Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

[Kabweza]

I don’t use Google+ much. It’s not that Google plus is a ghost town. No. There’s a flurry of activity from the people I follow - Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Googlers in Africa, and Robert Scoble. The decision for me boils down to one practical thing; page load speed.

[simondlr]

I'm from South Africa. I'm not sure if they cache Google+ here (I know they cache YouTube) or use a CDN, but I've found Google+ to do exactly this. It's slow, and sometimes stuff just doesn't load (especially images).

It's strange, because Google+ is the first social network I've seen that actually promotes itself on my campus (large installs with lifesize Angry Birds).

[JonnieCache]

Just out of interest, what is the life size of an angry bird?

[windsurfer]

I would assume roughly the same size as a pig.

[richardw]

Also from SA, and while Plus is fine for me, Youtube has become unusable. For years it was perfect but now I rarely get through a five minute movie without it going belly up. Vimeo and others, no problem whatsoever.

[antihero]

To be honest I often can't load a YouTube video on a "50Mbit" connection here in the UK. Because Virgin Media don't give a crap about capacity.

[joeyh]

I'm not in Africa, but I do have slow (dialup) internet in the US, and every G+ link is a nightmare.

About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive timeout in its SSL.

When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be read.

I suspect there is also javascript that times out or fails to gracefully handle failure to load some resources. I've never seen the flashy bling that people were talking about when G+ launched.

Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching.

To give some idea of how slow it is, I've had a single G+ page loading the entire time I typed this. Still consists of a white-on-white page.

I have, in some instances, needed to ssh to a fast remote server, and read G+ via w3m when there was a link I really wanted to read.

In contrast, when I click on a HN page, it comes up with very little discernable delay. The rare times I go to facebook, it may take it a minute to come up, but it always loads.

Around 5% of the US population still uses dialup.

[jonknee]

> Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching.

The assets cache just fine, SSL or not.

[joeyh]

I'm referring to my web proxy cache, not the browser's cache. I use polipo to cache, it does a number of things that makes dialup web browsing pretty fast. http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/

[18pfsmt]

Have you considered using Squid to cache everything (even over SSL)? You will have to install certs, but I think that may be the best route (especially if your OS is *nix). I am planning on doing this at my friend's cabin this summer where satellite internet is all they have.

[kristianc]

The point about Facebook is well made. I'm glad that Facebook have taken the decision (thus far at least) not to overload their core UX with JS effects. This means that it is nearly always very easy to use FB.

By contrast, it always feels like it takes twice as long as it should to tweet and use G+, because the UX has been designed to be "beautiful." And I'm in Europe - I can only imagine it is an order of magnitude worse in some of Africa.

[magicalist]

clearly you don't have timeline yet...

[klausa]

You could argue that core UX for Facebook is news feed, rather then profile pages.

[kristianc]

I agree (I don't spend much time looking at my own Timeline after all), but hopefully Timeline isn't a sign of things to come.

[franze]

i'm currently in bolivia, and well, lets say, the internet isn't always very fast or reliable. not only is the G+ website unusable (takes ages to load, breaks in between), but also the (right hand side top) widget thingy on search and gmail does not work. it shows (again and again) some red/urgent numbers displaying that something important has happened -> click -> nothings turns up. (and if it for once works, it's not important, just another random person added me to a circle).

fb loads fast, works perfectly - and after i resized my pictures to 480 to 360 i can even upload them.

my personal opinion is, that any website/app that implements it's scrollbars via JS has to much JS.

[esrauch]

The scrollbars are just styled using CSS, it's not exactly a huge payload.

[asto]

It's not just Google+, by the way. All of Google's services are noticeably slower after they switched to the new look that Google's changing everything to. Bad move in my opinion. We don't care if the pages are very pretty, Google. We just want what we want.

[toemetoch]

You can check with Chrome, Ctrl+Shift+I, then Audits and reload/Run.

A few years ago they started promoting best practices [0] and after following it + checking with Audit/pagespeed I got performance increases. Now it seems they abandoned their own best practices. Running an audit on a google page results in a lot of red/orange bullets.

[0] https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rule...

[obtu]

The new instant search does some strange things stashing js assets in hidden form fields, and it seems to have a performance impact at several levels (including the IO cost of serialising the session for restoring it after a crash). There's also some weird non-responsiveness with partially loaded pages.

[rowanseymour]

In Rwanda here - can't say I notice much difference between Google+ and Facebook. The Facebook website is significantly more usable than the Facebook Android app which doesn't work at all... but I think that applies the world over.

[yardie]

I'm in europe and the Facebook app is equally worthless here. I've gone back to using the website instead of the iOS version (now used exclusively for uploading photos).

[rowanseymour]

10 hops to plus.google.com but 30 to facebook.com. I imagine Google must have servers in Nairobi, Kenya

[vibrunazo]

> Maybe providing a ‘Google+ Lite’?

Have you tried the mobile website? Is it any better?

http://m.google.com/app/plus

[3pt14159]

On my 18 megabit connection it took 4 seconds to load into my chrome browser running on my Ubuntu desktop computer. BUT it does load much, much faster after caching is done.

[sparknlaunch12]

For those living in large US and European cities we take our internet speed for granted. I am assuming that it's not google to blame but rather local infrastructure?

[rmc]

Depends what you mean by "local infrastructure". Up until recently east Africa dint have a fiber link to the rest of the internet, it was all satilite. Forget last miles, this is the last 1000 miles.

[deathwarmedover]

For those interested in the current and planned undersea cable infrastructure, there's a good SVG diagram on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cable_map18.svg

[rowanseymour]

That's out of date. Try http://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/ which has cables planned up to 2014

[tbundy]

Must say, hadn't noticed the heavy UI, but now that I think about it, a bit ridiculous that Gmail still has a loading bar.

Can't comment on Google Plus, I kept my account for about 2 days. Not terrible or anything, the value proposition just wasn't there for me.

[mossplix]

and again SouthAfrica != Africa

[niel]

I agree that, in many respects, South Africa is an outlier in Sub-Saharan Africa. With regards to the issues at hand, though - internet connectivity and page load speeds - South Africa experiences most of the same issues as its neighbours and other developing countries.

Edited for grammar.

[_djo_]

In what sense, out of interest?

[thebluesky]

The article is actually about Zimbabwe, not South Africa.

I think what he means is that the title is excessively general "Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa". It's a bit like writing about the trouble you are having getting a fast Internet connection in Guatemala and then saying "North America" has connectivity issues. Different countries in Africa are very different from each other. It's like generalizing across Cambodia and Japan because they are on the same continent. Big difference...

[_djo_]

Fair enough, I agree that the author was guilty of the kind of continent-wide generalisations that's always misleading.

I was just a bit confused by the parent post's reference to South Africa, which was a bit off-topic as the author is from Zimbabwe. My assumption was that there were two possible explanations, that the post's author confused South Africa with Southern Africa, or that they considered South Africa to be so much of an outlier in this regard (which it isn't) that the submissions from South Africans weren't relevant. Either explanation would be wrong and worth correcting.

[Kabweza]

I'm the author.

Indeed Zimbabwe is not representative of all Africa. However, Zimbabwe actually has better internet that most African countries. At least it's in the top 10 of 54 countries on the continent according to Ookla (http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/)

If Zimbabwe's internet is bad enough to cause users problems loading Google+, It's likely worse in the majority of the countries on the continent.

Generalising therefore was not meant to paint the picture that all Africa is the same, but that Google (if they read this) need to have a strategy that takes into account the poor internet quality the bulk of Africa has.

[rowanseymour]

Here in Rwanda we keep hearing how we have the 3rd fastest internet in Africa according to Ookla, but it's kinda nonsense because Ookla measures speed to the nearest Ookla server. In Rwanda the internal infrastructure is great and there's an Ookla server in Kigali so it thinks we have great internet. But that doesn't take into account the connection to the rest of the world which isn't so great.

[_djo_]

Thanks for responding.

I do understand the point you were making, but unfortunately it does create the potential for your point to be forgotten as the discussion gets derailed into what is and what isn't representative of Africa. It may have been better to make that part of your title the 'Developing World' or something similar.

In any case I agree with the point you were making, which is that too many sites, especially social networking sites, are paying too little attention to optimising the experience for those on slower connections with high latency. So kudos for raising it and pointing to a specific example (Google+).

[rmc]

It's much richer and has much better infastruction than the rest if Africa.

[rowanseymour]

The post is from Zimbabwe so do you mean Southern Africa?

[rmc]

Unlikely, south Africa is quite an outlier in Africa. Southern Africa is usually taken to include it an lots of other countries (eg. Tanzania). That as a group, is jot an outlier within Africa.

[emwa]

Tanzania is actually part of Eastern Africa and not Southern Africa. But you are right, Southern Africa constitutes a group of a countries while South Africa is a single country.

[rmc]

Tanzania can be in both Southern and Eastern Africa. It's in the SADC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_African_Development_Co... ).

These terms are just descriptions, there are no hard, objective, definitive rules about it.

[mossplix]

same thing , Zm != Africa .. post title should be its hard to love g+ in Zimbabwe ...

[rowanseymour]

Ah ok. I agree. Generalizations about Africa are generally wrong. There's a world of difference between Cairo or Cape Town or somewhere deep in the jungles of the DRC.

There's really good map of planned and existing submarine cables to Africa at http://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/ which gives a fairly good idea of where the best and worst internet in Africa is