Google+ Drops "Ripples" -- Thumbing Nose at G+'s Most Loyal Users
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001102.html
As much as I admire Google (full disclosure, while I have consulted to
them, I'm not currently doing so), for the life of me I cannot
understand their fetish not only for killing features that are much
loved by significant numbers of users, but so often doing this with
little or no warning at all.
So here we go again. In a terse post on G+ today, Google announced
that they had immediately dropped support for the Google+ "Ripples"
feature. Zero warning. Just POOF.
Granted, if you're not a heavy user of G+ and don't have a lot of
followers, you may not have ever even bothered playing with Ripples at
all or even known of it. Ripples was always relatively hidden,
suggesting the amount of non-love Google felt it deserved.
But for folks like me (I have nearly 400K G+ followers), Ripples was
incredibly useful, providing me with a graphical representation of
sharing patterns related to my posts -- it was an extremely valuable
engagement visualization tool.
So, why did Google kill it now?
Oh, I can wager some guesses. Maybe nobody wanted to devote the
fraction of time necessary to maintain it, or perhaps a broader G+
backend redesign made it difficult or impossible to reasonably
continue for technical reasons.
Nothing lasts forever.
But in the name of bits, bytes, and Beelzebub, I simply cannot fathom
why Google cannot provide some degree of advance warning before
disabling features like this. A month? A week? 48 hours? Something?
Even if we grant that Ripples wasn't widely used and large numbers of
users won't be affected at Google scale -- these aren't valid excuses
for essentially thumbing your nose at some of your most devoted users
as if they just don't matter at all.
It's almost as if Google just doesn't want to be bothered unless
millions or billions of users are directly impacted.
I've been pushing back against folks claiming that Google is planning
to ramp down Google+ -- but Google's attitude toward the services'
most devoted evangelists seems downright bizarre, and indeed causes
one to ponder this question more deeply.
More than bizarre -- it's simple disrespect. And unfortunately, it's
the kind of communications failure that has become all too common with
Google.
We'll all live without G+ Ripples. In the relative scheme of things,
it's not a big deal.
But its very triviality has the ironic effect of causing one to wonder
how users will be treated when the really important issues roll around
again.
And at least for someone like me who has enormous admiration and
respect for what Google has accomplished, I'm left with a very sour
taste in mouth, that I really wish wasn't there.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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