So seriously, in fact, that …
Google has just launched games on Google+.
Because, you know, having games on G+ is SO much more important than fixing ALL the horrible usability problems with G+ …
Every time I say something negative about G+, the rabid fanboys say something that goes like this (paraphrasing):
But, but, but, the G+ team is doing all they can to make the service, the experience, etc., better … just cut them some slack and give them time.
… and then, Google goes and does something like this.
Launching games on G+ now is like pissing on G+ users and calling it rain.
It’s one of the features that users explicitly do not want. In the early days of G+, one of the things most commonly cited by the fanboys as giving Google an edge over Facebook was “the lack of games cluttering up the stream”.
Like I’ve been saying all along, everyone will slowly come out of the “ooh, new and shiny” haze they’re in, and realize how badly G+ sucks in comparison to Facebook.
Google+ will soon join the ranks of Google Wave and Google Buzz. Remember them? Yeah …
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
I hear ya. So many friends touted google+ and that they were leaving fb yet they still post EVERYDAY on fb lol. I am glad I found out about the name stuff before I bothered wasting my time on it. Between that, the terrible interface and the rampant fanboyism, I’ll stick to fb where I at least know ppl.
*snicker*. Games are like porn. They drive pageviews like nothing else. The Farms, the Fish, the Mafias, the Scrabbles – this is what built the FB empire, and G+ would be marketing failures if they didn’t realize that. You don’t get to the big bucks appealing only to the serious people (unless you’re StarTrek, or *maybe* Firefly). You gotta go for the masses.
Mind you, I’m not a G+ apologist. My world would be simpler if it fails as quickly as Buzz, and I’m terrified of the big G establishing an information monopoly on me. But trying to launch a social network without games is like trying to start a new cable company and not having sports channels.
Did you notice in the announcement it said that game updates are NOT in your stream? You have to explicitly seek out game updates.
Tom: I did see that. I also know that when people are incentivized to spam their circles for in-game benefit, users themselves will send out links to games and such in their regular update stream, which WILL appear in any stream that person is circled in.
Sure, I can “block” them — that is, block them completely from my G+ experience, not just their game-related noise — but that’s pretty extreme.
And, since anyone can add you to a circle and send you updates that appear in your “incoming” stream, it pretty much will render the incoming stream unusable once folks start circling everyone they can find and posting solicitations to help them out in their game …
Just because the games/apps themselves will post to a certain channel, doesn’t mean that G+ won’t be ruined by the users playing those games. Saying “games won’t ruin G+ because they’ll have their own channel” is pretty naive.
Ironic that the post I read in Google Reader right before yours was a “give them time to make it better” post. ;)
I still like Google+, but I’ll be ignoring the games.
My point is that great effort was made to enable you to be able to ignore the games. If you find that isn’t true, I’ll forward your feedback.
Naive would imply that I’m uninformed on this subject. I assert that we might disagree, but I’m not uninformed.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you were uninformed.
I’m sure there’s many good intentions here, but gamers are notoriously good at exploiting rules to their benefit. I don’t think Google has the manpower to combat that, and it’s not something that can be solved algorithmically.
What we need is more fine-grained controls over what appears in our G+ experience — not “circles” which is fine-grained controls over who we can try to send out to.
All they had to do was a better interpretation of human relationships and translate them in to a system. Yet, they copied an already created virtual system like Facebook and tweaked some spots.
It’s like having a scenery, a painting of that scenery and then copy the painting instead of the real scenery.
G+ is too damn same old same old. Nothing new to see really … great for geeks and people that “socialize” online when they don’t even know what the word “socialize” mean …