Ex-Google employee calls Google+ a ‘stupid Facebook clone’

Google’s social network Google+ has been the subject of numerous debates. Despite boasting a large user base, a recent study suggested the service is a ghost town and now a former Engineering Director at the Internet giant has chimed in, blasting the service and the company’s co-founder Larry Page. The former executive called Google’s products a means to an end and claimed the company was merely building tools to obtain as much personal information as possible about its users to better woo potential advertisers. Spencer Tipping, a programmer who left Google about a month ago, recently wrote a blog post covering his time spent at the Mountain View-based company. In an extensive list of pros and cons, Tipping discussed the technological culture and the corporate culture at the company, noting that the biggest corporate culture con was none other than Google+.
“I think Google+ is an effort that does not deserve the engineering minds at Google,” Tipping said. “This is mostly a personal bias. I see Google as solving legitimately difficult technological problems, not doing stupid things like cloning Facebook. Google, in my opinion, lost sight of what was important when they went down this rabbit hole.”
The former employee went on to say that he wasn’t fond of Google’s “ubiquitous political emphasis on Google+ that sometimes compromised other engineering efforts.” While Tipping may be considered a disgruntled former employee, the pros in his post did outweigh the cons, and he said he left “mostly because I wanted to take the time to pursue stuff closer to my interests.”