circle sharing. This really jump-started informal communities. Yes, they added more official communities later, but circle sharing was in my opinion a far more effective way to create real communities of people who get to know each other.

* Ultimately, of course, the most important part were the people themselves. It attracted a lot of interesting people. Geeks, early adopters, people with a passion for a wide variety of topics. People weren't using it to connect with families and friends they already know in the real world, they connected to new people with similar interests that didn't always fit a specific formal Community. Friendships were made, several businesses were launched based primarily on interaction on Google+.

I'm sad to see it go. I'm sadder still that Google mismanaged it into the
ground. They had something great, but seemed determined to destroy it by
forcing low quality content onto it, and removing popular features.

------
ocdtrekkie
It was actually super strange that in all the years it was there, Google never
bothered to put ads in Google+. Had they done so, I wonder if they would've
considered the platform more viable long-term?

~~~
combatentropy
Do you mean that they canned Google+ because it was making no money?

Surely at any time they could add ads. They knew how many people were going
there and how often. Therefore they then could make a good guess, from their
other apps, at how much money it would make them if they were to add ads.

It must have been that after doing the math they thought it was not worth it.
Or maybe they never meant it to make money directly, only to feed into their
other products, which make money. Either way, they knew how many people were
going there and how often, and decided it wasn't doing what they wanted it to
do and that it could not make enough money even if they added in ads.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
For quite a long while, Google+ was the third largest social network. It's
hard to imagine it could not have made a significant amount of money on ads.

It's definitely true that initially Google intended G+ to feed into the
overall Google thing, and that many integrations of combining disparate Google
properties together was actually done under the banner of G+.

But I do wonder with Ruth Porat's more "must be profitable" approach to Google
divisions, if they had added ads a couple years ago, if it might've been
considered worth maintaining.

~~~
Grue3
>Google+ was the third largest social network.

I suspect the metrics were heavily cooked at the time when this was reported.
At some point it was really easily to accidentally end up on G+ just by using
other Google products, and Youtube comments counted as G+ posts, which no
doubt made for incredible activity numbers.

------
blunderkid
What Google had to do was to blindly copy Fakebook and use its search engine
to market the hell out of it while there was still hope. In other words be
ruthless. But that trait comes easier to MarkZ than the Google trio. If you
couldn’t, at least don’t use math guys to build a product for humans. You see
Circles and collections and a plus one button may sound cute to HN audience
but are far too complex ideas for an average user. The avg dude needs a
textbox and a feed. Any value adding concept scrambles brains.

------
dbrgn
Circles were nice. The overall design was nice.

But was it original? To me, it seems that they directly copied quite a few UI
elements and concepts from Diaspora, including circles:
[https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2011/8/23/google-plus-inspired-by-
dias...](https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2011/8/23/google-plus-inspired-by-diaspora/)

------
INTPenis
In my view there are two things FB achieved; they got people to come, and they
got people to stay.

G+ got people to come, had an amazing position to abuse their monopoly just
like with Chrome, but failed to hold them there.

And I believe the interface might have scared some away but I also believe
there was nothing fun to occupy your time with while you're waiting for the
next notification high.

------
ggm
Lack of basic boolean logic to define interaction of a post into circles and
groups and people.

The "how do I tell _all_ my friends, except John, about a secret birthday
party" problem. I complained about this near the launch.

I have a circle of friends in g+ I will miss, if they do not migrate to
pluspora or a like service, which is inferior to g+ if not grossly inferior.

------
egfx
Instead of a seperate UI, Google+ should have been integrated into Gmail. Then
more people would naturally use it everyday. The integration would not center
around a separate UI but features would be enhanced to gradually bring circles
and the like into the core email experience. AOL managed to expand in this way
with email and chat as core features.

~~~
WorldMaker
Being integrated into Gmail didn't save Google Buzz. (That was also one of
Buzz's early critical privacy missteps was being integrated into Gmail and
showing up barely announced as opt-out rather than opt-in.)

If they were really smart, G+ should have better bootstrapped out of Google
Reader. Google Reader at the time had a very interesting and active social
community. (Instead they killed Reader as if it were a competitor to G+ and
just hoped the now incredibly inconvenienced community would just move to G+.)

------
hateful
The reason I used Facebook (emphasis on the past tense here) and not Google+
is for one reason only:

I could not post something on my wife's "wall/timeline" in Google+.

This is different than "tagging" someone in that it goes on their page, not
yours so their friends can see it.

I closed it and never used it again.

~~~
rak00n
When you tag someone their friends can see it on her wall if she chooses to.

------
pier25
It had some great features, but the UI/UX was IMO wrong and I'm sure it's what
turned people off about it.

So for example instead of having one stream of info, there were multiple
columns. This goes against the scrolling list behavior that everyone seems
addicted to.

------
usaphp
> The design was so much nicer, ux so much smoother than everything else.

I disagree, It felt unpolished and raw and did not have any distinct style or
consistency. You can hate facebook but they managed to cramp a lot of
functionality in a pretty clean looking design.

------
mikelward
I thought it was a great idea as a social network graph, so you could share
things on various Google properties (e.g. ACLs for photos). It also had a lot
of potential as a contact sync method.

Too bad Google kept promoting it like it was just another Facebook news feed.

------
aboutruby
It's a redirect to: [https://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-
right](https://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right) (I was just checking
for url shorteners)

~~~
eitland
That is the real url. I was in a hurry and pasted the internal one.

It doesn't redirect automatically though.

------
ken
Each of the individual features of Google+ sounded great on paper. I never
used it so I can't comment on the implementation.

What killed it for me is that it came from Google. They'd already showed
they're terrible at customer service, and terrible at service
longevity/continuity, and it just seems creepy for the same company to want to
do my web browser, my phone, my search engine, my social media, my web
hosting, my advertising, my payments, my shared documents (editing _and_
storage), etc.

It seems like, to Google engineers, "fully integrated with 173 other Google
services" is a feature. To me, it's a red flag. If they want me to use any
more services from them, they need to come up with some way to wall it off so
I'm assured that any potential issues with X don't affect my usage of Y.

~~~
Twirrim
Back when Google+ launched, we weren't yet at the "Google is evil" stage.
Social Media was just taking off.

What really killed it was no public API. It launched in the era of Tweetdeck
and the like being major tools for consolidating social media interaction.
There was no API. So to send a message to Google+, one had to specifically go
across to the only application capable of talking to it, theirs. When you're
already in/using Tweetdeck to post messages to Twitter, Facebook etc, why
would you want to go to a whole new client to post a message?

While it seems like mostly people have moved away from using such catch-all
clients for interacting (in no small part because Twitter have made it hard by
their various API antics), this missed the zeitgeist at the time, and never
got that critical mass going to sustain it.

If you're moving late in the market, you've really got to go where people are
and bring them to you, or you've got to fundamentally solve problems to a mind
blowing degree that other platforms have and can't. It did neither, even
though the features like circle were really good.

------
eitland
The rest of the Internet won.

On my way home today I wrote down why I liked it.

------
ArtDev
Good: Circles.

Bad: Circles privacy; who can see what. I found it confusing when it should
have been obvious. This kept me from posting. The UI should have made it
obvious.

------
reality_czech
What they got right was shutting down.

If only AMP would do the same.

------
jpswade
The question is, what problem did Google+ solve?

~~~
john-radio
It solved the problem of "It's 2016 and the fourth presidential debate. I want
to post about Marco Rubio! But I don't want to annoy my non-political-junkie
friends with this..." IIRC, Facebook had Friend Lists at the time, but it
wasn't easy to share content exclusively with a friend list.

------
ArtDev
With so many people abandoning Facebook for Instagram or Twitter, perhaps G+
was just before its time.

Not many people were on it. Well, except the Dalai Lama. He rocked it!

------
vikaskyadav
That they are shutting themselves down.

------
idlewords
It rid us of that awful Google Reader!

------
PaulHoule
Aren't the circles really aimed at the spammer mentality? (e.g. I am
broadcasting)

~~~
derfnugget
For me, circles seemed to do the opposite. Instead of blasting an update to
every person on my friends list (coworkers, family, friends) I could limit the
exposure to a subset.

This seemed like a better way to control spam in the ~3 posts I made on
Google+.

------
effnorwood
Nothing

------
franze
as an eexample of: it's not worth to screw your culture to pursue one(1) goal.

