vanderwal.net

I was watching Vergecast this week, (Google’s AI shake-up: What’s next for Demis Hassabis and DeepMind | The Verge) and in it David Pierce brought up Google+ again. Pierce uses it as a call out when large organizations jump into things they don’t fully understand.

Google had some understanding, but the biggest problem was their going with “Circles”. Circles were akin to groups, but the Circles were largely a construct from a user’s perspective. The individual leaning perspective of “Circles” is really odd and broken as each person has a different idea around who should be or is in a Circle, but also what gets shared in and out of the Circle. There were semi-closed groups / Circles but the boundaries weren’t clear at all. Who was in a Circle? What could be shared out (seemingly most anything) and its lack of clarity was deeply problematic as it was very porous.

A core element of social that is closed or semi-closed groups have very clear boundaries. Knowing how those boundaries work, who is allowed in, and the process to get allowed in. Google+ started at a time when those running social platforms were becoming abundantly aware there were some really toxic people and had learned how to handle them (to some degree). Google+ started with a foundation that made it really difficult to handle this, but also lacked the well known concepts to have clear boundaries for groups and interactions.

When you talked with anybody if they were using Google+, who were in many other platforms that were either fully open (like Twitter), and in closed group environments where the boundaries were clear and methods for dealing with bad actors (intentionally bad or accidentally) in clear means. The lack of comfort with the who and what is done with what is shared in Circle had a lot of people really uncomfortable with the oddly structured Circles.

Google+ didn’t last long and is long enough ago that it doesn’t come up often. Occasionally the Google+ getting woven into the Google applications like Sheets and Docs brought the really odd social structure with it, which made things really odd. Other services have done really well integrating these, but they have really solid and structured boundaries and groups with clarity as the core.

While I am one of the odd ones who really enjoyed Google Wave - Wikipedia and its wild flowing stream of interaction, the odd Google+ is one I don’t miss. Hearing David Pierce bring up Google+ and how always makes me chuckle. I always wish Google had spent time to sort out Google+ properly, but that didn’t quite happen.