Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by Pyrodogg » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:13 PM UTC

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #116

saucetenuto wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got curious about this a while ago, so I polled my nontechnical friends (artists, lawyers, that kind of thing). Out of 18 respondents, 100% of them used gmail as their primary personal email client. The lawyers all used Outlook at work, of course; maybe that 5% figure is for corporate clients?

think this has gone way up in recent years with ppl with old hotmail whatever accts fed up of spam,more people on gServices etc....more exposure to gApps via android etc (not to mention being forced into using a gAccount/gMail for android things...)

Gmail integration with a number of universities is also a great way to get a new, large batch of young and fairly intellectual people familiar with Google products every single year.

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

#122

Post by sootzoo » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:24 PM UTC

omouse wrote: post #100

sootzoo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about don't +-mention them? Just use their name and then attach a link to their Google+ profile instead? That won't count as a mention.

How often does one refer to somebody by URL? You may have noticed (I have, anyway) that FB now "helpfully" defaults to an @-mention if you start typing a person's name, essentially offering it as an auto-complete option.

As long as G+ doesn't go down this path, I can live with it, but I don't like that a "mention" automatically implies "full access" to whatever has been said, especially given that the choice of whether or not to share a particular post with that person is presumed to be up to the author of the post, not anyone else who was also included.

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

#123

Post by acqq » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:42 PM UTC

megablast wrote: post #2

Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on why javascript is required to read a blog entry. No, it should not be.

And I didn't manage to read it with Javascript and IE8. It seems that it's all because he uses http://sitebricks.org/ for his site. It is also unreadable the same way.

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

#124

Post by gospelwut » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:44 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #114

gospelwut wrote: post #90

There really should be a feature (lab) to let circles inherit. Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw

Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw | People I don't like but are hot enough to screw if I got the chance

That might warrant an entirely new circle. I suppose it's up to your tastes though.

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

#125

Post by clobber » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:44 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #80

sunchild wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have an email list with 304,985 contacts:

34.5% yahoo.com

24.0% other

13.9% aol.com

9.9% gmail.com

2.6% comcast.net

2.2% msn.com

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

#126

Post by DannoHung » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:55 PM UTC

ramanujan wrote: post #53

mlinsey wrote: post #8

We'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…

There is no effort involved in putting people in multiple circles. You just drag them into whichever ones you want or click on multiple checkboxes from any of their profile chiclets.

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

#127

Post by toddysm » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 5:04 PM UTC

parfe wrote: post #87

Facebook 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…

I think the problem of Facebook is that people don't know about those features. I personally didn't know about lists until Google+ got released and all this feature comparison started. The problem of Google+ will be to achieve critical mass. I don't care if I am going to use Google+ or Facebook right now as long as my friends are using it. Also, I wish there was a good integration of Google+ with FB, Twitter and LinkedIn (hell, I don't want to publish my status/question/complain etc. on 4 different sites).

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

#128

Post by eco » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 5:05 PM UTC

icarus_drowning wrote: post #41

g123g wrote: post #25

Finally a well balanced article after a week of non stop hyping of Google+. Google+ is just trying to do what Facebook is already doing with a few new features added to make it distinctive. Nothing really innovative or ground breaking. It is just the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it. Regarding the circles concept, if I need to share something with a certain…

It is quite obvious that Google+ is far, far from perfect, and I don't think that it is going to make even the smallest dent in facebook's market-share. But that doesn't mean that many of the features that make it distinctive-- including Circles-- aren't a positive step forward. (If anything, if the "defining features" of + serve no other purpose than forcing facebook to integrate similar features, I'd call it a succ…

A friend of mine made a bookmarklet to sort by time which helps " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/uxp/gplus_sort>. It should still be something Google+ offers though.

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

#129

Post by joebadmo » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 5:09 PM UTC

mlinsey wrote: post #8

We'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…

I agree that the asymmetry of Circles is a cognitive issue. Facebook groups actually work more like "Places"[1], which I think is a lot more intuitive, but I don't think FB makes the metaphor clear enough to leverage that intuitiveness. I also don't think FB takes the issue seriously enough.

[1]: (I wrote more about this on my blog: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for...)

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

#130

Post by jdthomas » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 5:10 PM UTC

cbs wrote: post #89

kloncks wrote: post #9

I 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 mos…

Agreed. Unless I maximize my window, I found the article impossible to read (right side of text is clipped and no horizontal scroll provide -- chrome on linux). This isn't the first page I've found doing this recently; it seems to be a (very annoying) trend.