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Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

zachholman.com

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Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#11

Post by mrclark411 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #6

Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every time I publish to a specific list. I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

I would agree - none of the companies in question forces a user to do this type of work. Only enhances the product if that's how you want to use it.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#12

Post by dos1 »

For one, I don't really feel like the expletive in the title helped his cause at all. A better title would have been "Facebook suggests groupings of your friends for you!"

I also thought his example was contrived. I mean, is there anyone who's so worried about their social networks that they will hem and haw over whether someone is a coworker or drinking buddy or whatever? And if there is someone like that, well thank goodness Google+ supports their neuroses!

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#13

Post by mrclark411 »

nchuhoai wrote: post #8
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #6

Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every time I publish to a specific list. I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

the point he is making is that users shouldnt have to do this work. The circle feature implies that they will automatically will take care of it when in fact it doesnt. It's a lot of manual labor as he elaborates.

Why didn't Google+ import from Google Contacts? I have done a fair bit of organizing there. I would communicate similarly on Google+ as I do by email.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#14

Post by drivebyacct2 »

nchuhoai wrote: post #8
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #6

Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every time I publish to a specific list. I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

the point he is making is that users shouldnt have to do this work. The circle feature implies that they will automatically will take care of it when in fact it doesnt. It's a lot of manual labor as he elaborates.

So, it's not magic because it can't read my mind, thus it's a bad feature because it takes work to fully, fully utilize? I guess I'm still missing the point. It'd be nice if Google knew my relationship with these people or somehow knew my best friends from my colleagues or tech interests, but that's asking a bit much.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#15

Post by drivebyacct2 »

dos1 wrote: post #12

For one, I don't really feel like the expletive in the title helped his cause at all. A better title would have been "Facebook suggests groupings of your friends for you!" I also thought his example was contrived. I mean, is there anyone who's so worried about their social networks that they will hem and haw over whether someone is a coworker or drinking buddy or whatever? And if there is someone like that, well than…

Facebook also supports my "neuroses" [sic] too. And thankfully. I have tech friends, family, and high school friends that don't know what "linux" is. I like to share articles, a lot, for discussion. I'm "neurotic" because I like to target who I share that stuff with?

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#16

Post by Pewpewarrows »

sudonim wrote: post #9
alpb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good answer to Zach. I'm having problem of too much noise when I follow a lot of projects and people on GitHub.

What are you trying to accomplish by following projects on github? Maybe they can make activity on projects more meaningful, like show you more activity if you're a committer or only big commits if the project is very active but you don't often click on activity items.

That's the point: it's very difficult to automatically determine what someone wants when they follow a project. Sometimes I only want to bookmark it because I know I'll find it useful in the future. Other times, I only care when a new stable version of it is released, with a changelog. When I'm a participant I want to see more details, like new issues or commits.

Instead, because of the lack of options, we're left with an unusable wall of notifications. Smaller projects get drowned out by larger ones, and it tells me every little detail of what is going on with every single project. I'm pretty sure I've never clicked on a single link from it in the past few years of using GitHub.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#17

Post by danso »

The author seems to be missing a gigantic point of order here. The reason why Facebook is algorithmically able to determine groups for you is because you, the user, have already entered in fields for Work, School, Location, etc. So the user has had to do a small amount of shit work for Facebook to do its magic.

Of course, that's a very small amount of work relative to manually placing friends into circles. But G+ does not (yet) have the same kind of parsed personal/profile information, which would require the same mechanism that FB has (deciding who to reveal what parts of your profile to)...and which, as far as I can tell, is not trivial to implement, or to graft on to the existing Google Account structure.

Of course, Google can ALREADY do this for you. No doubt they have mined enough information about each user, including locations of IP addresses, to fill out most of your boilerplate profile info. It doesn't take the EFF to realize the privacy implications of auto-filling your circles with people who don't realize that Google's algorithm has correctly guessed their location, age, school and workplace and is now implicitly exposing such information.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#18

Post by jsavimbi »

The main reason that drove me to delete my G+ account was the way circles were managed. I had done pretty well so far with 300+ people in my circles but then made the mistake of importing some shared lists into pre-configured lists and ended up with a bunch of grannies posting in my Node.js circle. To comb through, curate and modify a 600+ user circle proved to be way too much shit work than I was willing to do, so I just went ahead and deleted the account.

And I didn't even begin to address the amount of shit content replicated across all of my social media accounts by the same people.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#19

Post by petercooper »

Agreed. This is the primary reason I don't use Google+. I haven't got the time or inclination to split people into groups or even figure out what those groups might be. I did try but found it a taxing process.

Automatically coming up with criteria to filter by is a great solution. I'd love if I could send a tweet just to my UK followers or to those who tweet about "Ruby" a lot. This is all easily solved by machines and doesn't require me to do anything by hand.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#20

Post by Permit »

When Google+ released, I remember being somewhat confused that they opted for user defined Circles rather than using user relations as a gauge for friend "closeness". As the author of this blog post points out, users almost never want to get stuck placing hundreds of people in groups that could change at any time.

In fact, one Google Research paper[1] opens with the line: "Although users of online communication tools rarely categorize their contacts into groups such as "family", coworkers", or "jogging buddies", they nonetheless implicitly cluster contacts, by virtue of their interactions with them, forming implicit groups."

I'm curious what the eleven authors of this paper thought as they saw their Google co-workers developing a system they knew couldn't work.

[1]Suggesting (More) Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...)

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