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Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

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Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#71

Post by code_duck »

crazy2k wrote: post #70
nl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what he was saying. His point was that he was waiting for Facebook to make their pre-emptive response to Circles, and then FB released Groups. He knows full well is solves a different problem - that was the point of what he was saying. Not only does Groups not really do the same things as Circles/Lists at all, but Facebook appears to think that Lists don't work. Zuckerberg: Just take friends on a site, and…

So, once Google+ gains popularity, guys at Facebook will realize Friends List is a cool feature, will make it more visible and then kill Google+?

Perhaps some of those things might happen, but not necessarily all of them follow from the first.

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#72

Post by mcfunley »

I am a little puzzled at the importance ascribed here to the core idea of G+ Circles, as laid out in the slide deck. Mostly because we designed an identical sharing model and even gave it the same name at Etsy, without having read the deck. (Then we decided that was way too complicated and implemented something significantly simpler, but kept the name.)

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#73

Post by code_duck »

foxylad wrote: post #39

So 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…

I have to agree, I don't find the analysis or the train of thought particularly insightful. It seemed apparent to me that facebook being 'unable to change their core product' meant exactly what he figured out it meant 6 paragraphs later... not that they couldn't do it, technically.

Also, does he understand the extent to which Facebook actually uses PHP? "quick, adaptable tools like PHP" ... um... seriously?

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#74

Post by w1ntermute »

josegonzalez wrote: post #54
w1ntermute wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser/OS are you using? It looks fine for me (Win 7 + Firefox): http://i.imgur.com/BNjXj.png

Chrome on OS X.

Hmm, I don't have an OS X machine to test it on. Chromium on Linux looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/kEiQ2.png

I think it's an issue with the font renderer or font specific to your browser/OS combination.

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#75

Post by BANANARCHY »

wccrawford wrote: post #68

I think it's cute that he thought Facebook would suddenly start thinking about people's privacy and that their new big product would address that issue. They've been very clear that they think giving people their privacy by default would kill them. I wish I had the MZ quote on hand that proved that.

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#76

Post by JohnLBevan »

A suggested improvement to circles. . . Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property.

* Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members).

* Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin.

* Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved.

What do you guys think?

JB

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#77

Post by mattdeboard »

discodave wrote: post #65
richardw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In response to making our profiles public or not... I think a killer move from facebook would be a 'SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS' button for each post. It would be effectively like tweeting (individual posts) and would have critical mass pretty quickly due to fb's scale. Maybe it would be a nightmare building another twitter overnight or they would be pilloried for copying so blatantly. Additionally, it's occuring to m…

Every post on FB is a "shout it from the rooftops" post, that's the whole point of Google+.

Unless you meant 100% publicly available posts? That's the opposite of something Facebook ever would (or should) do. FB is a walled garden.

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#78

Post by JohnLBevan »

JohnLBevan wrote: post #76

A suggested improvement to circles. . . Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property. * Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members). * Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintai…

One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so I have two options: 1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my other friends 2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see (including people who follow me but whom I haven't circled as I don't know them). The first option excludes my followers, the second spams my friends. I could create another circle of followers and message them and the techies, but that doesn't sit comfortably, especially as I don't know which of my posts caused those people to follow me (perhaps a music video I favourites on youtube caught their eye and now they're getting spammed with HN links). Having some way where I could create circles to publish stories to, but have others subscribe to those would be handy - I then publish to my "tech stuff" circle, and anyone who cares to subscribe to "JohnLBevan.TechStuff" sees it, whilst it's hidden from others (to prevent annoying them - not for security). Again, I'd welcome your thoughts. Cheers, JB

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#79

Post by esrauch »

JohnLBevan wrote: post #78
JohnLBevan wrote: post #76

A suggested improvement to circles. . . Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property. * Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members). * Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintai…

One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so I have two options: 1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my other friends 2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see (including people who follow me but wh…

That's interesting; it seems to me that if circles aren't actually intended to be used from a content driven perspective (eg person X is an amateur photographer and also posts about geocaching; they don't care who reads either but they don't want to spam people that are interested in only one or the other) then that is how circles would be (you 'tag' your own posts and people who follow you subscribe to just some of your tags).

I actually think that definitively shows that the intent of circles is just security (person X doesn't want his mom seeing his drinking photos) and that the possibility of sharing content based on what the reader is interested in really just comes for free with that (though in a roundabout and inconvenient way; the provider has to determine what content the reader is interested in).

Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

#80

Post by edanm »

sunchild wrote: post #62
ramanujan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google has always favored many-to-many "tags" over one-to-many "folders". Gmail brought that distinction to the mainstream. Circles are really just tags on the user object, in the end.

I'm not sure just how "mainstream" Gmail is.

I've always heard that only 5% of email users use Gmail, but I don't actually have a source. Does seem to be accurate based on my (non-techie) friends.

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