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Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

thesash.me

111–119 of 119 posts

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

#111

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And this is a step to correct that. Search is hard, and its getting harder. SEO is ruining search, real human crowdsourced referrals offload the parts where algorithms cannot perform.

Algorithms are also written by real humans.

And are designed to make judgements in the absence of humans. No one can prepare a computer for every use-case mankind can possibly think of. We're orders of magnitude more clever than a computer can deal with.

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

#112

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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…

>DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN! From my experience, you can do this even after you join.

I connect to gchat using a third party program, and my contact list in this program is still full of unwanted contacts that I have to manually delete.

I said do it before you join to save people in a similar situation.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed, what should be a simple thing has turned into a usability nightmare. Why is Google limited the number of people I can add? Why is there a hard cap of 5000 profiles that I can add total?

If this is supposed to be a social network, why are these limitations in place?

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

#114
The barrier to entry to get oneself added to this list doesn't seem to be much. I added part 1 of 2 of the circle and already my stream is being flooded with stuff like this -> http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/442/gplushn.png/

Information overload in a language I don't even understand!

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

#116
Looking at the linked Hacker News Circle on Google+, the first person listed in the circle is "Paul Graham", who's pretty clearly not pg. The linked Paul Graham says "wow. so many people have me in their circles", and another user suggests it's because of pg [0]. I'm curious what percentage of the people are linked to the right profile.

[0] https://plus.google.com/114939270563299965266/posts/7UHfjBcD...

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

#117

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…

I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company that hires engineers). I don't think that they took design seriously at all until more recently and there hasn't been any lack of posts on HN or elsewhere talking about the growth of good web design. In short, their design has improved from 2010 and beyond due to a large push by management for updated and unified design across products, and I'd argue Matias Duarte's position on the Android team.

As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail.

That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc.

I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.

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

#118
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The setting is unfortunately hidden. You need to click on the little arrow that's next to the chat login next to stream to find it. If you're not signed into chat first do so then click the little arrow again. From there you can add and remove circles from your chat.

Thank you for finding that! If you go to the chat settings on the Gmail page (where I usually use chat), this option doesn't exist.

Thank you!! I've been searching for this inside Gmail and was very confused. I never thought of looking for it inside Plus

Edit: I spoke to soon. This controls who appears in the Chat inside Plus, but the chat inside GMail still shows everybody!

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doh. And now I have a whole bunch of people showing up in my chat client. Is there a way to disable that? I see the options for 'Who can start a Messenger conversation with you?' but they are somewhat limited and that's not the option I'm quite looking for.

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…

This is kind of a dealbreaker here. Especially since the chat in Google+ is indeed set to not show the Hacker News circle, but my chat in gmail is still showing everybody! And there's no visible setting to change that outside of Google+
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