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by jay_kyburz·11y ago·view on hn ↗
I find it so frustrating to watch Google fuck-up social. Pulling photos and communications into their own group is clearly conceding defeat. Google's social initiatives are already too splintered.

I wish they had some somebody who could cut through all the politics and read tape and build a really great, unified, product.

The first thing on my hit list - Material Design. It's just bad. It's too spread out, the animations detract from the experience, and every ui element just seems flaky. ARRG!

3 comments
It was the senseless need for a unified product that is the source of their social screw up. If they concentrated on making great products which fit together, people would naturally start to use then together without having to be shoved.
No no, unified is important, but if you are going to put all your eggs in one basket it had better be good. And hey, you don't have to get it right the first time, but it needs to grow and evolve as you see the weaknesses.

I totally agree that g+ should not have been shoved into every google product, instead it should have been a place you could go to access every google product.

I'm still convinced that the power of facebook is there is one url for everything an everyday person needs from the internet. People want one website that has everything.

Enabling unified is fine. Enforcing it, as Google did, against users' express wishes, isn't.

When my G+ and YouTube accounts were merged I ended up with (or as) the three top stories on HN (I've got a screenshot on Imgur somewhere, linked from my subreddit).

In December Google created a new "myaccounts.google.com" site where it's possible to manage Google accounts, including adding or removing services. While I can remove my YouTube account (there's nothing on it but history), it won't stay removed, thoughct that's in the cards. IOW: Google seem to be taking steps to disaggregate their offerings.

Several of the bigger blunders of G+ have revolved around both identity and bundling / tying. #nymwars, forced calendar integration (look up Robert Scoble's rant), the YouTube Anschluss. This is what Microsoft tried in the 1990s. Eventually people rebelled.

You cannot force someone to like you.

People want convenience, yes. But it doesn't mean it's got to be the same website for all of us -- I'd really like to see federated services solved.

Looking at your subreddit +/- 2 months of the May "all your YouTube are belong to G+" announcement, there doesn't seem to be any screenshot. Can you post a link?
> I'm still convinced that the power of facebook is there is one url for everything an everyday person needs from the internet. People want one website that has everything.

I strongly disagree. Take SourceForge as an example. A compelling case can be made that part of the reason it died is that it tried to do everything all in once place. On the other hand, when companies like Github popped up, they did code hosting, and they did it really well. Sure they later added stuff like wikis and web sites, but Github is still 99% focused on hosting and interacting with code.

Another example is AOL. A big part of the reason the web won out over AOL is that people had choice. You could get your email from Yahoo! (back in the day their email service was excellent), your news from CNN, host your web site on Angelfire, and use Lycos for search. Sure, you might get benefits from using two services that were owned by the same company (I personally use Blogger because it makes it so easy to pull in pictures from G+ which are synced from my phone), but you could use them in isolation just as easily.

Even Facebook is splitting their app into discrete apps on mobile (http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/12/30/facebook-will-contin...). Maybe they're just idiots, but it seems like the smart money is that they know what they're doing.

Another example is Google Drive. They tried to integrate Google Docs into Drive and call the whole thing "Google Drive". Why would my file syncing service have an office suite? That makes no sense! I want my file syncing service to work with documents created by my office suite, by I don't want them to be the same product. It was a nightmare, now they've split them back out.

And a final example. What you're talking about is basically the concept of a "portal" from the late 90s. It was tried, Yahoo! bet big on it. Google won with its white page and a single text field. People wanted a search engine that rocked, they didn't really care about having a unified experience. The web is messy, that's what makes it powerful! Google had its own portal for awhile, it wasn't all that popular so they dropped it.

People want products that work together at the points where it makes sense for them to work together, but they don't want a single product that does everything under the sun, because that makes it annoying to use just one of them (even if you use them all you only use one at a time).

If only it were shoving. I feel like I'm being thrown under a bus every time Google is like "YOU HAVE TO SIGN UP FOR GOOGLE+ TO DO THAT!" and it just makes me want to head to a bar.
Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507236
Isn't it the last stride in the UI/UX though ? we've close the circle, from skeumorphism, to flat, to minimal, to material, software and hardware allowed us to explore, that was cool, but now is the time to get back to function. Maybe.
Not a chance. It's an evolution sure (and one I'm happy to be using), but visual design is fashion and will keep on shifting with each iteration being able to draw on its N-1 predecessors.
I'm still hoping for a significant slow down. It's not a selling point anymore, this generation have been through many 'promises' of interface design ~innovation and I bet they're not responsive (sic) to it anymore.
Much like any fashion, I think it is a bit more likely it will be drawing on its k unique predecessors :).

I saw jean flares in a designer shop yesterday. Really? Again?

I quite liked the look of it till I spent time in Google Apps admin today! The dropdown control is completely broken, even in Chrome - you cant scroll without it closing on you.