Best part of the article: Game of Thrones reference. Or maybe I'm just excited for tomorrow..
Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
81–90 of 157 posts
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#82We'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…
It should be possible to extract circles from one's email and messaging behavior, to find friends and cliques. It should be automated as best as possible.
Even simply the most contacted people in the last week - and sharing to those people the most, even though you might have a friend you haven't seen for a long time, and they might be a great friend, that doesn't automatically mean you want to share with them. To assume that people want to share more with better and older friends and less with newer friends is wrong.
Users should get a menu of content automatically provided based on prior contact and clique analysis, and pick the items and people they find interesting to ensure more permanent viewing, which in time can fade over time if that content isn't liked. Even tracking what is clicked can automate this without having to manually like or +1 something - it's like listening to a person speak.
The last thing I want to do is setup a G+ account and start customizing friends lists, circles, clicking like and dislike buttons - it should be automated, and Google should delve into my GTalk and Email to see people I've been in contact. Whose emails am I replying? What people am I having conversations? I don't quite know who all my online friends are - G+ should work that out for me and cement those relationships without my input. Online friend dynamics are too liquid to be manual.
The problem isn't circles, it's the way they are created, edited and devised.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#83Earlier 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…
It should be possible to extract circles from one's email and messaging behavior, to find friends and cliques. It should be automated as best as possible. Even simply the most contacted people in the last week - and sharing to those people the most, even though you might have a friend you haven't seen for a long time, and they might be a great friend, that doesn't automatically mean you want to share with them. To as…
Google has already started down this path in Gmail -- when replying to a message, it suggests that I consider including one of my other contacts, and selects the suggestion fairly accurately.
I'd imagine this will be expanded and soon find its way into Google+.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#84It amazes me that this engineer appears to not know that Google+ Circles are already implemented in the core of Facebook as Friend Lists (though without a nice UI and pushed aside over time) and that Facebook Groups solve a completely different, unrelated problem.
Do you know anyone who knows how to use Friends lists?
Yes, I do and I teach all my friends.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a number of areas in G+ that seem like they're going to lead to highly-publicized mistakes, and the asymmetry of circles is certainly one of them. You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post). I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to…
But you can do the same mistake on Facebook, if I post a story to my wall and you comment on it, then you don't really know who gets to see it. The default sharing mode is "Friends of friends" if I remember it right, and that means my friends of friends can read your comment, and you can only see who my friends are, but not who my friends of friends are. On the other hand, I think most people are used to the fact tha…
Adding to this, if I comment on FB about any other member and use the @-mention feature, but they're not authorized to see the original post, they won't be able to read what I wrote or what anybody else did either. Compare that to G+, where a +-mention actually grants access for the post to the mentioned user whether they originally had it or not.
Imagine planning a surprise birthday party, where someone +-mentions them, even by mistake. So much for surprises!
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#86Would it help to have a visual repesentation of how each circle on google plus interactes with the others? A sort of Venn diagram attached to each post, so you could just drag the circles around to set who sees a certain post or reply. Seems some of the confusion on plus is do to the menus used to set which circle you are posting to. I know the first time I used it I didn't get it right away. Seems a visual repesentation of those relationships would clear things up.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#87Facebook already has circles!
Facebook groups is a distinct feature from facebook lists.
Facebook lists are the same feature as Google circles. And the only reason you didn't know this already is that you did not care enough to look, so circles cannot be all that much of a killer feature.
To utilize "Facebook Circles" first you must put categorize some friends into a list.
https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/
Click "Create a List" and drop some friends in. I have restricted permissions for anyone not in a list. A "Good People" list for those that I'll share anything with, and a few others.
Now to utilize sharing type some stuff into your status box. Anything, but lets go with "I can have circles too."
Now click the lock icon to the bottom right of the status entry widget. It will say "Make this Visible To:" And you see have a text box you can now type your list name into. I type "Goo" and it auto completes "Good People"
You can even exclude lists! So you can have a "Friends" list and a "Coworkers" list with people who overlap, but then post status that only go to your "Friends who are not coworkers."
The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#88So 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…
The way I read it, the author was explaining his expectation that Facebook would beat Google to implementing that model. This then emphasizes his misunderstanding of the point of that quote about building it before others. Even when agile about specific features, the inertia of Facebook's existing core product can be hard to overcome; entirely unsurprising given their huge userbase. Google was effectively starting from scratch.
Google has a lot of work to do, but with a mostly blank slate and less inertia to overcome. It's also remarkable how they have used this as an opportunity for improvements across the board, a the very least visually.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#89I don't mean to distract, but wow. What a gorgeously designed clean website. I meant to read the article - and I did after a while - but the first thing I did was CTRL + U to check out the source code.
I don't know, this website was so bad I didn't even bother reading the article. The needless choice to shoot in the actual post via javascript bothered me and the javascript based content loading took forever just to load some static text, the loading of the html document itself was quite snappy.
I hardly call dedicating the entire page's leftmost 400px of horizontal space to 4 links "gorgeous" use of some of the most valuable screen real estate. It was impossible to read on my portrait monitor. Even on my landscape monitor this website seems to be designed with the assumption I keep my browser maximized. I know my viewport is smaller than most people would like to design for so I let things slide if there is a lot going on the webpage, but this was entirely text, there is no excuse if the style can't adapt. Not only did it not adapt to my browser size there was no horizontal scrollbar to bring me to the text that went off of the right hand side.
Re: Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
#90There really should be a feature (lab) to let circles inherit.
Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw