[inthewoods]

Vic did a pretty great job getting Google+ in decent shape, but am I the only one that finds the overall strategy among these properties confusing? I know that whenever I talk with a normal, non-tech civilian they are always confused by the service.

They have Youtube (where you can upload videos), Google+ Photos (where you can upload videos and stream as well), Google Drive (where you can also upload pictures and videos in addition to creating standalone Google Docs).

It would seem to make more sense to me that there should be a Drive where I store Photos, Videos and Documents, or there should be standalone Photos/Videos and then a separate service for Documents.

To me, these services should exist separately, but Google+ should bring them all together - meaning I can decide, from my photos/videos/documents what to post to Google+. If I want to post a video to the general public, I should post it to Youtube.

Obviously people may have different use cases (consumer vs. business) - but as someone using Google services as both a consumer and business, I find the tools confusing - and it seems to be even more confusing for my Mom.

[aasarava]

You're definitely not the only one. Trying to understand the interaction between the various Google properties makes me feel like an idiot -- and yet I'm a Web developer with a CS degree who has been using the Web just about every day since 1994.

For example, have you ever tried to schedule a Google Hangout chat? As far as I can tell, there's no way to do it from Google Hangouts. You need to first sign in to Google+, then go to Google Events and create a new event, and then you have to specify that it's a video event.

Is it a use case they just don't care about? Is there no one at the company who's looking at this setup and thinking, "wow, this is confusing and we can probably simplify that"? Or is my brain just getting too brittle to make sense of it?

[guelo]

I feel that Google made better, more usable interfaces before they were taken over by designers. Modern designers are obsessed with removing features because that's the Apple religion. The new Maps is ruined because of this. Larry should fire all their designers and let engineers take over the interfaces again.

[pwang]

I find the new Maps to be so unusably slow, laggy, finnicky, and overall not an improvement over what Google Maps had been for the 4 years before.

And I can't figure out how to show traffic WHILE displaying directions or a location that I searched for. Seems like such a simple, commonly used thing... "Where is this place? What's the traffic outlook for the routes there?" Sigh

[astrieanna]

On the mobile version, zooming out (a couple of time, to some magic level) will suddenly make traffic appear (on the route and everywhere else), even while following the directions. I have not tried this on the desktop version.

[rogerbinns]

I gave up on G+ because they kept making it more and more unreadable. Posts ended up being pictures wherever possible. Then they made things go horizontally and vertically in random sized boxes. You could switch to single column mode, but ended up with almost no actual text on the screen - http://www.rogerbinns.com/galleries/From%20Posts/plusunreada... shows in yellow to tiny areas of actual content.

I still don't understand how anyone actually consumes G+ content in non-trivial amounts. The irony is that Google Reader was all about consuming content, but nothing was learned from that.

[Curmudgel]

I agree. I can't stand the low contrast gray typefaces, the new zoom buttons that replace the slider, the obnoxious, hyperactive search bar and the inability to rotate the map view (which should be trivial).

[watwut]

I agree too. Google tend to generate hard to use interfaces. Especially when you have small monitor, it is as if they did not eve tried them on such device.

[timothya]

That's an interesting use case, but the only time you're actually using Google Hangouts is when you're already in a conversation with someone, so I imagine that's not where most people would go when they want to schedule a call with someone.

When I think about scheduling, I immediately think about Google Calendar or Google+ Events, because that's where I would go to schedule any sort of event (with a video call or otherwise). Both of those places support adding a Hangouts video chat to an event.

[ww520]

Google+ became just like .Net of Microsoft. It's a umbrella for a number of confusing services forced together. Depending on whom to talk to and the favorite of the month, it can be different things.

It was social connect before. Now it's unified login. Next it's going to be whatever. Sounds awfully like .Net in the old days.

[MichaelGG]

Microsoft dropped branding everything ".Net" like a decade ago. .Net nowadays only refers to the .NET Framework.

[yuhong]

I think Vic formerly worked on .NET at Microsoft in fact.