A Shameful Ending
Pitched internally as an answer to the competitive threat posed by Facebook, project “Emerald Sea” eventually became Google+. I remember Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina writing back in 2011 something to the effect that ‘sharing on the web was broken,’ which was what first gave me the sense that this team wasn’t only interested in building a Facebook killer. They wanted to use Google’s strengths in processing information to reinvent what it meant to share information on the web....
Interesting quotes in the liked articles as well:
"Either there was a great opportunity to sail to new horizons and new things, or that we were going to drown by this wave."
- Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social for Google
Originally shared by Gideon Rosenblatt
The Fall of Google
I am very sad to write this, but Google's failure of leadership on Google+ is a complete disaster. The utter disregard for end users is shocking.
I hope that business cases will be written about Google+ in the future to illustrate what happens when businesses lose sight of the fact that end users still needed to be treated with the same respect accorded to paying customers.
I hope, too, that people will take a lesson from this service and the tremendous loss of human capital that it represents, to reassess how willing we are to trust our creations and our relationships to large corporations.
https://www.the-vital-edge.com/fall-of-google-plus/
Pitched internally as an answer to the competitive threat posed by Facebook, project “Emerald Sea” eventually became Google+. I remember Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina writing back in 2011 something to the effect that ‘sharing on the web was broken,’ which was what first gave me the sense that this team wasn’t only interested in building a Facebook killer. They wanted to use Google’s strengths in processing information to reinvent what it meant to share information on the web....
Interesting quotes in the liked articles as well:
"Either there was a great opportunity to sail to new horizons and new things, or that we were going to drown by this wave."
- Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social for Google
Originally shared by Gideon Rosenblatt
The Fall of Google
I am very sad to write this, but Google's failure of leadership on Google+ is a complete disaster. The utter disregard for end users is shocking.
I hope that business cases will be written about Google+ in the future to illustrate what happens when businesses lose sight of the fact that end users still needed to be treated with the same respect accorded to paying customers.
I hope, too, that people will take a lesson from this service and the tremendous loss of human capital that it represents, to reassess how willing we are to trust our creations and our relationships to large corporations.
https://www.the-vital-edge.com/fall-of-google-plus/
Coming back to read this later...
ReplyDeleteThe project name was "Emerald Sea"?
ReplyDeleteSo that's why the iOS app logged its data using the handle "EmSea"! ☝️
Wrote a piece on the platform too https://dhannoo.com/2018/10/09/google-plus-the-ghost-town-that-was-full-of-life/
ReplyDeleteThanks, Edward Morbius. It kills me to see things unravel this way.
ReplyDeleteIMHO, when Vic Gundotra left, many/most G+ aims were lost altogether... since then, the platform survived "as is" and that's all... vision was lost, OK. But destroying everything now is too much...
ReplyDelete/s
ReplyDeleteG+ seems like a squandered opportunity - a Google project that was being handled in a very un-Google manner. Pity.
ReplyDeleteI am still in denial stage, the only social media that I truly love is going away and I have to find a way to recover from it
ReplyDeleteI think G+ is probably the only social media where people actually have emotional attachment to it. I don't think people would do the same if facebook goes away.
ReplyDeleteI deleted my FB years ago when I realized they were spying on me when ever I was accessing a site and wwhen they added tagging of images to help improve their facial recognition sw
ReplyDeleteHalfey Halphstein I'm certain there will be wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and tearing of hair.
ReplyDeletePeople get attached to the most absurd of things.
Just ... don't tell them that.
Especially not in public.
Mewe.com
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what Gideon Rosenblatt means with "lose sight of the fact that end users still needed to be treated with the same respect accorded to paying customers"? Google never lost sight of that. From all I see, paying (G Suite etc.) customers are treated with exactly the same respect (i.e. none) as we non-paying (read: paying with our data) customers are.
ReplyDeleteGoes to show you virtual social media is junk. Only in person relationships count.
ReplyDelete#sub
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, Quork Q'Tar, you answer that question pretty well yourself. What we are talking about here is the reality of working with automated self-service platforms. Usually, when you pay, you get a live person as backup, but Google is generally dealing with price points (i.e. free or low cost) where they basically aren't willing/able to do that.
ReplyDeleteThe bigger point though is that if you pull end users out of the equation, the whole value proposition falls apart, so you need to accord respect to them. The self service we received prior to this meltdown actually seemed to work alright. It was really just problems with strategy. But since this past year or so, the service itself has been falling apart (spam) and then over this last couple of months the total silence from the management team here is what really crossed the line of disrespect for end users of the service and all the investments we've poured into it over the years.
IIRC Vic wasn't the hero of the story but a major part of the problem. Need to dig out the references …
ReplyDeleteGideon Rosenblatt I fell into G+ by accident. It was on my first smartphone, and with no small sense of trepidation, I pushed the red button one day. To say my world was changed is an understatement. I'm the least tech-savvy person you'll ever meet, trust me on that. But I was able to make friends from all over the world, meet people who've become like family to me, fall in love and start a new life.
ReplyDeleteThis has been my social media home, the only place I was, until that wretched announcement. Now I spend most days being lost, and very, very angry at Google. I feel that we, the everyday folks, who poured our little lives into making friends from all over have stabbed in the back. We're being evicted from our home for nothing that was our fault. Farcebook has these silly data breaches seemingly weekly, but they're still here. Nothing seems to touch them.
So I'll continue to wander in the wasteland, trying to find someplace to be. Someplace where my friends and family are. Someplace to call home.
Gideon Rosenblatt I'm watching the story of the NYTimes pulling from AdTech / ads networks in the EU with great interest.
ReplyDeleteThat would be an interesting precedent / precipice.
Jürgen Christoffel Agreed with you. Vic was gunning for something larger (probably Sundar's present seat), and lost. Part of the the G+ takedown may be retribution for that -- destroy all that your vanquished foe created.
ReplyDeleteThere were some huge flaws in the proposition and goals of G+, though some nice execution. It's a bit like one of those US-style thriller movies where the local small crime always ends up tied to some international syndicate. Why not focus on doing small things (or even reasonably large ones) well, for a change?
There's a place for a good online user-focused discussion platform. Clearly, this isn't that place.
Edward Morbius, interesting to think about an AdTech platform owned by a consortium of publishers, huh?
ReplyDeleteGideon Rosenblatt Or operating independently.
ReplyDeleteHow diversified is Google's revenue stream again? I've lost track.
In other news: Google themselves may not have lost track, and may be attempting to reorient appropriately.
So, here's the "Vic" background story I remembered: threadreaderapp.com - Thread by @morganknutson: "Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was. I'm still pissed about the ba […]"
ReplyDeleteJürgen Christoffel I read that in its entirety. It was at once, both depressing and interesting. The latter because, probably like most people, I have had similar experiences. I sometimes despair of corporations and management.
ReplyDeleteRoy Gardiner who doesn't. My favorite quote on this despair thing is Any company large enough to have a research lab is large enough not to listen to it. -- Alan Kay
ReplyDeleteJürgen Christoffel Slightly too much sour-grapes and I-know-better in that for me to give it full credence. Though it does suggest a poorly-managed project. I suspect many of the complaints are valid, but that it misses the bigger picture.
ReplyDeleteJürgen Christoffel: Strangely enough, he seems to have been both. Flawed heroes are trendy these days.
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo flawed heroes are ok, as long as their flaws don't interfere with their niche of heroism.
ReplyDeleteJürgen Christoffel: But such interference is usually a main source of the drama.
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo yes, hollywoodesk drama.
ReplyDeleteThe real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. -- Umberto Eco
Jürgen Christoffel: This is quite common in free software projects. They tend to have single, or small numbers of, people pulling them forward, and because the driver is often a personally relevant problem, the leaders are generally not exactly replaceable (even though the software is by definition easily forkable), and their personality ... quirks can lead to rather interesting, sometimes severely interfering, path dependent features in the whole systems.
ReplyDeleteGuido van Rossum, the Benevolent Dictator for Life (retired) of Python, has probably been most humorously vocal about this sort of thing, and Linux is kind of known as a project that Linus heavily delegated and recruited for so as to better alleviate this sort of thing. Contrariwise, people who don't care for RMS would call a lot of features in GNU packages examples of his personality flaws interfering with his code.
Andres Soolo good examples. Even as a very long time Emacs and Unix/Linux user, I still dislike info(1) instead of man(1). Thanks, RMS ;-0
ReplyDelete