31–40 of 129 posts
1- http://www.pcworld.com/article/9704/join_hands_in_ecircles.h...
2- http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-55246946.html
3- http://books.google.com/books?id=OCRdSXSKZ-AC&pg=PA131&#...
Surely 'major' is premature? Downvotes.. interesting. What I mean is that I'm not sure what is going to make it 'major' within the near future. They tried converting the Gmail userbase once before.
FWIW, word on the ground says that Brin is personally involved with Google's new Social efforts. So 'major' is right - at least internally, Google's throwing the big guns at this one.
I like the name, and the concept 'hook'. Here is to hoping that Google nails the UX and if its really really good. utilize google.com / gmail / android tastefully to get to critical mass. I am not sure if i want Google to be successful in social though, too much power in a single company...
If you had to pick a single company to succeed in social, would you not pick Google?
Google has had a company wide task force of engineers since 2007 called the 'data liberation front.'
http://www.dataliberation.org/
I think they have the muscle to take facebook's crown when it comes to the more personal, friends and family side of social networking. I also trust them to take my rights and my privacy seriously. A lot more seriously than facebook does at any rate.
Best case scenario: they nail the UX, and bring in a little of the awesomeness of wave while they're at it.
Good luck to them.
I like the name, and the concept 'hook'. Here is to hoping that Google nails the UX and if its really really good. utilize google.com / gmail / android tastefully to get to critical mass. I am not sure if i want Google to be successful in social though, too much power in a single company...
If you had to pick a single company to succeed in social, would you not pick Google?
Surely 'major' is premature? Downvotes.. interesting. What I mean is that I'm not sure what is going to make it 'major' within the near future. They tried converting the Gmail userbase once before.
Your comments need to add value, noibl. The clarification helps. FWIW, word on the ground says that Brin is personally involved with Google's new Social efforts. So 'major' is right - at least internally, Google's throwing the big guns at this one.
Didn't Eric Schmidt say something like you should not be doing things you want to hide? To follow that thought, what is wrong with Facebook's idea of everybody is a friend and my life is an open book?
I've been waiting to see what a behemoth like Google comes up with when they've put a lot of muscle to a product they've never before approached.
Looking at the presentation by Paul Adams (The Real Life Social Network) I can only hope it's just as exciting!
I think a social network that has the ability for friend groups / circles is way over due. Will be interested to see this!
Pretty critical thing here is to make maintaining those separate circles trouble-free. Google might have the necessary machine-learning capability to automatically put people into the right circles. If you have to start from scratch and do it all manually this won't work
Similar to when you first enable Priority Inbox. It asks you to mark a dozen or so of your emails as important or not important, then it guesses the rest of them based on that initial input. Then, if you don't agree, you can make some more corrections, and iterate until everything's generally satisfactory.
Obviously false positives and negatives have far greater potential consequences here than with priority inbox, but the same general ideas can be applied. Also the social graphs of the the people on your friends list is a very rich source of data for the learning algorithms. Once you've placed two or three people from work into the 'collegues' circle the connections between those two or three examples and the other people you know from work will make it pretty simple to guess the rest of the work circle.
EDIT: and assuming that circle will start off by importing your google mail contacts, it already has a fair amount of implicit data about your social graph when it comes to those people due to your email activity with them, and their email activity between each other.
Thinking about it, the priority inbox stuff could well prove to be a very rich soruce of data for them generally in this circle endeavour.