This pretty much sums up why I only post to +Google+Mike Elgan: +Chris Messina fucks up again+Chris Messina penned a takedown of Google+ on Hacker News, and the piece was re-posted on Medium (“Thoughts on Google+: I fucked up. So has Google.”)His post got people talking, because Chris used to work on Google+. (He also invented the hashtag.) In a nutshell, Chris’s complaints about Google+ are tenfold. I thought I’d summarize his ten points, and offer my opinions and observations about each in a kind of open letter to Chris. Dear Chris: 1. Can’t figure out what Google+ is forChris: What is the Internet for? What is paper for? What are TV, radio and books for? More to the point, why do you want someone to tell you what to do? Google+ is a brilliant blank canvas of communication for you to do anything you want with, from private one-on-one communication to blogging to novel writing to photo gallery publishing. And icing on the cake: The Google+ community is the best ever assembled online anywhere. 2. Can’t tell if Google is “worried” about Facebook, Snapchat, or PinterestYes, but you can tell that Twitter is “worried” about Facebook. That’s why they’re ruining it. In an existential panic, Twitter is slowly turning itself into Facebook, with the intrusive ads, algorithmic filtering, insertion of content nobody asked for and all the rest. You can tell Facebook is “worried” about Snapchat. That’s why they now shamelessly force you to install and use a separate Messaging app on mobile. Google doesn’t have ads, and isn’t “worried” about other social networks (being subsidised, essentially, by the rest of Google). That lack of “worry” is one of the reasons why Google isn’t actively wrecking Google+. 3. Google+ doesn’t aggressively “control” your digital identity The skimmers who got a “gist” of your post and moved on, didn’t seem to register that your perspective is mostly an industry-interested one, not a user-interested one. Long story short: Who cares if Google is “controlling” my identity? 4. Google+ is “Facebook lite,” something the world doesn’t needThis is your biggest error in understanding. Google+ isn’t “Facebook Lite.” It’s the opposite of Facebook. It’s the cure for the Facebook disease. Yes: Facebook has a monopoly on everybody. But the site and service itself is shit. They ruin your pictures posted on your profile pic. They ruin your videos. Facebook is confusing to use. They lie to you in multiple ways. The interface is fugly, cluttered and confusing. They aggressively censor about 90 percent of the content from your newsfeed (by Zuckerberg’s own admission). YOU CAN’T EVEN SEARCH THE CONTENT OF POSTS!! I could go on and on with everything rotten about Facebook, problems completely absent on Google+. 5. Google+ should have improved social networking by 10x, but didn’tYes, they did. : ) 6. It doesn’t sufficiently “motivate people to store more information with Google”Again, this is an industry wish-list item. As a user, I don’t care if I’m being motivated to store more information. Having said that, I literally store 100% of my information on Google (email, Drive, docs, Contacts, photos on G+). 7. “Google+ is confused and adrift at sea”The user experience is the opposite. It’s un-confused, clear, reliable, fast, fun and free. 8. Google+ isn’t evolving, changing and getting new features fast enough That’s like saying Mozart’s opera has “too many notes.” Who wants new features for the sake of new features? We all have things we’d like G+ to add. But mostly Google is doing far better than other social sites at avoiding bad new features, which is far more important. Facebook rapidly adds features, which almost always annoy users or flop completely. All social sites gain features at different rates. Twitter is just now adding comprehensive search, for example, which Facebook isn’t even talking about.9. Doesn’t know what Google+ is better for than FacebookIt couldn’t be more obvious, but Google+ is better than Facebook at literally everything. There’s not a single thing featurewise that I can think of that’s better on Facebook than it is on Google+. (Facebook has everybody, but that’s not a feature. It’s a catastrophic accident of history.) 10. Unlike Pinterest, which “helps you express your aspirational self,” Google “pigeonholes you into what you already are”This makes zero sense. Google doesn’t pigeonhole you in any conceivable way. There are no limits on content, media or addressing. The real names policy is gone. You can literally be and do anything you want on Google+. Google+ is by far the best site online to communicate privately. It doesn’t get hacked. It almost never goes down. And Google+ is by far the best site to communicate publicly. Even without cultivating a community, a public Google+ post is a page on the Internet, but with the possibility of radical viral sharing. Guess what: I’ll get more eyeballs and comments on this post than you did with your post on Hacker News and Medium combined – neither of those sites, by the way, did you single out for irrelevance. And I didn’t even invent the hashtag. All I did was do my post on Google+. In fact, Chris, your own post on Google+ linking to your story got far more comments than both your Hacker News and Medium posts combined: [plus.google.com/+ChrisMes…](https://plus.google.com/+ChrisMessina/posts/Q4CoWABqLCHSay) what you want about Google+, Chris Messina. But G+ is just better – far better – than anything else out there, and still by far the best place in the world to share one’s interests and ideas and spark conversations with smart, passionate people.I thank you for helping to make Google+ possible. But you’re wrong about Google+. [medium.com/@chrismes…](https://medium.com/@chrismessina/thoughts-on-google-8883844a9ca4https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673544#Googlehttps://plus.google.com/103567587425344837866/posts/YXKEmFiwqnS)
