Just opened up Google+ on a 15" Mac Book Pro in Chrome and all I see is whitespace and "You may know", "Interesting people and pages" and other useless crap, what I'm not seeing is my feed. Only around 10% of the screen space is used for things I care about, it really baffles me how Google thinks that this is a contender against Facebook. They should realise that spamming people won't make them like their horrible UI.
One of the points of the article is that it's hard to tell and control what is happening on the Google+ interface and system.
Add A/B testing and rollout of new features, utter lack of accountability and bugs, and probably no one in the world can ACTUALLY TELL if the alleged abuser actually sent an invite.
Some of that malware is really crude, and pretty much said "you didn't install any software, but here I am, a bit of software installing itself and asking you for permission. Be careful, because i could be a virus and do real damage to your system. So, you know nothing about me, and I could be dangerous. Do you want to install me?"
See also the numbers of people who fall for 419 scams.
Hell, I don't know how to use the gmail iPhone app; the Facebook iPhone app, the Reddit mobile site. I come from a generation where you click it and see what happens. Without a confirmation step that click could now land me in jail.
What's weird is that Google have the numbers and the skill to test their UI Changes. The UI must make sense to most people or Google would iterate it.
It makes me feel decidedly behind the apex. Like an old man needing a 12 year old to set the VCR clock.
> Could you possibly exaggerate any more? 10%? Really?
> With the multi column newsfeed on Google+ it's just impossible that you see less content than on Facebook.
Look at the screenshot I posted on the original content.
The point of my comment was that Google should focus on making their product actually usable instead of trying to carve out some market share by brute force.
If I'm going to my news feed, I'm expecting to see NEWS. Not people/groups etc. I might be interested in ...
Same for me around 10% even less are actual news posts from the first page I see on my "news feed".
You first have to follow/befriend someone to see any news, this is NOT different on Facebook!
If you log in with a new account on Facebook and have less than 10 active friends, you will see the same suggestions because there are not enough posts from your friends to fill your newsfeed.
I have around 160 friends in my circles on google+ and I'm following 10 communities ...
I see max 1 post. Rest is pictures I uploaded (WHY not share them ... HERE are people you might KNOW ... and "Communities you MIGHT be interested in" ... then the layout is so ridiculous that I can just see 1 or 2 posts on my small laptop screen. Sorry that's not how Facebook and Twitter look like.
Out of curiosity I just opened my g+ on a 1280 x 800 thinkpad and counted pixels and 17% was feed with my normal settings. Actually by changing the text size you can vary the percent of screen your feed takes from 0% to a max of about 75%. Facebook has a fair bit of empty space too.
The point is Google should make their product attractive instead of relying of just leveraging their existing power to promote it. It doesn't have to be exactly 1:1 for people to be expecting at least the same quality.
Edit:
Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4889ilnwfmplu0l/Screenshot%202014-...