It’s a pity, really. By all accounts, Google+ was competently executed, arguably an improvement over the house of Zuckerberg; but the monomaniacal push to get everyone who so much as looked at a Google service turned into an allegedly-active Google+ statistic soured everything it touched as well as poisoning the Google+ brand pretty thoroughly.
(Of note, even institutional Google Apps customers, the ones who shell out for centralized management and a connection to their preferred domain and so on, got the hard sell. And, the maze of refusal boxes and prechecked defaults and petulant nagging was like something out of the bad old days of dodgy application installers that “offered” you 6 different flavors of adware before getting to the point.)
Let it be a lesson on the limits of exploiting one property to push another, hopefully a painful one.
If Google+ does fold, it’s a great example of the Network Effect - why use Google+ when everyone is on Facebook? Or perhaps Karma for killing reader.
Will they bring back google reader with its basic commenting/following features? That was my ultimate social platform.
A big part of the problem for me is that Google is/was trying to push a real names policy across all platforms. I, frankly, don’t want to review all of the apps on my phone under my full, real name. The world doesn’t need to know what apps I use or like or dislike. It is already bad enough that Google gives every app seller your email address when you buy an app.
/mini-rant
i recently set up an extra gmail account for my business and i made a typo in my name, i had to venture into google+ to fix it and got pretty dern close to killing myself
Google+'s strategy of “lets make Facebook, except your friends aren’t already on it”, doesn’t seem to have been a winner. Sure the privacy options were a bit better, but you don’t give Google anything you want to keep private in the first place. Same with Facebook.
That said, the next big winner in social media appears to be “Whatever Mom and Dad don’t use and doesn’t keep a history.”
That would be a shame, we need competition in the world of social networks.
I post to facebook because more people are on it, not because it’s superior.
from what ?
It’s entirely possible we’d all still be using MySpace if they’d originally designed it in a way that prevented users from embedding music that played automatically or setting the background wallpaper to animated GIFs of sparkly unicorns.
Ironic, no? My space was (is?) customizable in a way that FB isn’t. If you asked people before FB I’m guessing they’d say that level of customization would be required for any successful competitor, and yet the opposite is true. FB forces all sorts of stuff on users, but on the other hand, Myspace users had terrible taste - it was the geocities of social media. :-p
And even Facebook thought that a level of customization was required at one point. Remember the apps that let you clutter your user profile with so much crap? For all the kicking and screaming that occurs whenever they revamp their UI, I think we can all agree that killing that was perhaps the best idea they’ve ever had.
Um, no…Google+'s failure has little to do with the network effect of Facebook, though I imagine that’s a fairy tale Vic Gundotra would like read to him before he goes to bed.
What failure?
I have fine control over who sees what, Facebook will never have that. I will never use Facebook either.
A big part of the problem for me is that Google is/was trying to push a real names policy across all platforms.
That’s what killed it for me as well. After pulling that shit, Google tried to slowly and quietly back away from it on YouTube, etc. - But the damage was already done and people said to hell with it.
Combined with Google’s already horrible privacy track record, it’s no wonder to me that Google+ was a failure.
Of course, if they hadn’t killed the Reader thing and integrated it with Google+ instead, they might have at least kept it going for the privacy unconscious.
i agree. the G+ communities and friends i have are all very active. G+ is awesome as far as i’m concerned. haters gonna.
FTA:
For the record, I used to work at Google.
The only friends I have on Google+ are nerd friends. Everybody else saw it and went “why?” and then continued using Facebook.
the G+ communities and friends i have are all very active. G+ is awesome as far as i’m concerned. haters gonna.
