
Google+ Is Walking Dead - coloneltcb
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-dead/
======
dragonwriter
> What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be
> considered a product, but a platform

Er, Google announced that when they _announced_ Google+, that it wasn't
primarily a separate product but a social layer that would weave together all
of Google's services. The Facebook-esque site has always been the tip of the
G+ iceberg. (The Forbes article on the departure, interestingly, notes that
the platform position has _always_ been Google's position, but that the _tech
media_ never believed it [1].)

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-
next-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-for-
google-now-that-its-leader-has-suddenly-left/)

~~~
Kequc
My understanding was that Google+ was primarily an identification platform. Up
until that point your Gmail was considered your Google identity.

Nobody it seems ever picked up on that and were focussed intently on spending
all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for
Google+ was above tepid. People would take seemingly any opportunity to call
it down even though the service worked incredibly well on mobile and the
company wasn't swamped with privacy allegations.

It was just a small thing Google+, a free social platform attached to ones'
Google identity. That so much controversy ended up surrounding something that
I feel was really rather clever and innocuous will continue to surprise me for
some time.

~~~
danudey
A lot of the hate I've seen for Google+ centred around being badgered
constantly to 'use my real name' on things. YouTube was a particularly
egregious example. Every time I logged in, it would say 'Hey, do you want to
use your real name? How great would that be!' When I said no, it would reply
with 'Hey, are you sure you want to not use your real name?', and if I then
confirmed that no, I didn't want to, it would say 'Okay, well we'll ask you
later then.'

If they had just said that 'Okay, your Google profile is now called Google+,
and your YouTube account attached to your Google Profile is now your Google+
profile, and you can go to your settings to complete the migration', it
wouldn't have been so bad. What they didn't do is offer anyone any reason to
change.

All the benefits they hawked for YouTube's Google+ comment integration were
actually such huge drawbacks that many top YouTubers turned off comments
entirely. Unsurprisingly, YouTube comments had gone from the mindless, racist,
misspelled prattling of the internet's ignorant masses to giant spam-filled,
link-filled dumping grounds of (varyingly) penis enlargement spam and giant
ASCII dicks, and YouTube comments went from bad to worse, a feat no one
thought possible.

It really feels like the decision was made for the YouTube team by someone
else (Page? Gundotra?), and the YouTube team just had to roll with it, with
their input being ignored and the Google+ team saying 'No it'll be great,
don't worry, you'll see, everything is better with Google+!'

To this day, people invite me by gmail address to threads, which I cannot
leave unless I tie my Google account to a Google+ account so I can join the
thread so I can leave the thread.

The entire thing was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and everything that
they wanted out of it could have been accomplished by providing value, rather
than extrinsic rationalization.

~~~
jcampbell1
I finally gave up and just blocked all cookies from youtube.com

It nicely solved the annoying google+ problem, with the added benefit that I
haven't seen a youtube ad since.

Apparently if you block youtube cookies, the ad server mostly just gives up.

~~~
copergi
Odd. I have cookies disabled period, and only enable them for specific domains
where I want to log in to something. I still get constant ads on youtube
unless I use an ad blocker.

------
DannyBee
FWIW: when it says " According to a source at Google, there’s a new building
on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not
necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure."

Given how many employees are on the mountain view campus, the attempt to
portray office space reorgs in a place known to have serious office space
constraints, as related to leadership changes, is silly.

1\. There is always a new or being renovated building on campus It's just the
way it is.

2\. I would actually assume this is entirely _not_ related to his departure.
Teams at Google outgrow their space all the time, and people get moved around
to accomodate expected growth plus real estate renovations of buildings, etc.

~~~
001sky
_— not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure._

Seems clear enough.

~~~
argonaut
That's a classic journalism tactic. Mention some unsubstantiated innuendo,
then qualify it so that you're technically in the clear.

~~~
ternaryoperator
Let's be clear: that's a tactic of yellow journalism. Good journalists don't
string together unrelated facts unless they know there is a connection and can
articulate it.

~~~
aragot
Same for the title. It's unsubstantiated. There are reorgs, but nothing in the
article confirms that G+ is dead.

~~~
001sky
The suspect <insert statement>, it is alleged.

Nobody needs this explained to them.

Similarly, I doubt anyone needs

"walking dead" =|= "dead-dead"

explained to them as a logical inequality.

But if you do...here's an example for reference.

 _Unless a firm has publicly announced that it is winding down, it is better
to avoid labeling a fund as “walking dead.” Tagging a fund in this way has
consequences. As in the case above, it can impact deal flow as companies
seeking funding may think twice about approaching a firm believed to be in
that category. It can hurt a firm’s prospects of being invited into syndicates
and even potentially damage a firm’s existing syndicates. It can jeopardize
relationships with current and prospective LPs if a forthcoming fund is even a
notion among the firm’s GPs. Finally, and perhaps most troubling of all, it
can even damage the prospects of portfolio companies backed by these supposed
walking dead VCs._

[https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-
rethi...](https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-rethink-
walking-dead-vc-firms/)

Google clearly has skin in the game here if this narrative means that they
will lose engineering talent from G+. Techcrunch clearly has skin in the game
here as a scoop is equal to eyeballs.

Luckily, google has PRs that make 10x what tech-crunch writers make. So surely
any needed corrections will make there way through the noize.

That being said, it would be great to keep the comments clean of superflous
tit-for-tat inuendo accusations when the undelying conflicts of interest are
pretty apparent and not overly subtle.

Countering inuendo with facts seems plenty enough to counter-spin any un-
substantiated points.

And the original point here stands well enough alone. Don;t disrefard the TC
qualification about the office relocation. That is a fair point and stands by
itself--no drama needed.

------
adventured
Google+ is Google's equivalent of Bing.

Scenario: a company with a quasi monopoly - and more money than it knows what
to do with accordingly - responds to a fast growing potential competitor by
getting into a market it doesn't understand well, is miles behind (arguably so
far behind the market has already decided the winner) and isn't well suited to
compete in.

See: IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook

Primarily I'm curious to see what Facebook's Bing is going to be. With a now
very profitable, soft monopoly in social (and the willingness to spend to keep
it), it seems inevitable Facebook will follow a rhyming history.

~~~
pconner
Oculus might be Facebook's "Bing."

~~~
mixedbit
Not really, because Oculus does not compete with anything done by any big
player. It is a new territory for everyone.

~~~
Maarten88
It would surpise me if Sony and/or Microsoft would not be working on a
competitor device, as an add-on for PS4/XBox.

~~~
evanmoran
Sony's project Morpheus was announced last month and is doing VR for PS4:
[http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-
com...](http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-computer-
entertainment-america-inc/2014/sony-computer-entertainment-announces-project-
morp.shtml)

------
IvyMike
The funny thing is I really like Google+.

Of course I don't use it much because so few of my friends do, and that's the
rub. But if I could magically move all my facebook friends to G+, I would.

~~~
VikingCoder
Most of my friends don't show up in my TED talks, in my Netflix Instant Watch,
in my Amazon Instant Watch, in my TiVo programs, in my Hulu+, in my Reddit, in
my HackerNews, in my CNN, in the sports I watch, in the New York Times.

If I could magically get my friends to show up in those places, I would.

Translation: LinkedIn is not Facebook is not Google+ is not any-other-media.

LinkedIn, I use for people I know professionally.

Facebook, I use for people I know... but probably not the ones I currently
know professionally.

Google+, I use very much like I used to use Google Reader and Blogger. I
subscribe to interesting people, Communities, and Pages. The experience is
MUCH nicer than following the same things on Facebook, in my opinion.

I do actually think Reddit has a slight edge in presentation for subreddits,
compared to Google+ Communities. But on the plus side (ha), Google+
communities tend to not have as many trolls in them, perhaps because they're
not anonymous. Perhaps because the trolls just haven't arrived yet.

I happen to also use Google+ as a massive backup of all of my photos.

~~~
krisgenre
For everything that I share with my family ( photos, videos ), I use G+. When
I don't care who sees my post, I usually use Facebook or twitter. One think I
love the most is syncing my contacts and photos/videos with G+ on my Android
phone.

------
subdane
Google+ could still win by exploiting a simple heuristic: Don't be Facebook.
Allow for privacy, allow for handles, integrate seamlessly with platforms that
have traction already (including Facebook). Remember how Instagram let you
take a photo and publish it to multiple services (Twitter, Flickr etc)? It was
a free, useful tool that made your life easier and made you look great. It had
a feed and following on top, but it wasn't clear in the beginning it would
even be a social network on its own.

~~~
pinaceae
problem is that privacy/anonymity runs counter to the core Google business
with is advertising and collecting personal data.

so for Google, they would need to find out what could be a defining feature
that would move people off FB. whatsapp's killer was signing up via telephone
number, from a smartphone.

for business people there's LinkedIn, for coders GitHub, for teens there are
SnapChat/etc. - Google would need to find an underserved target demographic
and build something, anything unique.

so far they have failed.

~~~
danudey
_problem is that privacy /anonymity runs counter to the core Google business
with is advertising and collecting personal data._

Well, that's the thing: you don't have to be anonymous _to Google_. Just let
people create a few separate 'profiles' that they can post with (like Reddit's
throwaway accounts, but integrated).

In the end, this would be even better for Google; Facebook can build a profile
of who you portray yourself as, but they can't get any behavioural data from
other aspects of yourself that you might want to keep off Facebook to avoid
attaching them to your real name. If you want an example, check out FetLife; a
giant fetish/kink version of Facebook. People post updates, photos, events,
etc. there that you almost definitely wouldn't post to Facebook, because you
don't want your real name attached to that (because sometimes people are
careless and might give away aspects of your life that you don't want
revealed).

Imagine if Google could make use of that information, those friends lists,
those interactions, those posts and comments and connections. They would have
a huge data harvesting advantage over Facebook, because they could see aspects
of your life that no one else could see, as well as aspects of your life that
you're open and public with.

The same goes for celebrities. They could have their 'celebrity' account (i.e.
their 'real' account), but also create separate personas that they could use
to read, post, comment, etc. As it is, if +Vin Diesel used Google+ like a
regular person, he'd get flooded with comments; as another example, Jewel
Staite, who is not even super-famous, posts pretty much any tweet and gets
hundreds of retweets and favourites, and dozens of worthless replies.

People like that can't use social media the way everyone else does; a
secondary profile feature tied to your primary account only via Google's
anonymized data collection processes, would let people like that use social
media normally, be marketed to, interact, and get value that they just can't
get right now.

There's probably lots of other examples, but those are the two extremes that
came to mind.

~~~
username223
> Imagine if Google could make use of that information, those friends lists,
> those interactions, those posts and comments and connections.

Um... that's the part I don't want, the part that makes Google even creepier
than Facebook. I want to maintain separate online identities for separate
activities, not let one big company follow me everywhere, but pretend to give
me separate identities that only it can correlate. I prefer my current
solution, where one barely-trusted corp gets me email, another my "social",
others my chit-chat in various communities.

------
27182818284
>What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be
considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with
other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Fantastic! The people who actually use Google+ don't use it like Facebook and
it is misguided to try to think one will fight the other. (Nor do people use
Facebook like Twitter. Nor do people use Facebook like they do LinkedIn or
OKCupid)

The Circles feature of Google+ makes it really easy to target only small
groups. I most often now see Google+ used for posts that are set to private
within a family. Thanksgiving plans shared just among a family. Your friends
on Facebook don't care about that, but your siblings do, and Google+ makes it
much easier than Facebook to maintain a circle for that sort of thing. You
just create a Circle called Family, and after you use it a couple of times,
Google defaults your posts to that circle. To the world it looks like you've
_never_ posted on Google+, but meanwhile you've been sharing pictures and
funny jokes with your brothers and sisters _every day_

And if you don't use Google+ this way, but most of your family has a Google+
account (is it possible to not have one anymore?) I'd highly recommend it for
this sorta thing.

~~~
npizzolato
You can do the same thing with Facebook lists. Not everything you share needs
to be sent to everyone. And if you're making plans for a specific event, like
Thanksgiving, that's kind of what Facebook events are designed to do. It also
has the benefit of collecting all the event-related posts into a single
location, something just sharing to a group of people wouldn't do.

And yes, everyone might "have" a Google+ account, but if no one you care about
ever checks it, then does it really matter?

------
zmmmmm
This really makes it sound like Vic was essentially fired. I wonder how much
Facebook's recent success in monetizing mobile is at the root of this? For a
long time the conventional wisdom was that there was no money in mobile at all
and it was a huge problem. Now Facebook is killing it, and Google's answer
seems to have missed the mark. Although this article is all loose rumors and
speculation, if you piece it together the picture feels believable: Google is
seriously worried their bet on G+ is wrong. Until Facebook starting doing big
numbers Vic had the benefit of the doubt, but now that it's clear in stark
numerical fashion that Facebook is actually increasing it's lead over Google
it's causing a serious rethink.

Personally I hope it _does_ push Google to rethink G+. It doesn't take too
much: step back a little, stop pushing it aggressively where it doesn't fit.
Actively support pseudonimity - let people have their privacy AND their G+
cake and participate in multiple circles under different identities. Add APIs
to let a 3rd party ecosystem develop. Encourage it. Yes Twitter wound it back
but only _after_ they were the undisputed leader. Fingers crossed.

~~~
Lerc
In a nutshell.

They should develop Google+ for the way that people would like to use it
instead of developing it for the way that they would like people to use it.

That goes for everything, Google or not.

~~~
rdtsc
Page wants to be Jobs and wants to be Facebook. They are playing catch-up in
both cases. They want to say basically "we will tell you what you should like
and what is nice and better for you, trust us". Well sometimes that works but
often it doesn't. In this case it didn't work.

I just got annoyed by G+. The realname thing, then being badgered about it.
Every one of those annoying "invitations" turn me further away from it. Maybe
I am just different or too contrarian, but that kind of sealed G+ in my head
as "stay the fuck away from this annoying thing".

~~~
wyclif
Are you aware that you can use Google+ with non-real names? I see loads of
them. Many people use a handle. Nobody who uses Google+ every day complains
about Nymwars anymore, that's so 2011.

~~~
zmmmmm
Maybe you should check their policy [1]. Clause #13 states that you should use
"the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you". Their support
page [2] very clearly states that your account may be suspended for violating
the policy.

Google may have softened their line on enforcement, but unless you're willing
to risk having your whole account randomly suspended (along with who-knows-
how-many other Google services will go with it), that doesn't really do you
much good unless you are treating it as a throwaway account in the first
place.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html)
[2]
[https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271](https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271)

~~~
wyclif
A policy that isn't enforced isn't a policy, even if it's written. I seem to
recall a relevant quote from King Gustav V of Sweden:

 _Never make a law you cannot enforce._

Bad policy-making by Google? Certainly. But nobody is getting suspended for
using a nom de plume on Google+ now.

------
notdonspaulding
I'm ambivalent about the future of Google+.

Eventually though, it would be nice if someone at Google figured out how to
make multiple-account usage not suck rocks. Why can I not sign out of a single
account? Why does the order in which I sign into my accounts matter for so
many things?

~~~
dm2
Try using Chrome's multiple profile feature. I use one for each Google account
and it makes the multiple accounts issue much easier to manage.

I also use LastPass across profiles and 2-way auth for both LastPass and
Google accounts.

If you want separate accounts just make one for YouTube (or whatever) then a
separate one for Gmail.

~~~
hatbert
Isn't that a major functionality regression? I mean, didn't we stop saying
"This website best viewed in IE4 with screen resolution set to 800x600" a
decade ago?

------
opendais
Google+, as a login integration scheme and a way to unify policies across
services, made sense. As a social network? Not so much.

Google is a great company but community building isn't a core strength they
have.

Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for
Google+?

~~~
tommi
> Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for
> Google+?

Yes. I don't believe it. Here's some random numbers (head counts in teams)

    
    
      - Core 50
      - Ops 20
      - Web 50
      - Android 50
      - Other mobile platforms 50
      - Integrations to other products 150
      - Technical writers, support etc 30
    

That's still only 400 employees. How would you allocate 1,200 employees to
Google+?

~~~
a3n
Maybe some employees got counted more than once because of overlapping
circles.

~~~
mikecb
I laughed.

------
fidotron
This specific article doesn't make too much sense, however, the grand mix up
of everything (most notably bringing Android in from the cold) is the real
elephant in the room, not G+. G+ was just a symptom of typical big company
soviet style central planning which now seems to be par for the course in what
was, during the golden era of technology growth, a shining beacon of
libertarianism inside and outside the organisation.

Maybe Google x somehow does keep the magic spirit they used to have but
there's a definite anti-user marketing droid led trend with everything from
Hangouts to Maps that should be far more concerning than the G+ fallout.

EDIT: To add, what always killed me about G+ was it wasn't the Googly answer
to the problem. What they should have done to counter FB was to get behind
something like Diaspora (i.e. an open source federated social platform, where
they happen to offer hosting for free if that's what you want), and encouraged
something like Persona as the ID system. Basically take the oxygen away from
FB, and provide a boost to the "open web" which they can index in the normal
manner.

~~~
rpgmaker
I didn't ever join g+ but this comment is selling google way too short. Sure,
they fucked up facebook-like "social" but they have gotten a lot of things
right that most companies with their position and size would've missed. Who
would've guessed 9 years ago that Maps would become such an integral part to
their business?* To most people that seemed to be a cool pet project, just one
of the many free goodies they provided.

* There would've been a heck of a lot more startup mapping the world if many people had such foresight were things were going.

------
dasil003
Google+ is in this weird place between Facebook and Twitter for me. I go to
Twitter primarily for professional interaction, and Facebook primarily for
personal interaction. Google on the other hand makes a ton of great services I
like to use, but I don't want to curate circles there and I don't want some
watered down feed of reddit-like linkbait.

Google has done a pretty good job on the no-doubt extremely thorny problem of
unifying accounts and multi-account login. I'm reasonably happy with that. I
love Gmail, and Hangouts, and Android in general, but Google+ makes me want to
blow my brains out every time they try to ram it down my throat. For the
hundredth time, I don't want to "find friends" before I join an urgent Hangout
I've just been invited to.

The worst part is that they sacrifice their core strength to chase an unproven
Facebook purely out of fear. Even if Facebook miraculously manages to crack
social advertising in a way that eats Google's lunch (and given the questions
around the value of Facebook advertising, that is a _huge_ if), there's no
hope for Google in trying to beat Facebook on their own terms. Frankly it's
been an embarrassment for Google, and I hope they really have killed it as the
central focus.

~~~
wyclif
"An embarrassment for Google", really? Seriously?

Google+ is actually designed far, far better than Facebook. And the
implementation of communities and circles really gets social interaction right
in ways that Facebook has not. Sure, Facebook has a much bigger user base. But
I don't think Google+ sees itself as a direct competitor to FB. It's more of a
tangential thing. I also think TechCrunch is hilariously off-base for writing
that Google is dialing down Google+. I think all that stuff is pretty much
clickbait.

~~~
dasil003
Not the product per se, but the strategy.

------
thibauts
This is what happens when you build a product for yourself without any regards
for what people actually want. G+ was forced down our throats in a bunch of
different ways and I'm glad the plan didn't work out.

Google probably won't do it, though it would be a great time to reconsider
their global strategy and think about what can actually be brought to the
people to make the information space better for everyone. I mean, _actually_.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I would like to see more effort in a customized Google Now.

Google will always need massive amounts of user data, that is a given because
of how they make money. I want something for giving up some privacy, and a
very effective customized Google Now assistant would work for me. The current
Google Now is a decent first baby step.

------
yeukhon
I am not a UX person and I am horrible with front-end. But the thing that
kills Google+ and new Google product UX today is the awful UX. When I want to
change a password, or look for option for two-factor auth, or getting app-
specific password (if you've enabled two-factor I need to get specific app
password for apps like thunderbird or iphone's Mail app) I would Google (yes,
the search engine) "gmail password", "google+ password".

That just shows me how awful the UX is. When I want to change my real name I
do the same, then come to the conclusion that I have to click on "edit
profile", click on the damn avatar in order to edit the real name, INSTEAD of
changing it from some "general settings" page.

I really like to mention Twitter's new UI is way better. I have a good UX with
the new Twitter. This is something Google just don't seem to understand.

------
simplemath
User identity is at the core of Google's long term goal of Google "search"
becoming the end all augmented reality AI assistant for humans everywhere. G+
was a halting step in this direction.

If Page really wants people to allow Google to feature creep their entire
lives, G will have to wage a PR war to convince people that not only can G be
trusted to manage identity, but that "Don't Be Evil" is a primary ideological
directive.

~~~
Spearchucker
It's interesting that no one has made a comparison with Microsoft's identity
system (what used to be Passport, became Live and is now "your Microsoft
account").

Passport started out well, then tanked, and the Microsoft account today just
works across all Microsoft sites - from outlook.com to Windows Phone, Visual
Studio, Skype and Windows 8 to Bing. Once the Passport mess settled nothing
was really heard about identity at Microsoft again, and yet the little
releases keep coming(ADFS 3, e.g.).

To me, if Eric Schmidt, Vic, Google+ et al had a failing, it was that of not
learning from others' mistakes (and consequent successes). Frankly, given that
Kim Cameron works for Microsoft I'm amazed that anyone could use the word
identity and not start by looking at how Microsoft does it.

~~~
simplemath
I actually like what G has done with chrome SSO and turning Chrome into the
default dashboard for their apps. I've found myself actually using G+ more and
more. Rolling Picasa into + is a really good strategy as well -" Oh hey, my
GS4 auto - uploaded all these cool photos from last weekend, might as well
share them"

Ironically enough, I think G+ faced its own identity problem for too long and
failed to get critical mass because of it. To me, the increasing convergence
of chrome and android is a bigger deal than anything happening with +

~~~
Spearchucker
I agree with what you say. Still find it amusing that after the real name
fiasco Google is left having to regain users' trust, whereas Microsoft did
nothing to gain anyone's trust and yet people _log into their operating
system_ using a Microsoft account!

~~~
simplemath
PEBCAK, PEBCAK everywhere...

------
dm2
I'd like to see Google+ converted to an iGoogle type homepage that could be
100% private and would have the option to completely disable the +1 buttons
and tracking across websites. It could have customizable widgets, optional
social media integration, and would be a main/start/homepage for Google
account users.

Google+ still has potential to be great (mainly because of their huge user
database and Google name behind it) if they can successfully pivot and create
something that is valuable, a Facebook clone forced onto people wasn't the
greatest idea that Google has ever come up with.

~~~
JPKab
I never understood why they went for the Facebook killer when they could've
easily built a LinkedIn killer instead.

LinkedIn is AWFUL. It's a giant spam factory with shit features, but I
actually like a lot of their employees other projects....

Anyway, Google should have users upload their resume to Google +, and then
have it be indexable and searchable through the Google front-end search. It's
a natural extension of the "share with Circles" concept.

~~~
dm2
I agree completely about how sketchy LinkedIn seems. It feels like every
action I do on LinkedIn is tracked and available for purchase. Then there was
their, "send all of your email through our servers" app.

A Google Professional/LinkedIn competitor would have been perfect for Google+.
I would also be more willing to share with my friends and family on a site
like that, so it would be a perfect LinkedIn/Facebook killer at the same time.
Google+ just focused too much on sharing with friends/the world type site at a
time when people are getting more cautious about sharing online and things
being public.

I do want a service very similar to LinkedIn but more trusted and less weird
stats/data-mining, Google would be a good company to make that happen, but
Google+ would need a major overhaul.

(I know Google tracks everything too, but the whole "pay X dollars to see who
viewed your profile" is when I made my decision to not support LinkedIn.

------
Zigurd
Google+ is pretty, but behind the pretty face it's an execution botch. Except
for lacking pseudonymity, the ideas were basically right. It was a pretty
Twitter with fewer limits and better follower management. Conceptually not
bad. But it seems to have stopped improving some time ago. Unlike, say, maps,
which is awesome on the Web and awesomer on mobile devices. And every update
gets better and better.

The Android app trails the Web site in functionality. You would think, for
example, that the implementation of circle management on a touch device would
be more drag-drop than the Web interface. Noooo, it's a series of lists views.

Where IS the FREAKING picture I just took? Since I got Glass, there's a third
place. Plus the ones I have not yet found.

Blogger integration was a terrible lost opportunity. In part because Blogger
sucks, too. The world needs to move fluidly between Tweet-ish things and blog
posts. G+ did not deliver on the fluidity. Sites could have used some social
pixie dust, too. But no. When Google+ stuff shows up in my GMail, it just adds
noise.

Then, riding the wave of the Blogger success, they tried to drain the troll
swamp at YouTube. Masterful allocation of resources and wise strategic move.

Because both my current books are about Android, their primary social presence
is on Google+. For one it seemed to work well. For the later one, not so much.

Now is a good time to reassess and find a mixed solution that's first-tier in
every category.

------
silverlight
I hope that Hangouts will be sticking around long-term. Although WebRTC
certainly helps in this area, Hangouts have quickly become the de-facto
standard for mutli-person video chat. Not to mention a good chunk of our users
use our app inside of Hangouts.

------
devindotcom
_The teams will apparently be building “widgets,”..._

Has there ever been a case of something called "widgets" succeeding by any
real measure? Even in fiction or idiom?

~~~
dm2
iGoogle, DuckDuckHack, WordPress. Widget is a nice name that hasn't been
abused and gets the point across to both technical and non-technical users.

It's kind of like an addon or sometimes a labs feature. Not required by all
users but available if needed.

------
joe_the_user
Great,

Hopefully they'll just end the push to make people unify account names across
platforms.

The efforts to make me unify my Youtube and my (inactive) Gmail accounts have
been fricken annoying.

~~~
ChrisClark
If you're not using your Gmail, just unify it. Nothing changes for you, and
it's not annoying anymore.

If you don't want a real name attached, create a Google+ Page with your
current nickname and use that. Then nothing changes for you, or anyone
following you.

If I were Google, I'd like to move all my products under one account too.

~~~
joe_the_user
So you are saying I should care about Google's convenience?

I've never been to "my" G+ page and don't intend to go now. Google has annoyed
me and it's their to solve that annoyance.

I am the consumer, get used to it.

~~~
ChrisClark
What I'm saying is that you seem to be very annoyed over something you can fix
in about 5 minutes. If you choose not to fix it, you choose to remain annoyed.
If you choose to keep getting annoyed, don't bother to complain about it.

To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents, "All
these new fangled social networks, we didn't need that when I was a kid, a
rock and a stick, that was enough, now get off my lawn."

~~~
joe_the_user
You don't understand.

It is one thing that I _can_ configure whatever through patience and
knowledge.

It is another being willing to configure stuff whenever some fool decides that
they want to change a service around. I can dance but that doesn't mean I
dance to someone else' tune.

------
leke
Google, you fucked up when you forced people to merge their youtube accounts.

~~~
r00fus
That was simply the last straw. Honestly, the writing was on the wall once
Google screwed up the pseudonym vs. real names response.

The response should have been to simply allow pseudonyms (i.e., Google knows
who you are logging in as, and can infer your identity very easily anyway) and
to do as twitter and prevent mis-use of real names where appropriate.

------
mattkevan
The main problem I have with G+ whenever I try to use it I have the sneaky
suspicion it's designed to benefit Google more than it does myself.

It feels like the motivation behind it wasn't to build an insanely great
social network but to maximise user value by tying web searches, emails,
interests, social circles, documents, location and more to actual identifiable
people.

I can see how that information can be extremely useful to advertisers and
therefore valuable to Google, but I do not see anything there that is worth
spending time on when there are many better, less invasive alternatives.

------
kyrra
It's a little sad I think. I like Google+'s overall interaction and how its
used as a tool. I use Picasa to organize my photos and have it sync to my
Google+ account. Google+ on my phone also auto-backs up all photos to G+.

Google+'s initial focus of sharing data with smaller groups of people was nice
as well.

But Facebook and Twitter have a majority of the users already and G+ isn't
better enough for people to move to it.

------
nogridbag
Slightly OT, but my business google apps account was just upgraded to google+
and "hangouts". I found it a bit troubling that when starting a hangout via my
brand new business google+ account, it named the hangout title with my
throwaway personal gmail account I rarely use. I'm sure Google has the data to
easily associate the two accounts, but they should not reveal this to the end
users.

------
randomstring
So they killed Google Reader (and RSS with it) for nothing?

~~~
tdicola
Ooph, twist the knife a little more. I'm still mad about Reader's death. At
least Feedly has mostly replicated the simple interface and quick scanning of
Reader.

------
programminggeek
I don't care about the article, I'm here to make a design complaint.

The page is a giant TC logo with an ad next to it, oversized menu navigation,
a headline, and then A GIANT PICTURE that literally takes up my entire 13"
laptop screen.

All of this before I get to the actual article with actual content.

Word of caution - not everyone browses the internet on dual 27" cinema
displays or Retina MacBook Pros. Even still, oversized images do more to
stroke the designer's ego than to truly enhance the communication of the
content.

For ad much as designers hate "Make the logo bigger", they have totally got
onboard with oversized photos on blog post headers/featured images.

------
iLoch
That's funny, I was under the impression something had to be alive before it
could be "walking dead."

------
MisterMashable
I was really surprised one day to find all my youtube comments on Google+ for
all my friends to see. Try explaining away comments about a fart video,
drunken bums, cock fighting or some other unfortunate mistake. Oh well (shrugs
shoulders)

------
dkhenry
The sad thing I think about with articles like this is that even though they
discount the amount of people who really like and use G+ ( we exist I swear )
that unless _enough_ people like it runs the risk of being cancelled.

------
frozenport
I used Goolge+ like an RSS reader but the new UI has too little density and I
stopped going on it. Seems like Google thinks I'm a monkey with a low
attention span.

------
novaleaf
i just started using Google+ actively.....

and I'm using it exactly like what techcrunch describes: as a platform, not a
product.

I use Picassa to sort my photos and post to google+ web albums for family to
use. I use Google+ Hangouts for IM, and I am using Google+ itself for
credentials (OAuth).

The actual Google+ product, never use it. It's actually a good thing that they
figure out usage patterns and adapt their strategy to reflect it.

------
lifeisstillgood
The only thing that worries me here is Google Authorship. That seemed like a
good idea, but with a dead G+ the concept needs some home

------
edoloughlin
Does this mean we can have our '+' back for Google searches?

------
pkhamre
If you play Ingress you know G+ is alive.

------
wyclif
Thanks for the massive clickbait, Techcrunch!

------
icantthinkofone
They're doing all that stuff with Google+ but this one guy leaving means it's
dead? Someone's writing out of both sides of their mouth.

Interesting how I couldn't get the people in my business or my family to even
look at G+ when it first came out but, this past week, my employees made a
circles just for them and that's how I found out my wife and kids had all
joined G+.

I'm starting to see this everywhere, at least in the circles I run in, so it
looks to me like things are looking up.

------
kimonos
Don't like Google+ either..

------
smegel
Serious question: has Google done anything truly right since gmail?

~~~
pessimizer
Not in my opinion. I was excited about Android before it was released, but
once I saw the APIs and found out it was going to be an all java userland, I
was bummed. Then I found out that it was difficult to get direct access to the
file system on it. I was sad because I wanted to use it for a tiddlywiki:)
After a while, I got excited that Motorola was going to make a particularly
attractive one (the Droid), so I was going to try it out anyway - but suddenly
the N900 was a thing and it was barely a choice.

Before Android, I really thought that Google's shit didn't stink. I would have
voted for Google for president. Afterwards it wasn't the same, and just went
downhill from there.

In retrospect, the only reason I thought gmail was so awesome was because they
gave you POP3 access. I mean, the UI was clean and simple, but it wasn't much
easier to use than any of the other webmail clients. I'm not saying that in
order to criticize gmail: that's the best they could have done, because _none
of the other clients were that difficult to use._

What I liked was the simple generosity that they showed by allowing me to
download and send my mail without using their UI. I was entirely willing to
let them read it all and target ads towards me during my searches in exchange.
[Edit: to be truly honest, I was excited that their math might really offer me
the products that I'd be interested in:) Seems so quaint now.]

Then, Android. The choice of laying a Java VM over the underlying filesystem
and kernel, and the choice to lock parts of the filesystem down and to fill
the OS with opaque binaries and phones with closed drivers represented the
opposite of the image of trust that had attracted me to them in the first
place.[Edit: Ugh! I forgot about the proprietary headphone jacks.]

I felt that before Android, Google trusted me to use their products, and I
trusted them not to be evil. After Android, it occurred to me that Google did
not trust me to use the phone I bought from them.

Google Docs is pretty successful. Not super successful, but successful enough
to put pressure on Microsoft, which is always good. Google revolutionized
search in the style of Altavista, and beat them on the math. Then they went
into email in the style of Yahoo and Microsoft, and offered a cleaner UI and a
softer sell than either. Then they went after Doubleclick and kicked its ass
with text ads then bought it as the coup de grace, went after Office, bought
YouTube after they failed to beat it, and went after Facebook (who had gone
after myspace and friendster), and went after Amazon in B2B, while repeatedly
failing to beat it or Ebay in retail or payments.

What I'm trying to say here is that Google hasn't given me anything that I
couldn't have gotten elsewhere _ever_. The distinction that Google had was 1)
being focused on the math (and therefore quality), 2) offering clean user
interfaces and APIs, and 3) having a conscience. Two and three have gone to
shit, and everybody has caught up on 1) - there's good math everywhere these
days.

