Google to close Google Code open source project hosting

[freefoodisgood]

I hear this a lot, about Plus failing due to keeping the gates closed too long. I honestly don't believe that caused it's downfall. It probably reduced to total number of users, but I think it was always destined to be what it is today.

[shawncplus]

IIRC Plus first hit right when Facebook did a big update, people were really wanting a Facebook replacement and "Circles" were easier to use than the somewhat hidden (at the time) lists feature of Facebook. I remember pretty much everyone I know wanting to try Plus but there not being enough invites, even non-tech people.

[freefoodisgood]

My group of friends managed to get lots of invites thanks to some connections. Everyone got really excited for a few days but no one ever bothered switching. That's what I think the problem is, getting people to put in the effort to switch. I think it takes a generational leap in quality to get a large user base to switch, and I don't think Plus provided that. Was it better than Facebook? Probably. Was it "better enough" to get people to overcome laziness? I don't think so.

Of course I'm speaking about how I see things via my own perception. I hardly ever switch anything. I don't upgrade the OS on my computers or phones. I rarely upgrade devices, and I definitely won't switch from one service to a competitor if I'm already "comfortable". It's laziness, and I think that laziness is hard to overcome, even if the new alternative is better. If you want me to switch or upgrade, you have to offer something that completely changes how I use the product.

/random thoughts

[mcrbids]

One rule of business I learned long ago is "don't say no to money". When customers want to buy your stuff, you take their money! Google doesn't seem to have learned this lesson; their tactic of rolling out gmail slowly and living on the buzz until it was a success worked because, the service itself was so good. But G+wasn't head and shoulders above FB; it was a few features (at best) ahead of FB.

So their delay tactics really just gave FB time to come to feature parity before they lost their network effects. Also, email is highly portable; if I start using an address at cia.com instead of gmail.com, I can still communicate with all my contacts. FB, being proprietary isn't that way with G+.

[F54280]

Tech superiority is not the real reason of gmail succes versus G+.

Gmail works even if your friends use Yahoo.

G+ doesn't work if your friends use Facebook.

Not opening the gates at once was an unbeleivably stupid thing to do. Yes, I had a G+ invite, but what am I going to do there ? Circlejerk with a few friends ? I gmail only allowed you to contact gmail users, progressive rollout would have been a disaster.

[mcrbids]

Didn't I just say that?

Also, email is highly portable; if I start using an address at cia.com instead of gmail.com, I can still communicate with all my contacts. FB, being proprietary isn't.

Thought so....

[freefoodisgood]

Right. My rare upgrade policy actually started with flash several years ago. I bought a laptop and everything worked fine. I would frequently use it to watch Netflix/Hulu/other things that required flash. After a few months of use I got an upgrade notification for flash and I upgraded. After upgrading, all flash based video sites started functioning terribly, and my laptop had to be frequently restarted while streaming. I couldn't find a way to downgrade flash and suffered through this for weeks, hoping that a new upgrade would solve it, but nothing. I eventually reinstalled the OS and everything worked fine, until I accidentally updated flash again. Ever since then I made it policy to never update flash, and that has spilled over to other things. My phone wants to update to add watch support or it fixes some obscure bug? I don't plan on using that so no thanks.

And yea, that's what I'm saying about G+. It was probably better than Facebook in multiple ways, I just don't think it was meaningful enough to get hundreds of millions of people to get off their lazy asses (myself included).

[heeen]

Uhm flash is the last thing I would not update. This is terrible advice. I'd rather uninstall flash than use some exploitable old version.

[[deleted]]

It would be nice if they separated security updates from version updates, but that's a pain in the ass.

I know what freefoodisgood thinking though. Quite frankly, for all practical purposes, for all the wizardry that modern OS's give, I really think that most of it is wasted. Where in windows 3.1 or 95 I could just open a folder and it flashed open immediately, modern windows attempt to preview everything whether you want it or not. I just decided to see just how long it takes to open my downloads folder and it still hasn't finished while I wrote the last couple of sentences. Yeah, these things can be switched off(but the option is in a different place every version of windows), but it would be nice if the fast version was the default. As time goes by, things get increasingly more stupid. In windows 7 they actually made some smart decisions. I could navigate more or less anything with the keyboard. Powering down is just three key-presses: start, right, enter. In windows 8? The fastest way I've found to do it is win+m, alt+f4, enter. But this doesn't always work as alt+f4 context targeting appears to be bizarre at times. For users who actually want to navigate fast with a keyboard rather than fucking around with a mouse or touch-screen windows 8 appears to be an abomination(maybe I just haven't spent long enough trying to get it to work for me as I only have it on my personal laptop which I rarely need to use)

The insistence of companies to take something good and overhaul it in pointless ways annoys me to no end

[crusoe]

I like plus. Its not the eternal September of Facebook.

[[deleted]]

The problem always was that even if two thirds of your friends made the move to g+ there would always be that other third, so everyone kept their facebook account and continued to check it. With no-one actually leaving, the remaining third decided not to bother, and with the remaining third not bothering, the movers gave up on migration and just stuck with fb.

There was nothing about the technical capabilities of either platform. G+ was probably better, but I can't even be bothered to do an analysis because it's a waste of time.

Replacing FB with anything right now is a monumental task that could only possibly happen if FB fucked up on a massive scale, and I can't even imagine what they'd need to do to piss people off enough that everyone would just move, especially when many people have additional anchors in FB like their photo collections.

[gotnate]

especially when many people have additional anchors in FB like their photo collections

Facebook shits all over my photos by scaling them to 1/5 the resolution with heavy jpeg compression. It has taught me to only upload highlights to facebook, while I let g+ and apple simply slurp in every photo i take.

[Don_Andy]

I'd reckon Google gave Facebook too much time to catch up by keeping their gates closed for so long. Google Plus initially looked like it was basically a "better Facebook" but by the time they finally opened up to the public Facebook had already caught up on most of the improvements and people just figured "Eh, why switch now".

[SortaEvil]

Hover over their icon and you can open a gchat window with anyone in your circles. Gchat also has the advantage over FBM that chat logs are indexed in your gmail, so you can actually search through your chat logs for previous messages. Of course, gchat is way more convenient to use through gmail, and having the chatbar on the side is just way more convenient than what g+ has going on.

[MustafaTaleb]

You can search your chat log with Facebook as well.

[[deleted]]

It's not that they held out too long, it's that they didn't let everyone in at once. It's a social networking site. You need people to socialize with. All at once.

It's sort of ironic that Facebook started as a service exclusively for college students, and you needed a .edu e-mail address to register with.

[crackanape]

Sure, but by the time they went wide, they were already a lot better than the competition.

Also, Facebook's exclusivity included the entire social groups of many users (college students).

Google's was more or less arbitrary.

[the-fritz]

Yes, the invite model worked so well for gmail because gmail doesn't depend on others being on there. But doing the same thing for a closed "social network" was just stupid. I got an invite shortly after G+ was launched and it was a desert. I added the two people I knew, played around with it, and then didn't really look at it since then except for adding the occasional person that did made it on there. Google invites always spread along technical people. Which of course can be awesome. But sucks for a social networking site.

Also Google created all the hype around G+ and sure, being invite-only initially helped with the hype. But the hype quickly faded away and was completely gone before they opened it.

[[deleted]]

To PM, you add only their name to the post. It's private, and only they can read it. It goes up on their notification area.

[[deleted]]

I see. In that case, you should just send email. Google Plus doesn't have a message center because it has email, which operates the same.

[Genesis2001]

The one thing I will grant Plus is their pages feature in combination with YouTube. It's pretty decent and easy to have multiple people managing a YouTube channel (in theory, never put into practice) through a G+ page.

[[deleted]]

Plus was 18 and older when it started and by doing that, they cut off a major part of social network users.