Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
rethrick.com
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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 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.
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.
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.
That's not how it works. You can put people into as many circles as you like.
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+.
A person can belong to more than one circle (that's why you have a list of checkboxes, one per circle).
FB Groups will trump the power and
flexibility of Circles
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.
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 think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy
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...)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Also, does he understand the extent to which Facebook actually uses PHP? "quick, adaptable tools like PHP" ... um... seriously?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
Agree it's not obvious for existing friends.
* 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 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.
I'd rather see a distinct "group" or "topic" feature.
No, it should not be.
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?
I think it's an issue with the font renderer or font specific to your browser/OS combination.
::-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.
<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>
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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... =)
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
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.
Well, actually Google is probably scared on the same (money) level.
Former Google Engineer Builds Uncrawlable Blog Website
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.
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.