Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+

Re:Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ by rogerbinns on Sunday August 02, 2015 @12:51PM (#9991346)

What killed G+ for me was how hard they made it to actually read anything. Originally it was okay, but as time progressed they favoured images over text, and then kept spreading text out further and further apart. I took a screenshot at one point where I highlighted in yellow the actual readable content, making up a tiny proportion of the page: http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png

Of course they had years of experience in helping people read content with Google Reader, so that had to be shut down and lessons ignored. Then they made sure there was no API, or even RSS feeds, so no one else could make a more efficient reader either.

Or in other words, did anyone at Google actually try using their product? (I seem to say that a lot about different Google products.)

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Re:Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ by alexschleber on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @01:15PM (#10004774)

I've been saying the same thing for ages... there even was a hashtag around at the time in 2012 if I recall... #waronwords

Google could never decide if they wanted to G+ to basically be Instagram (not surprising given Horowitz' Yahoo/flickr background), or if there was something to be done along the Interest Graph angle a la Reader / HN / Reddit / asf. The info density for the latter has always been terrible on G+, not to speak of various other iniquities that text-heavy posts (or post shares) had to endure for years, like much smaller images in the stream for the longest time.

Really they should have just split these two use cases into either two separate apps (maybe to prescient for 2011), or at least provided alternative UI views. Of course, a solid API including Write could have solved it as well as you alluded to.

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Re:Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ by Metapony on Sunday August 02, 2015 @02:17PM (#9991695)

This is a great point, thanks for the screenshot, it's very illustrative.

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