"Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell (or, tchau)."
I really kind of find this odd. I'm sure that other services have popped up to take it's place and that it's popularity is dropping, but I really find it hard to believe that they are Youtube (completely different service), Blogger (Which up until now I was under the impression that Google had forgotten that it even owned) and Google+ (More recent and less established than Orkut, and still a small amount of active users). I'm thinking more that non-Google services are the real threats, and that Google just has no benefit anymore in having users in any other service than Google+.
I don't find it odd, however, that another social network owned and operated by Google is shutting down though. While I think it's smart for them to try to consolidate their social strategy, I feel like they're engraining themselves in a service deeper and deeper that will, at some point, work more towards holding them back than allowing them to branch out into new products. That is all an incredible amount of opinion though, so we'll see.
> I really kind of find this odd. I'm sure that other services have popped up to take it's place and that it's popularity is dropping, but I really find it hard to believe that they are Youtube (completely different service), Blogger (Which up until now I was under the impression that Google had forgotten that it even owned) and Google+ (More recent and less established than Orkut, and still a small amount of active users).
Google didn't say that YouTube, Blogger, or Google+ have taken Orkut's place. Google said that YouTube, Blogger, and Google+ have outpaced Orkut's growth and are, largely as a result of that, more appropriate focuses of Google's resources.
> I'm thinking more that non-Google services are the real threats
This isn't about "threats", its about opportunities -- more specifically, its about where Google effort has the best returns for Google.
While much of YouTube is a desert wasteland in terms of community, there are definitely areas (like music and fitness) where it has a great deal of social / community activity. Just given how huge YT is, it wouldn't suprise me if just those niches outgrew Orkut a long time ago. Plus the growth trajectory is probably much better - if you were going to invest in YT community or Orkut, the former probably makes more sense.
Google+ almost certainly has more than 130 million users, however we see less than 10% of logins coming from Google+ in comparison to Facebook. This to me means that people are either more careful about what they share their G+ info with, or they simply don't care about Google+ at all (neither option is good for a social network). And let me tell you, I personally never login with G+ despite having a profile. Google+ accounts get created because the process is nearly automatic, not because people actually want to use Google+. Their user base growth is completely artificial in my opinion, so I would definitely call Google+ a failure.
Didn't Google also rename their social I/O presentations from "Google+" to "Google Identity Services"?, that might show you their confidence in the network. I'm still sour about the Youtube account merging though, so I'm biased.
I created an account under my real name (e.g., not Dr. Edward Morbius, an homage to 1950s SciFi), shortly after the public beta was opened. I closed it a few weeks later when the "Real Names" policy was starting to be enforced. I created a second account, as Edward Morbius, another few weeks later, to see how things would evolve.
I all but killed that with the YouTube Anschluss.
So, yes, there were people who created accounts, and a large number of those I interact with on G+ (a couple of dozen folks for the most part) who did similarly.
Which isn't to say I'm not still massively conflicted about the site.
I created one on purpose when they promised more privacy with the circles thing. I promptly stopped using it after their mass merger with other services ( the merge with YouTube particularly annoyed me)
I bailed on G+ for photo hosting. Imgur is vastly superior for my needs:
• There's the option of anonymous photo hosting.
• I can distinguish between uploading and sharing images. On G+ if you upload an image you must "share" it then and there, or it's forever private.
• Useful annotations and titles. Roughly comparable, but I prefer Imgur's tools.
• Better album options. In particular, I can figure out how to add images to specific albums in Imgur. G+ is fucking opaque on this. Yes, I'd prefer to be able to add an image to an album from the image rather than by navigating to the album first.
• Share an image to User Sub or another gallery and enjoy the fun. Or just build up a library of images associated with my subreddit and/or blog (my primary use of Imgur).
All the fancy-schmancy image editing tools G+ offers? I don't use 'em. I've got The GIMP, it's good enough for me.
In order to upload without sharing I suppose you can create a circle with nobody in it (I do that to bookmark posts I want to go back later: I reshare these to an empty "bookmark" circle) and "share" your pics only to it.
You can also just upload, and then not share the image (it's a separate flow after the upload that you can skip.) The default setting for an uploaded photo is "not shared".
• If true, it's a really fucked up UI/UX. Because the two actions have absolutely no need to be associated.
• If not true, it's a really fucked up UI/UX. Because in two years of using photos, I haven't sorted it out, and I routinely see people sharing individual photos to their streams (I occasionally ask "context") to find that they're assembling an album of some sort.
Again: the photo-sharing is pretty much useless on account of that, and Imgur shines by comparison.
If you want persistent storage you control, buy an S3 share or host your own. Frankly, broadband access is to the point the latter is viable for personal accounts. I'd like to see some sort of P2P distributed cache which shares load as well.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you don't share a photo when you upload it, you can share it any time later. (In particular, that's how auto-upload works.) If you share it, and then you delete the post where it's shared, it goes back to not-shared. That seems pretty straightforward.
It doesn't seem like a surprising UI to follow an upload with a share when you're sending photos to a social network. I'm not even sure Facebook gives you that choice. The two actions don't have to be associated, but they certainly need to be associated when you consider that folks usually upload photos to share them.
I don't think G+ Photos has been advertised as a "persistent store you control". It's a social network that has an auto-upload feature to make it easier to share images and backup shots taken on your phone. "Hosting your own" is not going to be a substitute for 95% of real-world users.
Honestly, the G+ photos UI is sufficiently fucked up that I've never been able to sort any of this out.
I see Google's offerings as suits my needs. And Photos hasn't offered that.
I disagree on HYO, because reasons. Persistent broadband, a $25 device, and 5 watts will get you a server. The software's free. Some form of distributed federated caching gets you redundancy and load balancing. Search is the tough nut, though there are a few projects which have been working at that (e.g., YaCy) for a while now.
Otherwise it's just protocols, autoconfiguration, and adoption.
The HN shadow-banning policy is one of the worst in the industry. Why not let the community decide? If someone makes one post that mod disagrees with, that person is effectively shut off from the rest of the community without their knowledge.
It's like locking someone up without telling them what offense they've committed.
It's odd because it's a bullshit rationalization that pretends to explain the decision while avoiding the all-to-obvious fact that Facebook won the present round of social networking.
And I say that as someone who's never had a personal Facebook account and doesn't care much for social networking in general.
The problem, in other words, is that it's a lie by way of omission and dissembling. And that everybody knows it.
As someone who has used G+ fairly heavily for 3 years, and eventually came to sort of like parts of it: it's annoying, creaky, and creepy. The underlying infrastructure is robust and reliable. The platform built on top of it is a mish-mash. Complaints from the first days of public deployment over noise, a confusion of controls, and a lack of clear purpose remain valid. And as a tool to destroy trust and goodwill in Google it's been unparalleled.
The more I observe Google (and I've been doing that for 15+ years now), the more I come to the conclusion:
• They're really good at search
• They're fucking amazing at infrastructure.
• They suck at pretty much anything at all human-factors related.
I think that letting Microsoft execs into the tent was a tremendous cultural mistake. Microsoft's alliances were, from the mid-1980s onward, but especially through the 1990s, with its OEMs, VARs, and ISVs, not with its end-users, except secondarily. The name of the game was to build and defend a territory: OEM preloads, per-CPU licensing, Office, APIs, proprietary protocols (e.g., Exchange and Directory). The played the lock-in game to its ultimate and absurd conclusion: they don't understand and cannot fix their own software.
Google started by offering tremendous value to end-users via search, and finding a minimally viable way to monetize that (relevant and non-intrusive advertising). It was recognized from the beginning as creepy, but so long as you didn't actually personally log in to the search engine, the personal association seemed sufficiently weak to be acceptable to most.
That changed with Gmail. Suddenly you were logged in to your search provider all the fucking time. And that, frankly, weirded me out. I avoided Gmail for a long, long time, and still don't use it for my personal comms. I've made my own peace with Google in that I use Gmail, over IMAP, for a pseudonymous account, and transact my search transactions largely with a different provider who pledges no tracking (and I've been in arguments with various folk over the credibility of that, no it's not bulletproof), largely DDG and StartPage (both proxied non-tracking search providers). And yes, occasionally my work mail is served over Google depending on the gig.
Then came Google Docs, which further freak me out, storage, and a host of other things. I basically never saw these as a good thing (from a privacy or data security viewpoint), even though I fully acknowledge the genius of using these to attack one of Microsoft's prime foundations (Office + Exchange).
Evidence is strong that Google felt very strongly challenged by Facebook and felt it had to create its own social offering, whether to compete, head off Facebook, or ... just sheer competitive spirit. There was (and is) also an interest in offering "an identity service", which has been a holy grail of the tech world for at least a couple of decades, and a trope of the science fiction literature long before that. I can credit the latter with part of my own reluctance to buy into the concept: a world in which everything is specifically attributable and hence tracked to a specific identity is pretty close to my definition of totalitarian hell. I reacted just as viscerally when it was Microsoft's Passport, as well to Facebook sign-on (I don't use FB, I won't use services requiring it).
Gundotra strongly evidenced a firm belief in the concept, as does Eric Schmidt. Page and Brin have been less outspoken on the concept, but it seems from what I've seen that they at the very least endorsed the concept. If they're driving it, then as I said, the rot goes to (and starts at) the very head. And if there's a single thing which would most likely destroy Google at this point, even above NSA and other snooping (which they could significantly engineer around, though by changing their entire present focus, see Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen on this in the past year, particularly their joint Columbia University conversation and Schneier's Stanford Law School lecture), it's the snooper state.
To backtrack a bit: I also think that advertising when first adopted by Google in the late 1990s snuck the camels' nose into the tent. Advertising is at its essence deceptive, and at odds with the interests of the recipient. By setting up this relationship, Google both created a dissonance within itself and a misalignment of interests with the end user. I don't know that this could have been avoided (figuring out how to tie revenues to Internet services outside of advertising has largely proved a wicked problem), but I think ultimately the camel ended up in, and in control of, the tent.
Another metaphor I like to invoke is of grabbing the tiger by the tail. The trick is more in the undoing than the doing.
I've been hoping that Gundotra's leaving might see an unwinding of things. I'm not seeing services disaggregate from G+ (though my YouTube status seems to vary from associated to not associated periodically). I haven't fully made up my mind on whether to stay or go. Ironically, it was conversations over Gundotra's departure and "death of G+" discussions which sucked me back in.
I'm with you there. I still fondly remember Google Buzz and haven't really found an alternative that has the same feel to it yet.
I hope there is some post facto analysis a few months from now. IMO Google is risking that this shutdown effectively causes the migration of a few hundred thousand Brazilian Google users to Facebook.
For me, if I were a Blogger user, I'd take it as a sign that it's time to migrate. Honestly, beyond some of the core stuff (gmail, contacts for android and keep), I don't think Google has much vested interest in maintaining most of the services that were once offered out of their 20% program. It's funny, but I now trust Google to keep supporting niche products far less than even Microsoft.
Then again, for me the catalyst was when they killed reader and iGoogle. The Old Reader, and others have largely taken it's place, but that integration into my home page was truly useful to me. Now, I'm far less likely to catch an article on any given day, I check HN almost daily, and a few others not quite as often, but it isn't the same... and it isn't my typical blogroll anymore.
They're migrating to facebook. Social networks don't make sense if they're nation limited, be it de facto or by design. People will migrate to the biggest most popular one eventually. I suspect facebook is just the best (by some people's standards) social network and social networking eventually falls into a natural monopoly.
If Facebook were de-blocked today, you might very well see a mass migration. All my students (Chinese high schoolers and college transfers) going abroad immediately send me friend requests as soon as they get out from behind the Great Firewall.
If you would have said Belgium, I would have been able to say this…
"In the 1970s, economist Edmar Bacha popularised the term "Belindia" as a description of Brazil: a little bit of Belgium and a lot of India, the country was very rich for some and very poor for most."
Speaking of rich and poor, data from the recent Brazil x Chile World Cup game shows that most Brazilian stadium attendees were white (67%), mid-high/high class (90%), and well-educated (86%). Ok, now I'm officially off-topic. Carry on.
but to google, 200M means their possible market size is really a fraction of that. Imagine 30M MAX users, assuming super high penetration. Google wants to focus on BILLIONS of users, not tens of millions.
Google+ is much larger than Orkut and has far more active users. Orkut never caught on outside of Brazil. Even in Brazil, its userbase is shrinking as users adopt Facebook and Google+.
Orkut did take off when it was launched in 2004. It just wasn't as good as Facebook. When Facebook opened up to users outside the education market, Orkut users switched.
I really kind of find this odd. I'm sure that other services have popped up to take it's place and that it's popularity is dropping, but I really find it hard to believe that they are Youtube (completely different service), Blogger (Which up until now I was under the impression that Google had forgotten that it even owned) and Google+ (More recent and less established than Orkut, and still a small amount of active users). I'm thinking more that non-Google services are the real threats, and that Google just has no benefit anymore in having users in any other service than Google+.
I don't find it odd, however, that another social network owned and operated by Google is shutting down though. While I think it's smart for them to try to consolidate their social strategy, I feel like they're engraining themselves in a service deeper and deeper that will, at some point, work more towards holding them back than allowing them to branch out into new products. That is all an incredible amount of opinion though, so we'll see.