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Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus

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141–150 of 157 posts

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

#141

Didn't read the article, design was too distracting (mouse wheeling with the mouse over the left side does NOT scroll the page). But check out that scrollbar! ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 10px; } ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb { border-radius: 10px; background: #ddd; } Thought it must be JS but it's webkit stuff. Can't decide if silly or nice, but I think it's pretty nice.

Well I gave it a try. But I am missing something: ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 10px; } ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb { border-radius: 10px; background: #ddd; } hi

Try adding a background color to your ::-webkit-scrollbar

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

#142
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 think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents

Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading".

I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.

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

#143
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…

yep, i'd love to see google+ groups as a feature orthogonal to circles

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

#144

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…

Possible, but the last thing Google would want to do now would be to repeat Wave and Buzz and make it complicated and only enjoyable by sysadmins and bots. That would be definitely useful when Google Plus is available for Apps, though

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

#145

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…

Too complicated. Circles are damn simple, just tags with a visual wrapper. It's important that they are. I think a lot of people are over thinking what Circles are or should be. It's probably because they're so centric to the product. But that's where their power comes from. Great ease in organizing your contacts to match your real-life associations, and having that be a central part to everything you do on the site,…

Hey Alec,

Thanks for your thoughts - I see your point, though think the functionality could be made available without increasing complexity. Circles would work in exactly the same way as they do now; there would just be an extra button available to those who wanted to use it to bring up a security panel (similar to google docs sharing functionality). If the default for a circle is for it to be a private group (i.e. as it is now), users only need to ignore the "share this group button" to avoid any complexity.

It looks like a few other people are having similar thoughts, so opinion on this area's certainly split: http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-l...

Thanks again,

JB

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

#146

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…

I see the thinking behind it, but it seems like it would be a mistake to make Circles any more conceptually complex than they are now. People are already making a decision about what circles to put things in, and what circles to share things with. I'd rather see a distinct "group" or "topic" feature.

Good point, perhaps the naming of this functionality would need to be changed to avoid confusing users. . . Personally I'd prefer it all to be under circles, since to me it's all a way of organising collections of contacts, but I admit I think about these things differently to a user, and I'd still be happy if the terminology were different so long as the functionality was there.

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

#147
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks esrauch - agreed, they're just there for security at present, but have a lot of potential to be a lot more with just a few tweaks to existing functionality. One of the big differences of having circles which could be used as tags is these posts could also be shown to public and not to those in your circles other than those who've subscribed to the tag. I believe one reason Twitter's so popular is it allows you to post whatever you like and people choose to be interested - if someone tried to make the facebook status public and put the same stuff in there that they put on twitter lots of their friends would end up blocking them.

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

#148
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps Google Venn's required?
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