The Horror of setting up a Google+ account for my mom(plus.google.com) |
The Horror of setting up a Google+ account for my mom(plus.google.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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.)
You can switch off some parts of it so the content is visible only internally, but your account picture, name, company you work for and the fact that you have an account are visible to anyone on G+.
If you were Google, which would you rather sell to advertisers, correlations between groups of five people of fifty?
I mean that is it known that in current social networks a life-time value of a person that with 5 strong relationship ties is less valuable over time than a person who has 50 very very weak ties (like most of my Google+ followers, people who I don't know)
I would rather sell a network that people want to use over one that they don't.
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"
This is actually what we're working on at FamilyLeaf: http://familyleaf.ocm
The younger generations don't use email, so you have to encourage them to share in different ways. But at the same time, you must make it dead simple for older people to share their photos and updates. On FamilyLeaf, we've solved that by using Chute (http://getchute.com) to allow people our age to selectively share from their photos on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, etc.
And older people can just attach photos in a message to send@familyleaf.com - they're automatically emailed to the whole group and collected in your universal family album.
You think it's a big part but you are in fact making that personal connection weaker.
At the very most in the world technology, email would suffice for your family.
The pages are designed to get the user to spend more time on G+.
Suddenly all their new stuff is too complicated. Google+ and Google Listen are painful to use.
Google+ is definitely not intuitive and during their recent upgrade have ripped off Facebook's profile and cover photo idea.
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."
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.
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.
This article and some others I've read all hint a larger issue, that if we're not celeb watchers, hangout addicts, et al, then we should be. We all want to be like the cool kids, right? Well, I don't really want to follow Felicia Day. I don't want to hang out on G+. I don't want to chat on G+. I just want to see what my friends and a few others are posting, and post a few things myself for their consumption. This would work a lot better without the persistent, distracting and annoying nagging for me to become the median user.
Even saying so, a lot of the points I say there are potential usability issues for everyone (at least for me they are). For example, the big banner ads for mobile apps and Hangouts.
I agree, the title is a bit misleading. By "setup", I meant creating an account and simplifying the user interface, and explaining to my mom how to start hangouts, share photos, etc.
Sharing is simple.
Where it seems like your complaints lie are in getting too much information - above and beyond what has been shared.
To me, I suppose that's small potatoes. I get the occasional distraction in my stream, but Google's usually smart enough to make it relevant, and about half the time I see something from outside of my circles, it ends up drawing me into a conversation.
I am decidedly not your mom, and I don't mind it. Also, my stream is active enough that those 'outsiders' ever take up any significant percentage of it, so perhaps I'm unable to see it from her point of view, but I don't think that showing me things I like, that I might otherwise have missed, is a 'problem' that needs to be 'fixed'.
Again, just my opinion. Can I ask what other social networks your mom has used, and how she found those, in comparison?
Most of the elders in my family - talking people 65+ - have computers, use Facebook, to keep in touch. Most of my mother's _friends_ are on Facebook for that matter. They do appreciate a phone call, but for grand-baby pictures and video, that's where the action is.
My mother is the exception. At the age of 70, she's never touched a computer. She likely never will.
Anyway - my point is that my family is not exceptional, nor especially early-adopting. We're pretty typical Americans, I think.
by the way; phones and postal mail still use technology.
Also, these views are all mine, what triggered them was the annoyances I came across as I was trying to simplify the Google+ interface for my mom. I find Google+ great for sharing links, photos and doing hangouts and I definitely don't know of a better or simpler solution for private sharing among groups of people. Like you said, it is really simple to share.
I do feel strongly about letting users easily opt out of getting too much information. If I want to see what's trending, I can visit the Explore tab. Like the left navigation, maybe it makes sense to let you hide stuff on the right sidebar as well.
My main annoyance though is with the persistent adverts (the banners you see on Explore, Hangout and Photos pages). And the "in your face" banner that you cannot get rid of, if you have less than 10 people in Circles. The only way is to add strangers to your Circles to get rid of it. Would it be too bad to have a "X" icon on the top right to get rid of these?
What is Facebook's motivation for connecting people? Or Google's? Or LinkedIn's.
A newspaper sold millions of individual pairs of eyeballs to advertisers. I would think the large numbers of correlations available in a largely connected network would be much more valuable than unconnectable individuals.