seri

You assume they ignored. The mere fact that those high profile Googlers actually create G+ accounts tells me that they are serious about community building this time around. And they actually managed to invite Taylor Swift in.

I'm not saying they're doing an awesome job. But they do care.

That would effectively be like a Facebook Page, wouldn't it? Believe me, you won't enjoy the signal to noise ratio within these "public circles".

I proprosed a different solution to the same problem, as explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738084

Edit: On second read, I think we do share the same concept, just different naming.

It seems to me that the most active use for G+ at the moment is as a broadcasting system, very much like Twitter. Maybe Google has envisioned this, maybe not. I admit I didn't. I thought Google would have done whatever it takes to promote more intimate and private communication among close friend circles.

But while G+ is arguably a better broadcasting system than Twitter, it is still broken. A tech celeb would love to consistently post tech stuffs, but while this activity satisfies his geeky followers, it would annoy his friends and families. And there is no way a tech celeb can manually add his followers into different circles.

I imagine if G+ fixes this problem, it will completely replace Twitter in no time at all.

One solution is to introduce a concept called Channels.

Suppose I follow DHH. The problem is DHH has a lot of interests, ranging from Ruby, entrepreneurship, to Forbes bashing (DHH fans bear it with me here). Now DHH doesn't know who among his followers cares about which of his interests, but he creates some Channels, namely "Ruby", "Entrepreneurship", "Forbes Bashing", etc anyway, so followers can filter themselves.

Now a Rails guy found DHH's G+ page. He would like to follow DHH, but he doesn't care so much about DHH's financial insight. Now that when he adds DHH to his "Follow" Circle, he can choose to pick some among many DHH's Channels and everyone is happy.

Finally, DHH's "public" posts are only visible to those who specifically added him to the "Follow" circle.

Totally. While it's true that getting praises from Andy the accountant and Bella the homecoming queen is much more meaningful than praises from Chris the programmer, it's just a matter of fact that attracting Andy and Bella in the early days is close to impossible. Andy and Bella just don't care about any new social network at all. And some of them have heavily invested in enriching their Facebook experience that they would think of G+ as a threat.

Perhaps more importantly, techies can have fun by themselves. They would play with Circles, follow tech celebs, tweak around with Sparks, and love discussing random topics with strangers. Now suppose early adopters consist of Andies and Bellas, they would just sit and wait until somebody does something.

That said, at the end of the day, G+ will finally have to figure out how to get Andy and Bella in.

Although I like the grandparent's anecdote and up-voted him, I would have made the same argument as you did against his point. It's just confusing and therefore unsatisfactory to use usefulness as a tool to decide how to spend your life.

The reason why one shouldn't be That Guy is not because spending all your life playing Poker, or doing Maths, or playing Chess (as in the case of Bobby Fischer) just for the sake of it doesn't benefit others, but because when your level of obsession reaches a certain point, the point of diminishing returns, you just get confused -- you can't tell whether you are still getting pleasure doing it anymore. You've been off-balanced with other parts of life for too long that you've lost the ability to approach your passion purely from intellectual curiosity, as you used to.

So the bottom line is, solving intelligent puzzles is fun, as long as you don't abuse it.

I would also recommend board games, such as Go, or Chess (actually, let's just pick Go; Chess is undeservedly popular, you know, like Java).

Without loss of generality, let us assume that all mathematical jokes are funny.

I'm Vietnamese, so I get a little curious here. Would you mind sharing what you particuarly like about Vietnam? And which city are you living in?

I think this is exactly the kind of comment that makes HN decline. Short and clever. But nasty.