[bane]

IMHO Google+'s principle problem is that it's multiple efforts all under the same name umbrella. This is confusing to users and seems to have been confusing to Google.

It's a longer-than-twitter public broadcast messaging system/social network/photo sharing/single sign-on/half a dozen other things.

There's some great ideas in there. Having a subscription style feed of people I want to follow, and their long-form posts (including deep linking) is much more interesting to me that twitter. There's been some absolute gems posted on g+ that simply can't be represented on Twitter. But it falls down because all these important thoughtful posts are buried in my regular social feed.

Everybody seems to like the circles ideas for organizing our connections, that's a great idea I'm surprised still hasn't been really replicated by FB. But then I can't assert different public names/faces to different circles. So my work circle sees me the same way my demoscene friends. But I'd rather use a formal identity for my work friends and a goofy presentation of myself in the demoscene (with an old crazy picture of me from a party). But I really can't. Unifying my identities, along with my logins, wasn't a good idea. And thus I don't really use g+ for social network stuff because neither I nor most of my contacts don't really want to pay the switching cost from FB/linkedin/whatever else. So literally the major initial message for what g+ is when it was launched, I almost entirely don't use or get anything out of. I say this as somebody who really doesn't enjoy FB all that much, but recognize its importance in connecting me to people I know and want to keep in touch with.

and it goes on and on. Lots of good ideas, mucked up by bad execution and a muddled vision that doesn't map well to most people's needs. It seems like the pieces of the product that are the best bits, are the ones that are not as deeply buried into the morass. Hangouts is pretty good for example and usually works like I want it to (I usually only message people). But now I hear voice, which I use all the time, is about to get bungled up with hangouts. I bet I'll hate whatever the integration looks like. There are tons of people I use voice with that I have absolutely no desire to tie up with my google+ identity.

The integration is too tight. Rather than being a bunch of well branded products, all under a unified umbrella, it's like a bunch of products were stuck in a blender, ground up and then half-baked into a some kind of...whatever it is.

I think if you can't point at a product and describe in a brief sentence, it's too big of a concept and that will start infiltrating your development of the product. What is google+?

Why not "google+ personal news" and "google+ social network" and "google+ chat" and whatever else? Each of those is focused and simple and disjoint enough not to cause confusion.

[welshrats]

This is the Frankenstein problem these type of apps have. You see it in stuff like SharePoint or G+, the horror stems from trying to do much, no matter how well you do the core things, the amalgamation is horrific to behold, unfocused, a sprawling tapestry of decay. People forget that Dr. Frankenstein selected the most beautiful parts to create the monster, it wasn't meant to be a horror it was meant to be a Promethean.

" How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! -- Great God! ... I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart..."

[joe_the_user]

IMHO Google+'s principle problem is that it's multiple efforts all under the same name umbrella. This is confusing to users and seems to have been confusing to Google.

I wouldn't put it that way.

A way to manage multiple efforts in one place could easily have been appreciated.

The problem was G+ was an effort to mold/carve the multiple accounts people had with Google into a single Facebook like thing. And it worked by pushing people through no-opt-out rather than pulling people by giving them something flexible and desirable. You had to turn your Gmail into a G+ account, you had to turn your Youtube into the same G+ etc.

It's true that rolling this stuff into one thing resulted in a complete mess. But it's important to notice it wasn't just a combining, it was a bondage-and-discipline style imposition.

[Pxtl]

Exactly. G+ as a common social platform for the Google space was a great idea... but a platform can't be opinionated, it has to leave customization of the experience to the users and the content-developers that are hosting G+-based conversations.

It started in the wrong place, a Facebook converted into a commentary platform instead of vice versa.

[acomjean]

>IMHO Google+'s principle problem is that it's multiple efforts all under the same name umbrella. This is confusing to users and seems to have been confusing to Google.

Totally agree with this. I made some effort and still can't figure out where photos I post to google+ go. I used to use the picassa page which was pretty good about making albums and sharing, now I just use Flickr.

[Andrex]

plus.google.com/photos/<your ID>/albums/posts

?

[inthewoods]

Right on - for me, it is that they could not make the fundamental decision of whether or not Google+ was a place or connective tissue between places. I can only guess, but it seems to me like a reaction to Facebook - they felt the need to differentiate from them and thus created this awkward construct. As I mentioned above, I think the winning strategy would have been to define Google+ as a place - the place to share stuff from all your other Google apps/sites really easily - basically create a feed of all your stuff from across the Google universe.

They've got some of it, but it doesn't quite work (for me at least) because of small gaps - like the fact that Chromecast works with Youtube, but not with Google+ Photos - thus in order to use Chromecast to display the wonderful video I just took, I have to essentially download it and reupload it to Youtube. Google+ Photos likely leverages the same tech as Youtube, but they're clearly being developed separately and that just seems silly.

Other people have put the fault on designers - to me this is a failure of product management and ultimately management to pull together the various forces that I'm sure exist within Google. And I don't think that was easy and that's why I say that Vic has some measure of success.

Google+ is, for me, almost really good - but it falls down in enough places that I would consider switching, for instance, if Dropbox came up with a full office suite to match Google Drive (which they seem to be working on).

[anorark]

>> Everybody seems to like the circles ideas for organizing our connections, that's a great idea I'm surprised still hasn't been really replicated by FB.

Facebook has something called "Lists" to organize your friend groups which is very similar to circles on google+. https://www.facebook.com/help/friends/lists

[inthewoods]

Circles seems like a good idea - but I find I don't use them.

[cookiecaper]

I agree, circles mandate additional cognitive load. They should've been implemented such that each user had 2-3 circles max, like "Work", "Friends", and "Family", and it was almost always invisible (meaning you'd almost always share with all). Prompting the user each time they want to post something and making them choose from their 8-10 circles greatly increases the friction of posting.

[bradbeattie]

That, and the decision is one-sided. Say I want to post something publicly about some new technology. Do I post it publicly and have it go into my family's feeds where it will be considered akin to spam? What if one of my friends actually _is_ interested in new tech but I don't know it?

I get that it would be an added layer of indirection, but to allow each user to have multiple subject personas for posting and let others subscribe to said personas might have been more useful. As it stands, I err on the side of caution and post privately to the people I can best guess might be interested.

[ZoFreX]

I think it would work better one-way if you could separate "visible to" and "posted to". I would like to post to "public" and "techy people", which would mean it appears in the feeds of people I don't have in my circles who have me in theirs, and people I have in my tech circle. It would like it to still be visible to people in my other circles if they went looking for it, but it wouldn't appear in their feeds.

[junto]

I have the same issue. Most of my g+ usage was photos that I shared with family only. I also shared the odd tech post publicly. When I do that my family get weird 'you might have missed' spammy emails, which I have been questioned about several times. I.e. why are you sending me this 'crap' stuff I'm really not interested in.

[dragonwriter]

> but to allow each user to have multiple subject personas for posting and let others subscribe to said personas might have been more useful.

Don't Pages let you do that?

[amaks]

I personally use them a lot. For example, I share immediate family-related photos and posts with the Family circle, general family stuff with the Extended Family, some stuff with Friends, some with Colleagues. It's useful and powerful feature, but requires skills similar to the email Inbox organization which some people seem to find too hard.

[malyk]

It's not that it's too hard, it's just not something I want to worry about. I think some people like to really organize things and some see it as a hassle.

For myself my inbox has essentially two folders. Inbox and Archived. My facebook lists is just friends and my google plus circles is just whatever the default is.

I don't want to think about who I'm sharing things with. I either share it with everyone on a social network or send it as an email to specific people.

[haakon]

Personally I never saw what the big deal was. They allow you to put people into lists, which you could already do on Facebook and Twitter at the time. But because they called them "circles" and visualised them as such, suddenly it was a radical new idea or something.

[bane]

I would use them more if I could assert a different identity/profile for each one.

[heathkit]

I think this is the crux of why G+ failed. When I first started using it, circles seemed like a killer feature. I divided all my contacts into work, friends, family, by location, etc. So I could share programming stuff with tech friends, but local stuff with local friends.

But, instead, I find I just share everything I care to share public. I think what people share is part of how they present themselves, and if I'm always in the context of being myself, with my real name and the same picture, then I'm going to share the same set of stuff.

[dredmorbius]

Circles always seemed to me like something someone dreamed up while way too high, and nobody ever said "dude, this just isn't going to work."

Put down the crack pipe and step away from from the whiteboard.

[dredmorbius]

Circles for incoming content are fundamentally broken as they don't allow topical categorization of content.

If I can subscribe to feeds, and set a preference for specific individuals on those feeds, I get a vastly superior information product. You can roughly approximate this via search in G+, but only roughly.

The lack of ability to follow people's topical posts (that is: show me +JohnDoe's post to SomeCommunity) was simply idiotic.

Reddit, subreddits, friends, RES dashboard, and RSS feeds give me much of what I was hoping for from G+. And a hell of a lot more utility.

[dragonwriter]

> If I can subscribe to feeds

You can, if people create them -- Google+ calls named feeds "Pages". You add the Page (originators categorization) to the circle (receivers categorization) you want, and that's how G+ supports classification from both ends of the communication.

[dredmorbius]

What I can't do is create a topic or keyword, and subscribe to that, with a preference for posts from specific individuals.

Nor can I subscribe to a Community, but only highly ranked posts (useless without downvotes), and/or of people I find compelling.

The Pages route is too many levels of indirection to be successful. Google and Silicon Valley understand that one click can be too much friction, let alone multiple, among several individuals.

I've never subscribed to a page. Hell, what a "page" is is utterly opaque to me (with 25+ years of tech experience).

G+ had a number of useful tools, probably Hangouts at the top of the list, but "Hangouts" UTTERLY FAILS TO COMMUNICATE TO ME what this is. "Group Video Chat" does. And that's what it is.

I've said before and I'll say it again: that should be spun out as its own product, and ultimately be geared to take on WebMeeting and related products.

Edit: Additionally: reddit has ubiquitous RSS. You can tag '.rss' to virtually any URL that's a valid Reddit page (front, subreddit, user, search, URL search etc.) and get a feed based on that. You can also subscribe to specific posts, which is pretty awesome -- through reddit's own notifications system (which blows Google's out of the water).

[dragonwriter]

> G+ had a number of useful tools, probably Hangouts at the top of the list, but "Hangouts" UTTERLY FAILS TO COMMUNICATE TO ME what this is. "Group Video Chat" does. And that's what it is.

Group Video Chat is a function of Hangouts, but its not all what Hangouts is -- in fact, its the second key feature noted in most Hangouts marketing. (Hangouts integrates iMessage-style individual and group messaging and group video chat and live broadcast video, "Hangouts on Air").

> I've said before and I'll say it again: that should be spun out as its own product

It pretty much has been for a while -- its got its own mobile app; its directly linked for actions from Gmail, etc. You can get to it through the G+ interface, but its not really tied to G+ as a product (vs. platform) now.

> and ultimately be geared to take on WebMeeting and related products.

That's actually one of the many marketing angles Google and its partenrs (Vidyo, etc.) are already taking with Hangouts and offerings integrating with Hangouts.