What did Google+ get right?

Post by naravara » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

CodeCube wrote: post #108

naravara wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The formality around making a discrete group of "Circles" was the problem. If they just let you have multiple feeds and you can add and remove people from those feeds it would have been fine. In those circumstances, the issue isn't you sitting there categorizing how close you are with each of your friends. You're just deciding who you want to share things with, it's not unlike a group chat you might have with a bunch…

This is a fantastic point! Over time, the number of group chats in FB Messenger has grown, and it totally meets this usage.

I also remember reading about this thing the "kids" are doing these days where they just spin up a dummy private instagram account and give a bunch of friends the password. The instagram account winds up becoming a sort of ersatz web forum that they use to plan social outings and share pictures. Inviting new people is as easy as giving them an invite to follow. Granting write/mod access is as easy as giving them account username/pass. It's a pretty clever hack to turn Instagram into a micro-forum.

And it winds up being a better implementation of circles. The "circle" is object of interest. It's not a categorization that you put people in, it's an entity in its own right.

Post by Terr_ » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

robotbikes wrote: post #100

Terr_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good: Circles as a way to separate social groups Bad: Forced to share a single "publicly linked identity" across all those groups. John Doe Public Accountant might not want people to know they also exist as John Doe Death Rocker, and vice-versa.

Yeah I think Google really screwed up when they forced YouTube into the G+ framework and started enforcing a sort of real ID with small exceptions (allowing single letter initials). I think the exceptions can after an uproar. The biggest challenge was people didn't see a reason to use it since the market was already saturated. Also they didn't provide any good tools for automating content creation which helped them a…

To be fair, even if they had the system I wanted -- one where I can have different identities in different circles -- I would still worry about Google somehow "leaking" data accidentally or for advertising profit.

Re: What did Google+ get right?

Re: What did Google+ get right?