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Google+ gets a redesign

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Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#161

Post by zem »

RuggeroAltair wrote: post #112

Am I the only one who thinks that the new UI is not very pretty? It's all (un)balanced to the left (for big enough screens) and the gray frame feels like a cage. Maybe some things work better, but I didn't have a good gut reaction at all seeing the new thing. P.S. I didn't watch the explanatory video, they are good at those but I wanted to see what it was without guidance.

yeah, the whole unbalanced-to-the-left thing is really offputting, to the point that i'm avoiding reading my stream. i planning to play around with css userstyles and see if i can centre the stream properly.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#162

Post by eblume »

eblume wrote: post #78
SkyMarshal wrote: post #75

For me, the problem with G+ is that you can't fine-tune the signal:noise ratio enough. In a nutshell, Facebook is a network of people I know first IRL, so getting pictures of their dinner last night or latest cat's antics and other useless stuff I can sort of live with, it goes with the territory. But G+ is more like Twitter with longer posts - I follow a a lot of people I don't know IRL, but only because of a shared…

I agree, and a friend of mine actually had a working Chrome extension to support filtering by tags (implemented as hashtags, but transparently, so if you had the plugin it rendered the tags in a prettier way.) Unfortunately his only takeaway from the experience was that designing extensions for chrome was really hard , and stuff kept breaking. He eventually gave up, IIRC.

Whoops, I got something important wrong there and the edit deadline has long passed: his takeaway was that writing extensions for Google+ was hard, not for chrome.

His complaint was the lack of a G+-specific DOM API, and how (at the time at least) Google kept changing things that broke everything.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#163

Post by tomkarlo »

jamesbritt wrote: post #146
tomkarlo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What this really meant was that I could get an "All" view that excluded those circles holding people I'm only sporadically interested in, without having to play with the circle frequency slider thing." So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.

So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? No, I'm not. It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude. I have, say, a dozen circles. Can you tell me how I can quickly choose to view a stream that consists of all of the content from only a subset of those circles? Then quickly choose a different subset…

Sorry - thought you wanted to produce set subsets of your stream rather than an arbitrary selection at any time. I agree that would be better served by checkboxes, but I'd argue it's not a common case and probably got sacrificed in the name of simplicity. Most users probably use the "All Circles" stream all the time.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#164

Post by [deleted] »

jamesbritt wrote: post #146
tomkarlo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What this really meant was that I could get an "All" view that excluded those circles holding people I'm only sporadically interested in, without having to play with the circle frequency slider thing." So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.

So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? No, I'm not. It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude. I have, say, a dozen circles. Can you tell me how I can quickly choose to view a stream that consists of all of the content from only a subset of those circles? Then quickly choose a different subset…

[deleted]

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#165

Post by [deleted] »

jamesbritt wrote: post #146
tomkarlo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What this really meant was that I could get an "All" view that excluded those circles holding people I'm only sporadically interested in, without having to play with the circle frequency slider thing." So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.

So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? No, I'm not. It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude. I have, say, a dozen circles. Can you tell me how I can quickly choose to view a stream that consists of all of the content from only a subset of those circles? Then quickly choose a different subset…

[deleted]

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#166

Post by btilly »

kin wrote: post #144
vito wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the whole point of Circles that they don't have to clarify that? You're in complete control of who you send things to from the very beginning, and the only way you can add people is by putting them in the appropriate circle(s).

Yeah, people are sharing wrong. If one person posts Vacation photos, they should post it to their Friends circle, while their Tech posts can be public posts. But, to be honest it's one more thing for people to do and is the reason why there's no fine-tuning of noise.

No they are not sharing wrong, the system is broken.

Google+ offers many ways for me to target content to a group of people that I personally know, and only one, "Public", to distribute content to anyone who might be interested.

Unfortunately there are at least 3 common use cases that need to be considered:

1. I target a message to people I think are interested. (Google+ does this well.)

2. I broadcast a message to people who may be interested. (Google+ sucks at this.)

3. A group of people forms for some purpose (work, game, whatever), and needs to be able to communicate within that group. (Google+ has no support at all for this, and the result is that I was forced to go to Facebook to communicate with people I was playing a Google+ game with.)

There is a real need for all three modes, and I don't know of anyone who does all three well.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#167

Post by toyg »

btilly wrote: post #166
kin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people are sharing wrong. If one person posts Vacation photos, they should post it to their Friends circle, while their Tech posts can be public posts. But, to be honest it's one more thing for people to do and is the reason why there's no fine-tuning of noise.

No they are not sharing wrong, the system is broken. Google+ offers many ways for me to target content to a group of people that I personally know, and only one, "Public", to distribute content to anyone who might be interested. Unfortunately there are at least 3 common use cases that need to be considered: 1. I target a message to people I think are interested. (Google+ does this well.) 2. I broadcast a message to p…

I agree that point 3 is still a very big omission. They must be trying hard to merge this "Group" feature into their Circles metaphor, and failing for some reason or other. I personally can't see how hard it could be to add special Circles which are shared by multiple people but managed by only a specific few, but I don't know anyone at Google working on G+.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#168

Post by toyg »

ja2ke wrote: post #128
SkyMarshal wrote: post #75

For me, the problem with G+ is that you can't fine-tune the signal:noise ratio enough. In a nutshell, Facebook is a network of people I know first IRL, so getting pictures of their dinner last night or latest cat's antics and other useless stuff I can sort of live with, it goes with the territory. But G+ is more like Twitter with longer posts - I follow a a lot of people I don't know IRL, but only because of a shared…

If I could just set my "Friends" circle to be the default function of the Home button (something I've wanted dating back to my first 5 minutes using the service) I would probably actually use Google+. "Home" being "EVERYTHING" is just a disaster. I want to see what the people I actually personally care about are up to first and foremost, and then I want to browse around to what the rest of the Internet is doing. Inst…

Not just that, but customizing the filtering tabs -- I get very rare G+ posts from my family, but still that tab lingers there, useless, while I'm forced to constantly peruse the drop-down to the right because oh no you can't add more than one custom circle to your tabs. Seriously, wtf.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#169

Post by mokus »

kooshball wrote: post #118
ed209 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam. Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.…

> Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam. Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem…

As I understood it from the context, the point of the quoted comment was that, even for the _same person_, whether something is noise or not varies wildly depending on their state of mind but for spam that is much less true.

Different people might have different opinions about what is and is not spam, but one person will be fairly consistent about it. For example, it doesn't matter much what mood I'm in - I'll almost always classify the same things as spam. But the same cannot be said of classifying things as "interesting" or "not interesting".

Your idea about a preferential ranking system would probably be a good way to go. Definitely better than trying to train a strictly go/no-go filter to recognize "interesting". The way Google+ posts seem to jump around every time I open the page (with no obvious correlation with things like number of comments or +1's), I actually wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing something like that.

Re: Google+ gets a redesign

#170

Post by neilk »

mbrubeck wrote: post #106
haberman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you configure what gets delivered as a notification? If you're so popular that people are adding you to circles all the time, can't you just turn those notifications off?

As far as I can tell, you can customize email and phone notifications, but you can't customize the notifications that appear under the red alert number on Google web pages. (I might be missing something.)

I like to think of the red alert number as my "score". The higher it gets the more I know I'm ignoring useless distractions.
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