If me contributing to a group is generally the death of it’s coolness, I’m guessing BoingBoing on Google+ has been re-animated and then destroyed and then had its ashes consecrated…
Not surprised. No reason was given to spend time there, and it’s a distraction from spending time here.
The whole social media “we need to be everywhere” thing doesn’t work unless you have content everywhere – which either means shadowing everything to everything, or having dedicated staff and preferably dedicated community members prepared to bootstrap each additional site. And even then, unless you have an overwhelming reason WHY you need to spread out, you’re just diluting the community and the brand.
And they didn’t even pretend to have a reason, other than “someone told us we should, and maybe it’ll produce more ad revenue.”
7 Likes
Is the Facebook variant doing any better? I don’t just mean Friends, I mean actual content worth reading with a reason to read it there rather than here?
(Not that I’m going back on Faceplant, I’m just curious about how badly they’re falling on their faces. Schadenfreude, perhaps. I know it’s bad form to say I toldja, but…)
1 Like
The Boing Boing Twitter is pretty useful. They have pictures posted there sometimes (which show up in-line now) and it’s basically RSS of all new BB topics so if I see something come through of particular interest, I will click through.
I guess it depends where you hang out. I tend to spend a lot of time on Twitter, if you spent a lot of time on G+ you might enjoy that as a basic “feed” too, even if you’re not replying there.
2 Likes
No clue, I’ve never Facebooked. I tried G+ as an amusement, but so far as I can tell, the only people I know still using it area family where a few members are Google employees.
1 Like
I follow BoingBoing on RSS…actually pretty much everything. If BB ever dumps RSS for Twitter I’m afraid I won’t be able to follow.
3 Likes
Well, yeah, Twitter is basically RSS for non-geeks. And you can follow famous-ish people or friends there without invoking that shitty “friend or not friend” calculus that Facebook demanded.
2 Likes
Not quite the only one but aside from when I don’t feel comfy going to BBS (i.e. while at work) or when I what to share something on BB to family, etc., I don’t have much use for the G+ group.
I wanted to like G+. But then I just got inundated with spam account followers and it became un-fun. So I quit posting anything. The real cutoff was about the point that two bots started to sort of flirt with each other (as best as bots can do) in the thread of one of my posts.
3 Likes
Which is weird because G is so good at preventing spam in GMail. Different teams I guess.
I am curious, as a woman with a relatively high online profile, do you find Twitter… uh, inhospitable? Read quite a few articles like this one recently.
1 Like
I’ve never really had a problem on Twitter. At least, never a being-a-lady-based problem.
1 Like
There’s a Google+ BoingBoing group ?
Apparently not… or at least not one that’s in use.
I post stuff there sometimes… I think in general Google+ just doesn’t have lots of people on it, at least in my experience. It is, however, the only “social media” I am on (no FB or the Twitters).
I see updates to it all the time, actually. Whenever I check my google+ account, which is like… a few times a week, I’d guess.
I get the occasional bot posting/friending/whatever-they-call-it-on-google+ to my account, too, but I just ignore them. I’m generally not high profile enough to get two bots to flirt with each other in comments.
You tend to get 10-15 one-sentence comments from different people, with very little in the way of conversation or debate. This is from two days ago:
The problem for me is that in order to read the actual article, you have to click through to the BB site. To comment, you either go back to FB or click one more button to get to the BBS here. It really doesn’t save any time and it’s obvious that more people commenting here have actually read the article. If I like an article, I’ll link to it on the main site so that I can share it with my actual friends rather than commenting with people I don’t know.
Google continues to try and cram its users into Google Plus, its also-ran social network. - Cory today.
Between the #nymwars, the google+/youtube fiasco, and other not-so-popular things that google+ has done that have been covered here, it’s not surprising that platform would be antithetical to a good portion of the bb community.
Tho tis valiant of the site to try to solider on to provide the content in the less popular channels that some may favor.
2 Likes
Yeah, it’s just like a web feed, but without the summaries, or the article text, or the original URLs.
It’s sad that people use Twitter so much for something it’s so terrible at. G+ is actually much better for link-sharing than Twitter, and doesn’t have the Facebook “friend” crap. The BB links and pictures all seem to end up on G+, so people who don’t understand web feeds but do understand Twitter’s deficiencies might want to give it a try.
Sounds like you want the web feed. That’s how I read BB.
