Google has gone to valiant lengths to convince us that rumors of Google+’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, but Google is no longer forcing new Gmail users to connect their account to a Google+ profile – yet another move that could signal the end for Google’s troubled social network.
I think I speak for all of us when I say – well, nice of them to do something Google+-related right for a change.
In all seriousness – nobody asked for Google+, nobody wanted it, and virtually everyone hated it, and it does not solve any actual problem anyone had with Google products. It doesn’t have to die, but it shouldn’t be forced down our collective throats anymore.
Try to change your Hangouts avatar on Android without Google+ or try to send a photo without Google+.
Try to install Hangouts on iOS5, you can’t install a text messaging app, ok you can on iOS6, right? No, because iPhone 3GS does not have a gyroscope and everyone knows you need a one to send a text message!
Gyroscope checking and mic checking used to be the only ways to properly check which physical iPhone model you were using. I highly doubt they actually USE the gyroscope. (Which is not location services, mind you.)
Great, the phone has enough hardware for Skype but not for Hangouts, mmmkay.
More like memory. Google apps on iOS look pretty but are generally shit anyway. Google+ hardly worked for the past year for me. It’d just hang whenever I refreshed something, so I uninstalled it.
That’s interesting. Back when I had an iPhone 4S for a few months, Google+ worked much better on it than it did on the Nexus S running ICS that I had previously. I even posted on Google+ about it at the time:
https://plus.google.com/117327314704144825871/posts/3aV1mMrrgom
The problem was their original insistence and strict enforcement of “The name on your government ID” policy.
I originally signed up, enjoyed it for a few weeks, then they locked me out because I didn’t want to use my real first or last name (or have it easily discoverable).
This was before the data liberation front had a way to export data from G+ so I lost everything.
I even deleted my YouTube channel when they all but forced G+ linkage. (And YT has enough problems with FakeDown notices).
I recently reconnected it when they eliminated the policy, but I think that killed it. There are many people who didn’t want to be instantly and preemptively doxxed as a condition of the terms of service (ask Violet Blue or Zoe Quinn).
But I don’t use it. I’m still suspicious when they all but imported my contact list into a circle, and they have already had to decouple and detach anything really useful. So everyone who didn’t like it found something else. Public hangouts are useful, but I don’t use that.
Not trolling at all. G+ is what a social network should be. If everyone adopted it, and its real name policy ( which BTW has hit up facebook too) the internet (at least the parts that Google has control over) would be a better place.
I know no one agrees with me, except those that have discovered the joy of G+. That’s cool I guess. Live and let live.
I like it better than Facebook. Is that saying a lot? It depends on your opinion of Facebook.
But in all seriousness, I enjoy the highly technical communities on there. Ham radio, hardware hacking, alternative OSes, Ingress, there’s a community or three for just about any kind of nerd. If they keep it around, I’ll be happy. I won’t cry if it goes away though.
I guess, yeah, I like the communities for the most part. There are a lot of dumb questions on there too. Where people will post questions like “How do i install Apache on fedora?” Or “Look at this leet bash script I wrote to DoSS people, isn’t it nifty!” Having said that, its more good than crap. Or rather, its really easy to ban people so you can pretend they don’t exist.
My thoughts pretty much exactly, it’s been the only social network I’ve seen that a) had posts I actually found interesting, and b) allowed me to sort/filter people in a way that made sense.
In terms of circles and permissions I like it but when you force something on people that hard it’s a natural reaction to reject it.
At the end of the day, Google was just doing it for money, both Facebook and Google are trying to sacrifice your privacy by creating detailed profiles for advertisers.
Google was only doing it because they were jealous of Facebooks means of delivering hyper focused advertising. It was never about the user.
A not-Facebook approach to social networking, that acknowledges all friends are not created equal, would have been a good thing.
Google instead started making Google+ more like Facebook, which was exactly what no one wanted. There’s already a Facebook.
So Google was one of the few companies that actually would have a chance to kill Facebook in the Social network game, because they could’ve ran G+ on their preexisting server infrastructure for practically free for years.
The thing about social networks is that it’s all about “network effect” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect The incumbent has all of the weight because everyone is already using it (you’re only going to use a network that has your friends on it, or the celebrities (like Twitter)).
The social network market is 100% Facebook’s to lose, you can’t beat them by only building a better product; They have to kill themselves (like MySpace did).
All Google had to do was build a decent product addressing the shortcomings of the Facebook platform, and then sit back and wait for Facebook to piss off their users enough that they went elsewhere (continuous privacy problems, time-lines becoming ad-lines), eventually the users would’ve went elsewhere on their own and it would hit a tipping point naturally…
Unfortunately Google got too anxious and wouldn’t wait, so they shoved the integration down everyone’s throat, and included stupid “Real Names” policies, so now everyone has a huge sour taste for G+, and I don’t think the brand can recover; it probably has tarnished any future Google social network.
Edited 2014-09-22 21:16 UTC
This. This is exactly it. All Google had to do was keep improving it in bits and pieces. A lot of my tech oriented friends had already started migrating from FB to G+, but when they started changing it for the worse, you could practically hear the rebound back to Facebook.
Interesting idea that only FaceBook can kill FaceBook by messing up and that all others have to do is be ready to take over.
FaceBook however doesn’t seem ready to kill itself at all, but G+ certainly has, even before it ever started to live
Edited 2014-09-22 23:17 UTC
So how long before Google lets me remove the G+ app from my (non-rooted) 2012 Nexus 7? They already killed Currents, but the icon is still f*ckin there!!
Can’t it be Settings -> Apps -> G+ ( or whatever) “Deactivate” ?
Edited 2014-09-23 12:57 UTC
Technically it only LOOKED mandatory. During GMail account creation, you could just close the tab when you got to the last G+ step, and it’d leave you with a regular working GMail account. Of course, adding an explicit “No thanks” button is much less deceptive.
I couldn’t possibly agree more with that it shouldn’t be rammed down our throats. I like to at least give kudos to app writers when I come across something that works well. And to do so I have to use [enable] G+. That and also trying to force it on us for YouTube…
One thing I *really* didn’t like a while back was that to post a Google Play Store app review, you were forced to register a Google+ account. Considering reviewers hadn’t needed to do that before (over several years), I thought it was a horrendous Google+ tie-in.
So I duly set up a Google+ account and was horrified how everything (and we’re talking about dozens of settings over many pages) was enabled to share with the world, so I had to spend an age turning off everything. Of course, as soon as any new Google+ feature was added, it was enabled by default as well. When Google Play Games started to get common, that too defaults to showing the world your gaming stats via your Google+ account.
Would you please THOM! Do not comment on the things that you know nothing ABOUT???