I’m still salty about that. Google+ was fantastic on release. Simple, clean, elegant, and fast. Then they steadily, systematically fucked it up. By the time it was cancelled, it had become unusable.
Comment on Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only
PlasterAnalyst@kbin.social 9 months agoGoogle+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.
kescusay@lemmy.world 9 months ago
evatronic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
G+'s downfall was they kept it invite-only too long. Demand was there, people wanted in but Google was like, “Nah…”
By the time it was open-access, everyone had moved on or back to their old social media platforms. It could’ve been great, but Google, in typical Google fashion, got distracted by something shiny and killed it.
wjrii@kbin.social 9 months ago
The sad thing is, if they'd thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.
Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.
kescusay@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yep. Once they screwed up G+, I committed to never becoming dependent on any Google service beyond Drive and Gmail, and only those two because they’re completely untouchable - Google couldn’t break those without having a mass rebellion on its hands.
Doug@midwest.social 9 months ago
In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that’s been way more successful than G+
wjrii@kbin.social 9 months ago
Gmail was also both "federated" and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn't all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
GreenMario@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you’d get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.
dan@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Hotmail was 2mb.
Kalkaline@leminal.space 9 months ago
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn’t want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I’m certain they did that for technical reasons.
Doug@midwest.social 9 months ago
Might Bluesky be doing the same?
GreenMario@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that “exclusive” feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.
Natanael@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
Yeah they’re working hard on scaling, they’ve had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
geosoco@kbin.social 9 months ago
It's also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.
Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.
0_0j@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“i am the choosen one!” As if…
Boy, our servers are ducktaped!