I think Google+ will be a social network for techie hipsters and other early adopters seeking a Facebook alternative, but the novelty will wear off, and the mainstream will barely notice. Just my initial impression. There isn't a compelling enough reason for Facebook's 750 million users to switch.
Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
51–60 of 157 posts
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#52So on the one hand this guy says FB is lean and agile because they use PHP - but produced a less than compelling response to circles. And on the other hand he says Google's "toolchain is not well suited to fast, iterative development and rapid innovation" - but they produced a polished social product from scratch in a remarkably short time. I'm afraid I don't ascribe much value to his analysis. Maybe there's a good r…
Believe it or not, it is possible for Facebook to be lean and agile yet produce a less than compelling response to circles. Google's internal process has also been criticized before by other former employees, such as the infamous color survey. Your eagerness to dismiss an account from someone on the inside is a little weird and doesn't refute the points he made.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#53We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+. On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as…
Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.
It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field.
You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends.
But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most.
Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#54Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this at many sites, including, most frustratingly of all, within Google's various help sites. I don't know enough Javascript to understand why that behavior is so often created. Is it so hard to respect the "classic" "canonical" middle click behavior?
It's a WebKit issue: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22382 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=255
Wow. Seems like such a simple and obvious problem and fix, it's educational to see how long it has taken to not get fixed.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#56We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+. On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as…
Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle. It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field. You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends…
Why sort everybody into just one circle? Most of my contacts are sorted into multiple circles so that I have more fine-grained sharing control. G+ also makes it fairly easy to create new circles on the fly for when I want to share a message with an even more specific group. I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#57[deleted]
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#58Interesting post, but it seems strange to me how he properly capitalises company names such as Microsoft and Google, but consistently doesn't capitalise "facebook". Is there some point to this, or is it just stylistic?
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#59This article should be titled:
Former Google Engineer Builds Uncrawlable Blog Website
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#60We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+. On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as…
FB for me (and it seems, for many) is an inherently private thing. I don't want groups outside of my real-life friends. That's the fundamental break here - I'm being followed (and following) much more widely, similar to Twitter. What Google has done is made Twitter for people who don't get why 140 characters is a feature.
So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones.
Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.