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Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

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Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#211

Post by munificent »

fedd wrote: post #32

too complex to use may affect usage negatively. too many features is not always good. trying to mimic real live brings the complexities of real life to the web. check this: "With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let specific buddies (or entire circles) know you’re hanging out and then see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until teleportation arrives, it’s the next best…

> imagine a jerk that noone loves intruding all the hangouts. but everybody too polite/dependant to unfriend

When you enter your hangout, you specify what circle(s) see the announcement. So just make a "Everyone but Jerk" circle and post to that. He'll think you're never in your hangout.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#212

Post by jcampbell1 »

I am quite impressed, but one thing that is severely broken is the number of duplicate names in the list. Basically if a person has two email addresses, then they show up twice. This would not be a big deal, but the email addresses are hidden, and it is impossible to tell which is an old/work email address rather than a personal one. I hope this is fixed soon.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#213

Post by munificent »

bryze wrote: post #8

Perhaps this will make facebook better. Competition can often improve product quality. For google this might, however, turn out the same way that Microsoft's grab for web applications is going. First to market is hard to break.

> First to market is hard to break.

Tell that to friendster. Er, myspace.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#214

Post by ianb »

nextparadigms wrote: post #197
kristiandupont wrote: post #96

This is exciting and all -- and much as I would love to see a serious competitor to Facebook, I still don't know how I would convince any of my non-techie friends that they should switch to this. Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests. Although it looks like a big discussion group, the news feed…

"Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests." I totally disagree with that. Facebook sorely lacks such a feature, and the lack of it has led to "spammy" messages from so called "friends" you barely even know, or care about in your list. Google+ seems to solve a lot of issues with Facebook. And I thin…

Don't you just hide friends with consistently boring messages? I do, and people I know do. It's a big stick, compared to some more subtle faceting, but it mostly works fine, while putting some pressure on the reader to accept a certain amount of tedium in those people I still want to listen to. There's also event spam, but that one category you can filter out separately (i.e., "ignore events from person X").

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#215

Post by int3rnaut »

richcollins wrote: post #114

One of the nice things about the product is its whimsical nature — a puff of smoke and a -1 animation appears when you remove a friend, and when you remove a social circle, it rolls away off the screen. Where do I sign up???

You can meet the rest of us that what to sign up by the Bike Racks.

BIKE GEEEEKS!!!! Mount up.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#216

Post by bauchidgw »

kristiandupont wrote: post #96

This is exciting and all -- and much as I would love to see a serious competitor to Facebook, I still don't know how I would convince any of my non-techie friends that they should switch to this. Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests. Although it looks like a big discussion group, the news feed…

>Still, it bothers me when it says "logged in" in the google bar at the top because google watches my searches.

well G watches your searches anyway, even tunes the search results to your search history, as its cookie dependend, not log in dependend. see http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#217

Post by encoderer »

pallinder wrote: post #202
DrCatbox wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distrust Facebook so much that I dont have a news feed, I dont have a way to share my pictures (because who wants to share 1024x768 resolution pictures with their friends? ffs why do I then have a 15mp camera?) and I have skype to chat with friends. Google+ is refreshing, it shows social networking can be better.

Couldnt agree more with you. Perhaps this is the thing for us non facebook users to use amongst ourselves :)

There are certainly many people who avoid or hate facebook.

All Google needs is a beachhead, right? For Facebook it was Harvard and then Ivy League schools. Perhaps for Google their beachhead is the Anti-Facebook people.

Once it grows a bit, people start writing apps that abstract FB and G+. Think: iPhone app with a Newsfeed feature that just seamlessly merges your FB and G+ feed.

The existence of apps like that will make it trivial for people to have a G+ profile in addition to -- even if never instead of -- their Facebook account. And then it's up to Google to grow more and more mindshare.

Maybe it'll always be an also-ran. A Facebook lil brother. But I wouldn't just write it off. We've seen this story before.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#218

Post by rhc2104 »

nostrademons wrote: post #133
msbarnett wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Buzz is a good example of how forcing an active account on everyone at the same time led to a large backlash. There's a pretty wide gulf between opening up and forcing it on people. You can't build a social networking sites if it isn't open to people in your users' social networks. But you also can't build a site people trust and want to use by forcing it on them.

Curiously, I've heard that FaceBook also started by forcing an account on everyone - Zuckerburg scraped the online student database so that everyone at Harvard automatically had a FaceBook account. (Or rather, he scraped it for FaceMash and then used the data again to start FaceBook.) You can get away with a lot more when you're a college student project than when you're a multi-billion-$ corporation.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register...

It does not seem like the Facemash data was reused for thefacebook.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#219

Post by joebadmo »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #210
joebadmo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see with user-defined groups implementation is conversations. If I share an item with my "work friends" group, and someone replies to it, who can see the reply? Is it only my work friends, or can the replier choose others to expose her reply to? What about people in my work friends list that she doesn't know or follow or is followed by? This already sort of happens in Google Reader. Sometimes I comment…

In Google Reader, comments on items are visible to everyone that can see the item. Edit: this is meant merely to inform, not judge how it is or should be.

Right, but that still leaves me not having any idea who can see my comments. Which is fine in Google Reader because I don't expect any level of privacy there, but in Google+, esp. after having explicitly set up Circles, I might expect some level of privacy which doesn't include people outside of the Circle I'm commenting in being able to see my comments.

With a "Place" metaphor, if you have a private place, nothing would leave that place, and only everyone visible in the place would be able to see any of your content. I think this is just a much more intuitive way to handle groups. It can be more flexible, too, because you could very easily create new places with varying levels of privacy, but the exact level of privacy would always be known to the occupants of the place.

Re: Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

#220

Post by PotatoEngineer »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #168
cryptoz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friends didn't need Gmail for you to be able to use it. But they did need Wave. And they do need +. There's a big difference between open protocols and closed systems.

It appears that you can interact with non-Google+-enabled accounts to a limited extent; they receive your posts as emails.

That might be the point that lets Google+ succeed: you can sign up and interact with your friends immediately, and then when they join Google+, you get to do more.

It will definitely help with the "I have an account but nobody else does" phenomenon.

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