The Tragic Beauty of Google+

Let me dispute the "beautiful" argument. I don't think Google does a good job at UI at all:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png</a><p>My first impression after opening this was "WTF is going on here?". It's floating panes atop floating panes, reinvented scrollbars, while the actual content is sparse. The same kind of nonsense that put me off using GMail.<p>But hey, that's what you get when you cram a desktop inside a desktop. I bet their new UIs work great on Chrome OS.

I've recently given up Facebook due to realising it was almost a complete waste of my time, and I have the same feeling towards Google+.<p>With Facebook it was becoming that I'd log on each day and see a bunch of irrelevant content from people I hadn't spoken to for years (and in some cases, met only once or twice). Occasionally I'd end up having a meaningful conversation but the signal-to-noise ratio was just ridiculously high. And then there was the advertising and lack of concern for privacy etc. I could go on.<p>It may be just me, but sitting down together for lunch or (if the person lives elsewhere) chatting on phone or Skype seem much more pleasant and fruitful modes of social interaction. And of course HN for reading interesting discussions about topics of interest :)

Journalists love to talk about how "beautiful" Google+ is -- first the mobile apps, now the web interface. But you are posting this link here, on a picture-free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.) "Beautiful" does not enable discussion, it enables advertising.<p>Google+ vs Facebook misses the point. Having lots of random people chatting about random things isn't very profitable, as Facebook discovered. There's no point in emulating that. Instead, Google+ is the universal publishing &#38; commenting platform for the highly profitable Google advertising ecosystem. Here's where Google talks to its actual G+ target audience:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/+/business/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/+/business/</a>

I still work and browse the internet with an asus eeepc 1000he and g+ is barely usable on that machine. Javascript and html(5) are gobbling my CPU to display images and snippets of text: typically post of maximum 3 lines and 7 displayed comments that are heavily dynamic for no real (imo) value for the end-user. Before that ajax everywhere and like buttons non-sense it wouldn't have been a problem.<p>The irritating point is that density of information hasn't changed that much. On the whole I think it's a regression of the web.

"The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting."<p>So, Facebook feels more "warm, personal" to the author - and I would agree, for the same reasons: On Facebook I share with my friends and family, while on G+ I mostly deal with interesting people I don't know directly.<p>The funny thing is that Facebook <i>wants</i> its users to interact more with people (entities) they don't know, for good monetization reasons, and exactly this could make Facebook much less warm and personal - and thus worse for its current users. Incidentally, I just wrote a post exactly about this (from a branding perspective): <a href="http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetization-clashes-with-branding/" rel="nofollow">http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...</a>

My problem with G+ is they keep making it harder to read content. The new layout is terrible for that (arbitrary sized boxes in arbitrary alignments). Newspapers have done that but there is human supervision for the content (which is almost always longer than a few sentences) and the layout is human supervised.<p>The irony is that there is a product specifically geared towards towards reading productivity and following lots of sources. Google will be killing it in two months (Google Reader).

I have a <i>fairly</i> good windows 7 machine. 64bit, 6gb. I opened g+ in chrome and it crashed, twice.<p>There are pop overs everywhere I move my mouse, making it even slower! I have a resolution of 1024x768 so everything is squished and hard to find/read.<p>I'll keep giving it a go, but I do wish they would add a 'lightweight' version, like the html only gmail for us people without top of the line machines that can run crazy amounts of javascript.

Google plus is the Nokia Lumia of social networks. Solid, great looking and not better enough than the incumbent to gain a significant market share.

For the past month, I've been checking on G+ before Twitter and other media or sources. Here is how I was dragged into it.<p>I had never used Facebook, and I had never used Google+. I guess I was too busy with Emacs.<p>Then recently I had to hit Google+ to follow some community thread on the Deep Learning channel, <a href="https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725</a><p>Somehow, the researchers from the field did settle there. Next I started reading the Machine Learning community threads, then the C++ one, etc... Eventually I did post to the Machine Learning community, and I saw the hits on our website, a few hundreds every day, for a few days, not much, but I could tell the right people were visiting, because they were spending way more time than visitors from other sources.<p>So my current understanding is that G+ is worth for its communities, and the targeted traffic it offers... my 2cents :)

Is there a way in G+ where we can follow only relevant topics from people we follow ?<p>Say if someone I follow posts something which he tags something ("tech", "travel" etc) and I can choose to follow only the posts that are tagged "tech".<p>This is something I cannot figure out and if its there, I'm sure it will avoid most of the clutter in G+.

I found Google+ great for collaborating with the maker community. The strength is use cases that involve discovery of pictures (&#38;diagrams) + discussion of ideas/things, as the communities feature works well for this. Adafruit is making great use of hangouts as well. However, I find that Twitter &#38; Facebook work much better than G+ as news feeds.

I think a revelation I've had recently is that, in general, friends are boring unless they are doing something of interest. The information I find on Google+ and other non-real-life endeavors from people outside my real-life bubble is much more interesting, as a rule of thumb.

there was a post that explained that what facebook did with timeline - put it into 2 line, so that people would not ignore sponsored posts on their timelines/feed. I wonder if google is trying to do the same. I find this feed quite distracting - my eyes keep on dithering between those columns. I suspect google is trying to do pretty much same thing as facebook.<p>It feels pinterest-y too, seems alot of social media sites have have had their design converge into what pinterest has realized with theirs.

- Facebook wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising.<p>- Google also wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising. However, Google also uses that information to provide useful tools such as directions, search, etc.<p>- I am much more likely to give Google my info because they give me all of these extra useful tools. Facebook provides nothing except a place for my mom to see photos of her grand kids. AS soon as she is on G+ I will be dropping FB.

Didn't like G+ design. They really should copy twitter's style.