Seems to me just like the oft-declared end of PC gaming or end of the desktop PC. From where the article writer stands, it seems to be a valid point, but on all three counts, from where I stand there is a huge and vibrant community. As a tech user I find that I get a lot of useful interaction with other tech users on G+. (For those into real gaming, PC gaming is where its at other than console exclusives. For programmers, a tablet just doesn’t cut it)
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Arguably, the ‘vast howling wasteland’ effect is (ironically, and, thanks to how damned annoying Google’s arm twisting was, deliciously so) a direct effect of their arm-twisting bullshit to try to juice stats.
By all accounts, G+ is at least competent in design(some are actively enthusiastic) and less evil than facebook by a fair margin. Allowed to develop organically, it would likely have found a niche of active users who actually like it(as seen here, posting about how they actively use it and actually like it).
However, when Google decided that basically every interaction with them save hitting the search box would be tied to at least a G+ nag, if not a mandatory signup, they created an army of unhappy, mostly unengaged, users who ‘counted’ for user number purposes; but were otherwise either wholly inactive or actively toxic. Good Job, guys. As we all know, a good online community is made of lurkers and bitter conscripts.
Amusingly, instead of producing a core of happy users who feel like they are in on the new, better, thing(though there are those), the attempt to build a massive userbase fast created the impression(bolstered both by aggregate engagement numbers, and by pissed-off people who have been nagged too many times to drink the kool-aid) that G+ is a howling wasteland, the grim salt-pan and biting wind enlivened only by the occasional nerd-mutant or glasshole.
This impression is not strictly fair to the (much smaller) community of actual users; but oh man is it sweet to watch Google reap what they have sown.
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Yep, nice that it’s reproducible. Thanks for documenting your method!
One potential weakness of the current analysis is that sitemaps are often organized in descending order of content freshness, to give crawlers the most current content first. So picking a sitemap file from halfway through the pile might be misleadingly low in terms of publicly visible content.
ugh, it’s not even easy to overlay two separate routes for myself, let alone others.
i don’t understand why Maps is so limited.
My big problem with G+ when it came out was: It’s a social network, and at the time, they seemed to be pushing it as a Facebook replacement. If they wanted me to stick around, they not only had to convince me to use it, but convince several of the friends that I used Facebook to communicate with. That, combined with the rolling deployment, meant that at any given time, I knew maybe four people on G+. We’d all crosspost our statuses between the two sites, and after a few weeks, most people would get bored and go back to just using Facebook.
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This was an issue for me too. I didn’t think I’d actually run into trouble because I have one of those thoroughly British names, but the very idea that they think it makes sense for them to demand a copy of my ID to use their service was completely off-putting.
For me it wasn’t actually that they had a real name policy as much as it was that when people said, “What about victims of domestic violence, or teachers, or any of the myriad of other people who have reasons to not use their real names online?” Google’s answer was, “They can go fuck themselves, we don’t need them.” It’s like when a Barilla pasta owner said that they didn’t need gay people buying their product. If you don’t need them, you don’t need me.
An excellent point well made! A city of four million is a ghost town if it was built to hold 1 billion.
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I always wondered if it is actually illegal to send Facebook (or G+ or other capriciously name-demanding-without-really-needing-it service) a doctored copy of said ID…
Well, if you are only sending them a scan or photocopy of your ID then photoshopping presumably wouldn’t run up against any forgery laws because you aren’t actually making the fake ID. Are you defrauding them? I don’t quite see how.
Anyway, it hardly matters now. You can definitely go find my (Humbabella Glitchen’s) google plus page which was strong-armed into creation because of my gmail account. There’s sort of an inherent contradiction between “You need to send us your ID if you want to use our service” and “We’ll make you use our service whether you want to or not.” Right now there are hundreds of millions of people who, if asked to verify their identity, would just say, “No, I don’t want a google plus account anyway.”
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Yes, like they axed Google Reader.
Ironically, I’d guess Google Reader had a more active community if you exclude auto-uploaded photo posting from G+.
The Google Reader loss still angers me, since it signed the death warrant for RSS, destroying a vibrant community of, well, READERS and independent bloggers.
What’s survived is sites that post big chunky graphics to Facebook. The reddit community sometimes comes close to the old Reader, but its upvoting system favors a late teen demographic whereas Reader’s “sort by magic” produced an excellently individualized feed.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for making the point of Google’s disastrous imitation of Facebook so well. For a few years it seemed willing to jump off a bridge if ANY of Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft did.
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The leader of this team of doctors was a dignified, solicitous
gentleman who held one finger up directly in front of Yossarian and
demanded, ‘How many fingers do you see?’
‘Two,’ said Yossarian.
‘How many fingers do you see now?’ asked the doctor, holding
up two.
‘Two,’ said Yossarian.
‘And how many now?’ asked the doctor, holding up none.
‘Two,’ said Yossarian.
The doctor’s face wreathed with a smile. ‘By jove, he’s
right,’ he declared jubilantly. ‘He does see everything twice.’
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Yes, Google Reader was something new that they made, and by anyone else’s measure was a massive success.
If Google had sat back and thought about it, it might have realized earlier that it ALREADY had a massive “social network” spread across its myriad languishing services and that all it needed to do to make this clear to investors is polish, integrate, and app-ify them.
And speaking of Google Maps: it’s weird how Google Latitude, which I guess started as an imitation of FourSquare, was “retired” only to reappear as location sharing buried inside the Google Plus app. Now you can’t see your friends’ locations directly in Google Maps, only on a half-functional G+ map… What’s the point, other than to force G+ usage?
Exactly this.
Social networks are for social people.
“The devil you know” at play here, I suspect.
What kills me about G+ is that we lost Reader for it. I know harping about Reader is old hat, but I’ll maintain that it was a huge mistake, and a costly one for everybody who uses the web. Thanks to Google’s decision to cut the balls off RSS so it could launch its Facebook competitor, the entire web is less literate than it used to be in the days when all you had to do to keep up was clear your Reader feeds every day.
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Did you mean “pus?” Because “puss” doesn’t rhyme with “plus.”
[quote=“vonbobo, post:9, topic:50337, full:true”]More than anything, i felt like it was simply bad timing for Google. After migrating from my space, I dont believe the heard was ready to jump to another format so quickly. What incentive was there to jump?[/quote]I remember when it launched that people anticipated fleeing in droves just to get away from everything they hated about Facebook – and everyone seems to hate Facebook for one reason or another.
You have my sympathy. I used to work on Internet Banking and came across many customers whose surnames fell foul of our crappy ‘banned words’ list (which I successfully had overhauled after two years of lobbying).
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I joined G+ as soon as I could.
Using a pseudonym.
I still have the letter interchange between somebody in Google and myself, this individual was demanding to see my ID in order to allow me to use the stupid thing. It all felt too East European. pre Berlin Wall fall.
Then they stopped me publishing app reviews unless I used a G+ account (that deplorable nonsense still continues).
WHnd such an entity treats you like that, when you are telling them that is not what you want and they do it anyway, trust is broken.
Yeah I don’t like Facebook, but I can use a fake name and they aren’t pestering me. Maybe they would want to pester me to use my real name, but they know they shouldn/t and just don;t make a fuss about it.
Wasn’t one of the Goolge guys Russian? It really shows.
The dumbest thing is that I was using Google Pay, they had (and continue to have) my credit card number, so they know wo I am, they didn’t need my real name, they had it all along.
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