All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me. I absolutely love it. It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact. Maybe it's just that I have enough interesting people to read that it's worth it to me. I'm not sure.
I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one hand.
Twitter, on the other hand, I really like. It's asymmetric, and lets me engage in casual conversation with people easily.
Google+ is a great marriage between the two. Long-form posts, comment threads, rich media integration, topical conversation via hashtags, and both Twitter-style multicast (public) and more Facebook-style (circle- or individual-limited) conversation.
I realize I sound like an ad, but that's not my intent. It just works for me. The complaint I see most often is "nobody's there". If you treat it as a publishing platform, rather than an RSS reader, it becomes a lot more attractive, and then that helps to solve the "nobody's there" problem as a side-effect.
This is something that's puzzled me. Is it the privacy implications, or just a general dislike for the company? The way I see it, it's a publishing platform for posts shorter than blog entries and longer than tweets. I read things that my friends write, and I write things for them to read. While there are games and pages and things, you don't have to use them.
I've had friends switch (switch, not start to use both) from Facebook to Google+, and treat it in exactly the same way as they treated Facebook. So I'm not sure if Google+ is better by its own merit, or just that Facebook has a bad reputation.
Before the privacy stuff became a concern, I just didn't like the product. The whole symmetric relationship model just never really hooked me. It's not any particular philosophical hatred. I just never "got it" like others seemed to. I understand it, but it was never the sort of thing that I was constantly refreshing.
It wasn't very useful to me before the whole app platform thing, and after the app platform launched, it quickly became too noisy and cluttered.
Facebook now has asymmetric relationships with subscriptions, and the app platform noisiness has improved a great deal in recent years. I just block apps which are particularly noisy.
A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting.
No, I don't care what you had for dinner
Meanwhile Google+ makes it exceedingly easy to group people in ways that makes filtering easy, and now with the slider to let you "mix" how much from each circle appears in your full feed, I can pretty close to mute anyone that becomes obnoxious while still just being one click away from still finding out what they had for dinner.
Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.
"Updates I don't care about" neatly summarizes why I don't like Facebook much. Maybe 1% of what I see when I log in to Facebook interests me.
I also much prefer the asymmetric relationships of Google+ - it matches the real world far better than Facebook "friends".
> Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.
Facebook lets you tone down updates and the like as well. Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.
> A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting.
> No, I don't care what you had for dinner
That's not a Facebook problem, that's a "people" problem. Whenever there are people involved, you will know what someone had for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, etc.
> Facebook lets you tone down updates and the like as well.
Well, that shows you how little time I now spend on Facebook. Never seen that. Where is it? I still can't find the options to do that, after clicking around like crazy. Unless you mean the person by person "all/most/only important" - that's far too much hassle.
In Google+ I've toned down the number of updates from my "following" circle that I use for people I don't personally know, for example, and I don't have to remember to adjust settings for individual people when I add them to that circle. Meanwhile, if I want to see that unfiltered stream, I only need to click on that circle, not on each individual member of it.
> Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.
I haven't, as I've never had any interest in using it, or in following any for that matter.
> Unless you mean the person by person "all/most/only important" - that's far too much hassle.
Yeah, that's the one. How else would you do it? It might be more annoying since you'd have to re-organise your existing friends all at once instead of doing it when you circle them. But I did that, and now I only see things from people I actually care about.
It might be that Facebook started out as just a news feed while Google+ started out as several, so it's more intuitive for a Google+ user to tone down the updates. There are Close Friends/Acquaintances/People Near You streams on Facebook, but I keep forgetting about them.
I really like Google+ also, but without all my Facebook friends (I deactivated Facebook after they overwrote my privacy settings) it's not nearly as useful or fun.
I'm trying a new technique - rather than saying "Hey, join Google+! It's really cool!" to people; I'm saying "Ah, yes, Facebook... I used to be one of _those_ people."
Agreed. I left Facebook a year ago after I realized I don't care about 99% of the stuff I read from my "friends". I'm much happier with Google+ thus far and very interested to see where it goes in the future. To me it has far more relevance and prospects than Facebook since it integrates with other google products like search.
I thought I would like it, and I do find some good content there, mostly blog length stuff. However I dont really want to blog on it, and prefer twitter for short stuff. I do see more g+ posts here too which reflects the good stuff.
From one 'hater' [1], some (obviously very personal) explanations:
- I dislike 'social networks' in general. They tend to look messy to me, they seem to try too hard to match me with this guy, connect me with that, make me follow one group and post to another. Arguably FB is worse right now, but I see the trend in G+ as well. RSS (and, occasionally Twitter) is good enough for reading for me. Mail and IM (GTalk, ironically) is enough for contacting the people around me.
- Privacy. I do have a Facebook account, mostly to stay in contact with some friends back in Germany. I tried to lock down the account as much as possible regarding privacy settings and my list of friends contains ~40 - well - friends (or family). I don't 'collect' friends and have no 'friends'.
- The combination of my mail(sort of, reduced that a lot already)/contacts/calendar/IM (hi, Android) provider with a 'You need to provide an ID if we feel like it'/'We delete your stuff if we feel like it'/'Pseudonyms are not wanted here' attitude social network seems scary. For one because I don't trust the 'plus' part of Google any single bit by now. And in addition I'd throw a large amount of extra free data about myself at a company that already collects far too much - for no benefit.
- It's full of bull.. Maybe it's me, but I had an account in the past, tried to follow interesting persons and ended up with pseudonym noise (people that were interesting being deleted, everyone discussing about this policy etc) or animated gif images. It was more 4chan than anything else - and I really tried hard to block people after the first 1-2 'offenses'.
- I loved the idea of circles, that is until I started to use them. The metaphor seemed nice at first, but it became frustrating after I moved past the first 20-30 contacts.
1: Actually I tend to reserve the word hate for things that - well - are actually of importance. 'I hate X' where X is a thing or a person I temporarily disagree with seems inflationary use of the term 'hate'.
Google+ itself is a good service, but my distaste for it comes from taking a look at a "bigger picture", as this is not just about sharing cat photos and fart jokes online.
Let me begin by saying I don't hate it, I just see it as a poor decision as Google+ allows Google to make a verified and robust profile of me for sale or subpoena, while giving me very little more than what facebook already offers. (Keeping in mind that while the USA already has low-requirements for digital subpoenas, it's still heading towards a completely warrantless-everything approach for digital information.)
G+ picks up where GMail and Google Analytics weren't able to go:
- It will have my full name (with google killing off accounts that were using pseudonyms.)
- It has my phone number and contacts: With a Google+ on my phone it has access to my contacts, geographic location and phone number.
- It follows me around the web far better than what Analytics was able to achieve.
- It follows me around real life: It can know what I'm doing and where I'm doing it, even if it has nothing to do with the web such as tagging, GPS-photos from all current era mobile devices, events and location based ("geo-everything") services.
Then when I include other google-owned services such as search, maps, youtube & blogger. I'm left placing a huge amount of information and trust in a company that has a business model defined by profiling me, a history of providing information to the USA government (don't forget Chinese hacking) and a track record of storing more than what I bargained for (such as Google Desktop) with the later landing them in hot water with the EFF.
I take pause because I live in a country where there was raging debate about combining the profiles from various government run services as it gives the government an orwellian-like power over it's citizens (they remained separate). Plus it provides an obvious target for those looking to abuse the data. When you consider that in the judicial system, a judge must approve the fishing and combining of this sort of information, I'm not about to hand over the same level of information to a company free from oversight.
"It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact."
Diaspora is my social media platform of choice for the freedom it provides. When it's easy I don't mind posting to other platforms through Diaspora, which I can with Facebook and Twitter.
If someone created a way to post to Google+ from Diaspora, I would post to it from Diaspora also. (If such a way already exists, I'd love to hear of it).
Unfortunately so far, the G+ API is read-only. There is no way to write any third party tool to post to it. It would be interesting to hear from someone with internal knowledge on what their actual plans on opening it up are.
Microsoft had 95% of desktop market share and installed IE on everyone's PC, which they claimed was part of the operating system. This essentially killed the browser competition for about a decade and Netscape got crushed.
Now how is this comparable to Google placing G+ in Gmail? Gmail is smaller than Hotmail and Yahoo Mail? They are a distant third.
Did you create a Google profile by accident? https://plus.google.com/settings/ , click "Delete profile and remove associated Google+ features". Voila, done. Your Gmail is pristine and the chip on your shoulder has surely vanished.
Internet Explorer cannot be removed without damaging Windows or affecting other programs which depend on Internet Explorer's files. You also said yourself it is "pre-installed".
You are not required to be a Google+ user in order to use Gmail, and you obviously won't see integrations in Gmail unless you have a Google+ account.
Because Google has a monopoly on non-shitty free email with GMail, in the same way that Microsoft has (had?) a monopoly on hardware-independent operating systems with DOS/Windows. (I wish I was really being sarcastic, you know because there are actually a billion web-based e-mail alternatives besides GMail that actually don't suck... right? Anybody know of any? At this point I'm earnestly inquiring.)
Gmail might be 'the best', but not enough to get a everyone to switch. So, IMO it's a question of where your suck threshold than anything specifically wrong with Hotmail / yahoo.
I see what you did there. Your assuming people who use G+ are trying to share their lifes with you. They are not. If I want to "share my life" with people. I will call them and drive to their house and spend time with them. That is sharing of life. Posting social gossip on a website is not.
I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one hand.
Twitter, on the other hand, I really like. It's asymmetric, and lets me engage in casual conversation with people easily.
Google+ is a great marriage between the two. Long-form posts, comment threads, rich media integration, topical conversation via hashtags, and both Twitter-style multicast (public) and more Facebook-style (circle- or individual-limited) conversation.
I realize I sound like an ad, but that's not my intent. It just works for me. The complaint I see most often is "nobody's there". If you treat it as a publishing platform, rather than an RSS reader, it becomes a lot more attractive, and then that helps to solve the "nobody's there" problem as a side-effect.