The more I learn of internet companies, the more I'm convinced you don't have to get it right, you have to get it first. Amazon still hasn't gotten online shopping right. Their search engine is shit. Their recommendations are often insane. But they were the first to scrabble up the pile which gives them the ability to kick down at everyone else. Facebook is a horrible social network. However, it was the first social network that didn't look like your teenage daughter's messy bedroom. Google also forgot one of their cardinal rules with Google plus - provide value for the user so that Google can provide value for its clients. There was nothing compelling, in and of itself, about Google plus. The nuances between Google and Facebook were entirely lost on all but the corner cases since the primary advantages were privacy and Hangouts and nobody understands their privacy or why they shouldn't just use Skype. On the other hand, any monkey understands he's being forced to create a Google plus profile in order to watch Youtube videos, and since he didn't used to have to do that he's going to resent it, not embrace it. It's embarrassing for Google "don't be evil" plus to lose out to Facebook due to network effects. This is a company that drove every single road in the world in order to get better maps but they couldn't come up with a better reason for people to use plus other than "because I said so." Google has $400bln in market cap. They throw shitty content at me all the time. What if they'd spent 1% of that on driving adoption of google plus through carrot instead of stick - what would it look like now? Google has been described as a company of engineers trying to make the world a better place... for better or for worse. Engineers are not the guys you want driving your social media bus. Wave, Glass, Buzz, Plus... they're geeky nerd tools that Google expected average citizens to adopt. I wonder if this will be seen as a wake-up call that sometimes the application matters more than the solution.
I agree with all of this. I bet Craig does too. What I didn't realize 1328 days ago was that Facebook had solved enough people's social network problems by that point. I came to Facebook late, and never really felt the need for FB or Google+. I saw Alexis Ohanian give a talk at UofM last year. One thing that he related that I recall was that Paul Graham had told him not to fret about the competition (Digg). He said something to the effect of: "Let your competition kill itself. Just worry about not killing yourself." I think that much is possible: it's Facebook's game to lose, not Google's game to win.
It's interesting, though - Digg was making money. Granted, they had to make a lot more money than Reddit; they had like ten times the staff at the time of implosion. But Reddit now has about 5x the staff it did at the Digg implosion and they're clearly attracting talent through options. Yet it not only makes no money, it doesn't even have a profit model. Digg should have won. Its content was fresh _enough_ for what they were doing, and they were monetizing it successfully. They just demonstrated succinctly that they cared much more about monetization than they did about their users and that was that. I read an economics book once that remarked that just because the Soviets lost the Cold War didn't mean the United States won... it just meant they lost second. I remain unconvinced about the long-term health of Reddit. You're right, though; it's Facebook's game to lose.
you know what I don't want? Everything connected and all in one place. Tech companies keep telling me I want this, and I really, really don't. I like my separations, my partitions, especially as a trans person who is not out to most of the world and currently lives in a relatively conservative area of the world, if everything I had was connected I could lose a lot of working relationships. Google's implementation of Google + into youtube really made me upset for this reason.
oh for sure, I'm aware, but I have had my singular youtube account for 6 years or so, and so It's got a bunch of videos on it, and it's got a long list of subscriptions that I can't be assed to move to another account. I'm lucky that my username was grandfathered in to the new system, and it does not display my real name, and any comments I make aren't shared to my real name google + . That said however, it's a problem that I shouldn't have had to solve. The integration did nothing to "improve the comment section" as it was claimed, it was just a way to force google + on all of their users. It was a business decision to get more people to use google + (more "butts in seats", as they say), i get it, but it frankly - if I lived in somewhere like virginia, or Texas, or Louisiana, or california 1 2, I could be in some danger if certain people found out I was trans. Facebook's "Real Name" policy - honestly an even bigger problem - has already been used to "out" trans people by assholes who found out about them and decided that they needed to tell the world all about it, and attempt to shame those people. As a trans woman, I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. If I was a trans woman of colour, the number is 1 in 8. This is not exactly small potatoes, friend, this is serious shit. All that to say, I like to keep my separations in place and I have good reasons for doing so. I am lucky, other people have not been so.
Google hasn't really ever forced you to use your real name, and allows you to create a new/fake google plus account to link to your youtube one. It doesn't seem like an issue at all to me, especially when I follow the same policy of "never mix internet and real life". Facebooks "real name" policy has lost them someone using their service. They literally want a picture ID before they let me use my old account. What google wants is to make every google account work for every possible service. So far as I am aware they do not want to force you to link all your currently existing google accounts under one name, and aren't forcing you to.
2 things: When google plus was first implemented into youtube, it was a forced link. the reason it exists in the system it does now is because even the "1 million + " subscriber club of hooligans was complaining about it, making videos complaining about it, etc. It was a PR nightmare for what was already an unpopular move for an unpopular social media service. In theory this is correct, and for most situations is. As I said before, I don't suspect malice, it's just a business move. moving everyone wholesale into a new system is much easier than encouraging people to switch a la carte. The problem came when you had accounts on several separate google services using the same email. They all became bundled together, because "same account, same person." There were ways you could force a continued separation (which became a little easier to do as they saw how unpopular their decision was), but there was little information for the average user on how to do it - most of it in tiny light grey print at the bottom of the white page. No one was "forcing you" in a literal sense, moving your hands for you, but they were putting the burden of work onto the people who desired (or as I showed before, might need) the separation, the "status quo." therein lies the problem. Youtube in particular is guilty of changing its interface in ways that its users hate, but makes youtube more ad revenue ( which is admittedly much less than it could be because of how google decides to run), rather than actually fixing any of the issues the users actually complain about (the subscription box has been junk for years now - to the point that some of my favourite youtubers use an email list to notify people of new videos instead). It's always easier to crop this change on everyone - think "New and Improved" pizza sauce on your average frozen pizza, which a few months later becomes "Original Sauce is Back!" when the original ingredients are more cost-effective.What google wants is to make every google account work for every possible service. So far as I am aware they do not want to force you to link all your currently existing google accounts under one name, and aren't forcing you to.
How Google could make Google+ awesome and begin tearing down the giant walls around social networks: 1. Make the "stream" a simple RSS feed reader, and 2. Make all posts on G+ profiles, pages, and communities simple RSS feeds. Make the "follow" button an add-to-feed button, and make "circles" into folders. These things are the basis of what RSS has been doing for however-long-RSS-has-been-around, and every social network has simply taken these things and confined them to their own network. Imagine how cool it would be if every social network did this - essentially becoming open blogging platforms and feed readers. You could just pick one to use, and follow any feed, whether it be from facebook, google+, or a website's self hosted RSS feed. Or I could not use any network, and host my own (rss-powered) blog, and use whichever feed reader I want to follow all my friends, any blogs, and any publication's RSS feeds. Obviously this is far too idealistic for anything in the near-term, but it'd be cool if google started a trend in that direction. Unfortunately google's recent direction seems to be away from open protocols.