Re:Bradley Horowitz Is Now Running Google+
by dredmorbius on Monday March 02, 2015 @07:19AM
(#9131489)
On photos and social: yes and no.
What's most frustrating for me with G+ and multimedia in general is that it keeps getting in my way.
When I'm looking for long-form text, I keep getting images.
When I'm looking for images, I keep getting long-form text.
Then there's video.
If I want to look at images I can go to a site that has images -- say, Imgur -- and browse those mindlessly. Or look at a curated set (say one of the subreddits, or an Imgur category). Imgur's even got a pretty decent image search.
Yes, if I had family and I wanted to specifically share certain images with them and all that, then G+ would be pretty cool. But quite honestly, the thought of using a third-party platform like that weirds me out and bothers me. I never cared for the "share everything personal out in public" mode, or even "on someoone's third-party service".
That said: image sharing is absolutely a killer social app, simply because the tools for users to do this themselves suck so badly (though this is increasingly less the case).
Add to all that: images and G+ are a pain in the ass. I cannot create a post with inline images. Creating an uploading albums is a pain (again, Imgur is hugely better at this). It does have autoawesome, which can create cool effects, but that's not something to pin a total system off of. There's copious free storage, which is cool, yes (and in general the underlying tech of Google / G+ has been both robust and exceptionally reliable).
But ... "fantastic user experience"? Please! From client bloat (even Yonatan complains) to ideosyncratic Markdown (dittos) to lost drafts (dittos) to hard-to-read small and low-contrast fonts and "cards" style presentation of long-form texts, it simply makes no sense. Imgur, reddit, and Ello are kicking ass and taking names in multiple categories regards G+.
Yes, it could have been good. But it isn't.
The good?
Notifications. "Subscribe by default" turns out to be pretty good (though there's a lot of stuff I'd prefer to turn off).
Search. Syntax sucks, but everything is indexed, and it's fast. Client bloat means you can't scroll back more than a few screens, but ...
Data liberation. Also useful.
The rest of it? Quite frankly, I'd scrap most of it and start over.
What's most frustrating for me with G+ and multimedia in general is that it keeps getting in my way.
When I'm looking for long-form text, I keep getting images.
When I'm looking for images, I keep getting long-form text.
Then there's video.
If I want to look at images I can go to a site that has images -- say, Imgur -- and browse those mindlessly. Or look at a curated set (say one of the subreddits, or an Imgur category). Imgur's even got a pretty decent image search.
Yes, if I had family and I wanted to specifically share certain images with them and all that, then G+ would be pretty cool. But quite honestly, the thought of using a third-party platform like that weirds me out and bothers me. I never cared for the "share everything personal out in public" mode, or even "on someoone's third-party service".
That said: image sharing is absolutely a killer social app, simply because the tools for users to do this themselves suck so badly (though this is increasingly less the case).
Add to all that: images and G+ are a pain in the ass. I cannot create a post with inline images. Creating an uploading albums is a pain (again, Imgur is hugely better at this). It does have autoawesome, which can create cool effects, but that's not something to pin a total system off of. There's copious free storage, which is cool, yes (and in general the underlying tech of Google / G+ has been both robust and exceptionally reliable).
But ... "fantastic user experience"? Please! From client bloat (even Yonatan complains) to ideosyncratic Markdown (dittos) to lost drafts (dittos) to hard-to-read small and low-contrast fonts and "cards" style presentation of long-form texts, it simply makes no sense. Imgur, reddit, and Ello are kicking ass and taking names in multiple categories regards G+.
Yes, it could have been good. But it isn't.
The good?
Notifications. "Subscribe by default" turns out to be pretty good (though there's a lot of stuff I'd prefer to turn off).
Search. Syntax sucks, but everything is indexed, and it's fast. Client bloat means you can't scroll back more than a few screens, but ...
Data liberation. Also useful.
The rest of it? Quite frankly, I'd scrap most of it and start over.