Ask HN: Would Google still kill Google+ If they new about Facebook’s problems?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29045510

by p2t2p • 5 years ago

6 3 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Google killed the + Google Search operator when they decided to make Google+ more important.... can they bring back the + operator please? it was not the same as quotes.

d--b• 5 years ago

Google shut Google+ down cause people weren’t using it. Nothing to do with how facebook was/is doing. And Facebook is still doing pretty fine btw…

codyogden• 5 years ago

Oh, this is relevant to my interests as the founder of Killed by Google.

Yes. They would have shut it down. It wasn’t popular and generated little public interest outside of certain—heh—circles. Google+ had its own negative PR issues around data leaking/scraping as well, negatively affecting the already precarious reputation held by early Google product adopters.

I maintain Google is no longer attempting to be a ‘social’ company, and they’ve realized this and have spent the last decade aligning behind new goal: being a known, reliable services company. That’s why Search, AdSense, AdWords, Workspace, Google Cloud, YouTube, etc are all things people use to _accomplish_ something. Yes, even YouTube is now mostly a medium for conducting business (creating content is business). Google is doubling down on being a services company. They’ve publicly pulled back R&D in nearly any VR/XR space despite being poised to be a perfect competitor to take on Facebook/Meta.

Looking at both the history and current state of “social” at Google, it’s always been and continues to be a mess. Core services like messaging between users is siloed between apps: Google Pay, Google Photos, Google Messages, Google Chat, Google Docs Chat, Stadia Chat, etc. Even Facebook (kind of) solved this with Facebook Messenger. If Google cared at all about social, their first move would be finding a way to make that core peace of modern day socializing (messaging) a seemingly magical experience for their billions-scale user base.

Until then, I would not expect to see Google enter or excel at any type of software product where one would go to be social.

Ask HN: Would Google still kill Google+ If they new about Facebook’s problems?

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