Being able to see all of the conversations about a story dispersed across the entire G+ network is very cool. I would love to see this incorporated into other sites.
I would go with G+ comments immediately over Disqus. I imagine most Google/Android news websites would, too (there are a lot of them). Facebook comments is horrible. It's the main reason why I quit visiting TechCrunch a long time ago.
Yeah, Facebook comments are what originally drove me away from TechCrunch. It was actually a blessing as the site took a nosedive in content quality around that time anyways.
Disqus has been making some poor moves lately as well, I don't like their new embedded comment form and surprising everybody with stealth ads is just bad taste.
I've written a lot of articles comparing comment systems. (such as [1] comparing LiveFyre, Disqus, and FB comments)
Both Facebook and Google+ comment systems prevent users from commenting anonymously. Some might consider this a good thing, but the comment count is cut drastically, which big blogs don't seem to like. Both systems have zero-click login, which is good for UX. (they don't have to register for another site)
Disqus and other related comments systems like LiveFyre have unique features like media embedding and live updating. And can interact with any social media service.
I'm partial to Facebook/Google+ comments for the reasons stated above, but Facebook hasn't updated their comment system in literally 2 years. There's a lot of missed potential.
EDIT: Looking at the implementation on Google's blog, Google does something that Facebook can't: they syndicate all posts on G+ linking to the blog post and integrate it into the comments section themselves. I'm not sure if this creates spam or now.
Additionally, since it goes the other way, each G+ comment on a post increases the G+ share counter by 1. Good for metrics.
Also, yet another way to try and strong arm folks into having an active google+ account. :)
Honestly, the biggest thing I do not like about this is how we are essentially breaking away at folks ability to shard their community involvements. Not a huge deal, I realize. However, many of my friends and family could give two craps about technical discussions. Which is why they are not already on sites such as this. :)
Circles are backwards for this, though. I shouldn't have to choose who I share my public posts with. Circles are great for posts I want to limit to a certain subset of people - e.g. semi-private conversations / photos about my friends that I'm not posting to Public. For posts where it's other people who want to do the limiting, I would like a way of categorizing my posts. A simple tag, or "public circle" would suffice. Let people subscribe to my "mountain biking" public circle (or tag), and I can post to that circle. Then people have the choice to either subscribe to everything I post or a subset based on their interests.
I would use that feature a lot and would re-add a lot of the celebrity posters if they properly tagged their posts. But since they don't have a way to do that and I don't have a way to limit their posts based on a filter they get shoved into a circle of "following, but not really" that I rarely check.
This is exactly what I've tried pitching to some friends. Of course, this is also in the "the web already had a method for this." It was even supported in blogger, where people would "tag" their posts.
Well this is a first step. This and more is long overdue but its a start.
I love Google+ because it seems to encourage much more in the way of long-form status updates, and public followers are much more "OK" than they ever were for Facebook. A lot of people use G+ as a de-facto blog.
Look at his posts. That's a blog. Isn't that a blog?
Now that they've got this honestly great market differentiating feature (from FB), why on earth hasn't blogger been subsumed into G+ to make an actually good blogging platform?
A powerful network of profiles and blogs where people can easily share/comment/solicit collaboration? That would be amazing. Easily better than svbtle.
Come on Google+, marry Blogger already. You could be a powerhouse of storytelling in a way that Facebook wishes it could be.
For everything done right with G+ there's something else which I'd say is plainly wrong or a huge oversight.
For example, Communities do a good job of facilitating limited sharing beyond your circles but they were implemented without support for posting from mobile and no option to prevent public community posts from being included in your public stream.
Both of those things have since been fixed, but I think it speaks to the same thing we're seeing here - Incomplete or outright lacking features that hurt obvious, compelling uses of the platform. Tom there is running a blog on G+ despite the lack of basic functions for formatting, linking and categorizing posts.
Someone had an idea of integrating Communities into Wordpress blogs, too, as sort of a forum replacement. I thought it was a pretty good idea, since they kind of act that way. You get "groups" of post, and then you can see everyone's post as a forum thread.
I'd much rather implement something like that than BBPress.
Hate to invoke "Godwin's law: Reader edition", but it seems a bit bizarre that they didn't integrate a flavor of this G+ comment system into Reader before calling it quits as they seem symbiotic at first glance.
EDIT: Thinking about it some more that would have the potential of turning Reader into a spammer/trolls paradise, so I guess the effectiveness of such a fusion is a bit more nuanced.
It was obvious that they wanted to kill Reader, as has been confirmed by many of the people who worked on it. The initial Google+ implementation was mediocre and no attempt was made to improve it – there were basic flaws like +1 sharing not working at all on mobile which went unfixed for at least a year.
Just turned this on for the Fogbeam blog, and so far, I like it. It's nice to pull together both the G+ related comments and the "native" blog comments in one place.
And while I certainly have my issues[1] with Google and G+, I generally like G+ more than Facebook and if this helps encourage adoption of it, so much the better in that regard.
Just c'mon, Google, give us access to our social graph using FOAF, ability to subscribe to Circles / Streams / Groups / whatever using RSS, ability to add an RSS feed to a Circle / Group / etc., and a Write API based on AtomPub. Throw in SIOC for the commenting stuff, and we're BFF's again. :0)
26 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 70.9 ms ] threadfrom my experience on G+ people don't correspond as coharently as they do on blogs themselves.
This is the first time I've observed irony in a single word.
Disqus has been making some poor moves lately as well, I don't like their new embedded comment form and surprising everybody with stealth ads is just bad taste.
Both Facebook and Google+ comment systems prevent users from commenting anonymously. Some might consider this a good thing, but the comment count is cut drastically, which big blogs don't seem to like. Both systems have zero-click login, which is good for UX. (they don't have to register for another site)
Disqus and other related comments systems like LiveFyre have unique features like media embedding and live updating. And can interact with any social media service.
I'm partial to Facebook/Google+ comments for the reasons stated above, but Facebook hasn't updated their comment system in literally 2 years. There's a lot of missed potential.
[1] http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/
EDIT: Looking at the implementation on Google's blog, Google does something that Facebook can't: they syndicate all posts on G+ linking to the blog post and integrate it into the comments section themselves. I'm not sure if this creates spam or now.
Additionally, since it goes the other way, each G+ comment on a post increases the G+ share counter by 1. Good for metrics.
Honestly, the biggest thing I do not like about this is how we are essentially breaking away at folks ability to shard their community involvements. Not a huge deal, I realize. However, many of my friends and family could give two craps about technical discussions. Which is why they are not already on sites such as this. :)
But you're right, my friends and family in my social network don't all want to see my blog posts, which is why I don't share my new blog posts.
I would use that feature a lot and would re-add a lot of the celebrity posters if they properly tagged their posts. But since they don't have a way to do that and I don't have a way to limit their posts based on a filter they get shoved into a circle of "following, but not really" that I rarely check.
I love Google+ because it seems to encourage much more in the way of long-form status updates, and public followers are much more "OK" than they ever were for Facebook. A lot of people use G+ as a de-facto blog.
For exmaple see Tom Anderson of MySpace fame (he also takes a lot of pretty photos): https://plus.google.com/+myspacetom/posts
Look at his posts. That's a blog. Isn't that a blog?
Now that they've got this honestly great market differentiating feature (from FB), why on earth hasn't blogger been subsumed into G+ to make an actually good blogging platform?
A powerful network of profiles and blogs where people can easily share/comment/solicit collaboration? That would be amazing. Easily better than svbtle.
Come on Google+, marry Blogger already. You could be a powerhouse of storytelling in a way that Facebook wishes it could be.
For everything done right with G+ there's something else which I'd say is plainly wrong or a huge oversight.
For example, Communities do a good job of facilitating limited sharing beyond your circles but they were implemented without support for posting from mobile and no option to prevent public community posts from being included in your public stream.
Both of those things have since been fixed, but I think it speaks to the same thing we're seeing here - Incomplete or outright lacking features that hurt obvious, compelling uses of the platform. Tom there is running a blog on G+ despite the lack of basic functions for formatting, linking and categorizing posts.
I'd much rather implement something like that than BBPress.
EDIT: Thinking about it some more that would have the potential of turning Reader into a spammer/trolls paradise, so I guess the effectiveness of such a fusion is a bit more nuanced.
And while I certainly have my issues[1] with Google and G+, I generally like G+ more than Facebook and if this helps encourage adoption of it, so much the better in that regard.
Just c'mon, Google, give us access to our social graph using FOAF, ability to subscribe to Circles / Streams / Groups / whatever using RSS, ability to add an RSS feed to a Circle / Group / etc., and a Write API based on AtomPub. Throw in SIOC for the commenting stuff, and we're BFF's again. :0)
[1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-wil...