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Mike Elgan Well, it started, and it was to be expected


G+_George Kozi
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 Mike Elgan Well, it started, and it was to be expected. To me, a non developer civilian, this year's IO keynote was a self absorbed, sleep inducing, developer geek festival.

 

The glaring absence of G+ was bound to fuel not so flattering speculations and give a lot of ammo to those who hate it. As you can see, the shooting has already started.

 

If as it is speculated, G+ will become nothing more than an identity service by the end of the summer, Google has a very big problem. You don't start a Social network, make people give you their identity info, and then change what you started into an identity service. That would imply that the Social part was just a trick to pry the info out of people.

 

I joined a social network that can be used as an identity service, not an identity service that masquerades as a social network.

http://www.cio.com/article/754815/Google_Noticeably_Absent_at_Google_I_O

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I have no idea whether Google+ is a success or not. As mentioned in previous comments, on a lot of their products Google seem to make changes throughout the year. One result of this is that conferences like IO will not have a large amount of changes to show you. (Again, this is almost the opposite of Apple's way of disclosing information, and updating product lines.)

 

I think you are being a bit unfair on Google+, if their original plan was to create a social network, get users to give you data in unprecedented levels and then turn it into a identity service, then that would be wrong. However, if Google+ has 'failed', and this is a way of salvaging as much of the information as possible, then that is another matter.

 

Google+ itself has an identity problem. What is it used for? For most people who want to post a status, a bit of messaging and post/view friends and family photos they will just use Facebook. It's nice that you can do that on Google+, but why would you? I love the communities here, and the level of discussion. Ironically, the more people who use Google+, the more 'spammy' and intolerable it would get.

 

I find your choice of insults at the start a bit puzzling. 'Self absorbed' - really? It's Google's biggest conference of the year, of course they will talk about their products. 'Sleep inducing': I haven't seen the actual presentation, but I generally distrust overly marketed and in some cases dumb-downed presentations. Finally, at a Google developer conference 'developer' and 'geek' are not derogatory.

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G+ is a success. Here in Germany it's has surpassed Twitter and many other networks (except Facebook)  in just 3 years. All the previous networks grew much slower during their first years. The interesting part is that I see many people from the "older" generations here, especially in the Photo Communities. This is a group that is really hard to get and never got attracted by Twitter and many other networks. It just shows how good and easy to use G+ is for new users and that they feel welcome here. 

 

The press just seem to like the attention G+ headlines get, otherwise I can't understand why they write sometimes such a crap. The previous I/Os had a much higher focus on the consumer and not just the developer. Maps was a huge part, YouTube was a huge part, and G+ was a huge part because G+ Sign-In was pretty new and important for developer. This year YouTube and Maps wasn't a part of the IO either - are they gonna die as well? If we misinterpret that like the press does they should be :) This IO was completely different from previous ones and they seem to change their strategy that they do product announcements separately. 

 

When the first rumors got spread by a site months ago a Google Member already mentioned that this is crap and those changes are not true, but it looks like the journalists can't (or don't want to) investigate anymore. G+ was the first App that got the new material look - this should show it's priority. Today G+ got 3 years old and does such a statement and post look like it's going to change in a bad way? No, it doesn't. Would the developer team behind G+ grow they would focus on something else and reduce it to an identity service? No it wouldn't. 

https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153/posts/inhtjFe2Phe

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