The first thing I have to do when looking at a demo video like this is mute the music so I can actually look at the usability of the interface without the soundtrack trying to tug at my heartstrings.
I find it hard to tell if this is going to be a step in the right direction or not. There are some red flags that go up for me, but it's obviously hard to judge based on descriptions and videos alone.
One of the biggest UX problems with G+ today is the way it handles notifications and conversations. Every event gets a notification, to the point that I rarely see a Google page without some red number in the top right, usually indicating nothing more interesting than "{random user} has added you to their Circles." The signal-to-noise ratio for the notifications is so poor that I've developed notification blindness. I've subconsciously tuned it out, so if someone actually does have something to say to me, I miss it.
Conversations on G+ are also poorly handled today. Because so many things are handled in the notification overlay, they all have to live in a narrow band on the right that is very hard to process visually. Whether in an overlay or on Plus itself, conversations are difficult to follow with their collapsed views and lack of adequate visual cues for the reader's attention.
I'm intrigued by the "Conversation Cards" that are mentioned on the redesign announcement, but the fact that they don't warrant their own demo video leads me to suspect that Google hasn't considered the usability of their conversations to be a top priority.
One last red flag for me is the customizable "navigation ribbon." It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves. I'm not saying it can never work, but it is a red flag for me here.
I hope the new G+ is a big step forward. I've been wanting to love Google Plus since it first arrived. At least they're devoted to G+, and they're staying hungry.
Notifications are pretty easily turned down. I only see notifications for things I'm tagged in, or when I've replied to a post previously. Maybe I'm just unpopular but I don't find that I'm being overwhelmed with notifications.
The navigation ribbon reminds me of the OSX dock in how it works. I don't think they gave up on the right solution, but rather the right solution is to allow people to decide what's important to them.
"It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves."
It's always depends on the app. If you have a tool where you primarily have heavy users e.g. a programmer's IDE - then customization makes sense. But in the case of Google+ I don't see the point either - it just adds extra complexity.
Think a/b testing: if your users start customizing around a particular pattern (particularly in larger numbers), there might be something to learn from that.
I agree that the conversations are difficult. When I click the notification window to see a reply, all I get is that one reply. I find it cumbersome to find the full conversation, to the point where I usually go to that person's page and find the original, eschewing the notifications altogether.
Can't you configure what gets delivered as a notification? If you're so popular that people are adding you to circles all the time, can't you just turn those notifications off?
As far as I can tell, you can customize email and phone notifications, but you can't customize the notifications that appear under the red alert number on Google web pages. (I might be missing something.)
There's a "Who can send you notifications?" section on the settings page which allows you to configure who can send you notifications that trigger the red alert.
For me, the problem with G+ is that you can't fine-tune the signal:noise ratio enough.
In a nutshell, Facebook is a network of people I know first IRL, so getting pictures of their dinner last night or latest cat's antics and other useless stuff I can sort of live with, it goes with the territory.
But G+ is more like Twitter with longer posts - I follow a a lot of people I don't know IRL, but only because of a shared interest, and I'm only interested in their posts on that interest, not the other noise.
Whereas pointless posts on Twitter are only 140 characters, don't take up much screen real estate, and are easy to skim and/or skip, that's less the case with G+. I really want a way in G+ to filter out posts by those people that don't have anything to do with the shared interest.
For example, if I create a "Functional Programming" circle and subscribe to a bunch of Haskell, Ocaml, ML, Lisp, and Scheme programmers that I don't know IRL, I'm really not interested in their vacation photos and whatnot. But currently there's no way to filter their vacation photo posts from their posts on functional programming.
An effective 90% solution would be to simply add hash tag filtering to circles, so I can instruct my Functional Programming circle to only accept posts with #functional, #functionalprogramming, #haskell, #ocaml, #ml, #lisp, #scheme, and block anything else without at least one of those hash tags in it.
Not quite perfect, and G+'ers would have to develop the habbit of using hashtags more than they currently do, but it's functional and flexible enough and provides the tools necessary for the community to solve this problem themselves.
This is my biggest G+ pain point, and while I have nothing negative to say about the redesign (it's nice), as long as it doesn't solve this one problem, it will do nothing to get me using G+ more (I check in about 2 or 3 times a week currently).
I think you can click on a circle you're not interested in hearing from (they're listed on the right-hand side in the current/old UI) and there will be a slider at the top of the stream from that circle that will allow you to completely mute that circle.
Then I guess you can add your own "topic alerts" by simply doing a search for haskell, lisp, scheme or whatever at the top and then click "Save this Search" to permanently add it below the "What's hot" button on the right (I don't think there's a way to limit that search to one of your circled though... maybe there is I'm not sure).
EDIT: You can limit a search to all your circles, but not to individual circles. Then again it is unlikely that your "Gardening" circle will have much to say about #haskell.
I think G+ needs to clarify whether it's aimed at "only real friends" as Facebook is, or aimed at "mainly people you don't know" a la Twitter. Once they clarify that, people will stop posting vacation photos for strangers to see, or stop posting Lisp programming tips to their personal friends.
Isn't it the whole point of Circles that they don't have to clarify that? You're in complete control of who you send things to from the very beginning, and the only way you can add people is by putting them in the appropriate circle(s).
The whole thing is somewhat inside out. People should probably expose the things they are going to talk about and users decide what they want to hear from them. You could then make a topic protected or public. Protected would allow the broadcaster to accept / deny subscribers to that topic. Still too complicated but it would at least give people the control they think that circles provides but doesn't.
Yeah, people are sharing wrong. If one person posts Vacation photos, they should post it to their Friends circle, while their Tech posts can be public posts. But, to be honest it's one more thing for people to do and is the reason why there's no fine-tuning of noise.
No they are not sharing wrong, the system is broken.
Google+ offers many ways for me to target content to a group of people that I personally know, and only one, "Public", to distribute content to anyone who might be interested.
Unfortunately there are at least 3 common use cases that need to be considered:
1. I target a message to people I think are interested. (Google+ does this well.)
2. I broadcast a message to people who may be interested. (Google+ sucks at this.)
3. A group of people forms for some purpose (work, game, whatever), and needs to be able to communicate within that group. (Google+ has no support at all for this, and the result is that I was forced to go to Facebook to communicate with people I was playing a Google+ game with.)
There is a real need for all three modes, and I don't know of anyone who does all three well.
I agree that point 3 is still a very big omission. They must be trying hard to merge this "Group" feature into their Circles metaphor, and failing for some reason or other. I personally can't see how hard it could be to add special Circles which are shared by multiple people but managed by only a specific few, but I don't know anyone at Google working on G+.
"Whereas pointless posts on Twitter are only 140 characters, don't take up much screen real estate, and are easy to skim and/or skip, that's less the case with G+. I really want a way in G+ to filter out posts by those people that don't have anything to do with the shared interest."
The big/rich displaying of every link is as big of a problem as the filtering for me. After looking at the update, I appreciate how easy it is to ignore Facebook posts and thus quickly engage with the few posts I can in a given day. Just imagining my current Facebook news feed formatted like G+ is exhausting.
More fundamentally: I don't care to transact my private life on someone else's server (especially someone whose business model is based on mining that life for marketing and other undisclosed purposes).
My professional interests and certain hobbies: not such an issue. Though I see no reason to tie these to a hard and real identity. I managed fine for my first quarter century on the Internet without that.
Actually I want both. I don't want to hear about Lisp from some noob I don't know, I want to hear about it from Peter Norvig and the like. Need both people + topic/interest for that.
I agree, and a friend of mine actually had a working Chrome extension to support filtering by tags (implemented as hashtags, but transparently, so if you had the plugin it rendered the tags in a prettier way.)
Unfortunately his only takeaway from the experience was that designing extensions for chrome was really hard, and stuff kept breaking. He eventually gave up, IIRC.
Whoops, I got something important wrong there and the edit deadline has long passed: his takeaway was that writing extensions for Google+ was hard, not for chrome.
His complaint was the lack of a G+-specific DOM API, and how (at the time at least) Google kept changing things that broke everything.
If I could just set my "Friends" circle to be the default function of the Home button (something I've wanted dating back to my first 5 minutes using the service) I would probably actually use Google+.
"Home" being "EVERYTHING" is just a disaster. I want to see what the people I actually personally care about are up to first and foremost, and then I want to browse around to what the rest of the Internet is doing. Instead, everything is shoved down my throat all the time.
Not just that, but customizing the filtering tabs -- I get very rare G+ posts from my family, but still that tab lingers there, useless, while I'm forced to constantly peruse the drop-down to the right because oh no you can't add more than one custom circle to your tabs. Seriously, wtf.
No, I want a system based around both people and topics/interests. As I mentioned above, I don't want to hear about Lisp from some random folks I don't know, I want to read about it from Peter Norvig and other experts. Need to be able to cross-reference both people/posters (Circles) and topics (hashtag filtering or whatever).
I can actually get the pure topics/interest stuff from subreddits like /r/haskell and speciality sites like lamda-the-ultimate.org.
Yeah I really like this, and I also like how google is not giving up. I do think it has potential, and if google can hit it, it will be huge for the company.
I think the piece that's missing is integration from other third party services - I would use my google+ account a lot more if I could post to it from apps I use often like twitter, instagram etc. There's always share to twitter in almost every app, which makes it easy. But to share anything to google+ i always have to go all the way to their site, which isn't worth it since many of my friends don't use it anyway.
One of the most hotly discussed API feature requests [1] but I'm nervous about it. I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.
I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.
Me either, but - IMO - the answer to this isn't to leave out the "write API," but rather the answer is to give users better filters and the ability to define their stream to meet their own desires. Of course doing so with a simple and intuitive UI is the tricky part, but hey... those G+ engineers make a lot of money, they should be able to come up with something, no?
> they should be able to come up with something, no?
no! :)
Probably the hardest thing in social media is noise filtering via a UI (it's hard for Google, it's hard for Facebook, it's just a hard problem).
For my own (app) selfish reasons, I'd like to see a write api for comments first as that doesn't cause issues on the same scale as writing posts to the stream. Could be a nice place to start.
Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering, Google has a lot more in-house experience with that than Facebook I imagine. I think even something as simple as a personalized Naive Bayes filter would go far.
Ad hoc groupings of people in your Lists and ad hoc set operations on your current groups (school intersection friends, union of all groups filtered where profession = X or Y, etc.) is something a write api would let a budding entrepreneur develop an app around and potentially make a lot of money.
> Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering
Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.
Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.
The problem is, that's not even the right approach. It's built on a faulty assumption - that "who" is the sole determinant of whether or not I'm interested in something. That's not even close to true, unfortunately. I have plenty of social-network connections for whom I value their posts on certain topics and have less-than-zero interest in what they have to say about other things. For example:
"I follow Bob, and I want to see Bob's posts on technical topics, but NOT Bob's posts on religion."
Or more generally:
"I follow all these people, but regardless of who posts what, I never want to see pictures of cats."
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
I don't know, I think a solution that was 80% effective would be incredibly valuable. I don't see this as something that's "all or nothing."
And my personal take is that, in the case of G+, the Circles thing is a good start, but they need a way to specify "excludes." Whether those excludes should be explicitly defined by the user, or whether they can use machine learning to figure out what I don't want to see is an open question, granted. But I'd take some UI for specifying "exclude this topic" (while acknowledging there is some inherent fuzziness in this) in the meantime.
> Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.
Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem like that's just me being pedantic but the result is that user end up with mail they do not want to receive, and mark it as spam. This is similar to how I respond to news feeds except I dont have an easy "mark as spam" button without blocking that person forever.
G+ should implement some sort of rating system to rank items that I liked and push those ones similar to it higher on the feed.
As I understood it from the context, the point of the quoted comment was that, even for the _same person_, whether something is noise or not varies wildly depending on their state of mind but for spam that is much less true.
Different people might have different opinions about what is and is not spam, but one person will be fairly consistent about it. For example, it doesn't matter much what mood I'm in - I'll almost always classify the same things as spam. But the same cannot be said of classifying things as "interesting" or "not interesting".
Your idea about a preferential ranking system would probably be a good way to go. Definitely better than trying to train a strictly go/no-go filter to recognize "interesting". The way Google+ posts seem to jump around every time I open the page (with no obvious correlation with things like number of comments or +1's), I actually wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing something like that.
> I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.
I always wondered why the Google+ team didn't implement that from the get go but after reading that, that's probably the biggest reason as to why they haven't.
It's a not very thinly-veiled shot at frictionless sharing and the like.
Having seen the hellhole my Facebook stream has become (while I've tried hard, it's almost impossible not to end up with unintended consequences for Apps and such), I'm on Vic's side.
This is all just part of the master plan. If/When Facebook implodes, there is already a place set up for everyone to go. Google has the staying power to weather a long lull in usership; there are other properties to support them. Facebook has 1 angle and history shows that to be a dangerous position--one bad decision can bring the whole thing crashing down a-la Digg.
I'm not saying Facebook is here to stay and has nothing to worry about, but Digg is a pretty poor comparison. What does it take for someone to switch news aggregators? Pretty much nothing. I just need to find another site that has links/discussion I find interesting.
What does it take for someone to switch to another social network? Actually quite a bit. One, I want my friends to be there too. That alone is pretty difficult, and a common complaint with G+.
But I think the real roadblock is probably photos. People love their photos. Can you imagine the work some people would have to do just to move that all to a new network? Some people I know have thousands of photos of themselves, and have posted thousands of photos. That is no small task. It helps keep people tied to Facebook, in my opinion.
Certainly I think Facebook could be usurped, but I don't think it's trivial and it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially.
> it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would introduce laws for that at one point. Also, it would be cool if a social news site could parse the ZIP dump of your data you can request from FB.
What I meant with the Digg comparison is an "implosion" scenario whereby Facebook does something disastrous to itself which causes a mass exodus, as opposed to something better coming along to supplant it.
I think it would be very difficult for it to happen any other way. Indeed, the points you make reinforce this idea.
Part of me wants this, too. But the other part of me hates it when a majority of my Facebook timeline is just updates from apps, games, and other crap that get automatically shared. This is a delicate balance.
I downvoted you for using the word "ghey" as some sort of perjorative, but the rest of what you're saying isn't doing much to dissuade me from my assessment. (Edit - the OP has edited to remove the word "ghey" since my comment, it was originally right before the phrase "blog posts" as an adjective.)
IBM didn't lose out to an "operating system," if anything, it was Microsoft that made them capable of competing in the personal computer space.
Google+ is not having trouble gaining traction because they don't have enough features.
I get that you're trying to make a salient point about not underestimating new products, but it's not really cohesive. The fact that Microsoft and Google have succeeded with products in the past doesn't lead automatically to the conclusion that G+ is going to succeed.
Google+ could be a success, or it could wither and die. For any positive example you cite, you could equally cite things like Microsoft BOB, the Zune, Apple Newton, OS/2, WebOS, Maemo, Sega Dreamcast, etc.
There's far more to success than buckets of cash, innovation for the sake of innovation, or yard-long feature lists. I hope G+ continues to improve, but its success is not a foregone conclusion.
"IBM didn't lose out to an "operating system," if anything, it was Microsoft that made them capable of competing in the personal computer space."
Yea, I discussed OS/2 before. The JDA was not particularly good, but the alternative MS chose was a lot worse, and that was MS's fault. See my username for my other posts discussing this matter.
They still want to enforce users to use "real" (for their definition of "real") names. As I write this, my profile is "suspended" because I didn't type my real name: "Your profile is currently under review to make sure it is in compliance with the Google+ Names Policy and User Content and Conduct Policy. Reviews are typically completed within a few days."
I also had to select "other" for gender, there's no option named "I just don't want to write it."
Yeah, sure:
"By focusing on you, the people you care about, and the stuff you’re into, we’re going to continue upgrading all the features you already know"
Yeah, no matter what they say about redesigns, I have trouble picturing G+ as a service designed to help make my life better. I just see it as a ploy by Google to get my personal data. It will take a lot for them to change that opinion now.
I decided to use a name that looked real, but isn't, and isn't mine. So far, I've yet to be caught by Google. The cost of this? Explaining to friends who don't know my opinion on anonymity on the internet.
They also have numerous number of people doing so. And people kicked for using their real name. Etc.
In short it just prove the unenforceability of the policy.
I heckled them about that in a conference and when offered to get help to have my account fixed, I declined saying that the only thing they need to fix is the policy itself by retracting it and apologizing.
> I heckled them about that in a conference and when offered to get help to have my account fixed, I declined saying that the only thing they need to fix is the policy itself by retracting it and apologizing.
I genuinely think Google+ has plenty of potential. Google's strategy seems a little more unified in terms of the way the posts are linking to search results, how you can setup circles and the other more niftier features that have been added that Facebook has yet to add.
But despite all of that. Something is missing, and i just cant quite put my finger on it.
> Something is missing, and i just cant quite put my finger on it.
It is missing "Google". For me Google means plain flat interfaces to best-of-breed tools (search, maps, mail). Many of their new tools (Play, Google +) are trying to resemble an iPad app. That's not Google's DNA, maybe. (Only maybe, because Chrome is the one tool they made that have this sexy look while keeping, for me, the pure Google DNA.)
In fact, I think Google may, one day, want give up doing business things. Look, they have plenty of ad money coming in the safe for years. I won't say they don't deserve it but instead of paying very clever people trying to beat Facebook, trying to have a better ad model, scratching their head on how to place an icon on the left (or right? or top?) with which gradient to have the "best" interaction, or even trying to make AR glasses, they could just give up on these childish tasks and just become the real New University of the 21st.
Ok, it is off-topic, but think about it: so many great brains, with enough money to pay them. They could be teaching everyone many fields of Science, and beyond, for free. They could scratch their head on how to get more food for less water, and write about it. Each Googler would have to publish one thing every week, on their channel of choice. A central feed would list them. Free access to knowledge. That, would be grand. Nearly as grand as Wikipedia...
I've got loads of people on my G+. I feel there's more to it, but i think "Jenius" has hit the nail on the head. I think its third-party app integration that's missing.
For me, it's not having a native client for my phone, and not having a good web interface to make up for it. I know Windows Phone doesn't have a large marketshare, but at some point Google+ will have to work with the Metro framework if they want Windows users to notice them in the future.
Of course, this could all be made up for if they had good email notifications, which they don't. I have a lot of people I follow on G+ to make up for the lack of people I know using it. With that, conversations from my real friends get lost. I'd love to have email notifications based on which circle someone is in, and have email notifications for everything my friends post.
To me, G+ is a good effort from Google. They've made a concerted attempt to add a social layer on top of the core Google products that have a unique take on social functionality and some manner of utility for users.
The problem comes down to engineering however - or more precisely, engineers.
I have always gotten the sense that G+ is a social network for "nerds". In this context, "nerds" refers to people that (like me) are:
1. More technically inclined than the average person
2. Willing to invest more time and effort into their social circles
3. Capable of grasping more abstract social concepts
4. Have an attention span longer than a gnat
While this is a very nice social network, G+ features are not designed for the instant grasp that Facebook has perfected. I think that FB's strategy of catering to the lowest common denominator - literally - in an elegant and usable way is what continues to cement their dominance over the space.
This latest redesign seems to be still very technically oriented, despite the pretty icons. The entire concept of reordering things is quite literally bunk when you get down to the average joe.
When are you going to reorder your icons on the left? What utility does it provide? As a regular user, you want something but the entire concept of moving stuff around on the screen isn't your priority. It is parsley on a dish, not the main course. Each G+ design feature I've seen so far continues to be just little bits of garnish, providing little in the way of truly useful functionality that makes the overall experience as a whole better in some way.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed in business and most certainly no one will be king of the hill forever. The world changes after all, and the generation that is being born now will utilize social media in a way we can barely imagine. However, that still doesn't change the fact that G+ as a whole seems to be an effort to make a social network for Googlers, not the world. We as HN readers should not gauge G+ by what we see through our own experience - we should gauge it by what our non-technical friends, family and random-acquaintances do, and that is how I'm gauging this design change right now (go FaceTime!).
They've made a concerted attempt to add a social layer on top of the core Google products...
That is the problem with G+ for me in a nutshell, and the reason why I killed that part of my Google account. I rather liked Google+ as an environment; it was the spillover into the other Google properties that I found irksome.
Frankly, I don't mind so much that Google learns a little bit about my habits and develops recommendations that are in accordance with them. But when I visit, say, YouTube, I would like the recommendations driven by my tastes (driven by my history) and subscriptions/follows -- I don't want political or religious/anti-religious rantings driven by my professional colleagues, pseudo-scientific claptrap shared by my (otherwise interesting) meatspace friends, and so on. They've already shared that stuff on G+; I don't need it pushing down stuff that is likely more relevant to my interests (or needs) on other Google properties.
I hope they will add anchor with target to images (and content posts in general, I guess). You can't middle click to open image in background and you can't do anything at all with javascript disabled. I really, really hate that (the former). Especially because they change the cursor on hover which makes you think it's an clickable anchor.
Double middle-click used to work (seriously, what?) but it doesn't for some time now.
I hope they fix their typography too. Arial is not the way to go, especially when you allow paragraphs as posts (or essays). Line-height makes it even worse. </designer's-rant>
I thought the original G+ design was refreshing and original.... but this is... so much better!
The main nav bar on the side reminds me of Unity. And yes I know that many people don't have wide screens and many also despise Unity (for that or other reasons) but this feller here sure likes it.
If only they could understand that UX is showing less, they would have won half the battle. Who needs all these buttons thrown at your face. If I need them Ill get them, please don't clutter and make user feel, "oh its so complicated". I had hopes on google plus, but this new UI, first thing that comes to my mind is Google Wave, less is more is the lesson for Google, the magic they have known for long(Google HomePage) but are discarding now.
"More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+"
Seems to me that continuing to count everyone who gets an Android phone or signs up for Gmail as a G+ user just invites people to pile on and point out how underwhelming G+'s userbase has been to date.
Am I the only one who thinks that the new UI is not very pretty? It's all (un)balanced to the left (for big enough screens) and the gray frame feels like a cage.
Maybe some things work better, but I didn't have a good gut reaction at all seeing the new thing.
P.S. I didn't watch the explanatory video, they are good at those but I wanted to see what it was without guidance.
I also think this is a step backwards. I was excited by the looks of it but the feel is very inferior. The feel reminded me of Microsoft Word somehow and thats not a good thing.
yeah, the whole unbalanced-to-the-left thing is really offputting, to the point that i'm avoiding reading my stream. i planning to play around with css userstyles and see if i can centre the stream properly.
It's going to change the face of podcasting, that's for sure. Case in point https://plus.google.com/110701307803962595019/posts - and maybe that will drag in more users (by interest graph rather than friend/family graph).
This is a huge step up for G+ and ultimately may lead to me using it it more. The problem I had with it before was it just wasn't intuitive to do anything with the interface. Now its easy to use, and I know exactly how to do everything without having to think about it. Its good to know that Google is sticking with their strategy of "Internet + you", I think its a good strategy.
Even though one can't reliably predict how to take down facebook, it's great to see google keep trying to lash at it.
Historically, no tech company stays in the #1 spot for more than a decade. That doesn't mean Facebook won't be around in 10 years, but it does show how volatile the tech market can be.
XBox was viewed as a joke but they kept at it with their cash machine, and now they're successful.
Dreamcast was awesome but they didn't have the cash to keep at it and had to throw in the towel.
If google keeps at it, they'll sink or swim, but you have to be persistent to try to take that share.
Personally, I think google hires at a far more talented tech pool. They're doing things like VR glasses and automatic parking cars while facebook makes a big deal about integrating with Skype. So the talent is there. The money is there. The marketing is there.
We'll see how this plays out. I'm excited to see the outcome.
> no tech company stays in the #1 spot for more than a decade
If that were a fixed law, then Facebook could still wait for Windows, Photoshop, Skype and Google Search to disappear before they had to worry about themselves.
I hope I will remember to revisit this comment in half a decade. :)
Facebook isn't even the #1 spot right now. Google, apple, and microsoft are still much bigger companies than they are. And oh yeah, they make PROFIT.
IMHO, facebook is GREATLY overvalued, but only time will tell if it's true. Their investment in price assumes that they will continue to grow and will still have no competition in a 1/2 decade.
$120 billion, or $80 billion - depending on who you talk to. Google is making cars that the blind can drive and glasses we saw in terminator. Facebook, they're giving us timeline. GE makes light bulbs, owns NBC, create military jets. Facebook gives us status updates. You think facebook can possibly be worth 1/3 of ALL of GE?
Of course, I'm joking a lil about facebook's offerings. I know they offer far more. However, to think they're going to be the only dog in town doing what they do is just being ignorant.
Tech is filled with creative people who fuck shit up all the time. Just as facebook made some people turn heads at MSFT and GOOG, so will someone else in the future.
FWIW, I interpreted this as the #1 spot for any given category of software. Facebook are clearly the #1 for social and have been so for a while. That's good enough in the context of this discussion.
It surprises me too, actually, given their absolutely terrible mobile apps. :(
Wow, huge improvement! Is the cover photo new too? (I haven't checked out G+ in a while.. - copied from FB?!) Looks more "fun" in any case, which is good. (Not saying they have to go completely spastic but this is a good mix)
The cover photo is to social networks as extra blades are to razors. Features are being stockpiled as if these companies were caught up in an arms race. It seems platform won't risk being caught without equivalencies, without questioning the worth of mimicking in the first place.
I'd like to see more confidence shown by social networks. Who's forging ahead when they're all chasing each other's tails?
I reading the comments here it seems like a lot of people don't use a basic G+ technique: don't view All Circles at once unless you really want to spend a while (like 5 or 10 minutes) browsing everyone you follow.
For example, I have circles for Java, Clojure, AI, Ruby, Semantic Web, etc., etc., and near the top of the screen I'll switch from All Circles to just AI, for example.
Also: the red notification number in the upper right corner: I usually ignore this and look at them all just once a day.
I don't treat G+ as stuff that I have to read. If I read useful and/or fun information that is fine, but I don't get concerned about missing something.
There's an excellent chrome extension that allowed one to check off specific circles to view as a group. Rather than have to view one circle, then the next circle, then the next, I could view multiple circles at the same time.
What this really meant was that I could get an "All" view that excluded those circles holding people I'm only sporadically interested in, without having to play with the circle frequency slider thing.
This new g+ design obliterates that plugin. The inability to view sets of circles is a major failing of the UI.
"What this really meant was that I could get an "All" view that excluded those circles holding people I'm only sporadically interested in, without having to play with the circle frequency slider thing."
So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.
So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream?
No, I'm not.
It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.
I have, say, a dozen circles. Can you tell me how I can quickly choose to view a stream that consists of all of the content from only a subset of those circles? Then quickly choose a different subset of circles? Or view a stream of all content except those in the PostTooMnayPictures circle?
I know of no way to do any kind of circle grouping/ungrouping, but if it's there I'd love to know about it.
The plus/minus extension allowed this by turning the list of circles into a multi-select checklist. Two seconds to change to any subset of circles to view.
Edit: It looks like the +/- developer is planning on updating his extension to work with the new layout
Sorry - thought you wanted to produce set subsets of your stream rather than an arbitrary selection at any time. I agree that would be better served by checkboxes, but I'd argue it's not a common case and probably got sacrificed in the name of simplicity. Most users probably use the "All Circles" stream all the time.
I think this is a positive direction for G+, with some nice, friendly, emotionally engaging UI touches that will help differentiate it from Facebook. However, I think there is one serious usability issue here, and that is the left alignment. On my 1920 x 1080 screen there is a massive gap between content and chat bar on the right. the content area feels uncomfortably crowded on the left, and it's just plain awkward to scan all the way to the right.
One thing of value I have noticed with Google Plus is when you receive a gmail within gmail, Google now includes senders Google Plus photo & link to their public plus account.
This has saved me some time as I didn't have to go hunt and peck for information about who the sender is.
So plus 1 Google ... that alone has proved valuable and falls more align with being a search/identity company rather then a social network.
Just got to try it out now. I see that you can scroll inside the chat list, but as soon as the scrollbar gets to the end, it automatically starts scrolling the main page. Why? It seems annoying to me, because I expect it to do one action (scroll inside the chat) and it ends up doing another (scrolling the main page).
It's a bit too chunky for me, i.e. requires a high screen resolution to view content properly - similar to what they did with their webmail service, but at least with that you can switch it to a compact mode. I think Google's employees may have a skewed view of the web due their high end computers.
What they need is are "show more like this"/"show fewer like this" buttons. Then they can use a Bayes filter (like the Spam flag in Gmail) to hide posts. So if you don't want to see that programming-language researcher's vacation photos, click "show fewer like this".
I think the new UI. One thing I have noticed, though, is that my 'stream' is displaying posts from all sorts of people I have no idea about, not just people in my circles. A little confused with that, the only option I have is to select individual circles.
I have seen fixed width websites before. But there was some design element (and good reasoning behind it) to justify it. For the most part these kind of websites make sure you can just ignore the white space.
But on google+, when they have a column on the extreme right (for chat), you can not ignore the damn white space. It is always there. It just looks a design push that had not been taught out completely.
The new design looks beautiful. But google+, while you have most of the features that are needed for a good all round social experience, please make it easy for non-techie people to understand.
On facebook page I can hardly find an empty space, but redesigned google+ has so much white space on each page...white space can be used for postit notes
Surprised to see Google advertising on the TV in the UK for G+, a week later they change the navigation - that's pretty bad timing for any new adopters.
I had the same problem, so I looked into it a bit more.
Apparently, NoScript disables local storage in such a way that even testing for it (using if(window.localStorage)) throws a NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR and terminates the script. This is obviously problematic, and seems a bug in NS instead of Blogspot, although it can be a deliberate decision by the NoScript devs, I don't know.
Following the instructions in the NoScript forums[1] works by making it return "null" instead of an error, thus letting the script run.
I'd still prefer if Blogspot didn't need Javascript to display a simple post, but alas, the trend seems to be unstoppable.
I was quite relieved to find that this iteration is actually semi-usable without JS. Still doesn't degrade as well as facebook mobile. Can't tell what the buttons are without the rollover, unless you have learnt them. Both Gmail and G+ rely on background images for buttons too, which leads to quite a bit of mystery meat navigation for me (I prefer to set my own background in my browser.)
You're making just the exact same mistake my comment referred to. The 'joke' is that it's just Google employees, but guess what? Reality doesn't mirror that. My circles are full of people who aren't Google employees. If yours are, then either you work at Google or you have a weird selection of friends and associates.
If you have proof that the 170million odd members are predominantly Google employees (which seems unlikely, unless they've spent their 20% time developing AI to be used as social networking bots), then I'll be pleased to see it.
I'm just never sure which Google+ I'm supposed to use - my work email, my other work email, my personal email, the email associated with my social networks?
The biggest barrier for me is the inability to login in with whatever I want and then hook in whatever networks I want.
I am a part of that audience and it's not anti-Facebook, but anti-(intrusively-social), which includes G+. Perhaps even at a higher spot than Facebook.
Maybe they can capture part of the anti-Facebook audience.
They would never get the anti-social-network audience, though. And this, which seems trivial, is important, because (for me) it's not that I am anti-Facebook, it's that I would never spend my time on a social network.
Besides, the same arguments that goes in an anti-Facebook opinion, are relevant also for g+
I find it hard to tell if this is going to be a step in the right direction or not. There are some red flags that go up for me, but it's obviously hard to judge based on descriptions and videos alone.
One of the biggest UX problems with G+ today is the way it handles notifications and conversations. Every event gets a notification, to the point that I rarely see a Google page without some red number in the top right, usually indicating nothing more interesting than "{random user} has added you to their Circles." The signal-to-noise ratio for the notifications is so poor that I've developed notification blindness. I've subconsciously tuned it out, so if someone actually does have something to say to me, I miss it.
Conversations on G+ are also poorly handled today. Because so many things are handled in the notification overlay, they all have to live in a narrow band on the right that is very hard to process visually. Whether in an overlay or on Plus itself, conversations are difficult to follow with their collapsed views and lack of adequate visual cues for the reader's attention.
I'm intrigued by the "Conversation Cards" that are mentioned on the redesign announcement, but the fact that they don't warrant their own demo video leads me to suspect that Google hasn't considered the usability of their conversations to be a top priority.
One last red flag for me is the customizable "navigation ribbon." It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves. I'm not saying it can never work, but it is a red flag for me here.
I hope the new G+ is a big step forward. I've been wanting to love Google Plus since it first arrived. At least they're devoted to G+, and they're staying hungry.