I'm not sure they aren't. All of my Google+ photos wound up in Google Photos without any work on my part, other than maybe actually accessing photos.google.com.
Isn't it funny that we're even having this conversation? That Google can offer two products, differentiated by a single character (Google+ Photos and Google Photos), with few obvious indicators as to which I should use?
It's confusing to me, but trying to explain it to my mom is absolutely impossible. I wonder whether the average user even knows there's a difference between the two. It's a perfect example of unnecessary redundancy.
I really feel like it is just to cleanse it of the connection to Google+. The product should have been an evolution of Google+ Photos, but they are clearly trying to de-couple services from Google+.
Look at the Inbox vs Gmail experiment for example. While not tied to Google+, Inbox runs parallel to Gmail and accesses the same things. Just a different window dressing. I'm sure many at Google want to see Inbox take over Gmail at some point.
This is one of the reasons I doubt we ever see a Material Design Gmail. I think they'll run with it until Inbox is "ready".
I think that the strategy there was make a new product (Inbox) to test how to reinvent Gmail. Gmail needs a redesign but have a very large user base to take the risk of make mistakes. With Inbox they are free to innovate and try to fix the email problem without carrying a giant on they shoulders. I think even Google don't know yet what's is going to do after.
> Isn't it funny that we're even having this conversation? That Google can offer two products, differentiated by a single character (Google+ Photos and Google Photos), with few obvious indicators as to which I should use?
Google Photos was announced May 2015, explicitly as the future of what had been Google+ Photos. It has been clear since then that that's what would be supported going forward, and then Google+ Photos was deprecated legacy.
I really don't understand Google products sometimes. Google+ Photos is different from Google Photos? Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets[0] are all separate things, though somehow interconnected?
And I'm a technical user. I literally don't understand how (or if) non-technical users are expected to be able to understand how these work.
But seriously, this has to take the cake. "Google Photos" is replacing "Google+ Photos", though "Google+" is still around, and you can use Google+ to share photos from "Google Photos" (but not "Google+ Photos", at least not anymore).
[0] Going to drive.google.com and then clicking "New Sheet" will redirect me to docs.google.com, even though Google Sheets was (at least at one point) presented as a "new" product distinct from Google Docs. At least that's how it seemed to me when they launched it.
I concur. I don't understand why they didn't just announce that they had improved Google+ Photos. As in this is the next big version of the same product. Oh, and we dropped the '+'.
Saying that we now have a new product that does the same as the old one, and then migrating people to the new one is just confusing to the user.
I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform, and back to standalone solutions similar to their offerings from the pre-Google+ days.
A bit off-topic:
I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that.
Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").
Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.
Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other. Even if I can't answer the phone (in a meeting, didn't hear it go off) she can take a look and see where I am.
Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out.
Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory.
Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.
> Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other...
iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.
IMO, hangouts is infuriatingly bad. It's way too keystroke-intensive to sign in and sign out of accounts in the iOS app; the Chrome app (plugin?) thing is terrible and the functionality seems to change every other week.
I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.
Looks like location sharing is being moved from Google+ soon too [1], and the auto awesome features in Google+ photos are still available in Google Photos. I use Google+ mainly to share photos, they're already there backed up from my phone, so it's convenient.
Like a lot of things that wound up clumsily rolled into Google+ location sharing actually existed pre-Google+ in the form of Latitude (which came out of Dodgeball originally).
And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.
I find circles very hard to understand compared to Facebook's "friendship model". If I add you as a friend and you accept, you can see my entire profile, and interact with it and I can the same with yours. Very straight forward.
If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?
The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit. This is what I find so irritating about Google+, it's everywhere it doesn't need to be. Comparisons to things like Twitter and FB fall flat for this reason.
I did that for a while to hide the random “notifications” from people I had never heard about that appeared every other day on google.com. I had to change the custom style so many times because they changed the ids/classes every other week that now I just logged out of my Google account to not see it.
There's a better way now. Click the notifications bell and then in the popup, click on the gear icon - you can check and uncheck boxes to customize which Google products show notifications there.
I actually have really enjoyed the UI for G+. I think it's really a technically excellent platform that has totally failed to execute well on the userbase side.
I absolutely agree. If my memory serves me correctly, it was the first Google app to feature "cards" -- which has obviously made its way to almost every other IP that Google owns. The UI is slick, and it felt very fresh when it debuted.
I like the UI for G+, especially for the posts and comments. I don't like the design of the menus though. On a comparative scale, Facebook is ugly and mostly cluttered.
Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.
Can they bring Google Reader back now? I'm still bitter about it being killed to focus on Google+. Now that Google+ is dead in the water it makes the decision to kill Reader even worse.
Why? Reader was in maintenance mode for years, and companies that appeared when it disappeared have gone above and beyond what they offered. See: Feedly.com
Feedly has improved a lot but it still doesn't display feeds as densely as Reader did and I feel a lot slower getting through a lot of feeds. Searching for articles was fantastic on Google Reader, but with Feedly it never works. Maybe I need to pay to enable search? Ultimately search 'just worked' on Google Reader and never works for me on Feedly.
If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
Do you use Feedly? Are you in "Title Only" mode? It's pretty dense -- I might be misremembering, but I'm not sure how Google could have been denser.
I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
Feedly may have improved it's layout since I last tried it (admittedly it's been over a year). But, of all the companies to come up with what I found to be the best replacement: reader.aol.com
I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.
My problem with Feedly is UI/UX. Web is.. fine, but the app have really weird interactions and is clunky.
I use Digg Reader. Web is awesome, love the simplicity, the app need some love but is way more better than Feddly. The thing I don't like about Digg Reader is the Digg part, I only want my lovely curated RSS feeds.
Also try NewsBlur, Feedreader, The Old Reader and Newsvibe but Digg Reader was the best for my needs.
Feedly's Android app is a mess. I can fiddle with the settings to get it into a usable state, but the default behavior just makes no sense (and it's not good after the tweaking).
The default, so far as I can tell, is to dump every feed together to provide an "all-up" view. That could be okay, but then they layer a terrible card UI on top of it that's completely unintuitive. The top cards are big and generally pixelated (because it zooms in for some inexplicable reason), and it switches to a slightly different view after the first card, again, for no clear reason. I can swipe through the cards and reach the end, where it shows a giant checkmark and the words "Done" and "N reviewed". Reaching that page doesn't actually mean I'm done, though. Nothing is actually marked read until I go back to the top and tap on each them (or use the "mark all read" option). I'm either completely missing the interaction paradigm they intend or they haven't put much thought into what the interaction paradigm actually is. Maybe the devs all use iPhones and the Android client is an afterthought?
Meanwhile their website is generally okay, but I am completely at a loss for how to mark an item as unread once I've opened it. I should probably look for a different feed aggregator.
Have you enabled "Auto Mark as Read" in Settings? You can change the "ALL" View in the Sidemenu.
I am actualy working on a Feedly alternative. That's sorts articles by popularity. And can import Popularty counts from Sites that offer it. I hope the 70k Hacker News Readers on Feedly would like that. My Idea is to make search free and instead offer "Sort by Time" and "Compact View" as a Pro feature. Would anyone here be interested?
No, I apparently don't have that enabled. I could do that, but I'm pretty much ready to move to something else. The Feedly web app is pretty nice, though it has quirks and obvious bugs. But I shouldn't have to change half the settings on the Android app just to make it usable. I can't understand how they built this and never said, "Oh, this is really awkward." It's awkward enough that I pretty much just never use it. I only used the Android app again recently because I got a new phone and decided to give it another try.
Of course, maybe everyone else loves the interaction model and I'm the oddball. That's entirely possible, but regardless I want to find something else at this point. (Trying Digg reader as of last night.)
Hey, I run NewsBlur and I'd love to know why it's slowing down in safari for you. I use Safari myself as my primary browser and NewsBlur's always instantaneous. Are you running any extensions, specifically adblock? Email me: samuel@newsblur.com.
I recommend Bazqux.com. It is similar to Google Reader in many ways, the UI is very familiar as well, and it lets you log in with a Google account if you like.
It is paid-for, although very cheap (and first month free). I ended up buying a life-subscription. I really miss Google Reader as well.
What's obnoxious is that everyone watching from the outside knew all these forced G+ moves were annoying and not welcome. One of the worst outcomes, imo, is the addition of G+ comments on YouTube videos - you end up with comments like "Check this out" in the video's actual comments section. Those comments are completely useless and destroy any sort of conversation, if it's even possible to have one in YT comments.
That's one of the reasons why I stopped using G+. I couldn't figure out how to make a public link on G+ to a YouTube video - without the comment appearing on YouTube. It got to a point where I would look on Vimeo etc to see if they had the video to link to.
Alientube (firefox plugin) might be of interest to you. It shows reddit comments for youtuve videos, which tend to be of slightly better quality (not always though).
In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.
Some of the teens also have facebook, but none don't have Google+.
This is because of two reasons: 1: Gmail means they all have Google+ accounts almost automatically, and 2: The privacy controls are much better in Google+, and they like that.
> In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.
The only few people I know on Google+ are hardcore google fans who work in tech. Every teen (~15-18) I know is on facebook. And their younger siblings.
Plugin, Facebook Messenger seems to be quite dominant across those age groups too.
> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").
I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.
> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years.
Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat.
Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing.
About a week ago I decide to look through all my friends' profiles and decide whether Facebook was worth keeping. It made me realise how much of their posts never made it to the wall (or whatever it's called) - bear in mind I only have about 50 people on there with a third are posting nothing. I ended up permanently deleting the account as it's just not worth it.
Apart from the privacy issues, one thing I really despise in Facebook is search. It literally sucks! Unlike Gmail, Facebook is built as a platform where information goes to die a quick death. In groups, as on web forums, a big drag is people asking the same questions again and again. Searching for information even by admins who would like to help people out is cumbersome and difficult due to the way Facebook search works (or doesn't work).
I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of.
...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools.
I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.
Picasa's an acquisition, and all of the stuff Google added to it was eventually folded into G+ with little fanfare so I'm guessing it wasn't a huge success.
Depends on the definition of success, I suppose. For Google I think success is either having a substantial percentage of the world's population using it, or for it to be making a huge amount of money, with that amount being compared to Adwords.
The closest they've come is almost certainly the new Google Photos app, which will probably end up with a decent portion of Android users actively using it.
How much longer before they kill Picasa and Picasaweb, which just provide a different UI (and different editing software) for the same archive of photos?
I converted my parents over to Picasa when it came out and they still use it; they don't have interest in moving family photos over to the cloud.
I am assuming that your comment re: spam is about is about Picasaweb (it doesn't make much sense to me for users to submit spam into their own desktop software). Perhaps a reason for this is that it mostly gets used by people who started with the desktop software and those people keep the photos private so that the only photos seen in public are spam?
I get emails from companies who upload their product photos to Picasa and then use the share feature to spam. No matter how many I marked as spam, they still make it through unhindered.
My grandparents still rely on it exclusively for local photo storage, and use Microsoft's OneDrive for actual sharing. I've been gradually coaxing them into the idea of using Google's stuff for sharing instead of Microsoft's with the expectation that Picasa will someday start pushing daisies and a migration will be needed, but that hasn't happened yet.
Probably pretty soon, no? Ars had an article entitled: "Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything". The claim was that Google builds multiple versions of its products targeted to slightly different market segments and use cases to hedge their investment. I think this is the perfect example (i.e. the fact that Google didn't just upgrade Picasa Web and built Google Photos instead). Given that Google Photos is most likely to succeed, it's just a matter of time before they shut down Picasa Web.
That seems to pretty much be what's happening... it's the same photo storage backend, but a new application in front of it... on my phone, the update was relatively seemless.. shrug ... who knows beyond that.
The new google photos is not a complete port of google+ photos. I enjoyed google+ photos. It had a poor man's HDR and a whole lot of other editing features which were functional and useful. They removed them all in the new google photos.
Another feature I miss is the auto-panorama feature. I can't see panos generated automatically any more after my account was migrated. Hoping they are brought back soon.
But I still like the idea of forking out the photos. That was the only thing I was using in google+
>"They already made us abandon our "picasaweb" stuff for Google+ Photos. Killing off Google+ Photos sends the clear message "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs". Not that shuffling gigabytes of photos around every couple of years isn't fun but, well, it isn't fun."
Having just spend part of a week moving off of Google code and now this I am beginning to seriously question my choice to use gmail for my domain email. As someone that uses blogger we didn't have a choice and all photos hosted on blogger got moved to the old picasa years ago and got "upgraded" several times. I wonder what the implications are for this. Will I have to fix all my blog entries? Probably easier to just move off of Blogger while I am at it :(
I work on the backend for Google Photos (and Google+ Photos and Picasaweb).
Picasaweb, Google+ Photos and Google Photos all store the photos in the same place.
There was never any need to "shuffle gigabytes of photos" when moving from picasaweb to G+ Photos and there won't be any needed to move from G+ Photos to Google Photos.
I don't see howany of that adds up to "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs".
Google is amazing but in the same token my grandma and my mom were using Google+ Photos. Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means.
You can bet I'm gonna think twice about recommending any Google product to my family just because of the time sink in doing support.
Doesn't this just mean that you need to click a different button to access the photos? There's a hierarchical change to make Photos a top-level product, and the product itself has had a facelift.
> Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means.
From what I've read around here, there's little to explain that matters basically, it's just a different URL, and a facelift. The fact that it's a different product is probably irrelevant to them, and not-knowing would be less confusing.
Can you comment on why Google Photos is missing so many features from Google+ Photos? Things like date picker, EXIF editor are missing. There's no highlight view, there's no way to make the detail pane of a picture open by default, and it takes a huge number of steps to rotate a picture, which I think is one of the most common editing tasks.
I'm a backend infrastructure guy rather than a product guy so I'll do my best but please take it all with a large grain of salt. I was privy to some of the higher-level discussions, but I spend most of my days down in the guts of the system. I don't spend much time debating the finer points of product direction or user experience (and the world is probably a better place because of that!)
Conceptually, Google Photos is very much a V1 product. It might sound a little weird since the team is experienced and a lot of the technology it is built on has been through multiple iterations.
But from a _product perspective_ Google Photos is a new product.
The product team was really focused on a few key aspects of the user experience (I'm not going to try to enumerate them here. The main reason is that I would certainly do a poor job of explaining them. The other reasons are that I can't remember how much of the strategy has been talked about publicly and it doesn't really matter for the point I'm trying to make).
Being focused meant saying no to things - at least for the initial launch.
So the first answer to your question is that for most of the mentioned features the answer is that they simply didn't make the cut for V1. I can't comment on which features will or won't make it to future versions.
Date picker is an interesting one. Really, the only reason it existed was to work around how painful it was access older pictures in Google+ Photos, Date picker was added to (somewhat) ease that pain.
In building a new product, there was a desire to make things like date-picker unnecessary. Make finding older photos so fast and painless that you don't even need it. Try grabbing the scroll bar in the new web-app - you can scroll to any time you want in seconds. On mobile, it's easy to zoom out, scroll and zoom back in.
There is also search, which often means you don't even _need_ to scroll through your photos to find what you want. Just this morning my wife wanted me to find a picture of a tatoo from six years ago. I was able to find it by searching for tatoo. It was awesome! In Google+ Photos I would have spent a long time trying to figure out the right date range and then searching around.
If you really want to jump to a date, just type it in search - I just tried "September 2012" and "9/23/2012" and they both worked great.
So I would argue that date-picker just flat out isn't needed any more, because the team focused on some core user experience flows.
Still, I find it kinda weird that Google feel the need to reinvent the wheel and redesign the whole site from scratch, when the old Google+ Photos is generally considered to be very well built. Why can't you just take Google+ Photos front end and build it up from there?
wow. i have lots and lots of pictures, mostly hosted to share on forums, that were uploaded all the way back on picasa.
then picasaweb. then google photo web. or something. photos still there.
then i was forced to join google+ to continue uploading/editing/sharing. And i think it became google+ photos. or google photos as everyone called it. i can still see all the pictures i uploaded to picasa showing as my pictures on my plus profile.
and now, i have no clue what they mean with this announcement. will i have to migrate? am i already on the right photos? will i lose things if i do not migrate?
i have backups so i can't care less. what worries me A LOT is that those photos are linked on all short of forums and people will not find the information i produced if the links dies.
Thanks for "organizing the world information", google.
I have passed the point where I would use any service Google launches, where they keep data I want to keep; and it's not because of Snowden.
They are acting like they are a bunch of startup teams constantly getting aqui-hired, with services getting changed, merged or canceled. I couldn't possibly recommend any of their services[1] to non-technical people, at any time something will stop working.
I'm not a wall to throw things at to see what sticks.
Organization seems to be the most common missing feature from Google cloud offerings (its, IMO, the biggest problem when you have more than a few items in Google Play Books.)
I hope this means I get the gallery app back on my phone instead of that godawful photos app. The photos app can't find half the photos on my device since it doesn't seem to have a functioning media scanner any more, and it took me half an hour to get the thing to spit out the path to a photo once when I desperately trying to copy it over to my computer to use it for something. Not that it is easy to copy anything in Android any more since you can't just mount the phone as storage any more, you have to use some broken media transfer protocol that doesn't work natively on mac and the official Android transfer app doesn't work. All this with a Nexus 6 that should be a top of the line Google experience device. I just want Gallery back and the ability to see the photos on my device and where they are, Photos is terrible and makes me fight it every time I open it.
I use Gmail, Maps, search, and, to a limited extent, the original, "basic" applications within Google Apps (is that still what it's called?).
For the rest, Google has basically taught me not to make the investment.
(I don't have any Adword nor advertising needs, at the moment. Otherwise, I imagine I would be using them.)
I was thinking of switching from the default text messaging application to Hangouts, on my phone, for the sake of maintaining a history of texts that the default app will dump beyond a certain count, but after incidentally running across comments about how fucked over Hangouts apparently has become, I'm pretty much not going there.
Google seems to be doing fine, revenue-wise, but they are losing me as... well, I guess I'm one bit of the "merchandise" that forms the basis of their revenue.
I don't hate Google. And I like the initiative on security and, "true names" aside, privacy. But I'm not excited any more about their product development.
Even in the physical world, I understand the impending, huge market for autonomous cars, and I like the pressure that Fiber has been providing to the erstwhile moribund large-scale ISP marketplace. But I miss the "moonshots." Although maybe they gave e.g. solar power enough of a nudge -- if not a push -- when it needed it, domestically.
P.S. Personal pet peeve. In my work, particularly in large organizations, I saw the need for something like Wave. (Anyone who's ever wasted time and effort on the outside of an extended and essential email chain conversation might relate -- as one example. Or trying to effectively maintain same and keep all in the loop and revisions straight, when on the inside of one.) But the terribly overburdensome (in terms of client processing demands for average clients of that time) and partially cryptic UI were a big initial turnoff.
Back to Gmail and Apps and whatnot. What Googlers actually seem to use for their own work, and lives (Maps, Picasa now become whatever...), seems to be better maintained. "Initiatives" to "secure markets" (Plus, I'm looking at you)? Yeah, not cutting it.
Initially, I would have given Plus a chance. Except that, for much of what interested me on it, I didn't care to go about publicly using my "true name" (health, psychology, and technical topics where some of my opinions might put off a potential employer).
No thanks, I'll keep my photos in Google Drive. I'm sure the interface is much better, but it is easy to sync drive with another service down the road if the time comes where that is necessary.
Ah thanks. I just created the "My Photos" folder automatically through google drive settings, and it automatically added every photo I've ever sent through google hangouts. Yikes, who wants that?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadSeems like it would be an easy win.
It's confusing to me, but trying to explain it to my mom is absolutely impossible. I wonder whether the average user even knows there's a difference between the two. It's a perfect example of unnecessary redundancy.
Look at the Inbox vs Gmail experiment for example. While not tied to Google+, Inbox runs parallel to Gmail and accesses the same things. Just a different window dressing. I'm sure many at Google want to see Inbox take over Gmail at some point.
This is one of the reasons I doubt we ever see a Material Design Gmail. I think they'll run with it until Inbox is "ready".
The latter is not a replacement for the former, which many many people depend on, so the only way Gmail is going away is if Inbox evolves to be it...
Google Photos was announced May 2015, explicitly as the future of what had been Google+ Photos. It has been clear since then that that's what would be supported going forward, and then Google+ Photos was deprecated legacy.
(Also, not to be picky, but I see no mention of Google+ Photos (let alone its status as "deprecated legacy") on the announcement blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/picture-this-fresh-ap...)
https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/d1XubVAZ5hV
Don’t worry, all your photos and videos will still be saved and available after you switch to the new, stand-alone Google Photos app.
And I'm a technical user. I literally don't understand how (or if) non-technical users are expected to be able to understand how these work.
But seriously, this has to take the cake. "Google Photos" is replacing "Google+ Photos", though "Google+" is still around, and you can use Google+ to share photos from "Google Photos" (but not "Google+ Photos", at least not anymore).
[0] Going to drive.google.com and then clicking "New Sheet" will redirect me to docs.google.com, even though Google Sheets was (at least at one point) presented as a "new" product distinct from Google Docs. At least that's how it seemed to me when they launched it.
"Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything"
Saying that we now have a new product that does the same as the old one, and then migrating people to the new one is just confusing to the user.
A bit off-topic:
I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that.
Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").
Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.
Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out.
Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory.
Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.
iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.
I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-...
And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.
If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?
[1] e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
I've only seen this printed in google search and google plus, not on any other website. Maybe it's an extension of yours?
If it's google search you're complaining about, just log out, or use something like DDG.
Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.
If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.
I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.
I use Digg Reader. Web is awesome, love the simplicity, the app need some love but is way more better than Feddly. The thing I don't like about Digg Reader is the Digg part, I only want my lovely curated RSS feeds.
Also try NewsBlur, Feedreader, The Old Reader and Newsvibe but Digg Reader was the best for my needs.
The default, so far as I can tell, is to dump every feed together to provide an "all-up" view. That could be okay, but then they layer a terrible card UI on top of it that's completely unintuitive. The top cards are big and generally pixelated (because it zooms in for some inexplicable reason), and it switches to a slightly different view after the first card, again, for no clear reason. I can swipe through the cards and reach the end, where it shows a giant checkmark and the words "Done" and "N reviewed". Reaching that page doesn't actually mean I'm done, though. Nothing is actually marked read until I go back to the top and tap on each them (or use the "mark all read" option). I'm either completely missing the interaction paradigm they intend or they haven't put much thought into what the interaction paradigm actually is. Maybe the devs all use iPhones and the Android client is an afterthought?
Meanwhile their website is generally okay, but I am completely at a loss for how to mark an item as unread once I've opened it. I should probably look for a different feed aggregator.
I am actualy working on a Feedly alternative. That's sorts articles by popularity. And can import Popularty counts from Sites that offer it. I hope the 70k Hacker News Readers on Feedly would like that. My Idea is to make search free and instead offer "Sort by Time" and "Compact View" as a Pro feature. Would anyone here be interested?
Of course, maybe everyone else loves the interaction model and I'm the oddball. That's entirely possible, but regardless I want to find something else at this point. (Trying Digg reader as of last night.)
(and in retrospect that comment was a lot more negative than I really feel about newsblur, I'm absolutely not looking to switch to something else)
It is paid-for, although very cheap (and first month free). I ended up buying a life-subscription. I really miss Google Reader as well.
What makes you think it was any different from the inside?
Why do you say that?
In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.
Some of the teens also have facebook, but none don't have Google+.
This is because of two reasons: 1: Gmail means they all have Google+ accounts almost automatically, and 2: The privacy controls are much better in Google+, and they like that.
The only few people I know on Google+ are hardcore google fans who work in tech. Every teen (~15-18) I know is on facebook. And their younger siblings.
Plugin, Facebook Messenger seems to be quite dominant across those age groups too.
*I think they are going to change the name and redesign the product to push forward the adoption.
Way to predict the past. Google's been doing that for years; its been widely noticed since Hangouts was spun out.
I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.
I feel that the FB posts are just as annoying and unwanted as those FW: FW: FW:... emails of yesteryear.
Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat.
Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing.
Odd.
I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).
We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of.
...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools.
I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.
I later moved lightroom into my workflow instead, mostly because of quick raw edits.
The closest they've come is almost certainly the new Google Photos app, which will probably end up with a decent portion of Android users actively using it.
I am assuming that your comment re: spam is about is about Picasaweb (it doesn't make much sense to me for users to submit spam into their own desktop software). Perhaps a reason for this is that it mostly gets used by people who started with the desktop software and those people keep the photos private so that the only photos seen in public are spam?
[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...
There's no "tool" to migrate your photos...all my photos are already in the new app.
But I still like the idea of forking out the photos. That was the only thing I was using in google+
From the TechCrunch comments.
The blogger photos will still be stored in the same place and the urls should continue to work.
Picasaweb, Google+ Photos and Google Photos all store the photos in the same place.
There was never any need to "shuffle gigabytes of photos" when moving from picasaweb to G+ Photos and there won't be any needed to move from G+ Photos to Google Photos.
I don't see howany of that adds up to "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs".
You can bet I'm gonna think twice about recommending any Google product to my family just because of the time sink in doing support.
From what I've read around here, there's little to explain that matters basically, it's just a different URL, and a facelift. The fact that it's a different product is probably irrelevant to them, and not-knowing would be less confusing.
Conceptually, Google Photos is very much a V1 product. It might sound a little weird since the team is experienced and a lot of the technology it is built on has been through multiple iterations.
But from a _product perspective_ Google Photos is a new product.
The product team was really focused on a few key aspects of the user experience (I'm not going to try to enumerate them here. The main reason is that I would certainly do a poor job of explaining them. The other reasons are that I can't remember how much of the strategy has been talked about publicly and it doesn't really matter for the point I'm trying to make).
Being focused meant saying no to things - at least for the initial launch.
So the first answer to your question is that for most of the mentioned features the answer is that they simply didn't make the cut for V1. I can't comment on which features will or won't make it to future versions.
Date picker is an interesting one. Really, the only reason it existed was to work around how painful it was access older pictures in Google+ Photos, Date picker was added to (somewhat) ease that pain.
In building a new product, there was a desire to make things like date-picker unnecessary. Make finding older photos so fast and painless that you don't even need it. Try grabbing the scroll bar in the new web-app - you can scroll to any time you want in seconds. On mobile, it's easy to zoom out, scroll and zoom back in.
There is also search, which often means you don't even _need_ to scroll through your photos to find what you want. Just this morning my wife wanted me to find a picture of a tatoo from six years ago. I was able to find it by searching for tatoo. It was awesome! In Google+ Photos I would have spent a long time trying to figure out the right date range and then searching around.
If you really want to jump to a date, just type it in search - I just tried "September 2012" and "9/23/2012" and they both worked great.
So I would argue that date-picker just flat out isn't needed any more, because the team focused on some core user experience flows.
Still, I find it kinda weird that Google feel the need to reinvent the wheel and redesign the whole site from scratch, when the old Google+ Photos is generally considered to be very well built. Why can't you just take Google+ Photos front end and build it up from there?
then picasaweb. then google photo web. or something. photos still there.
then i was forced to join google+ to continue uploading/editing/sharing. And i think it became google+ photos. or google photos as everyone called it. i can still see all the pictures i uploaded to picasa showing as my pictures on my plus profile.
and now, i have no clue what they mean with this announcement. will i have to migrate? am i already on the right photos? will i lose things if i do not migrate?
i have backups so i can't care less. what worries me A LOT is that those photos are linked on all short of forums and people will not find the information i produced if the links dies.
Thanks for "organizing the world information", google.
They are acting like they are a bunch of startup teams constantly getting aqui-hired, with services getting changed, merged or canceled. I couldn't possibly recommend any of their services[1] to non-technical people, at any time something will stop working.
I'm not a wall to throw things at to see what sticks.
[1] Beyond search, of course
BTW: I am unrelated to them but I do recommend QuickPic, it does pretty much exactly what you'd want and very little else.
I just went to photos.google.com for the first time and the last ten years of my pictures were there in chronological order.
For the rest, Google has basically taught me not to make the investment.
(I don't have any Adword nor advertising needs, at the moment. Otherwise, I imagine I would be using them.)
I was thinking of switching from the default text messaging application to Hangouts, on my phone, for the sake of maintaining a history of texts that the default app will dump beyond a certain count, but after incidentally running across comments about how fucked over Hangouts apparently has become, I'm pretty much not going there.
Google seems to be doing fine, revenue-wise, but they are losing me as... well, I guess I'm one bit of the "merchandise" that forms the basis of their revenue.
I don't hate Google. And I like the initiative on security and, "true names" aside, privacy. But I'm not excited any more about their product development.
Even in the physical world, I understand the impending, huge market for autonomous cars, and I like the pressure that Fiber has been providing to the erstwhile moribund large-scale ISP marketplace. But I miss the "moonshots." Although maybe they gave e.g. solar power enough of a nudge -- if not a push -- when it needed it, domestically.
P.S. Personal pet peeve. In my work, particularly in large organizations, I saw the need for something like Wave. (Anyone who's ever wasted time and effort on the outside of an extended and essential email chain conversation might relate -- as one example. Or trying to effectively maintain same and keep all in the loop and revisions straight, when on the inside of one.) But the terribly overburdensome (in terms of client processing demands for average clients of that time) and partially cryptic UI were a big initial turnoff.
Back to Gmail and Apps and whatnot. What Googlers actually seem to use for their own work, and lives (Maps, Picasa now become whatever...), seems to be better maintained. "Initiatives" to "secure markets" (Plus, I'm looking at you)? Yeah, not cutting it.
Initially, I would have given Plus a chance. Except that, for much of what interested me on it, I didn't care to go about publicly using my "true name" (health, psychology, and technical topics where some of my opinions might put off a potential employer).
You get your Drive and your shiny interface.