Comment by CobrastanJorji
20 hours ago
I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!
Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)
Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.
> It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy.
Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.
Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.
Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.
Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.
Orkut Büyükkökten's orkut.com might have been a semi-private project (Google, like any company, doesn't normally name its products after first names of its coders).
Also, as you say, it was populated by many Brazilians, an imbalance like that may discourage non-Brazilians from joining, so not sure if integrating them would have helped or hurt.
I was an Orkut user from the USA for a few years. The vibe was way nicer than Facebook. I think I was with them from 2007 to 2011 or so.
killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of the service's run.
The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.
I think that change happened well after G+ was dead
I just found this October 2011 post reporting about this change as it happened (4 months after G+'s launch in June 2011):
https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/
According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
"It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy."
The legendary Andy Hertzfeld played a role in shaping the design of Google Plus.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-andy-he...
Beside my friend who was gifted with invitation, there was nobody else from my circles (sic) and when asked they were replying with standard "why I should make yet another account". So for me it was a ghost town right from the start.
And frankly it was actually the first place where I truly noticed how big companies are extracting data from us; back then I felt really unpleasant when I tried to fill up profile.
I've got this old screenshot [1] and profile included: about me, "I know this stuff", current occupation, employment history, education path, place of residence with map, home and work addresses, relationship status and what kind of partner you are looking for, gender, other names - maiden name, alternative spelling, nickname, visibility in search results and a section for links to other websites. This may be seen as not much today but back then even facebook wasn't that "curious" - that was about to change.
I also tried to utilize Google Wave for our university group to keep us informed etc., but people wanted just "plain old" emails with attachments.
[1] - https://ibb.co/SDDGG3PJ
G+ died because it was clown colored google product, not a communal space for people. It was technology without any aesthetic that made you want to be there.
Myspace was hilarious because it was such a mess. The people owned it, hacked the css. Every profile page was a messy real person.
The migration of YT accounts to G+ is how most of the critical mass learned there was G+. It took years to recover nicknames.
IMO, their biggest problem was that they made a product that was terminally uncool.
Even worse was Google Wave. Totally unusable from the start, which is when I tried it, due to all the hype (by them) about it. Probably too JavaScript-heavy, was the reason, I think, back then. I remember reading reports confirming my guess, at the time. I was on an average machine. I bet the Google devs had quite more powerful ones, and in their infinite wisdom (not!), did not trouble to test, or even think of testing on average machines that most of the world would have.
G+ copied some features and design work the open source federated social media, particularly Diaspora. So yeah, a lot of the features were developed in context of privacy protections.
yeah they made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one was not iterating on making it a good product. they just dumped it into the world, mostly formed and did nothing with it.
it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it
forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.
blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information
Discovery was bad.
I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it did not take at all.
I remember that the (initial) invite-only aspect played out in the worst way. Some FOMO angle works, but it ended up just ... not working, and who joins a social media wastleland?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars