Comment by Ensorceled
10 years ago
One: Google+ was a terrible interface, in that it tried to force a "programmers" thought pattern on the user. Circles? OOP in disguise. It looked enough like Facebook that the different, and far more complex, behaviours were confusing to people. Switching would be painful. You may have liked it but most people did not.
Two: G+ kept trying to hook into everything Google did. My Youtube account with all my embarrassing 80s playlists and WoW videos and cats and ... WTF? NO I DON'T WANT TO SHARE THAT. Pretty much every time I logged in I had to say "No I really don't want to do that" until they finally snuck it through at some point. Many people just weren't interested in establishing a network with somebody who didn't understand privacy at all and kept changing the rules for existing services. Coupled with previous missteps, I'm looking at you Buzz, this was a deal breaker for many. Facebook has a bad reputation but at least they are not trying to surface embarrassing info from other sources.
Three: Google+ was tech heavy from the start, which meant it tended to drift "professional" and be considered "for the geeks". Friends and family were already connected to me on FB, G+ tended to be old colleagues who weren't close enough to be connected on Facebook. I just don't have much to share with those people that I'm not already sharing on LinkedIn. For a social network, geeky early adopters is NOT a recipe for success.
Four: Google+ started making other services worse. Youtube comments were a disaster and seriously broke content creators ability to have a dialog with their audience. Google Reader was gutted and eventually shutdown. New services were artificially hooked into G+ for no real reason. Basically, G+ became the punching bag for problems in it's other products.
You're making some valid points, however I do not agree with some of them.
For me Facebook is only useful for my personal life. Should I want to post about some programming stuff? Doesn't belong on FB. The reason is because FB ends up being a disaster if you combine your friends and personal interests with your professional network. It just doesn't work as it doesn't give you the tools to separate the two. And yes, I ended up silencing or unfriending folks for that reason as well, as an alternative to deleting the account altogether. And I have no acquaintances that use FB for non-personal stuff, unless they sell social media bullshit of course.
You're talking about circles being complicated. Not sure what it has to do with OOP, though those circles do represent a taxonomy. And they are complicated, but at least Google attempted solving the problem. The problem being that at home I'm a totally different person. And when I follow people I don't know, I follow them only to get stories on certain topics of interest and I don't really care about their personal life.
You're saying that G+ was tech heavy. I disagree because that's currently Twitter and G+ would have won if that were true. I don't know the reason, but my guess is that it had to do with shitty things like the real name policy. Or in other words, having FB's creepy restrictions without the network effect.
> Should I want to post about some programming stuff? Doesn't belong on FB.
That was kind of my point #3. You already had Facebook for your friends so G+ became your network for your geek friends and geek co-workers. If you're not a geek, you were already using LinkedIn for that purpose. That's a small market.
OO Programmers (and biologists) are the only people who naturally think in terms of complex taxonomy.
Agreed, their real name policy made it completely unattractive for many purposes, including Mashable trying to set up an account and needing to rename it to Pete Cashmore (if I remember right). But Twitter is not tech heavy, it's tech/startup/entrepreneur/media heavy, including tech but not strictly limited to it.
> Three: Google+ was tech heavy from the start, which meant it tended to drift "professional" and be considered "for the geeks". Friends and family were already connected to me on FB, G+ tended to be old colleagues who weren't close enough to be connected on Facebook. I just don't have much to share with those people that I'm not already sharing on LinkedIn. For a social network, geeky early adopters is NOT a recipe for success.
That, and during the brief window where G+ had the most hype and the best shot and getting mainstream, which also happened to be right when Facebook had just recently made some pretty egregious privacy fuckups and pissed everyone off... they very strictly limited who could get an account. I forget the exact timings but it was basically impossible for a typical prospective user to get G+ until around 6 months after they had actually rolled it out. What the fuck, guys?
Then when they finally opened up registration no one gave a shit anymore.
I guess maybe they were trying to mimic the thing with Facebook where you initially had to have a .edu email in order to get a Facebook account - but it's very debatable whether Facebook succeeded because of that or in spite of it.
I forgot about that! We were thinking of using it for a few things at work but then a few people in our office couldn't get in and ...
Google+ was a copy of Facebook, in that it didn't introduce really different new concepts or differentiators. I know, "What about circles?" Well, one big thing that people demand was privacy. That's why people built Diaspora & co and Snapchat. Google got Circles right, but one can't trust a social media which also owns your emails and Youtube comments, and they indeed screwed us with the Real Name Policy and the intrusion of G+ in all things Google.