Is Google Plus Enterprise a viable alternative? Could GOOG port us -- the loyal core users of G+ --- over to an Enterprise version? If we had to pay for it, how much should it cost? What would be the down side --- loss of public access, a legacy/restricted community, frozen development?
Great question. Find out.
ReplyDeleteG Suite Basic is $50/year (or $5/month) per user. I know that legacy free domains can upgrade. Not sure if a regular Google account can.
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich can you go to gsuite.google.com - Sign up for G Suite and see if you can signup a regular account for g Suite?
ReplyDeleteCharging for social media is a likely not viable. Competitors with larger user bases offer free use.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres I’d pay for it if the handful of people I follow here were on it and it had no ads.
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne I wouldn't. The user base is not large enough to recoup investment.
ReplyDeleteG+ Enterprise will last another 6 months max. Surely no one uses it.
ReplyDeleteEmlyn O'Regan The name alone signals that it is targeted to businesses.
ReplyDeleteFor those not familiar, this is gsuite
ReplyDeletegsuite.google.com - Google+
And if you want to see what a G Suite profile looks like, look at mine.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres I consider the discussions I have with friends here to be ample return on my investment.
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne I get that but the platform will be gone in 10 months so people will migrate somewhere and the discussions will continue. Most people cannot afford paying for social media.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres Everyone pays for social media. The question is whether you want to pay for it in money, having to look at advertisements, or having your information sold.
ReplyDeleteIn 10 months, I’ll still be here, as will everyone else using a G Suite account whose administrator has enabled it. If the conversations go away, I’ll miss it, but no more than I miss BBS chats, FidoNet, Usenet, BIX, or any of the other myriad of fora that have come and gone since I got on the net circa 1982.
I kind of miss Usenet, but not enough to go back for any extended period. I was mostly in technical groups, but the relevant product shut down, or I stopped using it (job change). The main product I still use.. well, the manufacturer set up a Stackoverflow type system that was much better suited for sustained technical discussion. The time is long long long past when I could firehose usenet, even just one hierarchy of it...
ReplyDeleteThe only "payment" they get from me is sales of my online behavior of course and most users who do not pay for access accept that as a given. In the case of gsuite, if it benefits you in a way that makes it worth paying them to sell your data, not a problem! For me, that is a deal breaker given all the free alternatives.
ReplyDeleteI am willing to put some money (subscription) towards high quality sites or those that I consider to be doing important work. But I also know a lot of people who are limited income, so payment-only sites can be a significant barrier to connecting to interesting people, including people who are financially scraping by because they do have ethics.
ReplyDeleteI do not know how to resolve this difficulty, that running a good site takes money ,and that the kind of people who really respect that might also be people who cannot afford to pay.
Shelenn Ayres Note, they don’t sell the data of G Suite users. gsuite.google.com - Committed to protecting your organization’s data | G Suite Security
ReplyDeleteNote that anyone who has a 501(c)3 can get a free non-profit account with unlimited users.
It looks like I found an alternative that could be the solution. I will set up a node for testing later this week if anyone wants to help evaluate it. If it works well, we can spread it to major groups and make it viral.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres do you mean to say that you've set up a G Suite node? Is it possible to import content and connections from regular G+?
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich no not a gsuite node... the solution i am looking at is a decentralized federation approach that allows easy integration with other social media ... i dont know if the G+ data circles etc will easily import yet - that is the reason for the test
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich I have been using G+ with my G Suite account since almost the beginning. It works fine. Whether it will continue to work after August is the question.
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne can you access your public "consumer" G+ content from a G Suite account?
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich I don’t have a public “Consumer” account. Just several G Suite accounts, including this one I am posting from.
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne might it be possible to reclassify an existing consumer account as a G Suite account? I.e. if we were to go this route, would we have to start from scratch and import data (if this is even possible in G Suite) or would it be like turning on paid mode (seamless data transfer)?
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich Why don’t you give it a try at the link I provided? You can cancel before you get to the payment part. I don’t have a regular consumer account to test it on.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, there is o way to import G+ content from one account to another, unlike gmail.
Brian Holt Hawthorne Yet.
ReplyDeleteJohn Lewis I don’t think there ever will be. That’s a feature we’ve been asking for since the very early beta days. They said it couldn’t be done because Google+ content was so interlinked with other accounts.
ReplyDeleteWhile they might spend a few hours adding additional G+ data to Google Takeout, I sincerely doubt they will be adding any import features.
Brian Holt Hawthorne But other services might digest the output of the Takeout. Then you could move to another server easily if you had your Takeout file ready to import.
ReplyDeleteJohn Lewis True. So, let’s hope they add comments to Google Takeout. The problem is, I want Takeout to include every post that I ever commented on, as well as every comment on one of my posts.
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne Yeah. That's a database hit... It's already taking half a day to get your stuff... can you imagine the SQL join?
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne hmm, so if we don't get full data takeout, we have a claim under EU Privacy law? Lemme consult my friend the EU data litigator...
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne I will try to set up G Suites once I know there is path to import user data (see here)
ReplyDeleteplus.google.com - Hello everyone I just visited Google TakeOut and selected all my g+ content ...