(burner account)

I was at Google watching the tech all hands with my boss when they announced that "social multiplier" (bonuses tied to success of G+) was going to apply to everyone in the company.

I turned to my boss and said, shit, our bonuses are going to be fucked because G+ is going to flop.

My boss told me not to worry, since "they are never going to be able to admit that this was a failure".

Sure enough, management tried to bullshit everyone on how successful G+ was and we ended up getting a high multiplier for the "success".

boq though

Easy to succeed when you transitively infect the entire codebase due to conformance and the way build dependencies are set up.

What framework would you have preferred be endemic instead of Boq?

pod? boq acts as if it gives you modularity but try attaching C++ code to Java

What are boq and pod..? (curious non-Googler here, Google search didn't help).

Some info here: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Googles-Boq-Wiz-Soy-framework...

Both are infrastructure frameworks used to run servers

Boq sells itself the wrong way. The real point of Boq is to just run your stuff, and as a consequence you have to use its annoying code framework for reasons I'll never understand.

Pod seems fine on paper, but it's awful. Every little thing you want to do is a huge codelab, and it's less supported. So people default to Boq instead.

I see what you did there ;)

fuckin' pod people

I suddenly want a listing of company KPIs that were graded successful, but were outright failures. I have personally witnessed my fair share of tire fires which were communicated in a rather fantastical way to management.

Every Google employee’s OKRs are supposedly readable by anyone in the company. I don’t know if the OKR scoring is also public, but regardless an enterprising individual could scrape other people’s OKRs every quarter and see which keywords are correlated with later promotions.

1. Promotions are not public (by which I mean accessible by anyone at the company).

2. OKRs are not automatically public (some teams choose to publish theirs; many don't).

It's amazing to watch even the lower level SWEs, who don't need to play politics, looking at a dumpster fire and telling their bosses it's great.

Telling your boss that their special project is a dumpster fire can have very bad career ramifications

That's why you tell their boss.

This is the fundamental reason large organizations struggle in the long run. If a cisco vp started a network generative ai initiative tomorrow, and in a year posted some results - do you think those results would ever be received badly? Or would they be massaged until they were good?

Externally - absolutely they could be received poorly. It’s a very common outcome for clueless executives forcing themselves into areas where they have no domain knowledge.

Internally, most execs will use their sociopathic tendencies to spin it into some kind of an ego boosting success story. Otherwise companies would drop so many current day tech executives.

A big factor in keeping it tight with investors is posturing. It’s definitely more important than performance or business results. I don’t think most tech executives sweat about their actual performance outside of small companies.

That would probably be 95% of KPIs across all big corporations anywhere.

It takes incredible and very rare leadership to be able to admit failures downstream.

Google Plus succeeded in getting people to provide their real names and other personal information across all of Google's services

Yes, this is why I stopped leaving comments and reviews. I really can’t have YouTube comments showing up when people Google my name.

you can change your youtube display name

Are youtube comments indexed by Google for public search? I've never managed to find my own comments via search!

G+ was indeed an internal success in that:

* It made a lot of coddled high-energy employees continue to feel valued and engaged and not jump to a competitor.

* It forced users to unify accounts making cookie joining and user data from different segments much more universally accessible to ads.

* It brought design uniformity to G on the web, which is an important to contrast the Google brand with the otherwise fragmented Android space.

* Lasting revenue and user data from Google Photos and Drive.

Google plus was Google doing what it does best: solving Google problems. It never had a chance as a product, but they didn’t need for it to win. They needed to re-consolidate data input to Ads and defend against a talent drain.

Was it really planned for that? This sounds like just a list of initially unplanned effects it had, used as internal PR spin at best.

The user account consolidation was pretty explicit. It might have been explained as necessary for UX consistency, but for Ads it was a huge way to whitewash otherwise verboten underwear-smelling.

G+ birthed the "create account / log in with Google" widget for non-Google websites, that could go alongside the "log in with FB" widget that was getting popular. Those widgets let Google / FB join your account cookies with whatever other ads get shown on the page.

G+ lead to a dramatically changed privacy policy that dramatically increaed data sharing.

+1 Google Photos is very successful, the product spawned out of G+ auto syncing photos.

Wasn't that more from the acquisition of Picasa?

This is kinda like saying, "The Vietnam War was a success. After all, it kept Indonesia from turning Communist."

Well that's kind of a brutal example, but I agree with the comparison. Indeed, G+ was successful for Google zealots and their bottom line. And in turn, to some extent, the shareholders.

Wait what impact did the Vietnam War have on Indonesia? I've never seen this documentary

Who's going to show a documentary like that?

I have seen articles claiming all sorts of "benefits" of the War, and I believe that was one of them. The coup of 1965, which massacred a million "Communists" was in there.

I imagine this is exactly what they put into their perf reviews at the time. Doesn’t mean it’s causal, or that those things wouldn’t have happened anyway, for a much lower cost.

What’s hilarious about the G+ rollout (in a highly dark comedy way) is that G+ was probably a superior offering than the competition. If Google had given it time and opportunity to fail, it would have succeeded because they could then fix the minor issues people didn’t like.

Instead they forced it on everyone using any Google product, hurting the product itself, but also preventing the critical feedback loop that would have allowed G+ to improve, and become organically successful.

I found G+ quite compelling. It was pleasant to use and I'm sure could of grown into a platform of its own. A place for features that made sense in their time and place and some kind of integration in some products. It seems YouTube is gaining some social features, for instance posts to followers and live chat. I think these would of been interesting areas to utilize g+. But then again I'm outside looking in, I can't speak to the costs they might of incurred letting things unfold at a more measured pace.

It wasn’t meaningfully better than FB (at the time) and there was no reason to switch.

100% was. I mean look at the modern usage of Instagram.

You have your Instagram, then your close friends list on Instagram. Then your finsta. And the close friends list on your finsta.

All of these are just g+ circles.

Facebook had lists (don't quote me on the name) which was very similar to Circles, without needing to be on the sahara desert of content which was Google+.

The advantage of FB was also that you saw content, whereas on Google+ everyone would have it locked up and you couldn't see it, great for the less popular types.

This comment reminds me of Google wave too.

Parts of it made sense, maybe a bit too early, not enough people using it.

I thought extra Instagram accounts are used as pseudonyms, which G+ was never willing to accommodate.

Instagram only implemented "close friends" after years of a solid user base to research the usefulness of that feature. It's not that they couldn't think of it; ideas are cheap. A lot of it has to do with the stories feature, an innovation stolen from Snapchat that G+ predates. And G+ Circles was way more complicated.

Circles feature was also marketed the wrong way. The G+ ad showed a lady bad-mouthing her boss in a circle that doesn't include him. Who's gonna put that much faith in the separation? The entire point of a finsta is that it's not a supported feature, so you can believe that it's totally separate and also has a different name. You'd use the finsta to bad-mouth your boss or perhaps even less wholesome things.

It was faster, had more features, and many of those were about your control. It was meaningfully better than FB in pretty much everything but active user numbers.

It was worse in the only way which mattered which was the content.

The biggest problem with G+ was they replaced GChat, and Hangouts was emphatically slower than GChat. Maybe the G+ product itself was fast - the only part of the product I actually used was a huge downgrade from what they had before. I actually stopped using GChat for years as a result, just because it was so slow.

Also I think Messenger may have been faster than Hangouts. It was not faster than GChat, but it didn't matter because Google killed it and that definitely drove me to use Messenger more.

Content aside, it was way more cumbersome to use than Facebook. My friends and I tried it cause one guy was a huge Google fanboy, and even he said "this sucks, man."

Scoble loved it /s

His former boss lit that dumpster fire. https://scobleizer.blog/2006/06/28/wow-vic-gundotra-leaves-m...

https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/vic-gundotra-the-father-of...

But the thing is, with a social networking site -- like a number of other products -- being objectively superior doesn't count for much if your friends are on the other one.

There is a way around this -- find an initial target audience (team gamers for Discord, students of particular colleges for Facebook), start out as a specialty site for those to get a nucleus of active users, and then start building out. But the kind of outreach and engagement (and, honestly marketing savvy) required to make this strategy actually work don't seem to be "Googley".

(It also helps to find target communities not well-served by incumbents -- like, perhaps, the multiple communities who interacted poorly with Facebook's "real names" policy. But instead, Google leadership insisted on copying that policy, and in a particularly heavy-handed way, to the point that Google employees couldn't register accounts with nicknames that they were actually known by to colleagues and family alike; see e.g. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/why-googles-rea... )

Well there I think part of the problem is that for the world's Googles running a boutique social networking site for auto mechanics or whatever makes less sense -- they'll want to have mass appeal from the jump.

It was! But forcing it on us made me hate not just Google+ but also YouTube and Chrome and Gmail. Suddenly I needed to worry that all of my Youtube comments would become published under my Real Name? And notifications for Google+ were showing up on my Chrome home screen? And it's pre-installed on my phone?

Google+ was pretty great. It had some really wonderful special interest communities, and it was really easy to separate my family identity from my tinkerer identity from my friends stuff. The whole circles and squares thing was a wonderful, front and center, privacy-focused metaphor, like some product people actually listened to what actual online community Ph.Ds were saying.

But the execs made everything worse repeatedly in an attempt to drive success metrics up.

Yeah. I liked most of G+, I like the current state of unified login, but oh boy. Those early unified login things were horrifyingly poorly done. Buggy, unfitting of how people used their systems, it was a disaster and I think it's a big part of why G+ failed.

This is the #1 biggest mistake large companies make when trying to force their way into a new product area.

"We already have a huge user base, we'll just automatically sign them up for <new thing> and get it off to a running start". No, these users will hate you for it and in fact ruin the experience for the select few who are actually interested. Meanwhile executives will tout the rosy user growth metrics, declare the launch a success and collect their bonuses.

There is no substitute for old-fashioned organic growth. Start small. Focus on early power users and listen to their feedback. Have something unique that sets you apart from the competition and attracts more users. This is how Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and the like were able to establish themselves in Facebook's presence while Google+ failed.

Not to mention that G+ had ideas that worked on paper about how users like to manage their connections, but didn't work in real life

Adding a new notification about everytime someone follows you is just asking for people to avoid the product

Is that different from Twitter, or appreciably different from Facebook?

Yes, their notifications were more "in your face" and for some reason you'd get a bunch of random people adding you to their "circle"

Poor UX management

It's surprising they didn't learn from Gmail. For a while I was the most popular person in my circle of business colleagues because I had gmail invites. Artificial scarcity goes a lot further than forcing something on everyone in the end.

On the contrary, they did try the artificial scarcity thing with G+, but unlike Gmail, a social network isn't really useful if your friends aren't on it.

They already knew that from Wave, which also had the "my friends aren't on it and I have no invites" headwind.

Yet Facebook was hyped because of artificial scarcity. They started by rolling out to one elite university at a time.

Gmail was able to leverage open email standards, so aren't constrained by network effect. Second, it was way ahead of competitors in terms of storage and overall product.

Google+ was competing head on with Facebook which had a huge leverage in terms of the network effect.

It doesn't work if the service needs the network effect. Google Wave crashed and burned right out of the gate because it was exclusive and it was exceedingly unlikely that all the people you wanted to collaborate with were able to get in.

Isn't Reddit what Google wave tried to be?

It worked well with Chrome though.

I remember the UI having made about as much sense as v1 of the Azure UI. I wouldn't have called it better than Facebook of the time in any way.

Well, it was more colorful I suppose.

It is funny because today I got an email that my work account was given a YouTube handle and it had my full name in the profile there. Same company practices 10 years on.

I still have two fuckin' YouTube accounts for some reason, too. Some devices log me into one, and some log me into the other one. It's almost as bad as Microsoft accounts.

One of the main problems of Google+ was that it hadn't the cool people on it, it was always too dork-looking.

Yeah they should play it safe and steady just like youtube shorts rollout. No need to panic. Ecosystem advantage is still with Google.

No, G+ was like the turned an ACL system into a social network. I even heard of someone using G+ circles for access control internally! And the G+ rollout redid how end user login works.

It wasn't just the execution, the basic idea was bad. The few people this overly complicated thing would appeal to are probably not the kind to use social media either.

man I miss G+

I have FB and refuse to use it, Twitter is purely for bored doom scrolling and thats about all I use.

Google+ was great, worked exactly how i wanted it and didn't try to sell me crap i didnt want to know about

The Facebook was great in 2005, too. If G+ had lasted longer I’m sure it would have gotten worse by now.

FB in 2005 was better in some ways, but iirc it didn't have pages, events, or communities yet, and those were truly useful features. I was a holdout until I went to college and saw how many clubs and stuff, even marketplaces (pre FB marketplace), were usefully organized on FB.

I could log into FB, browse the world-famous UC Berkeley meme page, RSVP for a comp sci talk, message my 8 group chats, sell my iClicker, buy a dining commons swipe, and message one of those "my sister needs a date for a party" ads all in one place.