The Horror of setting up a Google+ account for my mom

I've been a social media programmer since 2001 and personally I think Google+ needs a paper book to explain how to use it.<p>I always have people trying to get me to join them in hangouts and sometimes it works, but often it takes me 10 or 15 minutes to get the invitation and actually get into the hangout.<p>The funniest time was when it wanted me to update the software on my mac and it gave me step-by-step instructions to open a terminal window and use the command line to do the update.<p>I give Google credit for developing a sharing model that's different from the Facebook and Twitter model, so that Google+ isn't just an imitation of it's competitors. On the other hand, I dont know if I like sender-controlled sharing... There are so many people that want to spam me with this or spam me with that, and I'm not just talking about Nigerian spammers, I'm talking about close friends, family members, C-level people at places I work with and so forth. I'd rather see an intelligent social media platform that helps me pick out what I want and what I need to know; Facebook comes closer to that.

This article is a random list of annoyances, not a horror story about setting up Google+. Ultimately, it sounds like the author's mom would prefer email to Google+.<p>I think Google+ is a good tool for groups larger than families, like companies. You might want to share things with your coworkers, but email doesn't scale. So you can instead have a nice access-controlled internal sharing site, and people that are interested in pictures of your CNC mill or whatever can see them. ("Pages" are great for things like your cafeteria posting menus or pictures of food.)

Google has some inner conflict here. The marketing strategy is "more private than Facebook" but the obvious way to measure the success of Google+ is by how much oversharing people are doing. Optimize for that and you get pushy UX like the one described. Hopefully they can figure out a more nuanced metric.

Hi _ankit_, sorry to read that you and your mom had troubles with her initial Google+ experience. A few things sound like possible issues, and the whole thing is valuable feedback, so I'll file a few bugs, and pass the post along to our team. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

<i>she uses Google+ to stay in touch with other family members online (&#60; 10)</i><p>What I don't understand is if you want to stay in touch with a small group of close acquaintances/family why not use email? It's vastly easier to use than any "social network"

Those are valid points but Google has a different target.<p>The pages are designed to get the user to spend more time on G+.

Google started their life with a simple UI that anyone could use. You simply entered keywords into a textbox and hit the enter key.<p>Suddenly all their new stuff is too complicated. Google+ and Google Listen are painful to use.

And you can't page down using the spacebar anymore. That seems like a fundamental feature of the modern Web browser that Google decided not to support, and for what reason?

Without getting into the specific point-by-point refutation of this because, some of it is valid, I must first wonder why it is that people assume that every product should fit every person.<p>My first reaction is how horrible it would be to set up a Google+ account for my dog. I mean, my dog doesn't even have hands! Pulling that back a little bit though, it starts off with "my mom isn't big about the internet."<p>More to the point, there isn't actually any 'horror' in 'setting up a Google+ account for his mom'. By all accounts, the lack of horror in the actual account setup tells me that it was probably a fairly trivial affair, or even, uneventful. I was expecting something about real name guideline violations or switching accounts being an issue, but that's not the case at all, it seems.<p>Perhaps the most legitimate complaint (to my ears, your mileage will vary) is that there are non-circled posts added to your stream. The 'promoted' or 'hot' posts or whatever could certainly do with a toggle permission or something for the 'closed circle' types, and I actually thought that there was a way to keep people's stuff out of your stream.