Ben Smith (Hacker News):
The review did highlight the significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations. Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.
To give people a full opportunity to transition, we will implement this wind-down over a 10-month period, slated for completion by the end of next August. Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.
At the same time, we have many enterprise customers who are finding great value in using Google+ within their companies. Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a secure corporate social network.
Scott Perry:
Eight years ago my friends at Google were having their compensation made conditional on the successful launch of Google+. This was the outcome we all predicted, but it took much longer than expected.
Dave Winer:
Google+ was unmotivated by any need for what it did. No one loved it. It was born only to slow Facebook growth. It’s like having a kid so it can beat up your neighbor’s kid. Products, to be any good, must be motivated, have a creative purpose.
Nick Statt:
Google exposed the personal information of hundreds of thousands of users of its Google+ social network, the company announced in a blog post this morning. The news, originally reported by The Wall Street Journal ahead of Google’s announcement, means that Google+ profile information like name, email address, occupation, gender, and age were exposed, even when that data was listed as private and not public. However, Google says that it has no evidence to suggest any third-party developers were aware of the bug or abused it. The bug, affecting an API that was accessed by hundreds of developers, appears to have been active between 2015 and 2018.
The company says it closed the bug in March 2018 shortly after learning of its existence. The WSJ reports that the company chose not to report it because of fear of “immediate regulatory interest” that would lump Google in with Facebook, according to one source’s description of the incident.
Nick Heer:
That this disclosure wasn’t made until today — seven months after this breach was noticed — is unconscionable. But it is outrageous that the reason for not disclosing it in the first place was because they wanted to hide it from the law and that Pichai knew about it.
By the way, because Google tried so hard to make Google Plus work, it’s possible that your Google account — if you have one — is a Google Plus profile. You can disconnect it; Google calls it “downgrading”.
Brian McCullough:
Has anyone made this point yet? Pichai refused to testify to congress because he couldn’t. He would have either had to perjure himself or reveal this bug in real time before the committee.
Update (2018-10-10): Matt Haughey:
I’ll never forget when I was on Google’s campus in 2011 and a product team told me as much as I loved Google Reader, Google+ was going to replace it with something much better.
Update (2018-10-15): Morgan Knutson:
Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.
See also: Eli Schiff, Threader, and John Gruber.
Bug Google Google Plus Privacy Sunset
Jason Cross:
It turns out that, if you poke around online, you’ll find plenty of AirPods knockoffs. I don’t mean other true wireless earbuds (of which there are plenty of good contenders), I mean products designed to completely mimic the AirPods’ unique design, stems and all.
[…]
That’s because all the store listings for these not-quite-AirPods are from intermediary companies that resell the earbuds, at least until they accumulate enough one-star ratings or complaints to shut down their Amazon shop and start up a new one. In the weeks it took to gather and test these, about half of the product pages completely disappeared, though I was often able to find them again on a different page with a differently-named seller. Most of the products don’t list using a real brand name, instead stuffing the product listing with as many keywords and other popular product names as possible.
[…]
Don’t be fooled by the sometimes slick-looking product shots, too. Many of them are fake, especially the images of people using them. You’ll see lots of earbuds badly photoshopped into the ears of obvious stock photo models, and they always make the earbuds and stems look smaller than they really are.
See also: How to Avoid Counterfeits When Looking for Deals.
Previously: Amazon Is Complicit With Counterfeiting.
Update (2019-03-06): Juli Clover:
In our latest YouTube video, we picked up a pair of $50 i10 TWS earphones that have been designed to look like AirPods to see how they measure up to the real thing.
The i10 TWS AirPods knockoffs are almost carbon copies of the AirPods and at first glance, it’s hard to tell them apart. There are some noticeable differences to distinguish the two, though, which will be obvious to AirPods owners.
AirPods Amazon Audio Bluetooth Earbuds iOS Mac
Ben McCarthy:
IAP sales were actually lower than expected. Over the first week, about 0.5% of people bought an IAP. Over the full course of the promotion that increased to 0.75% which is still a good bit less than we were expecting. Perhaps the demographics of people who take advantage of such offers are less willing to pay for extras, or perhaps we’re just not pushing the IAPs hard enough within the app.
However…
The one thing we did not account for at all in our estimations was that people would continue to buy Obscura. Not only that, but more people would buy Obscura than we’d expected without the promotion. We’re still trying to wrap our heads around it, but we’re certainly not complaining. We were featured in a number of articles as a result of the promotion which definitely introduced us to new audiences, and the increase in downloads probably improved our visibility on the App Store.
[…]
It’s very hard to communicate to people that Apple’s Apple Store app is not the same as Apple’s App Store app. We quickly lost count of the amount of times we had to point people in the right direction.
Of course people expect to find apps in the App Store app. I looked for the free Obscura there myself, but you had to get the promo code from the retail Apple Store app.
In-App Purchase iOS iOS 11 iOS App Marketing Obscura
Benjamin Mayo:
A bug with the complications on the new Infograph faces in Apple Watch Series 4 is causing some very unhappy Watch owners today. Users in Australia have just experienced the daylight saving time change and are finding their Watches are now stuck in reboot loops.
Specifically, it seems the large Activity complication on the Infograph Modular face is not handling the loss of an hour elegantly, and instead causing the entire device to crash and reboot …
Previously: Do Not Disturb Bug.
Apple Watch Bug Time watchOS
