More Google+ meta

[foxfirefey]

Why I left Google:

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Google+: The Charge Of The Like Brigade

Could Google ever have won? I think so. But not by blitz. By envelopment.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Wow; thanks.

In other words, Google could have been Tumblr. :)

Also, it reminded me the game of Go. Google, Go, coincidence? I THINK NOT.

Envelopment indeed.

[liv]

Ooh, thanks for those. The Like Brigade one is particularly interesting. I mean, TechCrunch is so male skewed it's almost hilarious: absolutely nothing on the wallet names issue, still thinking that Facebook is the latest "cool" thing since Tumblr and Pinterest are beneath their notice. But still, I really like the point about Google getting in your face when they could have carried on just being an unnoticed part of the internet and gathered far more data that way.

[thirdblindmouse]

Hm, I think that post is dealing in the bigger picture and expecting the reader to know details such as the name brouhaha. If I knew none of those details, I would be more annoyed by the post's vagueness. I don't see any point where Tumblr and Pinterest should have been mentioned. The post is about what Googled was trying to do by introducing Google+, and that was: to be Facebook specifically.

Google lost its status as a neutral party because of a number of choices that minimized the user and promoted themselves unilaterally. How many of these decisions were made deliberately, and how many innocently? It’s hard to say, but in the end the analysis is merely academic. The reality is that they are no longer trusted. The liberties they took with their best assets were questionable at best and infuriating at worst. And they have had the side effect of drawing attention to just how much power Google wields.

This precisely. Before Google+ I used multiple services they provide, and they let me think that the accounts were linked for my own convenience as well as theirs. Google+ made it painfully obvious that my convenience or inconvenience was the last thing they care about.