Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using? Where's the sadness over the death of Apple Ping, or MobileMe?
>> They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don't think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.
> Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using?
You misunderstand. He's not necessarily saying Google should maintain Google Reader or Google+ forever; he's saying that users can't trust Google to keep all but its most popular services online. If you like some new/niche Google service so much that you'll be unhappy when it's shut down, you should seriously consider not using it in the first place.
I'm not sad to see Google+ go, but the aggressive rate of metrics-driven product shutdowns by modern SaaS companies is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Users learn not get used to new services and hold of using them heavily, because they'll probably get shut down; that dampens adoption so services inevitably get shut down.
IMHO, SaaS companies need to embrace niche products, otherwise they're eventually going to kill off a lot of consumer appetite for innovation.
> Where's the sadness over the death of Apple Ping, or MobileMe?
What useful features does MobileMe have, that iCloud doesn't? I just looked up the list of features and the only thing missing seems to be publishing a personal website with iWeb.
I don't know a single person using iTunes Ping, or heh, Game Center's social features.
This is rather different from Google Reader. Reader was a popular service that was going strong, the discontinuation really was a hassle to a lot of people. Google+ was essentially not used at all, so this should affect very few people.
Ironically, google reader was discontinued because they wanted people to use g+ exclusively for "sharing", and reader's ability to share/surface articles to friends was seen as unnecessary competition.
What’s the evidence that Google Reader was “a popular service that was going strong”? I don’t doubt there were a bunch of people in tech and media who were and still are vocally angry, but I don’t recall data showing that Reader was anything but a niche product.
It wasn’t expanding at Twitter/Facebook rates but it was apparently growing on a continuing basis. More importantly, however, it was popular with communities with outsize influence – journalists, writers, bloggers, academics, librarians, etc. who used it to follow and share — so when they launched a really half-assed replacement (i.e. it didn’t even work on mobile) most of the people writing reviews and answering questions were starting from a position of something which was useful to them being replaced with a mess, and Google+ never recovered from that bad reputation.
Years later, I was at a museum/gallery/archive/library tech conference and the Google Cultural Institute folks were running their sales pitch. Multiple people asked them where their institution would be “when you cancel this like Google Reader”, a sentiment I’ve heard in enough other contexts that I doubt is fully appreciated by Google management even if it has been good for getting users to think about lock-in.
They now have five of the top ten apps used on all smartphones so would expect those to not going anywhere. So things like YouTube, maps, etc.
Plus Chrome not going anywhere as well as the Google home. But would still
expect them to iterate. So even though Android has over 80% share still would not be surprised to see them move to Fuchsia.
Or Chrome, or Android, or YouTube, or Maps, or News, or Docs, or Translate or anything else that has a large number of users. Google Reader had some big fans, but never a large number of users. They don't get rid of stuff with lots of eyeballs.
The more infuriating part is that it doesn't even work on mobile FF. So the few times I accidentally click on a G+ link from my Google assistant feed, I don't even get the benefit of seeing a post with just a link to the real content.
even when i don't arrive there by mistake, i typically leave after less than five seconds - people would link to posts on G+ and before reading them i'd have to click through full-screen interstitials introducing me to the "new" G+ redesign. and i just didn't care, so i'd leave.
Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.
The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
FB has been slowly making friend lists even less accessible than before, so no wonder nobody's using them. Currently just making a status update visible only to a given list requires a ridiculous exertion: Open privacy dropdown -> select "More" -> select "See all" (the fuck?) -> click "Custom" -> TYPE a prefix of the friend list name in the combobox -> select the list you want from the dropdown.
The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user.
For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.
>For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
How low have we got, capacity wise, when this is even considered "a hurdle"?
At one time, people had to walk to the TV to change the channels...
And before that, they had to have candles and be good with finger shadows to entertain themselves...
It's because it forces you to pick. Outside of the discrete friendship groups online, there's an ever-shifting on-the-spot calculation about who's around you and how much you want to say. One day you might feel like telling friend X while you're in the coffee shop together with just one other friend, the next day you might not feel so open in the bar for a variety of reasons. Add in all the variables about who else is around, how much beer you've drunk, whether you've just been paid, if the relationship with a partner is going well etc. and every situation is different in a very nuanced way. I'm not on Facebook now, but when I was I rapidly gave up on the idea of administering my friendship groups because it felt like I was bureacratising my friendships in a very unnatural way.
Sorting feeds into algorithmically informed circles would be helpful. The current algorithm is a nightmare if it is data starved, ie you get fed a bunch a irrelevant info from people you just interacted with. There is no process to say, hey Facebook show me what my old college friends are up to. Or hey Facebook show me what my family is up to or hey Facebook show me political news. It's just a bunch of random grasping at straws.
> users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post
I'm not sure why this is harder than choosing an email address to send an email to. Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.
Seems like the easiest thing in the world.
Also seems weird to say that even selecting a group to share to is a massive hurdle, but the fact that facebook buries the same functionality behind 5-6 clicks for each post is convenient. Seems more like it was too easy, and had to be made harder.
Facebook's implementation is only behind two clicks. When you go to add a post, there's a drop-down to select who you want to see it. Opening the drop-down is one click. Selecting the list is the other one.
The problem is in managing the people in these lists. I haven't found a place where it shows all users I have in a single list. Adding or removing a single user is easy though, as the available lists are available for selection/deselection anywhere you're allowed to change your friend status with that person.
> Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.
But if you're truly disciplined about this, you never learn that your second cousin is interested in quilting too.
And in many scenarios, there is little reward to being disciplined; unless you're into rather transgressive quilting, you'll probably share your quilting projects with everyone.
There is nothing stopping you from sharing things you are proud of with you family circle. But technical discussions about quilting don't need to eventually end up on a random friends feed.
Google+ also implemented the opposite: you share to your Quilting collection, and everybody who follows you can choose whether to follow that collection or not.
The combination of circles and collections is very powerful, though the way G+ implemented it, they do overlap a bit, and don't entirely play well together. Slightly more flexible collections would help a lot.
I can see the argument regard engagement, but honestly you probably should take at least as long to think about your intended audience as you should posting your birthday picture.
Heck I wish Facebook forced you to provide at least one tag with each post, just so that we could unfollow e.g baby posts/political posts and then maybe get something useful out of Facebook (my current solution is to unfollow the annoying person, but that is a bit too crude).
Yeah, but they're not perfect. You quickly end up with groups containing mostly the same friends, but different configurations of them depending on the event and exactly who you want to include in each discussion. It's a headache, really
I don't know why circles was so difficult for some. As soon as it launched I dropped FB because I would always get concerned about different groups of people seeing what I posted. On G+ I immediately had a Family circle, a circle of people I knew from work, close friends and then people I met on the service. In fact it didn't seem like people had a problem with the system until TechCrunch gave them talking points. The same thing happened with them integrating it across the properties and the "ramming it down our throats" flap.
Livejournal had this long before G+ or Facebook existed, and people sure did regularly lock their posts to one group of friends or another.
The choice of how to restrict your audience was placed below the 'new post' entry box, and was something you'd usually think about after writing your post. Which was more likely to be a multi-paragraph thing than the short fragments we're so used to tossing off on all the commercial social networks now.
You are spot on. However you have groups in Whatsapp. If somehow you could use instant message groups as "circles" for publishing posts too... that's what I intend to do in my social network btw.
There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunities more visible.
> Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups.
IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful.
It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.
They were easy and intuitive. Facebook didn't promote them for the same reason the circles in Google+ lacked traction: The majority of users didn't care and didn't want it.
hmmm, I've been using it since it came out and still use it. Yes the UI is a little crap but basically every time you post there's a tiny drop down you can set which groups can see and which groups can't. It will stay on whatever you last chose.
Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list.
It's not heavily promoted but it is there. You can view feeds of your Facebook friend lists, just like Google+. Bookmark those feeds and you are good to go.
That's the feature for viewing a separate feed per friend list. The basic functionality of creating friend lists and assigning them different privacy settings isn't going anywhere.
This is a very cynical view of things. I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts. I can, however, perfectly imagine a PM who is "extremely numbers driven" to look a bad version of the algorithm that increases the time users spend shifting through shit and assume that the algorithm is a huge success because it increased "retention" and reduced bounce-rate.
Seems to me like PM's would think in the most positive terms about the same issue, e.g. what is the maximum amount of ad space that we can use before users lose interest?
No one would directly attempt to be evil, it'd just turn out that way.
“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.”
― Jean Renoir
As a PM, though not one that works at Facebook, I would probably approach it something like, how do we ensure that our users stay interested in the homepage, coming back as often as possible and staying on it as long as possible?
There are lots of other sites competing for attention, and to sacrifice a good UX would be shortsighted, especially with all the “FB is dead” comments people have been making the last few years.
And, to be sure, many will justify it by saying "by maximizing this revenue, we're able to provide even more services that people love for free." Is it a Faustian bargain if practically everyone is begging to be Faust?
>I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts.
Really? Especially a FB PM you mean? Because PMs otherwise have been known to use exactly such techniques and worse:
Agreed, pathogenic designs can come out of poor success metrics.
Some low level PM was tasked with optimizing time-on-site. They had some negative user feedback, but it didn't show up in their low sample UR and segmented rollout. Since they had good results in their primary success metrics and the secondary metrics did not tell a consistent story, they rolled it out to 100%. Any negative feedback from there was chalked up to change aversion among a small segment of users.
That's still too optimistic. You're assuming that they weren't fully aware of the problem, and would have fixed it if they could. The truth is that they only care about problems that could impact their bottom line.
Well to be frank I've been in these meetings and yes people do intentionally think of dark patterns. If people are willing to sit in war rooms to murder people and Wall Street board rooms to steal pensions, it shouldn't seem so unbelievable that someone could intentionally obfuscate a social media timeline. In fact they use more technical language, such as "engagement", to discuss these topics so that it seems less repugnant.
"Lard it up with debt, fire down to a skeleton-crew and stop all maintenance" sounds bad, like you're killing the company or something. "Unlocking value", hey, doesn't that sound better?
Similarly, "Let's get rich creating the second-coming of AOL by building a tacky nextgen panopticon" doesn't sound that great. "Creating a community of technical greats to bring people together and foster blah blah blah", while a completely bullshit nothing-statement, seems to shift focus off of the surveillance capitalism. For a bit.
Eventually, though, if you make your living sniffing other peoples' panties, eventually they notice and they take measures to limit your access to their laundry. FB and Google are both blocked entirely by IP at my gateway (along with a bunch of other surveillance shops), and the internet at home is so much nicer than what I see other people putting up with.
Easy, launder it through abstract metrics like “engagement” and “ad relevance” and the talks are about what make those numbers go up, not about holding pictures of your friends hostage behind more ads.
They are optimizing for posts that generate revenue. Since users don’t pay, the news feed is optimized for advertisers and the user posts that lead to more advertiser engagement.
True, no one goes around thinking "how can I make my product as obtuse as possible," presumably while twirling their mustache and saying "bwahahaha" occasionally.
The thing to realize is that there's not actually a functional difference between that and the "numbers-driven" guy you describe. Evil isn't just the sadistic maniac; it's the affable businessman who doesn't care, doesn't even consider, whether his product helps people or hurts them, so long as it maximizes profit.
> I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts.
Increasing "time spent" means spreading out relevant posts. I'm sure that Facebook is tuned to optimize for some combination of "time spent without drop-off in engagement". This is a "Good" version of the algorithm because it nets them the most revenue, while still fulfilling the need for the larger user base.
It's milkshake marketing[0]. People don't want the most efficient method of content consumption. That's why most "feeds" are no longer chronological. People on Facebook want to scroll around, look at posts, comment on articles, like a few things, etc. for X minutes/day without seeing things they've seen before, and without seeing things that are boring.
The job-to-be-done isn't to consume a certain relevant piece of content, it's to waste time and not get too bored.
I'd like to think that's not true, but it wouldn't be the first time such a technique has been used, apparently successfully. Witness the local TV news which is always teasing that some story is coming up next, only to put it at the very end of the broadcast so that you have to watch the whole 30 minute program (including commercials) to hear the 1 minute you care about.
Our local station started doing this where they would list the stories coming up on the right hand side of the screen. They held to it for about two weeks. Then they kept it, but then continually shifted the stories during commercial breaks. After many, many complaints, they finally got rid of it.
Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.
I've given up every platform that forwent the chronological timeline because other feed algorithms are just frustrating, and Twitter is the only one I miss.
I never realized Twitter curated timeslines because I don't follow enough people for it to cut anything out. It is effectively a chronological order of posts by people I follow.
My big problem with Twitter's timeline is showing me things that people I follow have liked. In every case, those posts are political and divisive, i.e., the "red meat" of social media. They're just throwing those into my feed to get a reaction from me, hoping that I'll "engage" with whatever stupid topic comes up, as though Twitter were a good place for having a discussion about anything.
I've turned off the "show best tweets first" option, and I stick with using Tweetbot. But, like most people seem to indicate here, about Facebook (which I don't use at all), my continued use hangs by a thread. It wouldn't take much for me to cancel my account. Again.
Facebook insiders have admitted that it is. Mike Allen, Facebook's first president, said this in an interview:
“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’,” he said. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.”
So that underscores their general attitude towards user behavior. The 'every once in a while' piece applies to the newsfeed too - it's designed to keep you searching for things you care about, and they carefully mix in things you don't, so that you're never too satisfied or unsatisfied, just constantly craving more.
It's just so bald. I hadn't seen anyone at Facebook so openly describing things like "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." They usually say stuff like "bringing people together," "connecting the world," etc.
He isn't the only person who talks about the dopamine driven feedback loops. Chamath Palihapitiya, who was one of the first engineers at facebook, talks about how they all used to gather in meeting rooms and have intense back and forth discussions on how they actually build this thing so that the entire world wouldn't be able to resist adopting it.
He talks about how at the time they really didn't foresee the foreboding future implications of what they were trying to build at the time.
That's a little like talking about how you didn't foresee the foreboding implications of designing a self-sustaining chain reaction involving neutrons.
Although I think the reaction continues and we can't tell exactly what's happening even now.
Yeah, I see lots of early hires of the tech giants bemoaning the monsters they've created. They are very concerned about the negative societal impacts of their former employers, but not quite concerned enough to give back the millions of dollars they earned peddling these products.
They will use those millions (or at least part of one of those millions) to create "An Initiative" along with an app or two to somehow combat the monsters. Of course that will fail but their conscience will be cleared. But more importantly, they will be able to think that their blood money is now normal money and they can live and die peacefully.
Give it back to who? Facebook? Their shareholders? Doesn't seem to help the situation in any sense. In the videos linked
the early FB engineer says the only thing he can do now is to try use the capital he has earned to combat the ills he created, which is a sensible approach in my view.
not quite concerned enough to give back the
millions of dollars they earned
Do you have a way to undo the social harm done by facebook for a few million dollars?
Or do you think they should just get rid of the money, K Foundation style, regardless of whether doing so would reverse the effects of the work they did to earn it?
Seems like the disbelief was more related to the quote's candor than content. Not surprising that this was the thought process, but pretty surprising to hear it straight up without a thick layer of "we're saving the world" to coat it.
I tend to think Facebook is more like a slot machine than anything else, where you are constantly putting in something of value (your posts, pics, etc) in hopes of getting something of greater value back (likes/shares, friend requests, heated debates, etc).
And just like a Slot Machine you are always left wanting to come back to play some more and even if you do your best to quit facebook, you are always being constantly reminded that of its existence everywhere you go.
If so they're doing a really bad job. The only ones in my friends list that is contributing anything except comments are the typical conspiracy nuts and racists. Every one else contributes next to nothing. Maybe a picture at major life events.
Yeah. I'd defy anybody to think critically about Facebook for five minutes and not come to that conclusion.
> This has been the MO of mass entertainment since the gladiators fought the lions.
Absolutely.
Lots of early proto-social media companies were already doing things like that back in the 90s. Like when AOL was king and "You've Got Mail!" was a household catchphrase and featured in their marketing. They knew that people were thrilled to get stuff from other people.
Probably the most obvious and recent antecedent to gamefied social media would be, uh, well, games. There were a few decades of ideas to cherry pick from the game world.
I actually find Axios to be a pretty great news source. Lots of solid, insightful analysis on categorized topics delivered as regular newsletters that don’t take up all your time.
It doesn't even have to be intentional. Imagine endless ABX testing to increase ad views and session time, cycling through countless feed algorithms. The winners could very well end up being the ones that are most frustrating for the user, but with product and engineering just thinking they are running some tests and reaching goals.
I strongly believe stuff like this doesn't happen by accident. It's easy to write pieces about how a soulless algorithm is determining stuff and we can all be sad about it, but in my experience, that's rarely true.
There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually they get steamrolled by a "product" person who's invented some new terminology for whatever shady shit they are pushing now. "It's just growth hacking" "complimentary contextually relevant ads will improve the user experience".
People know. They always know. They just choose to feign ignorance when they get busted.
Even if we grant them the benefit of doubt, it certainly isn't an accident to keep using the same algorithm once you know its consequences.
There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it.
Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to meet. Someone had to go, "Children are being drawn to extremist videos after watching PewDiePie and that's okay."
I view facebook's newsfeed and youtube's list of suggestions like entering into a popular reddit thread about something dividing the community that has lots of posts.
You enter into the comment section and it's automatically sorted by Controversial. At least that's how I see it.
People don't necessarily know. I can, or there was a time when I could, code a Mandelbrot set generator from memory. Yet that doesn't mean I can draw it myself in its infinite detail. Algorithms have unintended results, in general or in detail.
I agree this is generally true, but isn’t the case with my current grocery store shockingly enough. Both are essentially at the front of the store. I’m not sure why they are the exception to the rule, but I love it none the less.
There's a practical reason for this. Temperature and where they unload (and the perishable nature). Not saying there couldn't be a manipulative reason too, but I wouldn't assume so by default.
You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.
It seems to me that a sensible person buying a lot of groceries gets refrigerated and frozen items last so they have the least amount of melting/warming up on the way home. So the positioning of them after everything else is in the interest of the customer.
the perishables could be closer together, vs having people traipse across a store to get the basics (conveniently seeing hundreds of other opportunities to load up their cart along the way). "interest of the customer" (saving money) doesn't align with "interest of the business" (maximizing rev/profit)
No you don't. You can can walk around the outside so you only see the cheap raw produce, bakery, and dairy. There are also plenty of low margin items in the middle (canned beans) and high margin items in the back (meat and fancy dairy)
Ikea is funny because it has "shortcuts" all over the place where you can bypass larger chunks of the full path. You just need to look for doorways outside the main path. Also because most (all?) it's stores follow a very similar layout, so once you've been to one, you'll find the shortcuts in the others very easily and know pretty much exactly where you'll end up. They've just made the obvious path simple enough to mindlessly follow that most people do.
I hadn't watched broadcast TV for a while (lack of time), but when I did I'd just google whatever the teaser was, to see if it was worth waiting for. Very seldom would they have an exclusive breaking story that wasn't already all over the internet.
This is the same strategy as news sites where you have to go to the "next page" fairly often within the article (what does that even mean) so the ads reload, or there's a dumb slideshow where every 5 images it's an ad. Or when sourceforge had its full on transition to a money sucking machine and they made the UI worse and everything multiple page reloads away just to show more ads.
That is where the loading bays are, so they keep the fridges nearby so cold items have less chance to heat up. Plus milk is often stocked from behind, which can only be done where they have the extra space at the back of the store.
Not to mention you probably want to pick it up last, so it stays colder longer. This way you don't have to carry milk around the store while you look for all the other items you need.
Although, maybe that's an argument for putting it by the checkout lines instead, which I suppose are by the entrance. Hm.
I could buy this on smaller or older grocery stores, but the Safeways near me have 2 full aisles of frozen goods (and one additional one of refrigerated goods). These aisles extend all the way from the back to the front of the store, and are located in the center of the floor plan.
The milk is still in the back, along with perishable juices. The difference between them and the aisles is that processed foods (frozen dinners, vegetables, snacks, brand name yogurt & cheese, ice cream, breakfasts) are all located near the front of the store, while fresh ones (milk, meat, fish) are located at the back, and perishable-but-non-refrigerated goods (fresh fruits & vegetables) are off to the back & side. So it really seems like a deliberate attempt to put the items you would buy frequently as far away from the door as possible, and make you walk through the goods that you might stock up on on impulse.
Still doesn't explain why the cheese/yogurt/eggs aisle is stocked from the front, why the fresh produce displays are stocked from the top, or why cashew/soy/almond milk (which doesn't need to be refrigerated at all, and is in fact stored unrefrigerated in another part of the store if you buy smaller containers) is in with the milk case.
I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.
> why the cheese/yogurt/eggs aisle is stocked from the front
Logistics: because then you don't need rear access to the cooler shelves. That's square footage that you can better use in other ways. (In school I worked in a supermarket that put dairy in the beer/soda cooler, and we stocked it from the back.)
Some groceries -- every Whole Foods I've ever shopped at, for example -- have the eggs & dairy at the back with the milk, and stock those shelves from the back, too. Non-dairy "milks" only don't require refrigeration if they're ultra-pasteurized tetrapaks, which (in my experience) are only in 1Lt/Qt containers.
Milk is heavy. It's stocked onto shelves slightly angled forward so the remaining stock slides to the front for ease of reach. This need isn't generally applicable, or desireable, for other refrigerated/frozen foods.
I'm not sure that's a compelling reason. Why aren't frozen goods at the back of the store then?
And are you sure milk needs to be stocked from behind? Is it at the back of the store because it needs to be stocked from behind - or is it stocked from behind simply because its at the back of the store?
If you stock it from the front, then there could be a couple gallons in the back that never get bought. Unless they let the stock run out completely before restocking.
Plus with thing like milk, it is a real pain to push several gallons uphill to put something else in front (ever try to put a milk container back on the sloped shelf? Takes a couple hands and some fidgeting to do it).
Not from what I've seen in the UK. It heavily depends on the store where the products are placed, and the milk could be anywhere from near the door to the back.
For example, in Aldi stores, the milk is usually kept quite near the entrance, along with the kind of things you'd keep in the fridge (butter, cheese, etc) and the bread. In the likes of MS and Waitrose, it's usually somewhere near the side of the store, not too far from the entrance but past the fruit and vegetables. Same sort of deal with Tesco, Sainsburys, etc. Smaller convenience stores are usually just kind of random.
Nah, if you want real exploitative design, note how many shops are designed to draw out your shopping time as much as possible, by having a nice Z pattern that 'encourages' you to trudge through the whole store before ending up at the checkout. I think in that sense, most over here seem to have taken inspiration from the likes of Ikea or Costco more than anything else.
There's also the obvious 'fake sale' dark pattern, as well as the 'move everything round every few weeks to disorientate regular customers' one.
Which shops have a Z pattern? Which shops move products around? I've never seen that.
Costco certainly doesn't Costco has aisles, and sections for each major product category. IKEA has a "tour the store" design which is nice for a store you browse because you want something for every section (room in your house). You can go directly where you want if you know what you want.
Except I distinctly remember Facebook having customizable feeds in 2013. I was able to separate friends by groups to their own specific feeds and block them from my main feed. I havent been able to figure out how to get that feature back since I forgot about it. My best guess is I either deleted those lists or Facebook pulled back the feature due to lack of use.
Edit:
Here's a link to someone asking for help when I guess they started to pull the plug on custom friend feeds:
Before Google+ came out Facebook had "lists" where you could group friends to "lists" and make posts only visible to certain "lists". I used the feature heavily but come ~2013 I stopped using Facebook completely so I don't know if they have the same feature.
It was nice for keeping my World of Warcraft friends separate from "Family" and "College" and "Highschool" etc. As there were things I'd maybe want 1 group to see, but things I'd rather others didn't.
After ~4 years I just started unfriending people as it was easier then bothering to curate posts for specifics lists, and soon after I just deleted the account as I could SMS-text the people I wanted to chat with easier then bothering with facebook.
They specifically added mediocre, hidden filter options and labels in order to kill migration to G+. Once they were sure G+ was not a real threat, they stopped caring about those features they never wanted in the first place.
At least slot machines have a chance (however low) of paying out. The Facebook feed is a slot machine and all of the prizes are used condoms and dirty needles.
That's a really interesting perspective. In a sense, the only differences between clickbait listicle sites and Facebook are the infinite scrolling, the personalization, and who "owns" the ad network.
I'm pretty sure this is implemented on Facebook though it just isn't called 'circles' - I remember blog posts about the same functionality when Google+ launched, but I don't remember the details.
I unfollow (in contrast to unfriending) people who post things that I'm not interested in. I "hard follow" friends that post really cool stuff. By "hard following" I mean "See First" functionality of the the Newsfeed algorithm. It helps to keep my newsfeed more or less under control. I also try to teach the newsfeed to only show relevant ads by hiding those that I don't care about and clicking the ones I find interesting.
"The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit"
You know, I read this, and I thought "gee, Facebook is behaving a bit differently at the moment for me", because the last time I checked it, it showed maybe six posts and a message at the bottom that basically said I need more friends to see more posts.
And then I realized...I installed uBlock Origin the other day and promptly forgot about it, so of course Facebook hates me. It's like the Soup Nazi - no dopamine for you!
I was creeped out recently by how Facebook recommends people I've never met as friends; I've read some things that suggest it may be utilizing GPS data to try to match people in physical proximity, so I have to wonder if the recommendations are from the apartment building I live in.
"There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this."
Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.
Search discovery is by far my biggest pain point, and I say it as a fan.
I disagree with the GGP (I think) about Facebook wanting you to wade throw a river of crap so you stumble on ads. Their ads have been spot on to my interests so far.
I think an onioned version of Google plus circles could help Facebok influence the AI without preventing discovery.
But TBH, had G+ really been a contender at this point? This sounds like the creak of an abandoned house by now.
I can't even use Facebook without it freezing anymore. I'm using containers and locking down on tracking (no umatrix or noscript though) and Facebook literally craps itself everytime I have it open, helps keep me off of it. It must be my exact setup cause I do the same setup on every laptop / workstation and it slows to a crawl, though mobile.facebook.com works just fine... oddly enough. And I know if I use a vanilla browser it works just fine...
And in subsequent years they've done everything to hide this feature from the users and make it much harder to access (it used to be on the left navigation bar, now it's under 'Friend lists' (which also has been renamed at least twice) and also it disappeared from the mobile app)
The killer feature with circles is being able to post different things to different audiences IMHO, which Facebook can't do without different accounts.
That's not quite what I want -- I don't mind tech things being visible to family, but I suspect they're following me for the baby photos. So I don't want circles, or friend lists, that block people from seeing things, so much as a functional tagging system that lets the viewer decide which of my circles/lists they want to be in.
And I want it simple and easy to understand and use, even for non-techies, such that it "just works". And a pony.
No, but I agree that it would be a nice feature. Not so much as a tagging system, but this strikes me as something good they could finally do with all their ML/AI stuff.
I have friends who will post photos, and I'll love for FB to detect that they often post single photos, and allow me to subscribe to just those. Even if it means relying on FB's algorithms deciding what posts make the cut.
The same goes for friends who will occasionally post blog-style stuff. While I'd prefer it if they actually blogged, being able to go to their profile and getting a FB-suggested 'type' of post to subscribe to would be peachy.
Other algorithmic suggestions I can imagine:
- the friend who consistently posts great links to longer-form journalistic articles
- the friend who posts mostly 'funny comics/pics', but actually funny ones
- the friend who seems to know half the town and diligently clicks 'interested/going' for events that I am also interested in.
- and the above possibly with an option to drill down and get more specific suggestions (I'm sure FB could segment the events at least by a crude party/political dimension.
- the family member who posts all sorts of weird crap, but also the interesting family-related updates. It can't be that difficult to detect which of their posts are the family updates (and perhaps there could be a 'suggest category/tag/whatever' feature so that my dad can diligently mark these updates (which I know he would!).
With the above, or even a crude version of it, I could see myself browsing FB quite a bit, and I wouldn't mind the occasional sponsored post (which could be targeted specifically to the feed/mood I'm in).
I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing about all this, but I feel moderately confident that FB is not doing this, not because of particularly good reasons, but because they're stuck in a particular 'mode' and a bit too conservative about it (shortsighted advertising). I can't tell if this is just because they're a big corporation at this point, or because of 'SV incentives', or going public, or whatever else.
You can do that and indeed could do that before Google+ was even announced. It wasn't even tricky, you could create lists, set any one as the default, then when you wen to post just click and select the lists you wanted to appear to, or alternatively the ones you didn't want it to appear to.
I never got the whole circles thing as a unique selling point... like that functionality existed in Facebook beforehand and the reason people didn't use it much is simply because for a personal social media it's not that useful. I've used it maybe a handful of times in 10 years.
I mean I guess maybe because circles are a nicer design concept?
> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
You can do that already, with lists.
Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
I cannot track down any screenshots of how Path worked in the early days, only some media buzz around Path declining Google's buyout offer shortly before they launched +
So many old apps and services are just forgotten now, it's hard to prove any claim about who stole what idea. Kind of a shame really, so much of our digital history is effectively unknowable and lost forever.
It's a nice idea in theory but I prefer the current solution of completely separating your circles into different apps.
Work/Career - LinkedIn, topics of interest - Twitter/Reddit, personal stuff - FB, etc.
If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
I was excited about the "circles" idea on day one, but on day two I realized it was basically useless because it didn't let you create ad-hoc circle-groups based on venn diagram unions and intersections and differences, and their APIs were read-only so you couldn't hack this on top. I haven't cared about Google+ since.
On Day 2 I realized I was going to spend more time managing my circles than ever posting something to Google+. That was the moment I stopped logging in. (I like your idea of circle management. If they had adopted some sort of algorithmic approach where it "guessed" groups based on mutual interests/connections/etc then that would have worked too. "We've automatically created a group based on your University, when we add someone we will let you know!")
I can't imagine how I would spend very much time managing circles had I used Google+ more. The day I add somebody is the day I determine what circle(s) they would go into. For most people I know they would stay in those initial circles permanently. Moving contacts between, say, friends and work acquaintances would be pretty infrequent.
How do you imagine you would spend that much time managing them?
ML suggesting or guessing groups automatically would lessen the requirements of the user, but it was already pretty easy I thought.
Yeah, good points. I haven't used G+ in so long that I've forgotten the process. I think it was because I had way too many groups that I thought I was going to use, so each new connection required more though than necessary. You are right though, once you put someone in a group there isn't much more management necessary.
There's no amount of marketing and assurances that would make me believe circles would keep my private life private.
It's the reason why I never used Google Plus. And it's the reason why when I had a facebook account I never friended coworkers or professional contacts.
> Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.
While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.
I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.
This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.
This is exactly why the vast majority of my friends/family/contacts/whatever didn't use it.
Facebook was the first of this type of social network to get just about everyone to join. MySpace and Friendster and the like got the kids and the heavy web users but Facebook got your mom and your grandma. They got your boss, your barber, and your barista. They got the people who designed websites and the people who never did anything more complex than pointing at a picture on their iphone to launch an app.
It didn't matter if you or I liked some feature or other on G+ (or another competitor) because you can't just switch platforms like you can switch webmail providers. In order to work, you all have to be on the same platform and a good chunk of the potential userbase will simply never deal with switching platforms. How many people in your family or friend/acquaintance group still use their old hotmail (or AOL) email account? Probably not zero.
So even if they did "build a better Facebook" (which I think they did in many ways) it doesn't matter. A nicer layout and some improved features aren't enough to move the entire user base away from the default option. As long as it's a winner-take-all system, it will take a lot more to replace Facebook. It's more likely to become irrelevant than replaced.
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
I think the real solution to this turned out to be using different apps.
Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.
That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it.
So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. I feel like something that took that model and made it into a social network would be popular. (No, not like Reddit. Picture, say, Tumblr, but you can't reblog something if it's not from your community, instead only being able to create your own original link-post to it that doesn't propagate its interactions back to the community of the post it links to. So you have one shared piece of Original Content, but each community has its own sandboxed graph of likes and shares and comments and other interactions built around that Original Content.)
Not the same posters, but yes, that is what it is esentially. People are starting to notice that they don't actually want "social networks". Most people are not interested in constantly curating an optimal public image of themselves. What people want is communicating with people they like and share interests with. Slack and Discord are basically efforts to make more user friendly IRC. There is nothing wrong with that. (Except of issues with centralization and non-standards based communication)
One thing the younger kids are doing is making separate accounts altogether. I know for certain I follow my younger brother on his "family approved" account and not his "you're my close friend" account.
I always wondered why Facebook didn't just syndicate its site, i.e. allow people to congregate on differently-themed sites as they wish, while using the same infrastructure underneath.
I found Google+ circles time-consuming to maintain. Facebook actually had a better idea with Graph Search, which would have let me direct a post to “my friends from Boston”, or “friends of my friends who like hiking”. Sadly it probably was too “power-user” a feature for Facebook.
I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air.
However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate their contacts.
It could be argued that by focusing on the wide release, they inherently doomed the product. Hard to build a cohesive community of 300M when the stickiness factor doesn't exist yet. Arguably would have been better to focus on limited releases on niche communities to create that stickiness/increase retention.
Network effect is always going to be a problem. But beyond that, Diaspora is pretty functional. And pretty easy to use - the docs make it look a lot more complicated than it is. It isn't as featureful (no galleries, no events/calendars). If all you want to do is post and share, and have the privacy of Google+'s circles, Diaspora will do it for you.
Didn't the circles work in the opposite direction of how Facebook works?
That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.
Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.
The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.
Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
Sadly it seems they've hidden this to push their more tailored feed so they can push whatever ads and things through there aka filter (censor?) your friends posts better.
I found the circle pitch amazing, but in practice meh. That said G+ attracted a bunch of guys who gave me very nice streams of informations of all kinds. Some circles weren't as good in other network like twitter or reddit.
Apparently my brother's college roommate is a UX designer who worked on Google+ and he told my brother that he was directly inspired by the way I used AIM at the time. I had different screen names for different groups of friends and I would sign into AIM at different times of night with different screen names to chat with all these different groups.
Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
Circles is/was awesome, but it lacks the virality and oversharing present in the Facebook ecosystem. With FB, it was essentially (yes, one can fine-grain it, but it isn't straightforward) all or nothing, and people preferred all to nothing.
I agree that the "circles" idea is good, and that's why I'm implementing it in my social network. However the idea of circles by itself is not good enough for people to make the move.You need something else too..
Facebook had this feature from the beginning until August 8th, 2018. They were called Friend Lists and you could filter your feed using them. They also can be used for restricting access to content and that feature still exists.
Imho, with Google's raft of products, I think they used it wrong. Google didn't really need a Facebook. However, it did have room for a Disqus. They shouldve started with an improved system for comment pages on Blogger and YouTube (and heck, other products like Google News) and built out a social network from there, not the other way around.
The release was definitely terrible, but ironically not for the typical reasons of the time...namely servers falling over.
From my POV, the release was terrible because it let people in too fast. Social networks need to go through a period where only the "cool kids" are there. It creates a network effect. It was kind of impossible to go through that, so being on Google+ conveyed no status...in fact, it kind of did the opposite.
Agreed. I remember the first person I knew with a gmail account, back in 2003. I remember when I first heard of facebook. Being stuck with a "What is this?" thought for months was my problem and their lucky strike.
This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people.
We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.
Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.
And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.
Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
That also allowed Google+ to be used for virtual relationship with virtual identify far better than Facebook, although that is something Google dislike and constantly trying to crack down.
I unfollowed everyone except close family and a few local communities, buisnesses I actually care about. Now Facebook is great, now when I check it is has content I actually care about. FYI, there are tools to help you unfollow your 1000 friends...
I liked the idea of circles when posting, not just consuming. I know my work and university friends would appreciate techy stuff, but not my regular social circle. Same is true of my communities of which I'm a part.
On the other hand, this can enforce echo chambers, but as long as one is aware of that effect (and sadly, most wouldn't care), I really like broadly selecting my audience.
Take a look at what we're up to with https://textile.photos. Threads are private groups you can create and share with (currently photos, later any content). Very circle like.
Very much agree. I've ended up using Instagram as a de facto circle of people I actually care about, and rarely use up facebook proper, except to connect with more distant acquaintances.
MySpace had one clever thing going for it, and that was your "Top 8". People had to choose who would be in their "Top 8" friends listed on their profile page, and being selected by a friend was considered a badge of honor in the friendship.
Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.
You can create lists in Facebook and classify people into close friends, acquaintances, and restricted classes. You can view the feed from those lists if you want. It's more cumbersome than Google+ but you can do something similar on Facebook. I even have a list of all friends to actually see each and every update from all of them if I have the time and not the fraction of them that Facebook usually serves me.
I'm working on something that, to this day, is inspired on circles -- I just think the execution was really poor, the UX of having to always decide who sees what is just too heavy and there are better ways to approach this lovely idea.
I think one of the main mistakes which every big company makes, when introducing a new service or product that's different from their usual space/expertise, is to put the company's name on it.
Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name.
Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence.
But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it.
In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.)
Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them.
I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services.
Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.
My problem with Google is how terrible they've proven to be at building consumer software. The Google + news today just set me off even more than usual. All this search ad revenue has them drunk on power with zero concern for providing the end user with actually useful software.
I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing.
Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is.
So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY.
Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful.
Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.
I don't think you can put it down to "terrible marketing and release." Even a crappy release from Google still gave G÷ access and exposure to Google's enourmous user base. G+ got to feature in results whenever you Googled a name... it's 100 times the exposure any upstart social network could hope to achieve, even with genius marketing.
At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.
Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.
Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.
Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.
Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.
Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
I dearly miss the concept of circles in Twitter, both in incoming direction (filtering by what kind of stuff you'd want to read right now) and more important in outgoing direction (so I don't offend my fragile dev-o-sphere snowflake followers with manosphere or alt-right retweets).
Requires 2 things:
- feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them)
- feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle).
AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
I wrote a report in my freshman year of college on Google+ and how it was going to be "the next big thing in social media" due to Circles and how easy they were to use (I even got A!).
I still wish these had caught on more, or at least that Facebook hadn't implemented Friend Lists as an answer to this that they all but bury in their UI. It would be a much more tolerable place if they made it easier to use this, but similarly, if you have to categorize people in such a way that you rarely see their posts, what is the point of "keeping in touch" via Facebook in the first place? At least for me, if I don't care enough to see your updates (or at least the memes you like) on my news feed I may not think to look at your profile.
Poorly managed? They have now grown over 20% the last ten quarters and now over 26% the last two. Since the beginning never declined for a quarter YoY. Even though the great recession.
How many FTEs do they have running G+? There are a bunch of OSS people that use it because Facebook sucks and Twitter is toxic.
The good will from the OSS community in maintaining G+ can be easily paid for in the 250% growth you referenced. And please, save me from the 'we need to double down and focus on products that matter' - no, you need to maintain some credibility for your product ownership.
That's why I don't spend a single dollar with GCE.
Yes but not following how that relates to "poorly managed"?
I mean they are in all of history the fastest to a $100B market cap and since started in 1998 it was right at the .com bust. Then the fastest to $200B.
They have this immense cash-generating engine that is AdWords and that means management can make alot of mistakes without it even mattering. If that revenue went away, what would they do?
Conversely, if Bing was shut down at the same time, Microsoft would shrug and keep on rolling.
What exactly does "sunsetting consumer Google+" mean? The blog post wasn't particularly enlightening. Are they shutting down Google+ as a social network?
Probably, but the key point made in the article is that it will continue as an enterprise product, not just an internal one (though presumably Google is one of the enterprises that will continue using it.)
What exactly does "sunsetting consumer Google+" mean? The blog post wasn't particularly enlightening. Are they shutting down Google+ as a social network?
FTA: Action 1: We are shutting down Google+ for consumers. seems pretty obvious that's the case.
I mean, I get the term "sunsetting" - that isn't the problem. I don't know what "consumer Google+" means. I can guess that it might refer to the use of Google+ by ordinary people as a social network, but I'm far from certain of that interpretation.
They are shutting down the consumer version, which is the public edition. They are going to continue to develop and market Google+ for Businesses (like Facebook for Work).
I'm surprised that google keeps blogger.com for this long. it doesn't appear to be a commercial success and its features fall behind newer platforms like medium.
I like that there are also some privacy improvements in Android permissions mentioned in this post: "We are limiting apps’ ability to receive Call Log and SMS permissions on Android devices, and are no longer making contact interaction data available via the Android Contacts API."
We gave up the idea of pseudonymity on social networks just so Google could lose money on a product that it aggressively attempted to force the pseudonymous users of its other products to use. Actually pretty sad.
LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google.
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
That's the tragedy. It's a business that became one of the richest companies in the world in a few years, obtaining massive capital looking for investments along the way. It then holds all those investments (of money or time or intelligence) to the same standard of success and failure.
They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?
It did have users. I have no idea the exact number, and clearly it wasn't as many as Facebook, but it wasn't the ghost town people always made it out to be. Some of the Communities were actually quite active.
There are a lot of RPG communities, and a lot of roleplayers and RPG designers who don't even use Communities because G+ already is a community. Communities are a later addition, and G+ works fine without them.
Them: "We're shutting down X because too few people use it. Also, announcing Y!"
Users: "I'm not using Y. You'll probably shut it down."
[months pass]
Them: "We're shutting down Y because too few people use it."
The brand recognition that they hope will make Y successful might actually work against it.
No. We use a small part of the people API in production and will have to make changes in our code to avoid breakage. IIRC various points in Google's documentation pointed us to the more modern people API for our desired use case, away from "older" APIs which we will now have to revert back to...
Loads of people are depending on it, in spite of all Google's constant attempts to kill it. It started out as the best social network, and I've gotten to know tons of great people, projects and products there. It has really enriched my life in a way I don't see Facebook or Twitter doing. My Google+ friends and I will definitely miss it.
Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like.
It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one succeed, and who knows, maybe Mastodon will overtake Facebook one day, but I don't see any evidence in the Google+ shutdown that suggests that this is the case.
Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like.
I didn't say "it failed because it didn't do X". They said "... failed to gain developer adoption ....". To that specific point, I contend there is a clear and direct causal link between the decisions they made, and that lack of adoption. Of course I can't prove that in the strictest sense, but it's not hard to see that a lot of (potential) G+ developers kept asking and asking and asking for usable APIs and never got them. Speaking only for myself, as somebody who was initially a G+ fan and might have been inclined to build things on top of G+, I never did so for exactly this reason. Yes,"n=1" and all that, but a lot of other devs were very public with their position on this as well.
Obviously their decision to close it down involved multiple factors, but the lack of developer adoption was specifically called out by Google as one of those factors.
You're missing (or ignoring) a lot of historical context in your analysis. Google spent many years trying to compete with Facebook assuming that open standards were the thing that would win. ActivityStreams and PubSubHubHub are just two examples of federated standards that they built to compete, and that failed.
Google+ came out, if you'll remember, at the time that Page became CEO again and pivoted the company's direction away from standards and more towards product. In the case of social that clearly failed. In the case of Android it did not.
Yeah, I remember that, and I didn't intend my post here to be a detailed "analysis" of the entirety of what happened with G+. I just wanted to respond to one particular point that the author of the Google post made, vis-a-vis "developer adoption".
It would be fun to spend some time doing a more detailed analysis of the whole thing, including all of that historical context, but I don't have the time right now.
Before those two, more than a decade ago, Google also had OpenSocial, with MySpace and others. It was an interesting period of time, if you were there. The project was one of the "failures" that soured Google on having open standards at all costs.
Mastodon and Diaspora are both horrible names for anything aspiring to be socially popular. The former conveys something lumbering, slow, and now extinct. The latter sounds like a gastrointestinal disease if you don't know what it means, and conjures up images of a group of people being expelled or fleeing if you do.
G+ has been a laughingstock in terms of actual usage numbers for years. Nobody is using it. The fact that it was still supported is amazing. Is Google supposed to support failing products until the end of time?
For a definition of nobody that includes hundreds of millions of active users. Ie, more people than you will ever meet in your lifetime, possibly more than all the people those people will meet in their lifetimes.
No doubt this is a failure for Google.
For comparison, Bing turns over only a twentieth of Google's 60B per year.
Point and laugh if you like, but I'd be happy with considerably less than three billion a year.
It doesn't help that half of HN and I guess other communities as well decided to blame Google+ the social network for everything that was bad:
- linking their accounts (yep, bad)
- shuttering Reader (didn't care personally but I really doubt they calculated how much it would cost them in goodwill)
- etc
... and decided to use Google+ the social network as a target for all that frustration.
Google+ was really nice. And I'm gonna miss it.
Twitter? The place where I need to have 5 accounts to avoid spamming someone with things they don't care about?
Facebook? The place that 1.) Tries to make everything everyone puts into it public and 2.) makes large scale data harvesting possible and then say "didn't see that coming" after CA.
I've since been on Whatsapp (until Facebook bought it and destroyed the single reason why I was a walking billboard for it,) and later Telegran (don't like it either and I won't write anything there I cannot comfortably send on a postcard, but at least it is not proven yet that they will mine every ounce of metadata out of my connections and then try to kill me with spam, (including on my 2-factor address like Facebook will).
Mastodon? I don't know. Haven't tried yet. It might be brilliant but when I first heard about it it was presented as a twitter thingy and twitter is one of the more useless services I have a relationship with (of course, this is personal, for everyone who likes twitter that is more power to them I guess.)
People blame Google+ for that because Google branded all of that as Google+. At the time, Google+ invaded and occupied almost all Google properties, including YouTube (which was independent enough to resist part), Blogger (which resisted some), Reader (destroyed solely to remove Google+ competition), Hangouts, even Google OAuth
That doesn't make prevent the social network with the same name from being good though, although ironically the fact that it never became as popular as Facebook might have been part of why it stayed so nice for so long.
I think that was by design. Trying to sweep it under the covers to avoid outrage. I share that article with friends and they're likely to read the first half of the headline and not bother reading it.
there's a decent sized group of people who are outraged when google shuts down any product, regardless of if they used it or had even heard about it before.
I'm not particularly outraged, but the stereotype that Google shuts down projects too frequently to depend upon them is not going to go away when it keeps happening.
I use their mail, as a backup, their maps, and search engine. But I'd think long and hard before I developed against one of their services, or came to rely upon any future-project they released.
just out of curiosity, when was the last time google shut down a product that you were actively using?
For me it was Reader, and that was the only time. and yeah, i'm still a little salty about it. But every company shuts things down - google can't keep all their dead and unused failures running forever, and Google+ was obviously deserving of a shutdown.
"i don't trust google because they shut down things nobody uses" isn't really a rational complaint.
Reader, Orkut (yeah!), and Wave were the three I can remember off-hand. I suspect there were more.
I know that I had to cope with some changes to their map-pricing recently too - so I moved to an alternative (easy to manage since I was using leaflet.js as a wrapper).
Rightly or wrongly though I now have the impression that their APIs/Services are not likely to remain.
I guess this is a good time if anyone wants to create something similar:
- contextual ads OK with me, particularly if they are inline and not third party
- or a small yearly fee for no ads
- same features as Google+
- create the API that Google+ always lacked
- I and a lot of others don't really care about E2E for that kind of conversations so just don't data mine us, don't follow us around the web and don't sell out to Facebook and we should be fine.
But I'm gonna miss it. I haven't been too active the last few months so I guess I might be to blame too (but then again I've not been active anywhere else either lately except here).
Where else do you go to meet people who share interests in a more general sense? HN doesn't care about photography. Twitter doesn't allow me to chose to see someones photos but not their crazy posts about politics. Facebook... well, don't even mention it. It's less than a week since last time they let hackers access theirs users accounts, and even if they had a perfect security record wrt hacking, it seems they just can't stand the temptation to abuse data: change settings, do experiments on users to make them depressed, abuse 2-fator phone numbers for spamming, ask people to upload nudes - many of us couldn't make this up even if we tried..!
I know a lot of people in various Open Simulator related communities who are extremely unhappy about it, and are desperately searching for a replacement. Is that close enough?
I just realized this means plenty of long-form posts will poof into non-existence. Currently, the sole benefit from G+ to me is occasionally coming upon a solution to a problem, or at least a discussion, in someone's G+ blog. It so happens that the G+ crowd seems to consist of especially stubborn and strong-willed people with firm opinions, which lets the rest of us mooch off them.
Common "business as usual" technique. In a previous small company I used to work at, often when a senior engineer was leaving, the departure announcement email was mentioned as a last thing after a couple of "good news" announcements.
I think they are trying to spin it as a privacy-protecting move. This gains them two things:
1. They save face a little by not publicly confessing it was a failure.
2. Big tech (Facebook, Google, etc.) is facing privacy-related criticism right now. They can say, hey, this is yet one more step we're taking to improve the situation for everyone.
And they might even be partially right about both. Maybe they would have shut it down eventually but privacy challenges caused them to do it sooner than they otherwise would have.
oh no. My family have used G+ to share stuff. I don't want to have my mother-in-law on facebook, what else can we use?
I really like the idea of circles, some stuff I would share only with my close family, other stuff would be shared with wider family and friends, etc.
came here to say just that. the gall of google, claiming at the release of g+, that '+' was never an official qualifier and quotes were always the standard.
Serious question: you build your own social network based on what people really want it too work like, and won’t track them or allow advertising, instead you invite just a handful of “promoters” every year to show same ad to everyone (to pay your bills) and build in tools that will accept facebook export format - how do you crank-start such network to beat an obvious chicken-and-egg problem?
Serious answer: I would allow connections to current social networks. Maybe even bill it as an aggregator of sorts, so you can pull in (just for display purposes) as much data from linked social networks as possible. Give people a real reason to use your app without making them sacrifice the connections they've already made.
The problem with Google+ was the same problem as Facebook and Twitter have, except they were late to the party and didn't get a lot of free press and novelty-related attraction to help them gain traction.
They built a platform designed with no sharper focus than "for everyone", because that's what will supposedly generate the DAUs. But you have to try to bolt community on top of it and that's what generates the actual stickiness.
There are a galaxy of far stronger communities out there-- ones that were there long before Google+ and will be there long after. It's because they're clearly focused, themed communities-- newsgroups and forums.
If you provide some thread to bind the membership-- whether it's "People who Maintain Vintage Sansui Stereo Equipment", "People Who Really Liked The Animated Series 'Gargoyles'" or "Class of 1977 at Francisco Franco High School", it means people will generate content compelling to future users, and come onboard with attainable expectations.
These communities solved a lot of the problems that stymie many hypothetical Facebook killers:
* Selling new users. Just post the archives-- you can sell what you have, rather than promising "if we get aggressive enough and steer people into inviting enough loose acquaintances, somehow magic will happen and real community appears."
* Since they're more-or-less decentralized, you get very nice data partition models. On the outgoing side, you know that your messages are clearly restricted to one circle of potential viewers by default. On the incoming side, you're either viewing one community at a time, or aggregating yourself via RSS or the like under rules you know and understand. You're not going to be worried about a NSFW moment if you pop open "N-Scale Model Railway Enthusiasts Forum".
* The psychographic mix. You started with a clear message of value for participation, a give and take. In contrast, the classic social media feed appeals, by default, to a very specific type of self-promoter/narcissist type who just wants to bellow into the void "Look at me eating a burrito by the Eiffel Tower" and wait for validation. Think of all the people who never got on FB/Twitter/etc. because they saw no value in this type of interaction, or joined but have just a vacant profile after realizing it wasn't offering anything for them.
What the "community first" model doesn't do is scale to infinity. There are only so many people with any given interest. I think this is why Reddit is a success-- it's got a feel like a constellation of independent forums, that happen to use the same tech backend and SSO.
> Google is shutting down its long-neglected Facebook competitor Google+ following the disclosure of a vulnerability that could have resulted in third-party developers accessing private data from around 500,000 users, the company announced Monday.
I wonder if Project Strobe is also behind Google's recent effort to limit the permissions of Chrome extensions. So far I'm really liking the direction they're taking with this; making permissions optional and more fine-grained.
The use of the word "sunset" as a verb in posts like this is fucking infuriating. Yes, software types know what it means, but this is a consumer product with tens of millions of users, who have no familiarity with that term.
It's a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We're closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.
What? Sunsetting something is used outside of software. Hell, it's even used to describe temporary laws ("sunset law"). It's also used for brands and business policies.
And, sure, it might not make the top list of 1000 words you might hear on the street on any given day, but it's also very easy to search for. That doesn't make it a weasel word.
It's absolutely a weasel word, because there are plenty of common and clear ways to say this. The only reason it exists is so companies don't have to use words that connote a lack of success.
I think it exists because it's a concise way to communicate "this is ending, and will end in a predetermined amount of time, but it has not yet ended" in the same manner that sunset indicates that a day is ending but has not ended yet.
I'm a non-native speaker and sunsetting is not clear to me. I guessed what it means because I know Google and how popular Google+ is (in relative terms, I'm sure there's still hundreds of thousands of people who will lose contacts over this), but if someone had said Cloudflare is sunsetting, I'd just not have known what it meant.
And even knowing what it means, as I do now, I wouldn't say that sunsetting is any clearer in communicating that it's "going to" end than "shutting down" or "stopping" Google+. It's not as if the proposal said "ended" or "shut down" Google+, the "are" in something like "We're shutting down Google+" signals continuation to me.
I think this reply actually captures one of the problems with the term. It's super passive.
I realize this usage is becoming an official usage, but the original meaning was something that would end by design and automatically unless it was renewed. Like a law had a sunset provision if it already had an ending named at the time it was created. So the ending is built into the original plan from the beginning, it's bound to happen unless something changes.
Like... a sunset.
It's not something passive that's happened at Google though. They're saying we are going to close a service that is open, and has been expected to stay open indefinitely. It's not a thing that is just kind of happening, it's a decision that was just made and is being newly announced.
That's not true. Sunset years - to mean "a period of decline, especially the last years of a person's life" - is pretty well known. Irrespective of my background that's the first thought that pop into my head.
He has left the Linux project, at least temporarily[0], so presumably he will not be blogging, or alternatively he will have more time to host his own blog.
Google+ was a top-down, scrambling response to Facebook's meteoric rise. I think it ultimately failed because it didn't naturally mesh with or arise from Google's natural strengths.
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
It failed in my case because it polluted every other Google property - search, YouTube suggestions, etc. I'd prefer that suggestions and search results be based on my preferences and not those of an idiot cousin or a foaming-at-the-mouth prepper I happen to work with.
I didn't mean that particular ordinal literally... personally, I'm impressed by how they're able to achieve such a high level of uptime, data integrity, and near-realtime communication.
When it launched it was terribly incomplete.
It didn't even have events, which for a lot of people is a mayor reason to use Facebook and they could have even integrated it into Google calendar.
Events were eventually added much later (like a year after launch?), but at that point interest had already died down.
Why they did not delay the launch until it had parity with Facebook's core features is beyond me.
They killed it when they decided it would be a good idea to inflate user numbers with YouTube and Gmail users. It's better to have less but active users than a ghost town.
728 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] thread> Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using?
You misunderstand. He's not necessarily saying Google should maintain Google Reader or Google+ forever; he's saying that users can't trust Google to keep all but its most popular services online. If you like some new/niche Google service so much that you'll be unhappy when it's shut down, you should seriously consider not using it in the first place.
I'm not sad to see Google+ go, but the aggressive rate of metrics-driven product shutdowns by modern SaaS companies is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Users learn not get used to new services and hold of using them heavily, because they'll probably get shut down; that dampens adoption so services inevitably get shut down.
IMHO, SaaS companies need to embrace niche products, otherwise they're eventually going to kill off a lot of consumer appetite for innovation.
What useful features does MobileMe have, that iCloud doesn't? I just looked up the list of features and the only thing missing seems to be publishing a personal website with iWeb.
I don't know a single person using iTunes Ping, or heh, Game Center's social features.
Years later, I was at a museum/gallery/archive/library tech conference and the Google Cultural Institute folks were running their sales pitch. Multiple people asked them where their institution would be “when you cancel this like Google Reader”, a sentiment I’ve heard in enough other contexts that I doubt is fully appreciated by Google management even if it has been good for getting users to think about lock-in.
Plus Chrome not going anywhere as well as the Google home. But would still expect them to iterate. So even though Android has over 80% share still would not be surprised to see them move to Fuchsia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_smartphon... List of most popular smartphone apps - Wikipedia
Reader was an active product for 8 years. What more do you want?
90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.
Their own stats seem to back this: people arrive by mistake and immediately go somewhere else
The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...
For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.
How low have we got, capacity wise, when this is even considered "a hurdle"?
At one time, people had to walk to the TV to change the channels...
And before that, they had to have candles and be good with finger shadows to entertain themselves...
I thought g+ circles was a great idea, the reddit webdesign circle taught me I don't care about all of your kids.
I'm not sure why this is harder than choosing an email address to send an email to. Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.
Seems like the easiest thing in the world.
Also seems weird to say that even selecting a group to share to is a massive hurdle, but the fact that facebook buries the same functionality behind 5-6 clicks for each post is convenient. Seems more like it was too easy, and had to be made harder.
The problem is in managing the people in these lists. I haven't found a place where it shows all users I have in a single list. Adding or removing a single user is easy though, as the available lists are available for selection/deselection anywhere you're allowed to change your friend status with that person.
But if you're truly disciplined about this, you never learn that your second cousin is interested in quilting too.
And in many scenarios, there is little reward to being disciplined; unless you're into rather transgressive quilting, you'll probably share your quilting projects with everyone.
The combination of circles and collections is very powerful, though the way G+ implemented it, they do overlap a bit, and don't entirely play well together. Slightly more flexible collections would help a lot.
Heck I wish Facebook forced you to provide at least one tag with each post, just so that we could unfollow e.g baby posts/political posts and then maybe get something useful out of Facebook (my current solution is to unfollow the annoying person, but that is a bit too crude).
Google has ML based version of circle where depending on who is on the photo or whom you have added as recipient it suggests additional recipients.
To me that is a better UX.
a. They don't have to explicitly create circles.
b. If you keep adding someone new or remove someone over a period of time, the model would learn that and act accordingly.
c. If user wants to explicitly create a circle, they can probably do it as a group.
Too bad it failed. I liked g+
The choice of how to restrict your audience was placed below the 'new post' entry box, and was something you'd usually think about after writing your post. Which was more likely to be a multi-paragraph thing than the short fragments we're so used to tossing off on all the commercial social networks now.
Sounds like you need https://circles.app
IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful.
It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.
Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list.
Have also excluded family for a few posts.
I remember Facebook having it first; this blog post (https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to...) confirms that.
No one would directly attempt to be evil, it'd just turn out that way.
“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.” ― Jean Renoir
There are lots of other sites competing for attention, and to sacrifice a good UX would be shortsighted, especially with all the “FB is dead” comments people have been making the last few years.
Really? Especially a FB PM you mean? Because PMs otherwise have been known to use exactly such techniques and worse:
https://darkpatterns.org/
Some low level PM was tasked with optimizing time-on-site. They had some negative user feedback, but it didn't show up in their low sample UR and segmented rollout. Since they had good results in their primary success metrics and the secondary metrics did not tell a consistent story, they rolled it out to 100%. Any negative feedback from there was chalked up to change aversion among a small segment of users.
See the Sean Parker interview: https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
"Lard it up with debt, fire down to a skeleton-crew and stop all maintenance" sounds bad, like you're killing the company or something. "Unlocking value", hey, doesn't that sound better?
Similarly, "Let's get rich creating the second-coming of AOL by building a tacky nextgen panopticon" doesn't sound that great. "Creating a community of technical greats to bring people together and foster blah blah blah", while a completely bullshit nothing-statement, seems to shift focus off of the surveillance capitalism. For a bit.
Eventually, though, if you make your living sniffing other peoples' panties, eventually they notice and they take measures to limit your access to their laundry. FB and Google are both blocked entirely by IP at my gateway (along with a bunch of other surveillance shops), and the internet at home is so much nicer than what I see other people putting up with.
The thing to realize is that there's not actually a functional difference between that and the "numbers-driven" guy you describe. Evil isn't just the sadistic maniac; it's the affable businessman who doesn't care, doesn't even consider, whether his product helps people or hurts them, so long as it maximizes profit.
Someone else posted an interview with the former president of Facebook, and it's pretty enlightening: https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
Increasing "time spent" means spreading out relevant posts. I'm sure that Facebook is tuned to optimize for some combination of "time spent without drop-off in engagement". This is a "Good" version of the algorithm because it nets them the most revenue, while still fulfilling the need for the larger user base.
It's milkshake marketing[0]. People don't want the most efficient method of content consumption. That's why most "feeds" are no longer chronological. People on Facebook want to scroll around, look at posts, comment on articles, like a few things, etc. for X minutes/day without seeing things they've seen before, and without seeing things that are boring.
The job-to-be-done isn't to consume a certain relevant piece of content, it's to waste time and not get too bored.
[0] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensens-milkshake-marke...
Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.
It's also why Twitter wants to 'curate' your timeline, instead of simply displaying tweets from people you follow in temporal order.
I've given up every platform that forwent the chronological timeline because other feed algorithms are just frustrating, and Twitter is the only one I miss.
As far as I can tell, Twitter doesn't hide anything from, instead showing me tweets from people I don't follow.
I've turned off the "show best tweets first" option, and I stick with using Tweetbot. But, like most people seem to indicate here, about Facebook (which I don't use at all), my continued use hangs by a thread. It wouldn't take much for me to cancel my account. Again.
Facebook insiders have admitted that it is. Mike Allen, Facebook's first president, said this in an interview:
“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’,” he said. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.”
So that underscores their general attitude towards user behavior. The 'every once in a while' piece applies to the newsfeed too - it's designed to keep you searching for things you care about, and they carefully mix in things you don't, so that you're never too satisfied or unsatisfied, just constantly craving more.
Source (a slightly clickbaity-looking place, go at your own risk): https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
Does that give it less weight or more weight? It's hard to see what you were going for here.
He talks about how at the time they really didn't foresee the foreboding future implications of what they were trying to build at the time.
Although I think the reaction continues and we can't tell exactly what's happening even now.
Or do you think they should just get rid of the money, K Foundation style, regardless of whether doing so would reverse the effects of the work they did to earn it?
And just like a Slot Machine you are always left wanting to come back to play some more and even if you do your best to quit facebook, you are always being constantly reminded that of its existence everywhere you go.
> This has been the MO of mass entertainment since the gladiators fought the lions.
Absolutely.
Lots of early proto-social media companies were already doing things like that back in the 90s. Like when AOL was king and "You've Got Mail!" was a household catchphrase and featured in their marketing. They knew that people were thrilled to get stuff from other people.
Probably the most obvious and recent antecedent to gamefied social media would be, uh, well, games. There were a few decades of ideas to cherry pick from the game world.
Edit: brevity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J54k7WrbfMg
That quote reminds me of Louis CK's interview with Conan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c) where he says about mobile phones:
"You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product... and then you die."
There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually they get steamrolled by a "product" person who's invented some new terminology for whatever shady shit they are pushing now. "It's just growth hacking" "complimentary contextually relevant ads will improve the user experience".
People know. They always know. They just choose to feign ignorance when they get busted.
There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it.
Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to meet. Someone had to go, "Children are being drawn to extremist videos after watching PewDiePie and that's okay."
You enter into the comment section and it's automatically sorted by Controversial. At least that's how I see it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planogram
You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.
Although, maybe that's an argument for putting it by the checkout lines instead, which I suppose are by the entrance. Hm.
The milk is still in the back, along with perishable juices. The difference between them and the aisles is that processed foods (frozen dinners, vegetables, snacks, brand name yogurt & cheese, ice cream, breakfasts) are all located near the front of the store, while fresh ones (milk, meat, fish) are located at the back, and perishable-but-non-refrigerated goods (fresh fruits & vegetables) are off to the back & side. So it really seems like a deliberate attempt to put the items you would buy frequently as far away from the door as possible, and make you walk through the goods that you might stock up on on impulse.
I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.
Logistics: because then you don't need rear access to the cooler shelves. That's square footage that you can better use in other ways. (In school I worked in a supermarket that put dairy in the beer/soda cooler, and we stocked it from the back.)
Milk is heavy. It's stocked onto shelves slightly angled forward so the remaining stock slides to the front for ease of reach. This need isn't generally applicable, or desireable, for other refrigerated/frozen foods.
And are you sure milk needs to be stocked from behind? Is it at the back of the store because it needs to be stocked from behind - or is it stocked from behind simply because its at the back of the store?
Plus with thing like milk, it is a real pain to push several gallons uphill to put something else in front (ever try to put a milk container back on the sloped shelf? Takes a couple hands and some fidgeting to do it).
The distance from bay to fridge plus fridge to the exit is the same wherever it goes.
For example, in Aldi stores, the milk is usually kept quite near the entrance, along with the kind of things you'd keep in the fridge (butter, cheese, etc) and the bread. In the likes of MS and Waitrose, it's usually somewhere near the side of the store, not too far from the entrance but past the fruit and vegetables. Same sort of deal with Tesco, Sainsburys, etc. Smaller convenience stores are usually just kind of random.
Nah, if you want real exploitative design, note how many shops are designed to draw out your shopping time as much as possible, by having a nice Z pattern that 'encourages' you to trudge through the whole store before ending up at the checkout. I think in that sense, most over here seem to have taken inspiration from the likes of Ikea or Costco more than anything else.
There's also the obvious 'fake sale' dark pattern, as well as the 'move everything round every few weeks to disorientate regular customers' one.
Costco certainly doesn't Costco has aisles, and sections for each major product category. IKEA has a "tour the store" design which is nice for a store you browse because you want something for every section (room in your house). You can go directly where you want if you know what you want.
In the US, Trader Joe's does this.
Edit:
Here's a link to someone asking for help when I guess they started to pull the plug on custom friend feeds:
https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020258...
Friends List is here apparently:
https://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/lists/
It was nice for keeping my World of Warcraft friends separate from "Family" and "College" and "Highschool" etc. As there were things I'd maybe want 1 group to see, but things I'd rather others didn't.
After ~4 years I just started unfriending people as it was easier then bothering to curate posts for specifics lists, and soon after I just deleted the account as I could SMS-text the people I wanted to chat with easier then bothering with facebook.
Groups only. And even those are just an occassional check in.
Why on earth would this be the "point" and what product manager is being paid for this BS.
"If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."
https://m.facebook.com/help/ipad-app/204737159568794?helpref...
You know, I read this, and I thought "gee, Facebook is behaving a bit differently at the moment for me", because the last time I checked it, it showed maybe six posts and a message at the bottom that basically said I need more friends to see more posts.
And then I realized...I installed uBlock Origin the other day and promptly forgot about it, so of course Facebook hates me. It's like the Soup Nazi - no dopamine for you!
I was creeped out recently by how Facebook recommends people I've never met as friends; I've read some things that suggest it may be utilizing GPS data to try to match people in physical proximity, so I have to wonder if the recommendations are from the apartment building I live in.
Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.
I disagree with the GGP (I think) about Facebook wanting you to wade throw a river of crap so you stumble on ads. Their ads have been spot on to my interests so far.
I think an onioned version of Google plus circles could help Facebok influence the AI without preventing discovery.
But TBH, had G+ really been a contender at this point? This sounds like the creak of an abandoned house by now.
The killer feature with circles is being able to post different things to different audiences IMHO, which Facebook can't do without different accounts.
And I want it simple and easy to understand and use, even for non-techies, such that it "just works". And a pony.
I have friends who will post photos, and I'll love for FB to detect that they often post single photos, and allow me to subscribe to just those. Even if it means relying on FB's algorithms deciding what posts make the cut.
The same goes for friends who will occasionally post blog-style stuff. While I'd prefer it if they actually blogged, being able to go to their profile and getting a FB-suggested 'type' of post to subscribe to would be peachy.
Other algorithmic suggestions I can imagine: - the friend who consistently posts great links to longer-form journalistic articles - the friend who posts mostly 'funny comics/pics', but actually funny ones - the friend who seems to know half the town and diligently clicks 'interested/going' for events that I am also interested in. - and the above possibly with an option to drill down and get more specific suggestions (I'm sure FB could segment the events at least by a crude party/political dimension. - the family member who posts all sorts of weird crap, but also the interesting family-related updates. It can't be that difficult to detect which of their posts are the family updates (and perhaps there could be a 'suggest category/tag/whatever' feature so that my dad can diligently mark these updates (which I know he would!).
With the above, or even a crude version of it, I could see myself browsing FB quite a bit, and I wouldn't mind the occasional sponsored post (which could be targeted specifically to the feed/mood I'm in).
I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing about all this, but I feel moderately confident that FB is not doing this, not because of particularly good reasons, but because they're stuck in a particular 'mode' and a bit too conservative about it (shortsighted advertising). I can't tell if this is just because they're a big corporation at this point, or because of 'SV incentives', or going public, or whatever else.
Though let’s be honest here - anything you post on Facebook (or any other social media) you should assume is public, regardless of privacy controls.
I never got the whole circles thing as a unique selling point... like that functionality existed in Facebook beforehand and the reason people didn't use it much is simply because for a personal social media it's not that useful. I've used it maybe a handful of times in 10 years.
I mean I guess maybe because circles are a nicer design concept?
You can do that already, with lists.
Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
So many old apps and services are just forgotten now, it's hard to prove any claim about who stole what idea. Kind of a shame really, so much of our digital history is effectively unknowable and lost forever.
If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
How do you imagine you would spend that much time managing them?
ML suggesting or guessing groups automatically would lessen the requirements of the user, but it was already pretty easy I thought.
It's the reason why I never used Google Plus. And it's the reason why when I had a facebook account I never friended coworkers or professional contacts.
While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform.
I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively.
This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process.
Insanely, insanely hard.
Which, IMHO, means Google didn't understand what it was doing when it started G+.
They just tapped into one of the basic tenets of the human condition; the desire to be connected to another human.
Facebook was the first of this type of social network to get just about everyone to join. MySpace and Friendster and the like got the kids and the heavy web users but Facebook got your mom and your grandma. They got your boss, your barber, and your barista. They got the people who designed websites and the people who never did anything more complex than pointing at a picture on their iphone to launch an app.
It didn't matter if you or I liked some feature or other on G+ (or another competitor) because you can't just switch platforms like you can switch webmail providers. In order to work, you all have to be on the same platform and a good chunk of the potential userbase will simply never deal with switching platforms. How many people in your family or friend/acquaintance group still use their old hotmail (or AOL) email account? Probably not zero.
So even if they did "build a better Facebook" (which I think they did in many ways) it doesn't matter. A nicer layout and some improved features aren't enough to move the entire user base away from the default option. As long as it's a winner-take-all system, it will take a lot more to replace Facebook. It's more likely to become irrelevant than replaced.
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.
So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. I feel like something that took that model and made it into a social network would be popular. (No, not like Reddit. Picture, say, Tumblr, but you can't reblog something if it's not from your community, instead only being able to create your own original link-post to it that doesn't propagate its interactions back to the community of the post it links to. So you have one shared piece of Original Content, but each community has its own sandboxed graph of likes and shares and comments and other interactions built around that Original Content.)
You mean IRC?
I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air.
However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate their contacts.
I'd say, rather, "out of Gmail account users"
I don't think Facebook will add them, but Diaspora has them.
Oh is diaspora still alive? I would use it, but I'd guess I'd have even fewer friends there than on Google+
Network effect is always going to be a problem. But beyond that, Diaspora is pretty functional. And pretty easy to use - the docs make it look a lot more complicated than it is. It isn't as featureful (no galleries, no events/calendars). If all you want to do is post and share, and have the privacy of Google+'s circles, Diaspora will do it for you.
Facebook already has them...
[0] No idea if anyone on the Google team had actually used Lycos Circles but it's not unreasonable to think they might of.
[1] https://info.lycos.com/about/press/?pressReleaseId=1550
That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc.
Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective.
The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control.
Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
https://www.facebook.com/help/204604196335128
Sadly it seems they've hidden this to push their more tailored feed so they can push whatever ads and things through there aka filter (censor?) your friends posts better.
Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
ouch
[1]: https://nextcloud.com
[2]: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles
From my POV, the release was terrible because it let people in too fast. Social networks need to go through a period where only the "cool kids" are there. It creates a network effect. It was kind of impossible to go through that, so being on Google+ conveyed no status...in fact, it kind of did the opposite.
We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.
Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.
And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.
Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
On the other hand, this can enforce echo chambers, but as long as one is aware of that effect (and sadly, most wouldn't care), I really like broadly selecting my audience.
Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.
Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name.
Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence.
But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it.
In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.)
Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them.
I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services.
Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.
I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing.
Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is.
So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY.
Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful.
Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.
At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.
Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.
Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.
Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.
Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.
Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
Requires 2 things: - feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them) - feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle).
AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
I still wish these had caught on more, or at least that Facebook hadn't implemented Friend Lists as an answer to this that they all but bury in their UI. It would be a much more tolerable place if they made it easier to use this, but similarly, if you have to categorize people in such a way that you rarely see their posts, what is the point of "keeping in touch" via Facebook in the first place? At least for me, if I don't care enough to see your updates (or at least the memes you like) on my news feed I may not think to look at your profile.
That is pretty hard to do.
The good will from the OSS community in maintaining G+ can be easily paid for in the 250% growth you referenced. And please, save me from the 'we need to double down and focus on products that matter' - no, you need to maintain some credibility for your product ownership.
That's why I don't spend a single dollar with GCE.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin...
I mean they are in all of history the fastest to a $100B market cap and since started in 1998 it was right at the .com bust. Then the fastest to $200B.
Does that not take good management?
So they have both the #1 and #2 most popular sites now.
Heck they are rolling out the first robot taxi service in Arizona later this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites
Conversely, if Bing was shut down at the same time, Microsoft would shrug and keep on rolling.
They will keep it active as an internal network, but regular old joes won't be able to use Google+ anymore.
Probably, but the key point made in the article is that it will continue as an enterprise product, not just an internal one (though presumably Google is one of the enterprises that will continue using it.)
FTA: Action 1: We are shutting down Google+ for consumers. seems pretty obvious that's the case.
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?
It did have users. I have no idea the exact number, and clearly it wasn't as many as Facebook, but it wasn't the ghost town people always made it out to be. Some of the Communities were actually quite active.
Their only advantage to Facebook groups was more natural (temporal, not recommended) sorting of data.
Some Linux kernel devs IIRC (I do not hang there).
Some local people.
One user I followed who was very into clean energy solutions.
Gardening (vegetables, chilies, general).
Ham radio.
The thing I never saw on Google+ was politics (I guess it is there but I never looked for it and never found it : )
> "The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90% of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."
While i'm sure power law applies, 5 seconds is a hilariously low amount of engagement for the 90%
For active users, Google+ is basically the hub from which they strike out to the rest of the Web.
It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one succeed, and who knows, maybe Mastodon will overtake Facebook one day, but I don't see any evidence in the Google+ shutdown that suggests that this is the case.
I didn't say "it failed because it didn't do X". They said "... failed to gain developer adoption ....". To that specific point, I contend there is a clear and direct causal link between the decisions they made, and that lack of adoption. Of course I can't prove that in the strictest sense, but it's not hard to see that a lot of (potential) G+ developers kept asking and asking and asking for usable APIs and never got them. Speaking only for myself, as somebody who was initially a G+ fan and might have been inclined to build things on top of G+, I never did so for exactly this reason. Yes,"n=1" and all that, but a lot of other devs were very public with their position on this as well.
Obviously their decision to close it down involved multiple factors, but the lack of developer adoption was specifically called out by Google as one of those factors.
Google+ came out, if you'll remember, at the time that Page became CEO again and pivoted the company's direction away from standards and more towards product. In the case of social that clearly failed. In the case of Android it did not.
It would be fun to spend some time doing a more detailed analysis of the whole thing, including all of that historical context, but I don't have the time right now.
It was a catastrophic misjudgement that killed the platform at birth.
But, if they're outside Google, and therefore didn't screw up account merging, real names, search, native apps, etc? Potentially quite a bit longer!
G+ has been a laughingstock in terms of actual usage numbers for years. Nobody is using it. The fact that it was still supported is amazing. Is Google supposed to support failing products until the end of time?
For a definition of nobody that includes hundreds of millions of active users. Ie, more people than you will ever meet in your lifetime, possibly more than all the people those people will meet in their lifetimes.
No doubt this is a failure for Google.
For comparison, Bing turns over only a twentieth of Google's 60B per year.
Point and laugh if you like, but I'd be happy with considerably less than three billion a year.
If hacker news had 100 people working on it, it would need to do some tricks to stay alive.
- linking their accounts (yep, bad)
- shuttering Reader (didn't care personally but I really doubt they calculated how much it would cost them in goodwill)
- etc
... and decided to use Google+ the social network as a target for all that frustration.
Google+ was really nice. And I'm gonna miss it.
Twitter? The place where I need to have 5 accounts to avoid spamming someone with things they don't care about?
Facebook? The place that 1.) Tries to make everything everyone puts into it public and 2.) makes large scale data harvesting possible and then say "didn't see that coming" after CA.
I've since been on Whatsapp (until Facebook bought it and destroyed the single reason why I was a walking billboard for it,) and later Telegran (don't like it either and I won't write anything there I cannot comfortably send on a postcard, but at least it is not proven yet that they will mine every ounce of metadata out of my connections and then try to kill me with spam, (including on my 2-factor address like Facebook will).
Mastodon? I don't know. Haven't tried yet. It might be brilliant but when I first heard about it it was presented as a twitter thingy and twitter is one of the more useless services I have a relationship with (of course, this is personal, for everyone who likes twitter that is more power to them I guess.)
That doesn't make prevent the social network with the same name from being good though, although ironically the fact that it never became as popular as Facebook might have been part of why it stayed so nice for so long.
Poor G+.
The new GMail is also helping me with that.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17848500/google-inbox-shu...
I use their mail, as a backup, their maps, and search engine. But I'd think long and hard before I developed against one of their services, or came to rely upon any future-project they released.
For me it was Reader, and that was the only time. and yeah, i'm still a little salty about it. But every company shuts things down - google can't keep all their dead and unused failures running forever, and Google+ was obviously deserving of a shutdown.
"i don't trust google because they shut down things nobody uses" isn't really a rational complaint.
I know that I had to cope with some changes to their map-pricing recently too - so I moved to an alternative (easy to manage since I was using leaflet.js as a wrapper).
Rightly or wrongly though I now have the impression that their APIs/Services are not likely to remain.
But I only have those conversations with a small number of people, so I can't argue against Google's usage conclusions.
I use and enjoy G+ more than Facebook, and I have no interest in Twitter. I probably just won't have those conversations anymore =\",
- contextual ads OK with me, particularly if they are inline and not third party
- or a small yearly fee for no ads
- same features as Google+
- create the API that Google+ always lacked
- I and a lot of others don't really care about E2E for that kind of conversations so just don't data mine us, don't follow us around the web and don't sell out to Facebook and we should be fine.
But I'm gonna miss it. I haven't been too active the last few months so I guess I might be to blame too (but then again I've not been active anywhere else either lately except here).
Where else do you go to meet people who share interests in a more general sense? HN doesn't care about photography. Twitter doesn't allow me to chose to see someones photos but not their crazy posts about politics. Facebook... well, don't even mention it. It's less than a week since last time they let hackers access theirs users accounts, and even if they had a perfect security record wrt hacking, it seems they just can't stand the temptation to abuse data: change settings, do experiments on users to make them depressed, abuse 2-fator phone numbers for spamming, ask people to upload nudes - many of us couldn't make this up even if we tried..!
But it is too limited (Google+ lets you write and cite text posts etc.)
Also while I originally liked it I think it is too heavily tied into Facebook now.
1. They save face a little by not publicly confessing it was a failure.
2. Big tech (Facebook, Google, etc.) is facing privacy-related criticism right now. They can say, hey, this is yet one more step we're taking to improve the situation for everyone.
And they might even be partially right about both. Maybe they would have shut it down eventually but privacy challenges caused them to do it sooner than they otherwise would have.
+1
crickets
Does this mean they are just shifting the social network features over to other products?
after that you can click on [friends] and youll get a [friend me] url
If the product is good, people will use it. If it's not, they won't, in the end. G+ wasn't good.
They built a platform designed with no sharper focus than "for everyone", because that's what will supposedly generate the DAUs. But you have to try to bolt community on top of it and that's what generates the actual stickiness.
There are a galaxy of far stronger communities out there-- ones that were there long before Google+ and will be there long after. It's because they're clearly focused, themed communities-- newsgroups and forums.
If you provide some thread to bind the membership-- whether it's "People who Maintain Vintage Sansui Stereo Equipment", "People Who Really Liked The Animated Series 'Gargoyles'" or "Class of 1977 at Francisco Franco High School", it means people will generate content compelling to future users, and come onboard with attainable expectations.
These communities solved a lot of the problems that stymie many hypothetical Facebook killers:
* Selling new users. Just post the archives-- you can sell what you have, rather than promising "if we get aggressive enough and steer people into inviting enough loose acquaintances, somehow magic will happen and real community appears."
* Since they're more-or-less decentralized, you get very nice data partition models. On the outgoing side, you know that your messages are clearly restricted to one circle of potential viewers by default. On the incoming side, you're either viewing one community at a time, or aggregating yourself via RSS or the like under rules you know and understand. You're not going to be worried about a NSFW moment if you pop open "N-Scale Model Railway Enthusiasts Forum".
* The psychographic mix. You started with a clear message of value for participation, a give and take. In contrast, the classic social media feed appeals, by default, to a very specific type of self-promoter/narcissist type who just wants to bellow into the void "Look at me eating a burrito by the Eiffel Tower" and wait for validation. Think of all the people who never got on FB/Twitter/etc. because they saw no value in this type of interaction, or joined but have just a vacant profile after realizing it wasn't offering anything for them.
What the "community first" model doesn't do is scale to infinity. There are only so many people with any given interest. I think this is why Reddit is a success-- it's got a feel like a constellation of independent forums, that happen to use the same tech backend and SSO.
Source: https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/google-plus-shut-down-...
It's a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We're closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.
And, sure, it might not make the top list of 1000 words you might hear on the street on any given day, but it's also very easy to search for. That doesn't make it a weasel word.
And even knowing what it means, as I do now, I wouldn't say that sunsetting is any clearer in communicating that it's "going to" end than "shutting down" or "stopping" Google+. It's not as if the proposal said "ended" or "shut down" Google+, the "are" in something like "We're shutting down Google+" signals continuation to me.
I realize this usage is becoming an official usage, but the original meaning was something that would end by design and automatically unless it was renewed. Like a law had a sunset provision if it already had an ending named at the time it was created. So the ending is built into the original plan from the beginning, it's bound to happen unless something changes.
Like... a sunset.
It's not something passive that's happened at Google though. They're saying we are going to close a service that is open, and has been expected to stay open indefinitely. It's not a thing that is just kind of happening, it's a decision that was just made and is being newly announced.
It is therefore presumably not the primary consumer-facing announcement of the shutdown.
Hopefully they will use one of the terms you noted, or something similar, for that announcement.
"We are shutting down Google+ for consumers."
> this is fucking infuriating
Comments like yours are much worse.
> Action 1: We are _shutting down_ Google+ for consumers.
> software types
> weasel word
Pull the plank from your own eye first.
Interesting, wasn't this basically the same problem that Facebook had with Cambridge Analytica?
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-a-break-f...
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
At the risk of not being taken seriously, er, what are the first 5 wonders of the tech world?
Is AWS #1? Is Google's huge swarm of web search indexing machines #1? What makes it onto that list?
Events were eventually added much later (like a year after launch?), but at that point interest had already died down.
Why they did not delay the launch until it had parity with Facebook's core features is beyond me.