The answer to the question of why Google+ failed is simple. The answer is photos. The big mistake Google+ made was in starting out as a place for people to have meaty in-depth discussions.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/why-photos-rule-the-internet
And yet, the people I knew who bought in most to G+ were pro photographers.
I suppose Instagram has completely killed that though. Not buying Instagram was one of Google's dummer moves. It is growing like mad, would have given that "photo" element and the avg Instagram user has a personal income of $51,000 per year (not household) and is quite young. Avg income of Instagrammers is a multiple of Facebook (where, of course, many users have almost no income at all b/c of age). So though that number is close to the median household income in the US, this is individual income (if I recall correctly; could be wrong) and of course IG skews really young, so we're talking about people in general wealthy for their cohort.
>the people I knew who bought in most to G+ were pro photographers.
> meaty in-depth discussions
It's not a stretch to connect the dots there, though. Pros weren't looking for a place to post their latest selfie or a buddy passed out next to the toilet.
I belong to a couple of FB groups and a forum (same subject for all: collectible vehicles). The forum is the oldest (both in terms of founding date and user demographics). It is, without question, THE place to go for technical knowledge. I'll add that the forum format works well for cataloging this type of discussion. Even though it is superior on all counts, it is getting killed by the FB groups. The primary reason, I suppose, is the omnipresence of FB in millennials' lives but ease of posting photos is a very close second. (Add to that the way FB scrapes linked pages and inserts them as images.)
>Facebook (where, of course, many users have almost no income at all
That was among the first things I noticed when I started FB. I thought the elder forum members were cheap. They look like spendthrifts compared to FB users.
It's the instant emotion of photos over words which you have to write, spell and think about. Emotion and ease wins with photos. Slap a cute cat on it or a dog or a nekkid or near nekkid selfie and you get instant emotions of, "Aw" or screams of terror.
>Slap a
cute cat on it
Trademark violation!
>photos over words
Yeah, both composing and reading text is harder work --and in most cases, less descriptive-- than a photo. Good cataloging (tagging, title, sub-forums, etc) adds to the work. Laziness and the path-of-least-resistance are a big reason, too. Have you tried to introduce a thirty-something to the forum format? We did, and they screamed it was too confusing or too hard to post or follow. More than a few said it lacked pictures and they needed eye-candy (not their term) to sustain their interest.
<added>
Access by smartphones was a big factor, too. Forums suck on phone screens.
>Trademark
Ahh, so that's where I nicked that from!
I sometimes think the entire Internet has devolved to pics of cats and dogs followed, distantly by photos of people's drooling spawn. Of course sometimes it does rise to the level of Pure Art, like a vidie of a cat in a shark costume riding a Roomba. Take that Shakespeare.
>slap a cat on it
2010 is earliest I could find, but I don't think that's the original post
http://th3core.com/talk/traffic/another-google-ui-tweak/msg1287/#msg1287
Cat-slapping can get you fired, btw
http://th3core.com/talk/web-development/now-there's-no-escuse-slap-a-cat-on-it/
A few months ago, tech headlines were buzzing about G's new photo-deciphering program --how it could identify objects better than humans. Given the on-going shift toward reliance upon images, I think that image interpretation will be incorporated into the serps. Years ago, I tried photo-spamming on a large scale. It sorta worked but because of image search, not because the image's content was being used as a ranking factor. I suspect we are on the brink of in-context images becoming a part of the serp algo.
https://placekitten.com/
'Just use cat videos': New York Times boss wants Facebook to cut out news
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/03/just-use-cat-videos-new-york-times-boss-mark-thompson-wants-facebook-to-cut-out-news
RC
That NYT post should be split into another thread IMFO
Very important topic...
Yes, cut out news because we are losing as revenue.
Newspapers are great for some things but too slow. Up to the second news = Twitter
In the offline world TV is far more popular than picture books or reading.
https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher
Quote from: The ZuckEvery 10 or 15 years a new one comes along. They're always more native, they capture your human experience more. Immersively, you share more naturally what you're experiencing. I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal. You can just see this trajectory from early internet, when the technology and connections were slow, most of the internet was text. Text is great, but it can be sometimes hard to capture what's going on. Then, we all got phones with cameras on them and the internet got good enough to be primarily images. Now the networks are getting good enough that it's primarily video. At each step along the way, we're able to capture the human experience with greater fidelity and richness
A picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth ___ ?
>thousand words
Sometimes. At other times a good set of written instructions is invaluable and saves time, especially when you have to refer back to them. A video as well as podcasts trap you in a linear backwards and forwards information storage like trying to retrieve your data from a cassette tape on your TRS-80.
For all the abuse I've laid on Microsoft over the years, back in the DOS software days they could write one heck of a good manual. If you needed to figure out how to do something it was there, step by step.
Today, everybody tries to copy Apple and tell you next to nothing, except they are not as good as Apple at just making stuff work.
I believe videos have a slightly negative valuation by many/most? visitors. I'm seeing more and more news sites putting up a video but also writing a full article to cover the story. I can't say I've seen an increased use of photo stills in those articles, though. My personal favorite, slideshows accompanied by good, verbose caption text *might* be on the uptick.
What always irritated me was bloggers that would post a stock photo before any post. I don't mind if it's a photo taken by the author that relates to the post, but something obviously stock is just daft. But for a couple of years it seemed like that is what bloggers did. Seems to have died out or I'm hanging with a different crowd.
(Remind me to tell you what I think about ads in the middle of an article sometime.)
QuoteI believe videos have a slightly negative valuation by many/most? visitors.
I think it depends on why people visit a site. What task are they trying to complete?
Video & music dominate entertainment. But in terms of just getting specific goals accomplished they can certainly get in the way. That said, many product sales pages have review videos & even things like buying a boat or such could be seen as lower risk if a person can get a video of watching the thing run, a walkthrough tour of the boat to see its condition, etc.
I hate videos. I've lately figured out I need to dial it back as I'm spending 15 minutes looking for a text answer instead of watching youtube for 2 mins.
>slap a cat on it
Forward-deployed Ukrainian Battle Cat
https://old.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/xsuu4b/forwarddeployed_ukrainian_battle_cat/
Video tutorials are great for car and appliance repairs. Very useful in certain contexts.
Wait until they are showing in your AR goggles with the size of the wrench needed and an arrow pointing to the nut.
As I understand it, Google Glass never went away, but moved into more niche industry applications. It could be big in 10 years, but not as a techno-utopian tool for annoying people at restaurants, but for genuine tasks that people need help with.
https://www.google.com/glass/start/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-translate-ar-smartglasses-at-google-io-2022/
https://www.laptopmag.com/news/google-glass-is-making-a-comeback-with-some-strict-limitations
>Video tutorials
Every time I need to get something fixed on a car or around the house I watch a couple videos to see if I could easily do it myself or if it is worth paying someone else to handle it. There are videos for pretty much any problem you would have with any sort of mainstream vehicle out there. The home repair videos can be a bit more hit and miss in terms of quality though.
I still much prefer a slideshow with captions but I'll take a video if that's all I can get ...and it usually is.
>home repair
I just used videos from the manufacturers to install a sorta complicated control valve in the new shower. Then I watched a plumber's vid for some different views.
>car
I recently found 2 guys running a 'studio' right from the junkyard. Production quality is rough, but they were excellent about replacing a rear side window in a van. BTW, ebay is selling windows & body parts now. Pro prices were $400-500 and ebay was $85 and I didn't have to drive an hour to a good junk yard.
>thousand words
>video tutorials
For something like appliance repair videos work so much better for me than written instructions.
Agreed. I generally hate video as it is hard to skim. Who would have guessed millions would watch unboxing videos.
But for car or appliance repair, a good video just puts it all together.
For someone like me who is not particularly handy, I've been able to tackle projects I would not have touched without YOuTube. Has saved me so much time and money.