I think G+ was dead on arrival. Don't really know why that was the case but it just never made any sense. They had Orkut and killed it which kinda makes me wonder how management at Google thinks.
It was a better twitter, but the people were already on twitter It is a better subreddit community feature then reddit, but people were already at reddit.
Single sign on made people mad, but YouTube and Google passwords being different needed to become the same. They made it look like it was a conspiracy for everyone to be on Google+. Then this tied people's real names with their YouTube content and outed some people. Just a bunch of mistakes.
Heck I think if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack but then again ....
When it first launched, it reminded me a lot of the original Facebook design. I rather enjoyed it. It had communities, which facilitated a different kind of interaction than Twitter. It was less intimidating than Facebook's UI and wasn't full of social game requests and rants from distant relatives.
But, then Google redesigned Google+ into some amalgamation of Pinterest and modern Facebook, undoing nearly all of its advantages IMHO. I stopped using it shortly thereafter. I check back in periodically, but nearly everyone I've interacted with has also moved on.
Their invite-only model for the first X months was also an early nail in the coffin. It's hard to enjoy a social network when none of your friends are able to join you.
I disagree completely. It was a good step, copied directly from the Facebook (and earlier: Usenet) playbook, and created a group that others wanted to get in to and join.
That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months.
Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters.
I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half.
The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward.
I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.
It wasn't a better twitter or reddit because it's Google. I don't like all my eggs in one basket. Besides that Google wrecking their search results to give Google+ more prominence made me even more wary of such cross ties between services.
Actually I think the fact that reddit enables pseudonyms makes it quite different. I don't particularly want to share the fact that I'm super into weird animes with my colleagues, and reddit enables this, google+ not so much.
Forget weird animes; your coworkers might rib you about it a little, but that's not a career-ending revelation.
What if you're a recovering or current addict, and your support group is on a subreddit? What if you're advising people considering opiates to not follow your path, based on your own life experiences? That's not likely something you want to sign your name to.
What about domestic abuse victims who want to support each other? Victims of sexual abuse as children? Parents of children who have been abused?
What if you're into something that's would really set people off, even if it's something consensual? Consider what's happening over in Drupal-land - regardless of your opinion of Goreans, BDSM practitioners, etc., what if you're just into something that your local community or coworkers find anathema?
Can't you create multiple Google accounts? And they removed the policy to require real names, they even let you use a single word now.
You can't fool the machine but at least you can hide that you like anime from your co-workers and relatives.
I know people that own like 10 Google accounts between their YouTube and other services. You can't trust Google to not expose you (like they did it with YouTube account merges, Google Plus and other instances).
G+ didn't have a community feature until about 18 months after launch. ~ December 2012.
It's always been tremendously underpowered, in terms of admin and moderation tools.
Large Communities rapidly became cesspits or marketing tarpits.
Small and private communities -- I had one with about 40-50 members -- were suprisingly good, though that involved a lot of attitudinal orientation and careful curation of participants, most of whom I'd come to know over several years' general discussion.
> if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack
As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.)
As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug.
I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.
Yes, it was a Javascript nightmare, in terms of performance then and on then equipment.
Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts.
As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs.
I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE.
Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails.
Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap.
I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration.
Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.
Orkut was a usability nightmare and dominated by Brazilians who typically don't write in English. It was hostile to US users and a bizarre acquisition all around. What was the value proposition here other than "not Facebook?" I think they realized their mistake but it was too late and had to move to something else. They couldn't make it "Googly" and no one wanted anything to do with it outside of Brazil.
I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "Gmail Social" and let you build it out with your name, info, photos, etc and have that be a sort of opt-in social network straight from gmail, a bit like how hangouts is now in gmail. Instead they created this Google+ pig that makes no sense and fits in nowhere comfortably.
Also, it was bizarrely tone deaf to somehow tie youtube in this and to get these confusing prompts about merging accounts and such only to find your youtube shitposting and viewing habits now tied to your real name for any employer to find. This is a colossal mistake that I imagine will be studied in business schools for decades to come.
I read somewhere that Jobs gave Google the idea of a centralized social area for their users and considering Jobs' success rates with iCloud and other Apple initiatives on the cloud back then, it seems like they took advice from the wrong guy. Worse, Jobs might have been able to pull off some kind of Apple social network this way, but mostly because there is so much zealous fandom with Apple. Google is just a boring, unsexy service for most. They didn't realize how little liked they are. They're the barely tolerated nerds of the industry, not the popular kids. They should have just launched something easier, simpler, and more modest. Jobsian-like antics just won't work for their brand.
> I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "GMail Social"
Google tried it, called Google Buzz. It was pretty unpopular because they forced it on every GMail user. Suddendly everyone had his name, email and account private details exposed on public readable pages indexed by Google search engine. One year later it was dead. Yet to be replaced by Google+ with almost the same shaddy tactic. No wonder it failed, people don't like such shit.
Well, I did say "opt-in." I can imagine that approach working far better than an instant on "Hi, your stuff is now public" approach.
Look, they weren't going to dethrone facebook, but they didn't need to fuck up this badly. They could have gone with a more modest approach and pleased a lot of people who wanted a quick social profile in gmail in a jiffy and not a whole other service.
>Google Buzz.
Branding still matters. Google Social tells grandma whats up. Buzz, wave, etc make no sense to her.
But Gmail accounts already had profile sections. This was (theoretically) a way to tie together the other Googly stuff (mail, calendar, photos, text/voice/video chat, videos, etc) for easier sharing a-la Facebook.
I've always preferred both the full G+ website and the mobile app to Facebook and they were doing many of the things Facebook added shortly afterward. Granular privacy/sharing controls were much easier than anything FB had or has added since.
That said, as others have mentioned, with closed networks, you can't reproduce what Gmail did to Hotmail/Yahoo/etc 10-12 years ago. You can't just switch to a client/service because you like it better because, unlike email, it requires everyone you communicate with to also make the same switch. As long as this is the case, the only important "feature" is the existing userbase.
This BR domination started years after Orkut was launched (more or less in line with availability of FB to the general public). It was always a 20% Google project, so not sure why you refer to it as an "acquisition".
Hmmm. Orkut was a 20% project that blew up, but as friends at Google told me, was never created/properly engineered for the growth it experienced (after a while mainly in South America and India). I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Just looking back at my 2006/2007 email, Orkut was one big mountain of spam and 30% fake profiles.
It was not remotely dead on arrival. It's in many ways better than twitter and facebook. Google+ users were very enthusiastic. And many still are. But Google has worked hard to undermine their own good work, by removing popular features, doing needless redesigns, and by forcing people from other services onto Google+. Particularly the integration with Youtube, infamous for its low quality comments, fell badly with a lot of people who loved Google+ for its very high quality of discussions.
There was a point in time where Google heavily encouraged employees to use Google+. Around the same time they were integrating everything that was anything with Google+. That time has ended.
I was under the impression that the plus movement died a while ago internally at Google. They had an initiative to switch all of the user ids to plus ids and have everything revolve around your plus account.
My impression is that the YouTube integration was A Bridge Too Far.
The YouTuber's (Google's biggest social platform, and displacing FB recently in Alexa's rankings) didn't like it. The G+'ers didn't like it. And the privacy nuts (self included) really didn't like it.
It took about six months for that to play out, but in the end, Vic Gundotra was pushed out of Google, and G+'s Product Manager left to join YouTube directly.
It's been fits and starts since then. A major site redesign, which despite the standard Google UI/UX fuckups, is vastly less resource-intensive under the hood, this past December. But ... little else, and very long-wearing problems still unaddressed.
The lack of meaningful search is particularly embarrassing.
I suspect what may have done more to kill this than anything though is the political cycle. I'd joked to the former G+ chief architect that "the political cycle was hard on the social graph", and got back the cryptic response that "it was more complicated than that". This all a couple of years ago.
Then 2016-17 happened.
Given the general unpleasantness of political discussion, harassment, bots, etc., and what I suspect is soul-searching on multiple fronts as to what is really worth doing and engaging in, Google are themselves increasingly tarnished.
Google had a chance to be the open standards communications platform. Just as Gmail succeeds in the world of federated email, Google was poised to do the same with standards based chat, RSS, etc.
Vic Gundotra, with apparently passive approval from above, killed all that and Google lost its only real differentiator in this competition: not being the centralized bad guys.
I think that's a bit unfair as Google tried to federate social networking many times but failed (ActivityStreams is one that comes to mind but there were several others).
The big change, imo, came when Larry Page returned as CEO. He shifted the company's strategy away from "technology" and towards "products". In same cases this was a major success, it's when Android started to actually improve its UX, but it also meant no longer focusing on things like standards as much.
I don't know who this guy is, but I find his claim to provide "Analysis and News About Google" highly dubious if he's just now noticing that google has pulled resources from Plus. Has there been a single significant update to this platform since it launched?
> Has there been a single significant update to this platform since it launched?
There was a makeover in the last six months. The article even refers to the relaunch supported by the awesome Luke Wroblewski. Luke is a smart guy and it's telling that he's active on Twitter.
One thing I will say, as a designer I'm saddened to see designers think they can re-UX a site to success. When the fundamental are against you, you might as well piss into the wind. Or visa versa as is the case with sites like Craigslist.
Agreed on the underlying tone of the article. None of this is news. The guy must be living in a cave, under the basement of the Googleplex.
There were news stories even back then that Google is about to kill Google+. Actually it was big news then when Google kept Google+ still around. Search for "Vic Gundotra" on Arstechnics, Techcrunch, etc.
Hate to pile on, but this was my reaction as well. If this were an article written today about someone losing their patience with MySpace it would only be very slightly more confusing.
FWIW, I really liked Google+ at release and had hoped it would become popular, but the platform's inability to achieve anything close to a critical mass with mainstream users doomed me to continue using Facebook as my "stay in touch with friends/relatives who live far away" platform and I haven't given google plus a fully formed conscious thought in years.
This matches a common complaint about Twitter - that most of their senior executives don't use the service, and as a result couldn't possibly understand how to improve it.
Lots of gloating about the failure of Google+, even though Facebook could really use a competitor (although, yes, something smaller than Google would be better).
The one feature G+ had, that I was sad to see failing, were their "Circles". The idea that you have different personas within different social groups, i. e. work/high school friends/family/...
It's theoretically possible with Facebook I guess, but I just don't trust them not to change my settings, nor do I actually feel like I know the ins and outs of what's private and what's not.
Twitter is a bit better because the clients are made with account-switching in mind. But one account with maybe different "channels" would still feel better.
Google+ would have been great if Facebook didn't already exist. I tried to use it but it is pointless if no one else you know is there. I think less than five of my facebook friends tried it.
In the end I just deleted both my facebook and google plus and have never looked back. :)
I don't understand what you mean. The article was posted 20h ago by a guy who has over 50,000[0] followers, in to a collection that has almost 100,000[1] followers. Of course a lot of people saw it.
* A good founder cohort if you're into intelligent, quirky, and techie discussions. Basically "Googlers and Friends". (Though this also included a bunch of marketing types, a net negative.)
* Really solid technical fundamentals. I'll scream until I'm hoarse about what Google doesn't get, but one thing that they absolutely nail is solid, robust, scalable, updateable infrastructure. The server-end side of G+ was amazingly robust and had exceedingly few outages. Only a small handful of site updates that I'm aware of ever broke the service. That's an exceedingly good record on any score.
* Scale. Basically, Gmail and Android registrations fed into the G+ userbase, and whilst that is something can, quite rightly, be criticised, it makes for a potentially large engagement pool.
* Search. Took a while, but when Google bolted Search onto G+, it was fast and comprehensive. Not necessarily useful, but every comment was indexed. (HN's Algolia is comparable, though more useful.) Reddit still struggles with search (timeouts, no comments), though the syntax is powerful. Ello's search is useless. (Yes, I poke around the oddball corners of the Internet.)
* Long posts. It was possible to, pretty much, write a book within a post if you wanted to. For those of us who live by words, this was useful.
* Integrated images and video. Photos were definitely well-presented (if overused), and being able to preview / play YouTube on-site not bade.
Later features made small-group interactions fairly viable (though large was always a nightmare), and more.
I've addressed criticisms elsewhere, most particularly in my "Plussology and Plexology" collection on G+ itself.
G+ communities were great for quite a while. In many ways reminiscent of HN (quality/serious reactions) but more topical, until it started to be used as just another social advertising outlet with cross-posts.
With cloud services being as cheap and available as they are, what's to stop a federated social network from really taking off? Is there a chicken and egg problem here? Why can't a decentralized social network displace Facebook the same way Facebook displaced MySpace? Is it simply a question of marketing? Or is it the lack of profits in creating such a network? Does technologies inherently go from "open" to "closed" with no chance of ever turning back?
Because Facebook managed to be the first massive service that convinced just about everyone to sign up. A good chunk of those people would much rather deal with the minor annoyances or nebulous complaints about Facebook than set up and learn how to use a new service. Just being "a bit better in some ways" is not enough to drive the mass adoption needed to create a shift away from the incumbent Facebook.
And since Facebook would never allow some theoretical decentralized network to interface with their service, it would end up like all the other attempts: people who like to try new things/dislike the status quo will check it out, realize they still need to cross-post to Facebook, and give up.
The only way to pull it off would be to offer something sufficiently novel and in-demand that people would scramble to use it. From what I've seen in the past, those sorts of things don't come from loose federations of decentralized network nodes. They come from commercial development and heavy promotion....or they are bought up by a company that does those things.
I use Google+ everyday. In my private circle, there are multiple posts from members each day. These are private posts shared among these people everyday.
It makes me curious how many other small private circles exist like that. Obviously it isn't as big as Facebook, but people don't use it like they do Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter. For my private circle, most people have Facebook, Twitter, etc in addition to Google+ and the content posted on Twitter and Facebook is usually not what is in the private Google+ circle. I think a big mistake people made was that Google+ should replace Facebook, etc, rather than work in parallel with those services.
That said, there is writing on the wall that it is either going to be eliminated or drastically changed. For example, there are sometimes now little feedback windows that pop up and ask you questions about why you use Google+.
Google+ was quite good in the beginning, invite-only to get a circle of incrowd users on it first. Much like Facebook only allowing students from certain universities, but for nerds where people would write interesting stuff.
It would've grown to Twitter like proportions easily if they would just let it grow organically. Imagine getting an invite, signing up and then seeing great content by great people. Of course you want to partake.
Then came the YouTube mistake. Millions and millions and millions of user accounts that do absolute nothing. Google somebody's name and a good chance you'll find a completely void Google+ profile.
80 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadGoogle+ was never good.
Single sign on made people mad, but YouTube and Google passwords being different needed to become the same. They made it look like it was a conspiracy for everyone to be on Google+. Then this tied people's real names with their YouTube content and outed some people. Just a bunch of mistakes.
Heck I think if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack but then again ....
But, then Google redesigned Google+ into some amalgamation of Pinterest and modern Facebook, undoing nearly all of its advantages IMHO. I stopped using it shortly thereafter. I check back in periodically, but nearly everyone I've interacted with has also moved on.
It's really quite a shame.
That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months.
Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters.
I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half.
The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward.
I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.
What if you're a recovering or current addict, and your support group is on a subreddit? What if you're advising people considering opiates to not follow your path, based on your own life experiences? That's not likely something you want to sign your name to.
What about domestic abuse victims who want to support each other? Victims of sexual abuse as children? Parents of children who have been abused?
What if you're into something that's would really set people off, even if it's something consensual? Consider what's happening over in Drupal-land - regardless of your opinion of Goreans, BDSM practitioners, etc., what if you're just into something that your local community or coworkers find anathema?
Reddit allows compartmentalisation of interests. G+ actively prevents that.
You can't fool the machine but at least you can hide that you like anime from your co-workers and relatives.
I know people that own like 10 Google accounts between their YouTube and other services. You can't trust Google to not expose you (like they did it with YouTube account merges, Google Plus and other instances).
It's always been tremendously underpowered, in terms of admin and moderation tools.
Large Communities rapidly became cesspits or marketing tarpits.
Small and private communities -- I had one with about 40-50 members -- were suprisingly good, though that involved a lot of attitudinal orientation and careful curation of participants, most of whom I'd come to know over several years' general discussion.
As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.)
As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug.
I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.
Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts.
As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs.
I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE.
Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails.
Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap.
I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration.
Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.
I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "Gmail Social" and let you build it out with your name, info, photos, etc and have that be a sort of opt-in social network straight from gmail, a bit like how hangouts is now in gmail. Instead they created this Google+ pig that makes no sense and fits in nowhere comfortably.
Also, it was bizarrely tone deaf to somehow tie youtube in this and to get these confusing prompts about merging accounts and such only to find your youtube shitposting and viewing habits now tied to your real name for any employer to find. This is a colossal mistake that I imagine will be studied in business schools for decades to come.
I read somewhere that Jobs gave Google the idea of a centralized social area for their users and considering Jobs' success rates with iCloud and other Apple initiatives on the cloud back then, it seems like they took advice from the wrong guy. Worse, Jobs might have been able to pull off some kind of Apple social network this way, but mostly because there is so much zealous fandom with Apple. Google is just a boring, unsexy service for most. They didn't realize how little liked they are. They're the barely tolerated nerds of the industry, not the popular kids. They should have just launched something easier, simpler, and more modest. Jobsian-like antics just won't work for their brand.
Google tried it, called Google Buzz. It was pretty unpopular because they forced it on every GMail user. Suddendly everyone had his name, email and account private details exposed on public readable pages indexed by Google search engine. One year later it was dead. Yet to be replaced by Google+ with almost the same shaddy tactic. No wonder it failed, people don't like such shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
Look, they weren't going to dethrone facebook, but they didn't need to fuck up this badly. They could have gone with a more modest approach and pleased a lot of people who wanted a quick social profile in gmail in a jiffy and not a whole other service.
>Google Buzz.
Branding still matters. Google Social tells grandma whats up. Buzz, wave, etc make no sense to her.
I've always preferred both the full G+ website and the mobile app to Facebook and they were doing many of the things Facebook added shortly afterward. Granular privacy/sharing controls were much easier than anything FB had or has added since.
That said, as others have mentioned, with closed networks, you can't reproduce what Gmail did to Hotmail/Yahoo/etc 10-12 years ago. You can't just switch to a client/service because you like it better because, unlike email, it requires everyone you communicate with to also make the same switch. As long as this is the case, the only important "feature" is the existing userbase.
Google+ survives despite Google's mismanagement.
It's hilarious that this guy seems like the last person in the world who hasn't figured out Google+ was a dud and has no future.
He's also a good illustration that technologies that were widely panned and rejected can still have users that love them.
The YouTuber's (Google's biggest social platform, and displacing FB recently in Alexa's rankings) didn't like it. The G+'ers didn't like it. And the privacy nuts (self included) really didn't like it.
It took about six months for that to play out, but in the end, Vic Gundotra was pushed out of Google, and G+'s Product Manager left to join YouTube directly.
It's been fits and starts since then. A major site redesign, which despite the standard Google UI/UX fuckups, is vastly less resource-intensive under the hood, this past December. But ... little else, and very long-wearing problems still unaddressed.
The lack of meaningful search is particularly embarrassing.
I suspect what may have done more to kill this than anything though is the political cycle. I'd joked to the former G+ chief architect that "the political cycle was hard on the social graph", and got back the cryptic response that "it was more complicated than that". This all a couple of years ago.
Then 2016-17 happened.
Given the general unpleasantness of political discussion, harassment, bots, etc., and what I suspect is soul-searching on multiple fronts as to what is really worth doing and engaging in, Google are themselves increasingly tarnished.
Vic Gundotra, with apparently passive approval from above, killed all that and Google lost its only real differentiator in this competition: not being the centralized bad guys.
The big change, imo, came when Larry Page returned as CEO. He shifted the company's strategy away from "technology" and towards "products". In same cases this was a major success, it's when Android started to actually improve its UX, but it also meant no longer focusing on things like standards as much.
There was a makeover in the last six months. The article even refers to the relaunch supported by the awesome Luke Wroblewski. Luke is a smart guy and it's telling that he's active on Twitter.
One thing I will say, as a designer I'm saddened to see designers think they can re-UX a site to success. When the fundamental are against you, you might as well piss into the wind. Or visa versa as is the case with sites like Craigslist.
Agreed on the underlying tone of the article. None of this is news. The guy must be living in a cave, under the basement of the Googleplex.
Search quality overall (and not just Google) seems to be taking a hit in the past couple of years, maybe longer.
FWIW, I really liked Google+ at release and had hoped it would become popular, but the platform's inability to achieve anything close to a critical mass with mainstream users doomed me to continue using Facebook as my "stay in touch with friends/relatives who live far away" platform and I haven't given google plus a fully formed conscious thought in years.
The one feature G+ had, that I was sad to see failing, were their "Circles". The idea that you have different personas within different social groups, i. e. work/high school friends/family/...
It's theoretically possible with Facebook I guess, but I just don't trust them not to change my settings, nor do I actually feel like I know the ins and outs of what's private and what's not.
Twitter is a bit better because the clients are made with account-switching in mind. But one account with maybe different "channels" would still feel better.
Or better yet: failed to create a federated, open-standards, open-protocols, multi-client alternative.
So much potential, squandered.
In the end I just deleted both my facebook and google plus and have never looked back. :)
"Hey, let's go check on what's happening on google+?" or "What I'll just google google+ to see what's happening there..." said no one ever.
[0] https://plus.google.com/+GideonRosenblatt [1] https://plus.google.com/collection/UgYzY
This is actually more often than I log in to Facebook because I get more interesting content from those two guys than I do from my friends and family.
Though I follow Gideon on G+, and ran across it on one of my Circles as well, later on.
It's now been shared something like 190 times (a tremendous re-share rate for G+), and is apparently being discussed inside Google itself.
* A good founder cohort if you're into intelligent, quirky, and techie discussions. Basically "Googlers and Friends". (Though this also included a bunch of marketing types, a net negative.)
* Really solid technical fundamentals. I'll scream until I'm hoarse about what Google doesn't get, but one thing that they absolutely nail is solid, robust, scalable, updateable infrastructure. The server-end side of G+ was amazingly robust and had exceedingly few outages. Only a small handful of site updates that I'm aware of ever broke the service. That's an exceedingly good record on any score.
* Scale. Basically, Gmail and Android registrations fed into the G+ userbase, and whilst that is something can, quite rightly, be criticised, it makes for a potentially large engagement pool.
* Search. Took a while, but when Google bolted Search onto G+, it was fast and comprehensive. Not necessarily useful, but every comment was indexed. (HN's Algolia is comparable, though more useful.) Reddit still struggles with search (timeouts, no comments), though the syntax is powerful. Ello's search is useless. (Yes, I poke around the oddball corners of the Internet.)
* Long posts. It was possible to, pretty much, write a book within a post if you wanted to. For those of us who live by words, this was useful.
* Integrated images and video. Photos were definitely well-presented (if overused), and being able to preview / play YouTube on-site not bade.
Later features made small-group interactions fairly viable (though large was always a nightmare), and more.
I've addressed criticisms elsewhere, most particularly in my "Plussology and Plexology" collection on G+ itself.
https://plus.google.com/collection/MY_CX
Some have literally hundreds of photos saved on Facebook for sharing.
And since Facebook would never allow some theoretical decentralized network to interface with their service, it would end up like all the other attempts: people who like to try new things/dislike the status quo will check it out, realize they still need to cross-post to Facebook, and give up.
The only way to pull it off would be to offer something sufficiently novel and in-demand that people would scramble to use it. From what I've seen in the past, those sorts of things don't come from loose federations of decentralized network nodes. They come from commercial development and heavy promotion....or they are bought up by a company that does those things.
It makes me curious how many other small private circles exist like that. Obviously it isn't as big as Facebook, but people don't use it like they do Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter. For my private circle, most people have Facebook, Twitter, etc in addition to Google+ and the content posted on Twitter and Facebook is usually not what is in the private Google+ circle. I think a big mistake people made was that Google+ should replace Facebook, etc, rather than work in parallel with those services.
That said, there is writing on the wall that it is either going to be eliminated or drastically changed. For example, there are sometimes now little feedback windows that pop up and ask you questions about why you use Google+.
It would've grown to Twitter like proportions easily if they would just let it grow organically. Imagine getting an invite, signing up and then seeing great content by great people. Of course you want to partake.
Then came the YouTube mistake. Millions and millions and millions of user accounts that do absolute nothing. Google somebody's name and a good chance you'll find a completely void Google+ profile.