If it's any consolation, it doesn't work with javascript either. I middle-clicked the "previously described" link and it took away the blog entry that I was in the middle of reading.
I see this at many sites, including, most frustratingly of all, within Google's various help sites.
I don't know enough Javascript to understand why that behavior is so often created. Is it so hard to respect the "classic" "canonical" middle click behavior?
And I didn't manage to read it with Javascript and IE8. It seems that it's all because he uses http://sitebricks.org/ for his site. It is also unreadable the same way.
It amazes me that this engineer appears to not know that Google+ Circles are already implemented in the core of Facebook as Friend Lists (though without a nice UI and pushed aside over time) and that Facebook Groups solve a completely different, unrelated problem.
His point was that he was waiting for Facebook to make their pre-emptive response to Circles, and then FB released Groups. He knows full well is solves a different problem - that was the point of what he was saying.
Not only does Groups not really do the same things as Circles/Lists at all, but Facebook appears to think that Lists don't work. Zuckerberg:
Just take friends on a site, and cut them into subgroups. Sounds good in theory. But almost no one wants to make lists. We’ve been at this for a few years, and promoted heavily. Most we’ve gotten is 5% to make lists, and most don’t make more than one.
Lists (in Facebook) suck - they UI is hidden and terrible.
Facebook Groups came out when the author expected Facebook to respond to the concepts behind Google+ Circles. It turned out that it wasn't a response to those concepts at all, and was something unrelated.
Since the author doesn't mention Facebook Friend Lists, I can only presume that he doesn't know about them otherwise they should be top of mind when looking at Google+ Circles. He even talks about "copying circles" even though they are already in the product. I'm not sure why you think he knows anything about them? Did I miss something in his article?
Yes! I use facebook much more than I otherwise would because of the Friend Lists feature. I assure you that the users to whom this feature is important have found it. I presume that Google somehow believes that the rest of you will suddenly be super impressed with this feature now it is brought to your attention.
Facebook lists provide (barely) adequate functionality for users with large and/or complex social networks to constrain sharing but, like Circles, they're a PITA to set up. Fiven most people don't need them it's no surprise they're buried in the UI, particularly given they constrain rather than encourage sharing.
To 'constrain sharing' is exactly the point. Maybe you don't want your co-workers, in-laws or not so close friends to see personal photos or posts? Myself, I participate in more than one professional and social group of people. Things I share or say to one group are irrelevant, confusing or just noise to people in the other group and vice versa. So, constraining sharing sounds fine.
I don't have a Google+ account, and don't know if it solves this, but one of the failings of FB lists is that they only control what you share, not what others share about you--there's no way to set things up so that you can have your work friends, your school friends, and your close friends all tag photos of you, but only have those tags be visible by default to other people within the same circle.
We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+.
On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as many non-techie non-early-adopters as possible about Circles, and many get it and love it, but several don't really understand it.
In particular, the asymmetry of circles is overlooked by a lot of people, even by some casual users who think they understand how Circles works. On Facebook, there is one authoritative list of who is in the group, and posts to the group stay in that group. On Google+, your circles are not my circles. I may have you in a "close friends" circle, you may have me in a big "co-workers" circle, or you might have all your friends in one circle. When I am browsing my "close friends" feed and see a post by you, I may guess wrong about the social context that you are sharing that message in, and make an inappropriate comment, not realizing who else received the message. (The way to determine on G+ who received a post is by noting and clicking on the gray "Public" or "Limited" in the upper right of the post) Maybe I am underestimating people, or maybe comments are just much less big a deal than posts, but I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents.
If I had to make a prediction, I'd think that the ease-of-use and clarity of FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles. I could be wrong, so it'll be interesting to see what ordinary users prefer.
There are a number of areas in G+ that seem like they're going to lead to highly-publicized mistakes, and the asymmetry of circles is certainly one of them. You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post).
I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to be fair, nothing is as easy to misdirect as a twitter DM.
You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post).
On private posts, the word "Limited" appears next to the post, on which you can click to see who it's visible to. It's not as obvious as it could be, but it's there.
If I am at a cocktail party, and something is said among a group of friends, I know I won't "out" anything if I only discuss it later with those who were originally within earshot.
I appreciate how Google has brought this into the electronic realm. I do wish there was not a 21 person limit because I already see people sharing with much larger pools and you don't know who persons 22...n are who can also see the discussion.
But you can do the same mistake on Facebook, if I post a story to my wall and you comment on it, then you don't really know who gets to see it. The default sharing mode is "Friends of friends" if I remember it right, and that means my friends of friends can read your comment, and you can only see who my friends are, but not who my friends of friends are.
On the other hand, I think most people are used to the fact that posting on Facebook is pretty public, and that the Circles feature might give people a false sense of privacy so they are more likely to make that mistake.
Adding to this, if I comment on FB about any other member and use the @-mention feature, but they're not authorized to see the original post, they won't be able to read what I wrote or what anybody else did either. Compare that to G+, where a +-mention actually grants access for the post to the mentioned user whether they originally had it or not.
Imagine planning a surprise birthday party, where someone +-mentions them, even by mistake. So much for surprises!
Agreed, The surprise birthday party is one exact case where this would be annoying, in almost every other situation most users would prefer the current behavior (In my experience anyways)
How often does one refer to somebody by URL? You may have noticed (I have, anyway) that FB now "helpfully" defaults to an @-mention if you start typing a person's name, essentially offering it as an auto-complete option.
As long as G+ doesn't go down this path, I can live with it, but I don't like that a "mention" automatically implies "full access" to whatever has been said, especially given that the choice of whether or not to share a particular post with that person is presumed to be up to the author of the post, not anyone else who was also included.
FB Groups will trump the power and
flexibility of Circles
FB Groups are more like mailing-lists. Useful of course, but I'm subscribed to 4 groups already, neither subscription being my choice, and I find the feature itself useless for Facebook.
when I first used Circles the first feature that came to my mind was the ability to make a circle public and to add other administrators to it and allow other people to 'follow' it, or add it to another circle
I think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy
Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.
It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field.
You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends.
But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most.
Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.
Why sort everybody into just one circle? Most of my contacts are sorted into multiple circles so that I have more fine-grained sharing control. G+ also makes it fairly easy to create new circles on the fly for when I want to share a message with an even more specific group. I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts.
Google has always favored many-to-many "tags" over one-to-many "folders". Gmail brought that distinction to the mainstream. Circles are really just tags on the user object, in the end.
I've always heard that only 5% of email users use Gmail, but I don't actually have a source. Does seem to be accurate based on my (non-techie) friends.
I got curious about this a while ago, so I polled my nontechnical friends (artists, lawyers, that kind of thing). Out of 18 respondents, 100% of them used gmail as their primary personal email client. The lawyers all used Outlook at work, of course; maybe that 5% figure is for corporate clients?
think this has gone way up in recent years with ppl with old hotmail whatever accts fed up of spam,more people on gServices etc....more exposure to gApps via android etc (not to mention being forced into using a gAccount/gMail for android things...)
Gmail integration with a number of universities is also a great way to get a new, large batch of young and fairly intellectual people familiar with Google products every single year.
It should be possible to extract circles from one's email and messaging behavior, to find friends and cliques. It should be automated as best as possible.
Even simply the most contacted people in the last week - and sharing to those people the most, even though you might have a friend you haven't seen for a long time, and they might be a great friend, that doesn't automatically mean you want to share with them. To assume that people want to share more with better and older friends and less with newer friends is wrong.
Users should get a menu of content automatically provided based on prior contact and clique analysis, and pick the items and people they find interesting to ensure more permanent viewing, which in time can fade over time if that content isn't liked. Even tracking what is clicked can automate this without having to manually like or +1 something - it's like listening to a person speak.
The last thing I want to do is setup a G+ account and start customizing friends lists, circles, clicking like and dislike buttons - it should be automated, and Google should delve into my GTalk and Email to see people I've been in contact. Whose emails am I replying? What people am I having conversations? I don't quite know who all my online friends are - G+ should work that out for me and cement those relationships without my input. Online friend dynamics are too liquid to be manual.
The problem isn't circles, it's the way they are created, edited and devised.
Google has already started down this path in Gmail -- when replying to a message, it suggests that I consider including one of my other contacts, and selects the suggestion fairly accurately.
I'd imagine this will be expanded and soon find its way into Google+.
There is no effort involved in putting people in multiple circles. You just drag them into whichever ones you want or click on multiple checkboxes from any of their profile chiclets.
> Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.
A person can belong to more than one circle (that's why you have a list of checkboxes, one per circle).
FB for me (and it seems, for many) is an inherently private thing. I don't want groups outside of my real-life friends. That's the fundamental break here - I'm being followed (and following) much more widely, similar to Twitter. What Google has done is made Twitter for people who don't get why 140 characters is a feature.
So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones.
Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.
In response to making our profiles public or not...
I think a killer move from facebook would be a 'SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS' button for each post. It would be effectively like tweeting (individual posts) and would have critical mass pretty quickly due to fb's scale.
Maybe it would be a nightmare building another twitter overnight or they would be pilloried for copying so blatantly. Additionally, it's occuring to me right now that a big issue would be deciding how to integrate those shouts into the newsfeed... oh wait by following people.
That problem is related to the fact that Circles can be both used as (1)a privacy group of people to which you push stuff and (2)a filter for content published from that same group. To avoid this kind of confusion maybe Google should separate those uses more clearly or just drop (2) altogether.
Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.
I agree that the asymmetry of Circles is a cognitive issue. Facebook groups actually work more like "Places"[1], which I think is a lot more intuitive, but I don't think FB makes the metaphor clear enough to leverage that intuitiveness. I also don't think FB takes the issue seriously enough.
I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents
Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading".
I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.
I don't mean to distract, but wow. What a gorgeously designed clean website. I meant to read the article - and I did after a while - but the first thing I did was CTRL + U to check out the source code.
Totally disagree. No text appeared until I enabled Javascript; even then, in Firefox, the text color/typeface was so faint as to be unreadable. (I was interested enough to try firing it up in Chrome, where the text had better contrast.)
Firefox issue should be fixed. Gecko is weird about some CSS rules, it also renders Helvetica Neue way too thin. I've subbed in Arial for FF users. Sorry about that.
As for Honeycomb people, I'm sorry but Honeycomb behaves very odd--reporting itself NOT as Android. this is a well documented problem. I just don't want to write a fix for it. It behaves fine on the iPad/iPhone and any mobile Android browser so I assume Honeycomb will catch up soon.
I don't know, this website was so bad I didn't even bother reading the article. The needless choice to shoot in the actual post via javascript bothered me and the javascript based content loading took forever just to load some static text, the loading of the html document itself was quite snappy.
I hardly call dedicating the entire page's leftmost 400px of horizontal space to 4 links "gorgeous" use of some of the most valuable screen real estate. It was impossible to read on my portrait monitor. Even on my landscape monitor this website seems to be designed with the assumption I keep my browser maximized. I know my viewport is smaller than most people would like to design for so I let things slide if there is a lot going on the webpage, but this was entirely text, there is no excuse if the style can't adapt. Not only did it not adapt to my browser size there was no horizontal scrollbar to bring me to the text that went off of the right hand side.
Agreed. Unless I maximize my window, I found the article impossible to read (right side of text is clipped and no horizontal scroll provide -- chrome on linux). This isn't the first page I've found doing this recently; it seems to be a (very annoying) trend.
Finally a well balanced article after a week of non stop hyping of Google+. Google+ is just trying to do what Facebook is already doing with a few new features added to make it distinctive. Nothing really innovative or ground breaking. It is just the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it.
Regarding the circles concept, if I need to share something with a certain group of my contacts, I will prefer Email or Dropbox rather than putting it on some social network whether it is facebook, google+ or twitter.
It is quite obvious that Google+ is far, far from perfect, and I don't think that it is going to make even the smallest dent in facebook's market-share. But that doesn't mean that many of the features that make it distinctive-- including Circles-- aren't a positive step forward. (If anything, if the "defining features" of + serve no other purpose than forcing facebook to integrate similar features, I'd call it a success).
Indeed, suggesting that Google+ is simply some sort of "copy" of facebook plus a few new features is a pretty short-sighted view of the service, as the entire model of Google+ is hugely different: instead of viewing one's social graph as one monolithic entity, Google+ views it as a series of graphs that are often intersecting and often entirely different. And that is very useful, especially for people who might want to be able to share things with their coworkers that are entirely different than what they share with their friends.
I'm not going to argue with the assertion that a great deal of Google+'s early "success" is simply due to "non stop hyping", rather than the service's actual strengths. But that doesn't mean that the strengths it does possess are somehow frivolous or meaningless. They simply aren't.
Simply put: sure, you might be happy sharing with email/dropbox, but a great deal of people would rather that our current social networks had a more granular view of sharing/following/etc. (this includes me). And I hardly think its fair to criticize them the way you have-- it is more than just "the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it" (indeed, many of the early adopters have been very critical of the service, even noting when facebook or twitter is superior-- see Jeff Jarvis' comments about how difficult it is to follow live events on G+[1]).
It is still far too early to tell whether G+ is a 'facebook killer'-- I strongly suspect that it isn't. But that doesn't mean that unfair poo-pooing of it simply because it is over-hyped is the right response. Both Twitter and facebook could learn a great deal from what Google has done, and I genuinely hope they do.
As I said above, if that happens, I for one will consider G+ a rather startling success.
A friend of mine made a bookmarklet to sort by time which helps <https://github.com/uxp/gplus_sort>. It should still be something Google+ offers though.
It has been said a lot of times, but something is perfect not when there is nothing to add but when there is nothing to remove.
G+ is very much like that and this is quite a notable thing that a so large project with so much power is reduced to such a few functionalities. This is actually what makes it bearable otherwise it would be pretty hard to follow. I wonder if they'll be able to keep this nice contraption evoluting, this will be quite a challenge ihmo : things like knowing who see your posts won't be easy to solve without privacy issues.
From the post: A few years ago, before the CEO cared a whit about social networking or identity, a Google User Experience researcher named Paul Adams created a slide deck called the Real Life Social Network. In a very long and well-illustrated talk, he makes the point that there is an impedence mismatch between what you share on facebook and your interactions in real life. So when you share a photo of yourself doing something crazy at a party, you don't intend for your aunt and uncle, workmates or casual acquaintances to see it.
In real life, the crazy party photo you would be showing your friend would be on your phone's screen or (in olden days) it would be a hardcopy photograph. Putting your phone or the hardcopy photo back into your pocket would be the end. The potential for blowback would be limited to whatever could be whipped up by your friend's verbal description of what he'd seen.
Whenever you put anything on the Internet, though, there's not really any way to control its spread. Whatever privacy mechanisms a sharing/social site puts in place will be broken by crackers at some point or part of the system will break on its own and leak information. Long before that, though, one of the people you permitted to access the controlled content will simply copy it and share it with other people.
Don't put anything online that you wouldn't be comfortable with your grandma or work colleagues/boss reading.
It's not about the technical restrictions, the edge cases. It's about what a user expects when posting, the overall experience when sharing.
There will be the occasional embarrassing reshare, but for the most part users will (in theory...) feel more comfortable sharing more sensitive information if they better control who sees it. I found this post on technical vs social privacy interesting: https://plus.google.com/116222833568410151476/posts/QDwkrxrp...
The problem is that on the Internet you don't have that control. How and where you post something can influence how it can spread, but nothing can control how it spreads, just ask the RIAA. The problems are mostly caused by people who "feel more comfortable" because they wrongly think they can control it. As many people have said, "If you don't want it to get out, then don't put it on the Internet."
There's no control just like there's nothing stopping people from recording your conversation in real life and passing it around the office. Sure, on the Internet things are easier, but it's the same concept that you can make it socially difficult to reshare certain things.
Saying "If you don't want it to get out, then don't put it on the Internet" is coloring things too black and white. What about those tech articles that you'd like to share, but don't want to annoy your non-technical friends with? What about the nonsensical updates that you're _okay_ with people seeing but _would rather avoid_ having certain people see?
Not everything that people post are naked pictures or incriminating evidence. There's just some things that are socially awkward to share, and that's where "control" comes in.
Ah good. That's a huge improvement as far as I'm concerned. Now if you could block someone from seeing any photos of yourself that would be even better.
Do we believe in a complete coexistence between Google+ and Facebook?
Google+ : Facebook :: Facebook : Twitter
Facebook allows some directionality in posting that offers you some assurance. Twitter offers you none. Google+ offers a whole other control.
The problem is, I've had to explain the difference between Incoming, Following and more. I think Google needs to be explicit in their comparisons:
1. Circles allow for directional sharing. You can target an album of photos to your family easily, or pics from the bar to your friends just as quickly and safely if you setup your default Family and Friends circles sanely.
2. Incoming shows posts from those who are sharing with you, despite you not having added them to a circle of some sort. This is like Twitter, basically, except for you can also take it a level further and share only with certain people on certain posts, depending on the type. (I think they can extend this with tags and be able to have more focused and detailed sharing patterns between people.
3. By combining the long form and discussion-prone posts of Facebook, with the public conversation space of Twitter... they have a strange mass-forum quality. I'm following Googlers that are posting about all sorts of things. I've commented, and even been added by others (and some who seem to be from Google).
I'm not sure Google has clearly articulated all of the ways that their offerings are unique or better. I hope they do, it's so funny, I thought of Picasa as neat, but for others. Today I was given an SD card and asked to copy the photos. This is for a fairly tech illiterate family. I could easily upload to Picasa from my chromebook, and then from Google+ I could share it to my Family circle. I have no doubt that relatives could use this and get value from it. I think with a slight bit more integration, Google will have a wide and fairly smoothly integrated offering, and one that brings value to a diverse set of people.
Google+ allows me to share bits of news among my friends quickly, and they want to converse about it in a smaller space that is determined based on post to an automated degree. Imagine if, instead of "adding friends on reddit", you share link on G+ to a select group of people who share those interests. It could be reddit but tags instead of subreddits, if circles or circles+tags are done right. If this is the case, why would I use Facebook, it seems like shouting... like, uh, Twitter.
If this usage of Circles is too complicated, why would G+ have a shot?
The first application for Google, should use link submissions in subredits on reddit, to filter your link submissions to target them to users that subscribe to those subreddits (as to not bore or off put others). Or that filter everyone's links submissions to only include links that appear in a subreddit you subscribe to.
It's like tags, but instead inferring link interest from reddit subscriptions.
Perhaps Facebook just understand that for a social network to be successful you need to encourage sharing at all costs; Google+'s Circles actively constrain sharing, increase complexity and raise the barrier to entry.
Perhaps Facebook just understand that for a social network to be successful you need to encourage sharing at all costs
Unfortunately it also discourages meaningful sharing. My G+ "stream" is already home to discussions and photos the likes of which would never have popped up in my facebook feed.
So on the one hand this guy says FB is lean and agile because they use PHP - but produced a less than compelling response to circles.
And on the other hand he says Google's "toolchain is not well suited to fast, iterative development and rapid innovation" - but they produced a polished social product from scratch in a remarkably short time.
I'm afraid I don't ascribe much value to his analysis. Maybe there's a good reason why he's an ex-wave and ex-plus engineer, and that could explain why I think I hear an axe being ground.
Believe it or not, it is possible for Facebook to be lean and agile yet produce a less than compelling response to circles. Google's internal process has also been criticized before by other former employees, such as the infamous color survey. Your eagerness to dismiss an account from someone on the inside is a little weird and doesn't refute the points he made.
I have to agree, I don't find the analysis or the train of thought particularly insightful. It seemed apparent to me that facebook being 'unable to change their core product' meant exactly what he figured out it meant 6 paragraphs later... not that they couldn't do it, technically.
Also, does he understand the extent to which Facebook actually uses PHP? "quick, adaptable tools like PHP" ... um... seriously?
The way I read it, the author was explaining his expectation that Facebook would beat Google to implementing that model. This then emphasizes his misunderstanding of the point of that quote about building it before others. Even when agile about specific features, the inertia of Facebook's existing core product can be hard to overcome; entirely unsurprising given their huge userbase. Google was effectively starting from scratch.
Google has a lot of work to do, but with a mostly blank slate and less inertia to overcome. It's also remarkable how they have used this as an opportunity for improvements across the board, a the very least visually.
Wonderful inside-view.
With this the "Facebook Browser" makes even more sense. Facebook is probably more scared of being dethroned on the data-gathering (therefore advertising) than losing the social "battle" itself.
Well, actually Google is probably scared on the same (money) level.
I think Google+ will be a social network for techie hipsters and other early adopters seeking a Facebook alternative, but the novelty will wear off, and the mainstream will barely notice. Just my initial impression. There isn't a compelling enough reason for Facebook's 750 million users to switch.
With social networks, what really matters is how users think they should use the graph. It matters whether it's a personal or professional graph. That's why social networks are "balkanized" across personal/professional lines.
I find G+ especially useful in a "semi-professional" use case. G+ is just an extension to gmail that adds some easy ways to organize work groups.
For example, a meaningful percentage of my gmail activity is sharing links and info with project teams. It's more intuitive to me to create a circle for each team and post to them via G+ than it is to prepare an ad hoc email to them each time. Also, I'd rather organize that conversation as a private stream with discussion, etc. It avoids clutter in my gmail inbox.
I also spend a lot of time chatting and talking on Skype. Now that I can organize group video chat via G+, I can cut Skype out of my workflow. I don't like using the Skype client at all.
I realize that solutions to these use cases existed before G+, but G+ provides a unified interface that has a powerful effect on my willingness to organize a graph inside Google.
I can see Google+ taking off for enterprise users of Google Apps, once it's released to them.
Interesting post, but it seems strange to me how he properly capitalises company names such as Microsoft and Google, but consistently doesn't capitalise "facebook". Is there some point to this, or is it just stylistic?
I think it's cute that he thought Facebook would suddenly start thinking about people's privacy and that their new big product would address that issue.
They've been very clear that they think giving people their privacy by default would kill them. I wish I had the MZ quote on hand that proved that.
I am a little puzzled at the importance ascribed here to the core idea of G+ Circles, as laid out in the slide deck. Mostly because we designed an identical sharing model and even gave it the same name at Etsy, without having read the deck. (Then we decided that was way too complicated and implemented something significantly simpler, but kept the name.)
A suggested improvement to circles. . .
Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property.
* Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members).
* Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin.
* Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved.
One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so I have two options:
1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my other friends
2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see (including people who follow me but whom I haven't circled as I don't know them).
The first option excludes my followers, the second spams my friends. I could create another circle of followers and message them and the techies, but that doesn't sit comfortably, especially as I don't know which of my posts caused those people to follow me (perhaps a music video I favourites on youtube caught their eye and now they're getting spammed with HN links).
Having some way where I could create circles to publish stories to, but have others subscribe to those would be handy - I then publish to my "tech stuff" circle, and anyone who cares to subscribe to "JohnLBevan.TechStuff" sees it, whilst it's hidden from others (to prevent annoying them - not for security).
Again, I'd welcome your thoughts.
Cheers,
JB
That's interesting; it seems to me that if circles aren't actually intended to be used from a content driven perspective (eg person X is an amateur photographer and also posts about geocaching; they don't care who reads either but they don't want to spam people that are interested in only one or the other) then that is how circles would be (you 'tag' your own posts and people who follow you subscribe to just some of your tags).
I actually think that definitively shows that the intent of circles is just security (person X doesn't want his mom seeing his drinking photos) and that the possibility of sharing content based on what the reader is interested in really just comes for free with that (though in a roundabout and inconvenient way; the provider has to determine what content the reader is interested in).
Thanks esrauch - agreed, they're just there for security at present, but have a lot of potential to be a lot more with just a few tweaks to existing functionality. One of the big differences of having circles which could be used as tags is these posts could also be shown to public and not to those in your circles other than those who've subscribed to the tag. I believe one reason Twitter's so popular is it allows you to post whatever you like and people choose to be interested - if someone tried to make the facebook status public and put the same stuff in there that they put on twitter lots of their friends would end up blocking them.
I see the thinking behind it, but it seems like it would be a mistake to make Circles any more conceptually complex than they are now. People are already making a decision about what circles to put things in, and what circles to share things with.
I'd rather see a distinct "group" or "topic" feature.
Good point, perhaps the naming of this functionality would need to be changed to avoid confusing users. . . Personally I'd prefer it all to be under circles, since to me it's all a way of organising collections of contacts, but I admit I think about these things differently to a user, and I'd still be happy if the terminology were different so long as the functionality was there.
Too complicated. Circles are damn simple, just tags with a visual wrapper. It's important that they are.
I think a lot of people are over thinking what Circles are or should be. It's probably because they're so centric to the product. But that's where their power comes from. Great ease in organizing your contacts to match your real-life associations, and having that be a central part to everything you do on the site, is what makes them useful the way Facebook's lists and groups, or Twitter's lists, are not really.
Thanks for your thoughts - I see your point, though think the functionality could be made available without increasing complexity. Circles would work in exactly the same way as they do now; there would just be an extra button available to those who wanted to use it to bring up a security panel (similar to google docs sharing functionality). If the default for a circle is for it to be a private group (i.e. as it is now), users only need to ignore the "share this group button" to avoid any complexity.
Circles aren't private groups, though. They're asymmetric. I don't have to know what circles other people have put me in. My circles are for me, not for the people I've added to them. I get Garry's point, but I think he is also overthinking how they should be used, and missing the point that circles are mainly about sharing. I can't share tweets with just the people on a certain list, or a combination of lists and specific people.
I agree there's a lot of potential value in the signals from public list-type structures; I even built a small app around that idea applied to Twitter lists: http://www.sabe.us . For what they are intended to be though, as far as I can tell, it makes sense to keep circles as simple as possible. Google has done a good job of reducing the friction to organizing people and then using that organization for granular sharing.
I do also strongly agree that G+ could use some sort of grouping functionality so people can organize around common interests, among other features. But I think this should be distinct from circles…maybe as "channels" or something.
Possible, but the last thing Google would want to do now would be to repeat Wave and Buzz and make it complicated and only enjoyable by sysadmins and bots. That would be definitely useful when Google Plus is available for Apps, though
Would it help to have a visual repesentation of how each circle on google plus interactes with the others? A sort of Venn diagram attached to each post, so you could just drag the circles around to set who sees a certain post or reply. Seems some of the confusion on plus is do to the menus used to set which circle you are posting to. I know the first time I used it I didn't get it right away. Seems a visual repesentation of those relationships would clear things up.
Facebook groups is a distinct feature from facebook lists.
Facebook lists are the same feature as Google circles. And the only reason you didn't know this already is that you did not care enough to look, so circles cannot be all that much of a killer feature.
To utilize "Facebook Circles" first you must put categorize some friends into a list.
Click "Create a List" and drop some friends in. I have restricted permissions for anyone not in a list. A "Good People" list for those that I'll share anything with, and a few others.
Now to utilize sharing type some stuff into your status box. Anything, but lets go with "I can have circles too."
Now click the lock icon to the bottom right of the status entry widget. It will say "Make this Visible To:" And you see have a text box you can now type your list name into. I type "Goo" and it auto completes "Good People"
You can even exclude lists! So you can have a "Friends" list and a "Coworkers" list with people who overlap, but then post status that only go to your "Friends who are not coworkers."
The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.
so use http://www.circlehack.com/ The point is that facebook has the ability but chose NOT to deploy it. There isn't some barrier to "Changing their core product" that the blog author seems to think.
Specifically, the blog author says that they would be able to technically deploy a 'Circles-like' feature very quickly, but that they would choose not to, because it changes the BEHAVIOR of the core product.
You're trying to disagree with the author, but you're both saying the same thing. Oddly enough, that is his point.
Except the feature is already there? and it was there at in 2009, at least. We are not saying the same thing. He was worried Google+ would be trounced by Facebook deploying a clone of circles, except the feature already existed. Facebook has circles but chose to bury the UI. Probably because 99% of people don't care. Like most people here didn't care enough to utilize Lists but somehow think Google Circles is the killer feature facebook doesn't have.
I suppose it's an argument of semantics at this point, so I'll let it go, but the one thing I would make amendment to is that Circles IS the UI, mostly. All Circles is is the UI and the integration, and honestly, while the integration is the technical aspect, it's the fact that the UI is what it is, and that it's up front and center that makes it noteworthy.
Users take cues on how something should be used. Since lists are not central to how Facebook works, it's reasonable that many people don't use it. It's possible that Facebook made a conscious choice not to make it a central feature. They may want the standard behavior to be that everyone can see everything.
Personally, I think of Facebook as a broadcast-to-everyone-I-know medium, and as a result, I don't say much on it.
|The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.
I really don't think Facebook even wants you to use this feature. I had set up my lists a long time ago, but never figured out how to actually share specifically to them until reading your comment. Facebook practically hid this feature, but included it in such a way that they could hedge and at least say they at least offer the feature.
I did, it just wasn't something I was going to delete my account over. I was definitely interested when it was announced, so I set my lists up, but how to actually share to those lists is, in my opinion, unintuitive so I never stumbled on how to do it. I don't think it makes Google+ the Facebook killer, but if they can offer a few more ways to differentiate in positive ways I think it's a good start.
"I had originally assumed that he meant facebook would lack the agility to make the necessary technical changes, so central to their system. But I was wrong--the real point was that they would not be willing to change direction so fundamentally. And given such a large, captivated audience you could hardly blame them."
Facebook has always been about sharing every post with every person. You're right, the only difference is that g+ puts the UI in your face. You're forced to put people in circles, and it's stupidly simple. Facebook hides the feature, and in a community filled with highly technical early adopters, someone needs to write multiple step instructions to explain it.
Care to write up a Google+ version for the same result that is not "Multi-step"? The only reason people weren't doing this on facebook before is because they never cared to.
I'm reminded of Time Machine in Mac OS X. From a technical perspective it's inferior to dedicated backup software, but from a user perspective it's infinitely better because people actually use it.
I did bother to look; I do care; but I found the tool to be unusable. One accidental share with the wrong people is enough to dissuade me from ever trying again.
It is often asserted that users don't care about the privacy of their communications. I don't know what rock these people are living under, but it seems pretty damn essential to human existence to me. If you've run a different service where people didn't seem to care, it might be because in order to do more private sharing, they simply created a separate account. In this new era of "real name" social networks where it's harder to have multiple accounts, custom privacy settings are even more essential.
And it's simply false that it's too complex for users. Flickr does this, with prefab and nonce user group sharing, and it works pretty well. Well enough that swingers trading naughty pictures can coexist with holiday snaps.
LiveJournal had features like this since 2002 and nearly every frequent user had custom friend groups. Enough for terabytes of teen angst to be shielded from the whole school learning about it.
I think customizing sharing is a matter of getting the UI right; there's no lack of demand for this feature. Google+ takes it one step beyond, and makes it fun to sort people into circles. Furthermore they have a help/tip system that gradually teaches you how to use it. I feel sure that their implementation will be a success, and that people will be making at least as many private/restricted sharing posts as public.
I think the problem of Facebook is that people don't know about those features. I personally didn't know about lists until Google+ got released and all this feature comparison started.
The problem of Google+ will be to achieve critical mass. I don't care if I am going to use Google+ or Facebook right now as long as my friends are using it. Also, I wish there was a good integration of Google+ with FB, Twitter and LinkedIn (hell, I don't want to publish my status/question/complain etc. on 4 different sites).
People are not using Facebook List not because the feature is not important. Quite simply, it is because -
1. It takes 3 - 4 steps to get to your list page (depending on where you are on FB)
2. It is buried deep inside Friends page
3. List is not used anywhere on FB except Friends page, making it very useless.
Google + on the other hand -
1. Takes 1 1/2 step to put your friends in a circle. The 1/2 is the drag and drop.
2. It is right smack in front of your face.
3. Notice there is no Friends or Followers page on G+? It is the Circle page.
4. Circle is used more than just for categorizing your friends. You can use it on your stream and it is displayed on the left side of your stream. On Facebook, Groups are displayed on the left of your newsfeed, which is one of the worst mistakes Facebook has done.
Summary - To add your friends to a 'Circle' on Facebook, you can either:
1. Create a list, which takes about 3 - 4 steps and hit a dead end street
2. Create a group, which takes about 5 - 7 steps.
And you wonder why people are going gaga over Circles (1 1/2 steps)
Didn't read the article, design was too distracting (mouse wheeling with the mouse over the left side does NOT scroll the page). But check out that scrollbar!
::-webkit-scrollbar {
width: 10px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
border-radius: 10px;
background: #ddd;
}
Thought it must be JS but it's webkit stuff. Can't decide if silly or nice, but I think it's pretty nice.
The author seems really angry at Google and clearly wants to demonstrate how much smarter he is in comparison to the rest of the organization. Nearly every sentence is drenched with this sort of stuff:
"It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure--but I don't find it all that interesting, personally."
". I listened politely, all the while rolling-my-eyes in secret at their seemingly implausible naivete."
"I laughed, disbelieving. Facebook has a hacker culture, they're only a handful of engineers, and they develop with quick, adaptable tools like PHP."
This post isn't about Google+ or Facebook. This post is about "Look at me, I'm so much smarter than my old bosses"
Something clearly upset him pretty significantly at Google. I'm not sure he's got a clear point of view on this.
Did you finish reading the article? Towards the end he admits that even he missed the boat. In my opinion all the snark was setting up for the fact that, even though he was so confident he had things figured out, he turned out to be completely wrong. The point is that no one can really predict how this will turn out.
Personally, I think you're right, but you sort of take a risk when you go for hyperbolic sarcasm. I'm not sure how much of the first paragraphs he believes; much of it, if he did, somewhat discredits him in my eyes as an engineer (let alone as an unbiased source). The takeaway certainly doesn't depend on whether the preceding paragraphs are gospel truth, but one's judgement of the author's credibility, in my opinion, does.
Totally agree. His begrudging "It's ok, I guess" conclusion doesn't make the rest of it any more insightful. It's all the worst sort of locker-room gossip.
156 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadNo, it should not be.
http://i.imgur.com/9Oy37.png
I think it's an issue with the font renderer or font specific to your browser/OS combination.
I don't know enough Javascript to understand why that behavior is so often created. Is it so hard to respect the "classic" "canonical" middle click behavior?
His point was that he was waiting for Facebook to make their pre-emptive response to Circles, and then FB released Groups. He knows full well is solves a different problem - that was the point of what he was saying.
Not only does Groups not really do the same things as Circles/Lists at all, but Facebook appears to think that Lists don't work. Zuckerberg:
Just take friends on a site, and cut them into subgroups. Sounds good in theory. But almost no one wants to make lists. We’ve been at this for a few years, and promoted heavily. Most we’ve gotten is 5% to make lists, and most don’t make more than one.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/10/06/live-blogging-faceb...
Lists (in Facebook) suck - they UI is hidden and terrible.
Facebook Groups came out when the author expected Facebook to respond to the concepts behind Google+ Circles. It turned out that it wasn't a response to those concepts at all, and was something unrelated.
(BTW, it's not me down voting you.)
(me) nlothian @dhanji Can you settle an argument on HN? Do you know about Facebook Lists or not? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2749711
@nlothian Yes, of course I do. Someone on there has already answered it: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2749651
http://twitter.com/#!/dhanji/status/90316893113696256
Agree it's not obvious for existing friends.
On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as many non-techie non-early-adopters as possible about Circles, and many get it and love it, but several don't really understand it.
In particular, the asymmetry of circles is overlooked by a lot of people, even by some casual users who think they understand how Circles works. On Facebook, there is one authoritative list of who is in the group, and posts to the group stay in that group. On Google+, your circles are not my circles. I may have you in a "close friends" circle, you may have me in a big "co-workers" circle, or you might have all your friends in one circle. When I am browsing my "close friends" feed and see a post by you, I may guess wrong about the social context that you are sharing that message in, and make an inappropriate comment, not realizing who else received the message. (The way to determine on G+ who received a post is by noting and clicking on the gray "Public" or "Limited" in the upper right of the post) Maybe I am underestimating people, or maybe comments are just much less big a deal than posts, but I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents.
If I had to make a prediction, I'd think that the ease-of-use and clarity of FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles. I could be wrong, so it'll be interesting to see what ordinary users prefer.
I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to be fair, nothing is as easy to misdirect as a twitter DM.
On private posts, the word "Limited" appears next to the post, on which you can click to see who it's visible to. It's not as obvious as it could be, but it's there.
There's a problem with even being able to see the 21, from the pov of the poster...
I appreciate how Google has brought this into the electronic realm. I do wish there was not a 21 person limit because I already see people sharing with much larger pools and you don't know who persons 22...n are who can also see the discussion.
On the other hand, I think most people are used to the fact that posting on Facebook is pretty public, and that the Circles feature might give people a false sense of privacy so they are more likely to make that mistake.
Imagine planning a surprise birthday party, where someone +-mentions them, even by mistake. So much for surprises!
As long as G+ doesn't go down this path, I can live with it, but I don't like that a "mention" automatically implies "full access" to whatever has been said, especially given that the choice of whether or not to share a particular post with that person is presumed to be up to the author of the post, not anyone else who was also included.
I think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy
It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field.
You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends.
But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most.
Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.
That's exactly what they are: a visual interface to tags and tagged social graph nodes.
I've always heard that only 5% of email users use Gmail, but I don't actually have a source. Does seem to be accurate based on my (non-techie) friends.
34.5% yahoo.com
24.0% other
13.9% aol.com
9.9% gmail.com
2.6% comcast.net
2.2% msn.com
My mistake.
Even simply the most contacted people in the last week - and sharing to those people the most, even though you might have a friend you haven't seen for a long time, and they might be a great friend, that doesn't automatically mean you want to share with them. To assume that people want to share more with better and older friends and less with newer friends is wrong.
Users should get a menu of content automatically provided based on prior contact and clique analysis, and pick the items and people they find interesting to ensure more permanent viewing, which in time can fade over time if that content isn't liked. Even tracking what is clicked can automate this without having to manually like or +1 something - it's like listening to a person speak.
The last thing I want to do is setup a G+ account and start customizing friends lists, circles, clicking like and dislike buttons - it should be automated, and Google should delve into my GTalk and Email to see people I've been in contact. Whose emails am I replying? What people am I having conversations? I don't quite know who all my online friends are - G+ should work that out for me and cement those relationships without my input. Online friend dynamics are too liquid to be manual.
The problem isn't circles, it's the way they are created, edited and devised.
I'd imagine this will be expanded and soon find its way into Google+.
That's not how it works. You can put people into as many circles as you like.
A person can belong to more than one circle (that's why you have a list of checkboxes, one per circle).
So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones.
Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.
I think a killer move from facebook would be a 'SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS' button for each post. It would be effectively like tweeting (individual posts) and would have critical mass pretty quickly due to fb's scale.
Maybe it would be a nightmare building another twitter overnight or they would be pilloried for copying so blatantly. Additionally, it's occuring to me right now that a big issue would be deciding how to integrate those shouts into the newsfeed... oh wait by following people.
Unless you meant 100% publicly available posts? That's the opposite of something Facebook ever would (or should) do. FB is a walled garden.
Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.
[1]: (I wrote more about this on my blog: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for...)
Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading".
I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.
I would love to finish reading this, but his site design is preventing me from scrolling down to read the rest of the entry.
(Page not public. Not taking credit. I'll take it down in the morning.)
As for Honeycomb people, I'm sorry but Honeycomb behaves very odd--reporting itself NOT as Android. this is a well documented problem. I just don't want to write a fix for it. It behaves fine on the iPad/iPhone and any mobile Android browser so I assume Honeycomb will catch up soon.
As for no-JS readers... =)
I hardly call dedicating the entire page's leftmost 400px of horizontal space to 4 links "gorgeous" use of some of the most valuable screen real estate. It was impossible to read on my portrait monitor. Even on my landscape monitor this website seems to be designed with the assumption I keep my browser maximized. I know my viewport is smaller than most people would like to design for so I let things slide if there is a lot going on the webpage, but this was entirely text, there is no excuse if the style can't adapt. Not only did it not adapt to my browser size there was no horizontal scrollbar to bring me to the text that went off of the right hand side.
The part where G+ becomes your social life like Facebook currently is for many people...I just can't see it.
And a redundant of them. This is like Friendfeed, where you get reposts from different sources every damn minute.
Regarding the circles concept, if I need to share something with a certain group of my contacts, I will prefer Email or Dropbox rather than putting it on some social network whether it is facebook, google+ or twitter.
Indeed, suggesting that Google+ is simply some sort of "copy" of facebook plus a few new features is a pretty short-sighted view of the service, as the entire model of Google+ is hugely different: instead of viewing one's social graph as one monolithic entity, Google+ views it as a series of graphs that are often intersecting and often entirely different. And that is very useful, especially for people who might want to be able to share things with their coworkers that are entirely different than what they share with their friends.
I'm not going to argue with the assertion that a great deal of Google+'s early "success" is simply due to "non stop hyping", rather than the service's actual strengths. But that doesn't mean that the strengths it does possess are somehow frivolous or meaningless. They simply aren't.
Simply put: sure, you might be happy sharing with email/dropbox, but a great deal of people would rather that our current social networks had a more granular view of sharing/following/etc. (this includes me). And I hardly think its fair to criticize them the way you have-- it is more than just "the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it" (indeed, many of the early adopters have been very critical of the service, even noting when facebook or twitter is superior-- see Jeff Jarvis' comments about how difficult it is to follow live events on G+[1]).
It is still far too early to tell whether G+ is a 'facebook killer'-- I strongly suspect that it isn't. But that doesn't mean that unfair poo-pooing of it simply because it is over-hyped is the right response. Both Twitter and facebook could learn a great deal from what Google has done, and I genuinely hope they do.
As I said above, if that happens, I for one will consider G+ a rather startling success.
[1]:https://plus.google.com/105076678694475690385/posts/JSWreaGr...
G+ is very much like that and this is quite a notable thing that a so large project with so much power is reduced to such a few functionalities. This is actually what makes it bearable otherwise it would be pretty hard to follow. I wonder if they'll be able to keep this nice contraption evoluting, this will be quite a challenge ihmo : things like knowing who see your posts won't be easy to solve without privacy issues.
In real life, the crazy party photo you would be showing your friend would be on your phone's screen or (in olden days) it would be a hardcopy photograph. Putting your phone or the hardcopy photo back into your pocket would be the end. The potential for blowback would be limited to whatever could be whipped up by your friend's verbal description of what he'd seen.
Whenever you put anything on the Internet, though, there's not really any way to control its spread. Whatever privacy mechanisms a sharing/social site puts in place will be broken by crackers at some point or part of the system will break on its own and leak information. Long before that, though, one of the people you permitted to access the controlled content will simply copy it and share it with other people.
Don't put anything online that you wouldn't be comfortable with your grandma or work colleagues/boss reading.
There will be the occasional embarrassing reshare, but for the most part users will (in theory...) feel more comfortable sharing more sensitive information if they better control who sees it. I found this post on technical vs social privacy interesting: https://plus.google.com/116222833568410151476/posts/QDwkrxrp...
Saying "If you don't want it to get out, then don't put it on the Internet" is coloring things too black and white. What about those tech articles that you'd like to share, but don't want to annoy your non-technical friends with? What about the nonsensical updates that you're _okay_ with people seeing but _would rather avoid_ having certain people see?
Not everything that people post are naked pictures or incriminating evidence. There's just some things that are socially awkward to share, and that's where "control" comes in.
I'm not sure that Google+'s circles will stop your boss from seeing a drunken photo in this scenario.
Google+ : Facebook :: Facebook : Twitter
Facebook allows some directionality in posting that offers you some assurance. Twitter offers you none. Google+ offers a whole other control.
The problem is, I've had to explain the difference between Incoming, Following and more. I think Google needs to be explicit in their comparisons:
1. Circles allow for directional sharing. You can target an album of photos to your family easily, or pics from the bar to your friends just as quickly and safely if you setup your default Family and Friends circles sanely.
2. Incoming shows posts from those who are sharing with you, despite you not having added them to a circle of some sort. This is like Twitter, basically, except for you can also take it a level further and share only with certain people on certain posts, depending on the type. (I think they can extend this with tags and be able to have more focused and detailed sharing patterns between people.
3. By combining the long form and discussion-prone posts of Facebook, with the public conversation space of Twitter... they have a strange mass-forum quality. I'm following Googlers that are posting about all sorts of things. I've commented, and even been added by others (and some who seem to be from Google).
I'm not sure Google has clearly articulated all of the ways that their offerings are unique or better. I hope they do, it's so funny, I thought of Picasa as neat, but for others. Today I was given an SD card and asked to copy the photos. This is for a fairly tech illiterate family. I could easily upload to Picasa from my chromebook, and then from Google+ I could share it to my Family circle. I have no doubt that relatives could use this and get value from it. I think with a slight bit more integration, Google will have a wide and fairly smoothly integrated offering, and one that brings value to a diverse set of people.
Google+ allows me to share bits of news among my friends quickly, and they want to converse about it in a smaller space that is determined based on post to an automated degree. Imagine if, instead of "adding friends on reddit", you share link on G+ to a select group of people who share those interests. It could be reddit but tags instead of subreddits, if circles or circles+tags are done right. If this is the case, why would I use Facebook, it seems like shouting... like, uh, Twitter.
If this usage of Circles is too complicated, why would G+ have a shot?
It's like tags, but instead inferring link interest from reddit subscriptions.
Unfortunately it also discourages meaningful sharing. My G+ "stream" is already home to discussions and photos the likes of which would never have popped up in my facebook feed.
And on the other hand he says Google's "toolchain is not well suited to fast, iterative development and rapid innovation" - but they produced a polished social product from scratch in a remarkably short time.
I'm afraid I don't ascribe much value to his analysis. Maybe there's a good reason why he's an ex-wave and ex-plus engineer, and that could explain why I think I hear an axe being ground.
Also, does he understand the extent to which Facebook actually uses PHP? "quick, adaptable tools like PHP" ... um... seriously?
Google has a lot of work to do, but with a mostly blank slate and less inertia to overcome. It's also remarkable how they have used this as an opportunity for improvements across the board, a the very least visually.
Well, actually Google is probably scared on the same (money) level.
I find G+ especially useful in a "semi-professional" use case. G+ is just an extension to gmail that adds some easy ways to organize work groups.
For example, a meaningful percentage of my gmail activity is sharing links and info with project teams. It's more intuitive to me to create a circle for each team and post to them via G+ than it is to prepare an ad hoc email to them each time. Also, I'd rather organize that conversation as a private stream with discussion, etc. It avoids clutter in my gmail inbox.
I also spend a lot of time chatting and talking on Skype. Now that I can organize group video chat via G+, I can cut Skype out of my workflow. I don't like using the Skype client at all.
I realize that solutions to these use cases existed before G+, but G+ provides a unified interface that has a powerful effect on my willingness to organize a graph inside Google.
I can see Google+ taking off for enterprise users of Google Apps, once it's released to them.
Former Google Engineer Builds Uncrawlable Blog Website
They've been very clear that they think giving people their privacy by default would kill them. I wish I had the MZ quote on hand that proved that.
* Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members).
* Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin.
* Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved.
What do you guys think?
JB
I actually think that definitively shows that the intent of circles is just security (person X doesn't want his mom seeing his drinking photos) and that the possibility of sharing content based on what the reader is interested in really just comes for free with that (though in a roundabout and inconvenient way; the provider has to determine what content the reader is interested in).
I'd rather see a distinct "group" or "topic" feature.
I think a lot of people are over thinking what Circles are or should be. It's probably because they're so centric to the product. But that's where their power comes from. Great ease in organizing your contacts to match your real-life associations, and having that be a central part to everything you do on the site, is what makes them useful the way Facebook's lists and groups, or Twitter's lists, are not really.
Thanks for your thoughts - I see your point, though think the functionality could be made available without increasing complexity. Circles would work in exactly the same way as they do now; there would just be an extra button available to those who wanted to use it to bring up a security panel (similar to google docs sharing functionality). If the default for a circle is for it to be a private group (i.e. as it is now), users only need to ignore the "share this group button" to avoid any complexity.
It looks like a few other people are having similar thoughts, so opinion on this area's certainly split: http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-l...
Thanks again,
JB
I agree there's a lot of potential value in the signals from public list-type structures; I even built a small app around that idea applied to Twitter lists: http://www.sabe.us . For what they are intended to be though, as far as I can tell, it makes sense to keep circles as simple as possible. Google has done a good job of reducing the friction to organizing people and then using that organization for granular sharing.
I do also strongly agree that G+ could use some sort of grouping functionality so people can organize around common interests, among other features. But I think this should be distinct from circles…maybe as "channels" or something.
Facebook groups is a distinct feature from facebook lists.
Facebook lists are the same feature as Google circles. And the only reason you didn't know this already is that you did not care enough to look, so circles cannot be all that much of a killer feature.
To utilize "Facebook Circles" first you must put categorize some friends into a list.
https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/
Click "Create a List" and drop some friends in. I have restricted permissions for anyone not in a list. A "Good People" list for those that I'll share anything with, and a few others.
Now to utilize sharing type some stuff into your status box. Anything, but lets go with "I can have circles too."
Now click the lock icon to the bottom right of the status entry widget. It will say "Make this Visible To:" And you see have a text box you can now type your list name into. I type "Goo" and it auto completes "Good People"
You can even exclude lists! So you can have a "Friends" list and a "Coworkers" list with people who overlap, but then post status that only go to your "Friends who are not coworkers."
The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.
Yeah, and the fact that I don't need step-by-step instructions.
with code: https://github.com/voloko/facebook-circles
You're trying to disagree with the author, but you're both saying the same thing. Oddly enough, that is his point.
Personally, I think of Facebook as a broadcast-to-everyone-I-know medium, and as a result, I don't say much on it.
I really don't think Facebook even wants you to use this feature. I had set up my lists a long time ago, but never figured out how to actually share specifically to them until reading your comment. Facebook practically hid this feature, but included it in such a way that they could hedge and at least say they at least offer the feature.
Facebook has always been about sharing every post with every person. You're right, the only difference is that g+ puts the UI in your face. You're forced to put people in circles, and it's stupidly simple. Facebook hides the feature, and in a community filled with highly technical early adopters, someone needs to write multiple step instructions to explain it.
It is often asserted that users don't care about the privacy of their communications. I don't know what rock these people are living under, but it seems pretty damn essential to human existence to me. If you've run a different service where people didn't seem to care, it might be because in order to do more private sharing, they simply created a separate account. In this new era of "real name" social networks where it's harder to have multiple accounts, custom privacy settings are even more essential.
And it's simply false that it's too complex for users. Flickr does this, with prefab and nonce user group sharing, and it works pretty well. Well enough that swingers trading naughty pictures can coexist with holiday snaps.
LiveJournal had features like this since 2002 and nearly every frequent user had custom friend groups. Enough for terabytes of teen angst to be shielded from the whole school learning about it.
I think customizing sharing is a matter of getting the UI right; there's no lack of demand for this feature. Google+ takes it one step beyond, and makes it fun to sort people into circles. Furthermore they have a help/tip system that gradually teaches you how to use it. I feel sure that their implementation will be a success, and that people will be making at least as many private/restricted sharing posts as public.
1. It takes 3 - 4 steps to get to your list page (depending on where you are on FB) 2. It is buried deep inside Friends page 3. List is not used anywhere on FB except Friends page, making it very useless.
Google + on the other hand -
1. Takes 1 1/2 step to put your friends in a circle. The 1/2 is the drag and drop. 2. It is right smack in front of your face. 3. Notice there is no Friends or Followers page on G+? It is the Circle page. 4. Circle is used more than just for categorizing your friends. You can use it on your stream and it is displayed on the left side of your stream. On Facebook, Groups are displayed on the left of your newsfeed, which is one of the worst mistakes Facebook has done.
Summary - To add your friends to a 'Circle' on Facebook, you can either:
1. Create a list, which takes about 3 - 4 steps and hit a dead end street 2. Create a group, which takes about 5 - 7 steps.
And you wonder why people are going gaga over Circles (1 1/2 steps)
Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw
| People I don't like but are hot enough to screw if I got the chance
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::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb { border-radius: 10px; background: #ddd; } Thought it must be JS but it's webkit stuff. Can't decide if silly or nice, but I think it's pretty nice.
<html> <head> </head> <style> ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 10px; } ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb { border-radius: 10px; background: #ddd; } </style> <body> <div style="background:red; margin-top: 1000px;">hi</div> </body> </html>
"It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure--but I don't find it all that interesting, personally."
". I listened politely, all the while rolling-my-eyes in secret at their seemingly implausible naivete."
"I laughed, disbelieving. Facebook has a hacker culture, they're only a handful of engineers, and they develop with quick, adaptable tools like PHP."
This post isn't about Google+ or Facebook. This post is about "Look at me, I'm so much smarter than my old bosses"
Something clearly upset him pretty significantly at Google. I'm not sure he's got a clear point of view on this.