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Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

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Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#101

Post by mladenkovacevic »

antimatter15 wrote: post #48

I'm the maintainer of the Google+ Hacker News Circle (Well, the script/cron job that makes a circle from hngp.axxim.net). I increased the frequency to every five minutes to keep up with the new growth. It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to upda…

Just wanted to say great job. Browsed through your github. It's hard to believe you're only 16. Keep up the good work.

Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#103

Post by jrockway »

mkl wrote: post #95
jrockway wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult. Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate…

Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX. They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles t…

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to.

Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.)

(Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)

Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#104

Post by pacomerh »

richbradshaw wrote: post #38

I added myself to this circle when it was first announced. Today I've gained over 1000 followers! Wondered why and found this post. Interesting to see that 89 votes and 34 comments leads to around 1000 people taking action. Makes you realise how big this community is!

Yeah, same here, I'm not sure if putting a circle public like that is the best choice, it'd be nice to be able to have access using your HN account somehow. We'll see how it goes. I wonder if others will start adopting this 'sharing a circle' method to promote their stuff.

Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#105

Post by johngunderman »

jrockway wrote: post #103
mkl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX. They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles t…

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for. I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to. Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expect…

> I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns.

EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being:

People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.

Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#107

Post by hessenwolf »

jrockway wrote: post #84
betterth wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Leave it to Google to screw up privacy, I don't use G+ much but this right here has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would say it's intentionally convoluted to get people to have poorly set settings (more "sharing"), but let's face it, Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design (they're engineers!). Anyway, I spent 20 minutes frantically trying to figure out how to handle gChat privacy settings…

Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult. Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate…

Then, please explain, why is it so bad? What is the weak link in the chain? I just decided against joining the HN circle because the list of instructions to do it was too much like the instructions for editing linux config files, which I only follow out of necessity.

Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#108

Post by Kesty »

lhnz wrote: post #19

This is a smart move. There are many interesting directions and questions. (1) Can we choose to give a particular search weight to different Google+ groups that are against our profile? I'd like to see what Hacker News thinks the search results should be and I'd like to see what my friends think the search results should be. (2) Following from the previous point, I believe Google could effectively turn this into a so…

I think the idea is great, but I'm not sure Google has fully figured out what to do with it's social search.

I may like to know in search what all the Hacker News users like and dislike, but I'm not sure I'm really intereseted in everything they write on their google wall (even if mostly are probably great posts :) ).

Re: Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

#110

Post by AbyCodes »

jrockway wrote: post #103
mkl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX. They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles t…

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for. I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to. Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expect…

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

Um... Isn't that the reason "circles" in Google+ exist? To draw lines?

It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.

I don't think anyone only "reads" one community. According to interest, one participates in many?

Personally, I found all this quite confusing (and just when I figured how to "circle"; doh, limit has been reached for adding people. But, you can start adding tomorrow!)... and following the advice of sp332 and betterth, I avoided falling into blunders like Google adding all 1000+ contacts to my Gtalk or notifying each and everything that ever happens in G+ universe.

Moreover, since now people are split inside circles, am I supposed to update the circle manually everyday?

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