Google+ comes up short

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/07/google_comes_up_short.html?cm_sp=most_widget-_-blog_posts-_-Google+%20Comes%20Up%20Short

by gangadhargs • 15 years ago

17 22 15 years ago

blogs.hbr.org

pnathan3• 15 years ago

I got an invite on G+ this morning and logged in. Here are my thoughts...

I found it had a very very prominent user interface of "who sees my data", and the 'circles' interface is very - IMO - obvious.

This is very reassuring: Google's obviously not trying to go the sketchy route of "how much data can we send out to everyone unannounced", at least not at the start. I left Facebook for that reason, and don't plan to ever go back.

Although, I found it a little confusing about following. "I added so and so to my following... I hope they didn't get an invite!!!!" Because that would be awkward - I just want to see what some of the influential techies are doing and perhaps to talk with them, not to "be friends" ala the Facebook/Livejournal approach.

jaysonelliot2• 15 years ago

They'll see that you've placed them in a Circle, but it's no different than following them on Twitter.

If someone is an influential techie on G+, they get lots of people following them, and they won't even take a moment to consider whether it's someone trying to be "friends."

That's one of the fundamental differences with G+. It's not like FB, forcing you into an all-or-nothing approach to sharing.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

That's what I figured. It's like Dreamwidth in that respect; separating out "people who read you" from "people you read".

jaysonelliot2• 15 years ago

The author seems to be suffering from a classic case of confusing personal anecdotes and preferences with actual insight and analysis.

He seems to have joined G+ with some sort of expectation that he'd find a full-baked, revolutionary new site that would change his perception of social networking. It's evident from his article, indeed his very first sentence, that he doesn't think Facebook has any shortcomings that need to be overcome.

If you're starting from the position that "Facebook works just fine, I don't need a better way to share things online," then yes, Google Plus is not solving a problem for you.

There are a lot of people who just want to use the Internet to share family pictures and funny jokes they've heard, and don't care about or understand things like owning their data, controlling their privacy, or ensuring that different sites and protocols are interoperable and predictable.

They won't rush to join G+, because they are fine where they are inside the walled garden of Facebook, just like they were find inside AOL's walled garden in the 1990s. Eventually, Google+ will be for them, but not right now.

I'd call that "early days," not "coming up short."

timr• 15 years ago

"If you're starting from the position that "Facebook works just fine, I don't need a better way to share things online," then yes, Google Plus is not solving a problem for you."

Yes, exactly. And for the vast majority of Facebook users, that's where they're starting. And that's the guy's point. And he's absolutely right. Google has an uphill climb with this one, because they're competing against two established players who already do a great job of what they do.

"There are a lot of people who just want to use the Internet to share family pictures and funny jokes they've heard, and don't care about or understand things like owning their data, controlling their privacy, or ensuring that different sites and protocols are interoperable and predictable.

The only people I hear complaining about Facebook and Twitter on privacy grounds are the same people who complained that iPods were over-priced, that Macs aren't open enough, that VHS was inferior to Beta, and that MP3 was going to fall to Ogg Vorbis any day now. Could they be right? Sure. Do I think that's likely? Not based on past experience. Realists know that "good enough" carries the day -- especially when "good enough" is actually pretty darned good.

Maybe Google+ will be a vastly better experience in a few years, but right now it's clunky and awkward, and the payoff for using it is low. Literally everyone I care about is on Facebook, and if they make their groups feature slightly more prominent and easy to use, they'll have matched Google+ feature for feature. That's the point of the essay: to make a compelling alternative to a strong competitor's product, you have to do a lot more than add a few basic features.

jamesteow• 15 years ago

" Literally everyone I care about is on Facebook"

Everyone I cared about was on Friendster and on Myspace too.

My favorite people who I'm friends with on Facebook tend to rarely post on Facebook (if at all) or use Twitter as their main outlet.

I enjoy the social purge as my list get re-populated by my true friends of the time and the quality of the content re-aligns with a better signal-to-noise ratio.

On a side note: photo uploading is way better on G+. I've been extremely unhappy about the re-encoding on Facebook which outputs my photos with less quality (despite uploading at a high quality setting) where as Google retains my original image and scales it according the browser size. That alone makes my experience vastly better as nothing annoys me more than seeing friends use my low-res photos of them as their profile photos when they should have access to a high-res version.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

Sounds like a textbook "innovator/early adopter/mainstream" situation to me.

cgranade• 15 years ago

This article seems to basically be a giant troll... if you can't see what problems Google+ claims to solve for a consumer, you aren't looking very hard. As far as I can see, there's two giant issues that G+ addresses and one that's arguably more important, but also more invisible.

1) It's not Facebook. Don't discount how much some people loathe FB as a company, and (in my opinion) rightfully so! They've made a business out of tricking users into accidentally over-sharing, they've engaged in some pretty stunning acts of censorship, and keep changing the UI in drastic steps that shock their existing userbase. (I have some sympathy with this last one, but it is a widespread complaint, nonetheless.)

2) In G+, privacy controls are manifest and obvious. There's little functionality in this realm that FB doesn't also offer, but it's not actively hidden from users on G+, but rather promoted to a primary feature of the UI.

The other thing that I think G+ does right is to get away from the "one-size-fits-all" model, under which every contact is a "friend". When you hear people saying "they're my Facebook friend, but not a real friend," it's clear that FB has flubbed it. G+, like Twitter and other such social media networks, allows for asymmetric contacts, which really lets the user control how they want to use the site.

Anyway, that's just my 2¢.

kidmenot2• 15 years ago

Am I the only one thinking that this article is just a pile of bullshit?

+ launched 12 days ago, isn't it a bit too early to talk about its defects?

resnamen• 15 years ago

Definitely too early to talk about a lack of network effect. Facebook didn't start life preprogrammed with users; it was Myspace that had all the users and content!

kidmenot2• 15 years ago

Yep.

As it happens all to often, many people write only because they have a keyboard.

But that's not even surprising, if you consider that they probably are the same people that, in real life, talk only because they happen to have a mouth.

bpd1069• 15 years ago

The author forgot to do one very important step, send out invites to people in your closest circles that aren't on G+ yet.

akkartik2• 15 years ago

It's even more natural than that. On the first day I simply organized my contacts and started sharing. Some of them are now on G+ and some are not, but all of them get notified when I share something with them. And they can see it in their inbox whether they signed up or not.

I don't think of it as a 'social network' I have to 'invite' people to. I think of it as amplifying my sharing.

pkulak• 15 years ago

That's what I did too. Of course, most of the links that people get in email are broken... but it would be great if it worked!

_shane• 15 years ago

The millions of people that have joined Google+ and the throngs of people that have buzzed about it would beg to differ with the author who is obviously is trolling.

Also, he conveniently omitted from the article the fact that he's a visiting researcher at Microsoft. Possible conflict of interests?

icarus_drowning• 15 years ago

Google+ solves a lot of issues. It is easy, rather than confusing, to set up lists of friends, and using them is likewise easy, rather than frustrating. Video chat that's free and easy to use (as opposed to easy to use but not worth the expense in the case of Skype or incredibly expensive and inordinately difficult to use in the case of many corporate IT solutions).

It doesn't solve every need that Facebook doesn't, but it does address quite a few of them.

abrahamsen• 15 years ago

He might be right. Google+ may never challenge Facebook or Twitter.

This doesn't mean Google+ will be a failure though, because unlike what he asserts, Google+ does offer one thing they don't: A tight integration with the Google services. Each of the various services used to have their own ways of sharing, now (or soon) they will have the same interface, namely Google+.

People may still use Facebook to keep track of old acquaintances and twitter to follow celebrities, but use Google+ to share photos from Picasa and their Android phone with their family, share documents from Google Docs with their colleagues, and Hangout with their friends. Which also explain why Google+ put Circles first, the various services doesn't overlap that much.

Joshua Gans will most likely be an active user of Google+ because of one these services, namely Google Search. Google Search is being tied to Google Profiles through the rel=author tag. This will put his name and picture next to his writings. The user clicking on them will go to his profile page. If he also share links to his writings on Google+, these will be shown alongside his profile. That will be hard to resist for any blogger.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

TL;DR: Google+ mainly makes Google better. It has overlap in functionality with both Facebook and Twitter, and make take marketshare from those, but that is not the sole success criteria.

Andrex• 15 years ago

Correct. People also need to realize Google+ isn't just the site you see when you go to plus.google.com. It's a Google-wide initiative that affects almost all of their properties. Truly, an improved version of Google.

yaix• 15 years ago

>> Facebook provides "hyper-local news," allowing people to broadcast [...] to their social circle [...]

Nope, FB allows people only to broadcast to their social network. That is what G+ "solves for consumers". The "hyper-local news" becomes targeted, really only to the social circle that's interested.

How ironic, that the author used the G+ term "social circle" to describe what FB is doing.

btilly• 15 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-llwYjxv8Y&feature=play... says what Google+ solves in a very entertaining way.

Google+ comes up short

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