Google+ is interesting. I was persuaded to try it by three things: (1) Circles, so I can structure my contacts rather than having an undifferentiated blob of “friends”, (2) I’m fairly confident that Google’s Data Liberation Front won’t let it turn into a jail, and (3) my best geeky friends seem to be joining en masse.
I begin to think Facebook might actually have a fight on its hands. I’m getting the feel of tremendous demand for something that’s full-boat social networking but not Facebook finding an outlet, because it’s not just my geeky friends that are signing up.
This will bear watching.
I’m liking it as well. Circles in particular has a lot of potential, filling the niche currently filled by Yahoo Groups and allowing “business-lite” usage of the service (only post this to people I know at my company), which Facebook seemed to actively discourage. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with further Google products integrations (Docs, Calendar, News, Reader), how fully featured the Android interface becomes, and just how they’ll handle third-party apps. If they screw up anywhere, third-party apps is where it will be.
I utterly detest Facebook’s handling of “Friends” and their lackadaisical attitudes towards data ownership and privacy. Facebook is already blocking users from using utilities to extract their existing contact lists from the service.
It’s funny, but XKCD’s semi-sarcastic take on it was actually spot-on:
[ http://xkcd.org/918/ ]
What is it? It’s not Facebook! What’s it like? Facebook!
A lot of people are looking for a big social network that is NOT Facebook. Google is creating enough attention around this one that they really might have a chance here. I hope so. I really hate Facebook and I hope the constant bleat of all Facebook, all the time, everywhere, finally comes to an end.
What I found particularly clever is that Google took the one thing that Facebook does really badly — namely, separate your contacts into the different groups into which most people organize their lives — and made it the central feature of their data model.
I’m liking it a lot and I really hope there is a mass exodus.
>It’s funny, but XKCD’s semi-sarcastic take on it was actually spot-on:
Yeah, you know he’s on Google+ now, right? I just, er, friended him. Or encircled him, or whatever.
While I am not asking for an invite, I would be pleased to get one from anybody who has spare invites left. Am curious about this and really want to dump Facebook (though I guess this might be impractical as a lot of people are entrenched into its features and games and would be reluctant to change).
>(though I guess this might be impractical as a lot of people are entrenched into its features and games and would be reluctant to change)
I kind of figure that’s a useful filter. The kind of person who can subside into mindless Farmville-ing for hours a day I’d rather stayed on Facebook rather than crapping on Google+’s signal-to-noise ratio.
The friends management system also let’s you follow people that doesn’t follow you, ala Twitter. So it may be both a Twitter and a Facebook killer. You’re now on my circles, Eric! Muhaahaha!
Not that I’m too bothered about it, but it seems to me the notion of circles is equivalent to the Diaspora notion of aspects. Only, perhaps named in a slightly more user-friendly way. Unfortunately I think Diaspora has a lot of the what right, but not very much of the how. Good idea, not so good implementation.
Also, maybe one day I’ll find out why rubyists have thrown away the best i18n toolset known to man (gettext) and require fiddling with yml files for which tool support isn’t half as good.
I must not be well-connected enough. No invites…
FWIW, Facebook has long offered the functionality of Circles. You are not limited to an “unstructured blob of friends”. It’s just that the feature is not front and center, and is a bit clunky. But it’s there.
> I kind of figure that’s a useful filter. The kind of person who can subside into mindless Farmville-ing for hours a day I’d rather stayed on Facebook rather than crapping on Google+’s signal-to-noise ratio.
I agree with this in theory. But since the main focus of a social network is to connect with real-world friends, I think that the popular social sites always manage to capture the not-so-discerning crowd which appears to be in a majority for their success. And I fear that the measure of success in social networking is volume more than quality. I guess one reason why Myspace for example, was so popular in its prime was this.
What I would really love to see if Google+ can change that. One idea would be to allow us to turn off these “extra” features (if any) on a global basis and focus purely on what we need it for.
Hm. Well, apparently I’m not 1337 enough to warrant an invite. :(
Invites appear to be turned off now or I’d be handing out some.
Please put me on your list when they get turned back on. Note that I’ve associated a different email address than usual with this comment; please use that one. My usual one has been down for a while and I haven’t had time to fix it.
The invite button on the main G+ page mysteriously appears and disappears based on whether invites are on or off. It confused me a bit at first — I could have sworn I remembered a button but then couldn’t find it. Greying it out is too straightforward for Google, I guess.
The facebook/twitter hybrid of circling/friending/following takes some getting used to. I’d never try friending esr on Facebook since he doesn’t know me from Adam. I wouldn’t hesitate to follow him on Twitter since that’s what you do. But circling him on G+ took a moment’s hesitation. He doesn’t have to reciprocate so I guess it’s ok but somehow it feels more like friending so it feels odd to do it without his permission.
Maybe that’s just me. I’ll certainly get used to it.
One nice thing is that they are iterating pretty fast and taking lots of suggestions and feedback. It really*is* a beta, not like Gmail allegedly was for so long.
I actually trust Google about as much (that is, little) as Facebook, but they already know who I know from my Google Contacts data (I have an Android phone) so Google+ seems worth a shot.
“Trust” here doesn’t mean that I think they’ll perform some evil corporate magic on my personal information and send me eeevil advertisements, like I think it does with a lot of people – it means I know they’ll roll over in the face of any government requests.
I’m thinking that if Google+ works, and has a decently business appropriate air, that what will actually be crushed is not Facebook but LinkedIn.
And I’m not L33t enough for an invite either.
@SPQR:
True that. I don’t facebook but I do linkin. They are arguably more obnoxious with what they do with your data than facebook, but people tend to give them less personal data.
@r:
That’s the “trusted computing” sense of trust. You’ve already put so many eggs in that basket you have no choice but to trust it and watch them to make sure they don’t abuse the trust too badly.
Access to your Google Contacts data is just an OAuth authorization away for third parties like Facebook. The nice thing about being Google is that they don’t have to go through that extra bit of clicking, but that’s just a setup detail.
In any case, Google+ looks good. It seems like the nerdier people I know are all signing up, and the people who keep trying to get me to install some irritating penguin-related Facebook app are staying away.
I don’t rate either, and that’s mildly surprising…
I don’t rate. But if anyone should toss a spare invite my way I’d, uh, be your “friend” forever.
“Not that I’m too bothered about it, but it seems to me the notion of circles is equivalent to the Diaspora notion of aspects. Only, perhaps named in a slightly more user-friendly way. Unfortunately I think Diaspora has a lot of the what right, but not very much of the how. Good idea, not so good implementation.”
That sums up my immediate impression.
They are entering the social network space with a clean image and a clean design. Those are pretty good things to have going for you.
Jay, invite sent your way to the listed mail address on your personal website. We spoke at Penguicon a couple of years ago by a skeeball machine.
Thanks for the invite, Ken.
Google+ looks nice and sparse and straightforward. I hope it stays that way for a while before I start getting sheep thrown at me.
I’ve never seen an invite button but adding people using email addresses and posting something to the circle they are in sends them an email and if they click on the link in said email it basically works as an invite (at least it did when I last tried a two weeks ago…)
You no longer need an invite, just a gmail address.
Fact: Google+ has 4.5 million users. Will be announced on Monday.
As I get more opportunities to invite people, I’m going to try to bring them over.
The major advantage of G+ right now: NO GAMES!!! No FarmVille, no “So-and-so has answered a question about you!” notifications, no SuperUltraRoyaleWithCheesePokes. In summary: No bullshit.
Of course, Facebook was like that pre-bullshit. Can Google really be counted on to stay committed to servicing the needs of geeks like us with serious information-firehose problems rather than the needs of Facebook’s mass consumers?
r: If Google can retain the good sense to AVOID adding the bullshit…I’ll buy that at a black-market price. So will a lot of other people.
This about sums it up: http://i.imgur.com/xg8I7.jpg
One of Facebooks biggest failings is not recognizing that there are people who speak more than one language. If I post on my wall in English, most of my friends will understand it but some in Germany or Hungary will feel embarassed because they think they are supposed to understand it but they don’t completely do, and might even think I am being snobbish, and if I post in Hungarian or German that is nothing but pure annoying noise to those of my friends who don’t speak these. So if it is easy to put people into differents friends-circles based on their preferred language, and share every post with different people, I am sold – oh, except that I want to put some people into multiple circles (because some are multilingual too) and I am not yet sure I can do that. Probably not yet.
This predicts that you can expect Google+ being the No. 1 Hispanic-American social networking site because people easily share some things in English with one group of their friends and some in Spanish with another group. Expect similar rapid growth in India. This alone could boost its popularity if Google is smart enough to recognize this potential.
>This predicts that you can expect Google+ being the No. 1 Hispanic-American social networking site because people easily share some things in English with one group of their friends and some in Spanish with another group. Expect similar rapid growth in India. This alone could boost its popularity if Google is smart enough to recognize this potential.
Actually Orkut is quite popular in India and was the No.1 social networking site until Facebook fever took over. And Orkut belongs to google too. I wonder if google+ has any plan to merge orkut with their services.
Shenpen:
You absolutely can put people into multiple circles. I have contacts in anywhere from one to five circles. It will be interesting to see if you are right about Google+ and multilingual users.
Thanks for the invites, folks. Now if I could just get one of them to work…
Just tried again, and this time it let me in. Yay! Now to figure out what to do with it.
@David:
I have read some comment that even if Diaspora never would get much market, but if it did inspire other social networks, it would anyway be a success.
@Shenpen
It would be nice if profile was multi-language. Currently you can, from what I remember, make some fields vsisible to only some circles, but AFAIK there is no way to have multiple versions of the same field.
@Brent Michael Krupp
Well, the “acquitances” circle is geared from what I remember from its description towards such one-directional following.
“So if it is easy to put people into differents friends-circles based on their preferred language, and share every post with different people, I am sold – oh, except that I want to put some people into multiple circles (because some are multilingual too) and I am not yet sure I can do that. Probably not yet.”
Maybe they should have called it Venn Circles…;)
I note that a significant chunk of moderately technical people I hang out with – the Baen Barflies and other semi-related F/SF fans/authors – seem to be migrating post haste to G+ from FB. Of course right now we’re on both but I’ve only seen one person who prefers FB and a number of comments saying how much they like circles.
It will be interesting to see whether some other groups I know of generally even less technical folks decide to move or not
Erbo Says:
The major advantage of G+ right now: NO GAMES!!! No FarmVille, no “So-and-so has answered a question about you!” notifications, no SuperUltraRoyaleWithCheesePokes.
I’m certain this will make me popular…
If G+ hangs onto its spartan nature then I fully expect G+/FB to bifurcate along gender lines: men to G+, women to FB.
Shoot the messenger if ya want, but I’ve observed very different patterns of usage on FB among the genders. Men tend to post when they have something to say, women tend to post whether or not they have something to say and are by far the majority users of the above “junk” as noted by Erbo. But Erbo forgot my favorite: those “what movie star are you?” questionnaires.
I told you this would make me popular.
@michael hipp
About gender difference in communication.
It is also called “chatting”. It is often done by people with a social life.
Sticking with informative communications is bad for your social life.
I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t received any invitations to Google+. While the people on this blog don’t know me very well, I have 200+ LinkedIn connections who are at least solid acquaintances if not friends, yet none have generated invites. On the other hand, I don’t do Facebook at all.
This has me suspecting that Google+ is currently drawing more people from Facebook than from LinkedIn. It will be interesting to watch this over time and see how it plays out.
Cathy
@Winter “It is also called “chatting”. It is often done by people with a social life.”
Really? Giving the computer the answer to a question like “Do you think Winter has ever cheated on his wife?” is chatting? By that definition, hiding in the basement playing CoD is having a “social life”.
Sure glad you explained that to me.
If that’s what having a “social life” is about then I think I’ll just stick with having positive interactions with my wife, children and a few dozen close friends and extended family and avoid this whole “social life” think you speak of.
@Michael Hipp: You’re not kidding. My fiancee LOVES a bunch of what I refer to as “those wanky-wank Facebook games,” to such an extent that she’s actually spent real money on them. (Money I GAVE her, in fact, after I got sick of buying her the prepaid cards for all those various games. Now I just put some cash on a Walmart prepaid debit card for her every time I get paid. After I do so, she can choose to spend it however she likes, but, once she spends it, it’s gone and she doesn’t get any more until I get paid again.) She’s part of the reason why Zynga’s financials are so good, as we see from the S-1 they filed for their IPO.
Still, I often lament: “I wish I’D thought of the idea for all those silly games like Farmville. I coulda made a FORTUNE!” :-)
And yeah, I forgot the “what movie star/Harry Potter character/superhero/famous accordion player/whatever are you?” quizzes. Some of those are at least mildly amusing, but others I would gladly consign to the “bullshit” bin.
Winter: By your definition, all the spam I get that Gmail kindly filters out for me could be considered “chatting” and “having a social life.” Thanks, but no thanks.
> This has me suspecting that Google+ is currently drawing more people from Facebook than from LinkedIn. It will be interesting to watch this over time and see how it plays out.
Hardly true. On Plus, your entire Linkedin profile is already loaded, including connections available for sharing (and invites).
Maybe you’re just low on the priority list.
Look at it this way, Eric, as popular as he is, wasn’t high enough in the connection graph to get an invite during the first several days.
>Look at it this way…
It may be of interest, then, that I got an invite on day two. Most of my delay in joining was due to overloaded servers making the registration system unavailable.
@Michael Hipp:
“women tend to post whether or not they have something to say”
@Erbo
“Winter: By your definition, all the spam I get that Gmail kindly filters out for me could be considered “chatting” and “having a social life.””
Definition
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chat
chat (ch [[tfd.com]] t)
intr.v. chat·ted, chat·ting, chats
1. To converse in an easy, familiar manner; talk lightly and casually.
2. Computer Science To participate in a synchronous exchange of remarks with one or more people over a computer network.
And if you have no clue what chatting and small talk are for, here are two introductions. Actually, most of the comments on this blog are little more than small talk and their male counterpart, dick swinging (like this little interlude)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_talk_%28phatic_communication%29
http://www.yelvington.com/value-of-small-talk
And why is Farmville any different from WoW or GTA?
And why is Farmville any different from WoW or GTA?
Blasphemer. Stone him.
Winter Says: “Actually, most of the comments on this blog are little more than small talk”
I thought you said that small talk wasn’t informative. I find many (most?) of the discussions here informative. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.
How exactly is that related to sending FB spam to all your “friends” requesting they give you some extra worm medicine for your Farmville herd?
> It may be of interest, then, that I got an invite on day two.
I knew you’d do this.
They definitely have not opened it to everyone, by the way: it may have been open briefly this morning, but right now, it’s saying they’re full.
@Michael Hipp
“I find many (most?) of the discussions here informative. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
If we ignore that one man’s information is another woman’s noise and vice versa. Then this blog has a high signal-to-noise ratio, sometimes.
But outside of college text-books, we always see a lot of small-talk. “I got an invite”, “I didn’t”, “it was open/closed”, “Kate’s dress was wonderful”, “William looked smart”. What is the difference?
Most blogs are worse. But conversation without small-talk?
fake account said on July 11th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
>> It may be of interest, then, that I got an invite on day two.
> I knew you’d do this.
What? Speak the truth?
The backlash against Android begins. Not that they have a chance in hell:
http://twitpic.com/5olpan
http://twitpic.com/5olpi2
http://twitpic.com/5olpn6
http://twitpic.com/5olpup
Those aren’t my pictures, but they were posted to Twitter, so I think they’re fair game.
Android could be a billion dollar business….
for Microsoft:
http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2011/07/11/android-could-be-a-billion-dollar-business-for-microsoft/
500,000 activations/day x 365 days/year x $10/device
Yup, 1.825 billion dollars per year. As the article says, “Nice work, if you can get it.”
Microsoft really only needs around $5.50/device to make $1,000,000,000 / year in Android licensing revenue, except, of course, Android is growing at a phenomenal rate.
One of my tweeps occasionally tweets out a blurb with a link to his facebook page, which is of the sort that one cannot see without logging into FB. My response has become a bit of a running gag:
No, I will not sign up for Facebook so I can see what you have to say. I will not help out on your farm. I will not join your Mafia family. I will not build an embassy in your City of Wonder. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!
I’m hoping G+ never makes me say something similar.
We want G+ to be free and open to 3rd-party development, because that’s the grooviest way to handle these things. We want the moderators and administrators to be lenient and fair to the user base. And Google presumably wants to encourage widespread adoption.
The result of this is that G+ will have a Farmville port before three months are gone, or it will be rejected as an autocratic playground for The Man (if 3rd-party apps are subject to too much restraint to prevent anything Farmville-like from getting through,) or I’ll eat my hat. One of those three. If the design is inherently better, though, it may be possible to better contain and filter the Farmville cancer. Maybe.
In the meantime, I’m sticking with email and topic-specific message boards.
We want G+ to be free and open to 3rd-party development
I don’t. G+ already integrates beautifully with a free and open application platform. It’s called the internet.
fake account, then you missed the speculation in earlier threads that Microsoft was making far more from patent banditry on Android than selling its own mediocre phone O/S.
@The Monster:
First of all, I concur with the sentiment. I’ll even go one further — I don’t tweet, either. Which makes me even more old and cranky, especially since your purported response seems to violate the one rule I thought I knew about twitter:
me@home:~$ wc < No, I will not sign up for Facebook so I can see what you have to say. I will not help out on your farm. I will not join your Mafia family. I will not build an embassy in your City of Wonder. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!
> foobar
1 48 213
me@home:~$
“If G+ hangs onto its spartan nature” – interestingly, I remember that the main reason people migrated from MySpace to Facebook was that MySpace allowed too much customization and people were generally fed up with green-on-pink, photo-backgrounded, automatically-music-playing profiles and wanted something that’s just simple and elegant. And that was Facebook with their much more limited customization options. Then Facebook lost its spartan nature by opening up the app space and pretty soon everybody was flooded by silly invitations to some vampire game from their less-than-genius friends.
I just got invited and I immediately noticed a potential source of embarrassment using circles: people you know, but you just cannot place into a category you wish to. Or you’ve forgotten how you got to know them in the first place.
@Shenpen: “Then Facebook lost its spartan nature by opening up the app space and pretty soon everybody was flooded by silly invitations to some vampire game from their less-than-genius friends.”
After watching FB spin out of control, I’ve become convinced that the key to long term viability is to completely disallow all apps. Or else hire some Apple-esque control freak to disapprove them all. Heresy, I know.
But how else do you keep G+ from getting facebooked? The above comment by Max E about a port of Farmville made me want to throw up.
@hari:
Isn’t that the use-case for an “Other” circle?
@Ravi/@hari: I don’t really think anyone can tell but you which circles you’ve placed which people in. You just pick the circles based on what you have in common with those people. For example, you could put your geeky friends in a “geeky” circle, your work friends in a “work” circle, etc. People can also be in more than one circle. So if you have a circle called “hackers” and you happen to work with one, you could put your hacker friend in both circles.
> People can also be in more than one circle.
Or fewer than one circle. Like me.
“Android is the Linux desktop dream come true”
http://derstandard.at/1308186313932/Interview-Google-Android-is-the-Linux-desktop-dream-come-true?linux
…. At $15/unit to Microsoft.
fake account, you keep repeating the same thing. What point are you trying to make?
@Patrick
Not every response includes all of the elements, and sometimes part of the gag is splitting it into multiple tweets, especially the last line.
fake account,
> …. At $15/unit to Microsoft.
Nah. At well below that price it’s much cheaper to contest / work around the patents. I doubt they will get even $2 a unit, all told.
Yours,
Tom
That Linux and Android infringe on Microsoft’s intellectual property, and hence are not as open as is claimed, perhaps?
Why am I supposed to dislike Android because (if true) Google makes money from insurance companies by providing a way for interested customers to contact them (via ad clicks)?
The logic there (in one of the stupid pictures Fake Account linked to) is boggling.
I can only infer that it’s the standard Leftist* disgust with someone making money; at least, that’s the nearest thing in my experience that fits.
(I’ve seen it many a time – someone getting angry about some activity X, not because they claim anything is wrong with X, but because X happens to also be profitable for some party.)
(* This is one of the few political tropes that seems limited to one side, at least in America. Perhaps in other parts of the world, the local “Right” also has a reflexive distrust of profit, at least sometimes?)
Back on the G+ topic – we’ve observed that “apps” are both profitable and enthusiastically welcomed by a set of users that will pay money.
Thus the issue is, how’s Google monetizing G+? Because it’s not free to run, and Google isn’t in this business to not make money.
(Me, I don’t mind “apps”. I like playing some Scrabble, for instance. It’s a social activity, on a social website. As long as they’re easily blocked so I don’t have to see endless blather about ones I don’t care about, I have no issues.)
Sigivald Says: “As long as they’re easily blocked so I don’t have to see endless blather about ones I don’t care about, I have no issues.”
Therein lies the problem. Facebook makes that nearly impossible, as best I can tell.
fake account Says: “At $15/unit to Microsoft.”
I’ll take that over $500 to Apple any day.
Keep tryin’, fake. You’re free entertainment.
Some interesting tidbits:
Most Googler laptops, and a significant (and probably growing) number of desktops are Macs. Elsewhere the Macintosh is comfortably entrenched as the hacker’s Unix workstation of choice, and it’s even getting there at Google, the Linux stronghold to end all Linux strongholds.
Eric’s idea of the GPL becoming obsolete has a ring of truth to it: the (L)GPL used to dominate open source licenses; but most of the stuff on Google Code is Apache or BSD, with GPL a close third.
Well, Jeff, maybe that’s fake account’s point … but I am unable to discern it. Of course, that Microsoft has some dubious patents that it uses to extort money is an indictment of our patent system, not Open Source software. As for licenses, the problem is that FSF overreached a bit much and a bit too quickly with the most recent GPL version. It is increasing resistence to its adoption in open source projects with significant corporate support.
Finally got a google+ invite.
From my daughter.
God I’m getting old.
We’ll never let you forget that, Patrick. You should not have admitted it.
> We’ll never let you forget that, Patrick. You should not have admitted it.
He argues too carefully to be young.
Yours,
Tom
>> We’ll never let you forget that, Patrick. You should not have admitted it.
>He argues too carefully to be young.
However, blurting out his decreptitude will give marvelous opportunities for pointed side remarks for *months* to come.
> However, blurting out his decreptitude will give marvelous opportunities for pointed side remarks for *months* to come.
I would hope it would be years, but you’re probably right (sigh).
OK, I got on it (under my real name) to see what’s the thrill.
I suppose it’s bad form to beg for an invite … But still, if anyone has one to spare …
@Jeff Read
Just because they use Apple hardware doesn’t mean they use OS-X …
“Close to half of Google’s 20,000 employees use a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, playfully called Goobuntu.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html?_r=2&th&emc=th
@ravi @Morgan Greywolf: I figured out now that it doesn’t show which circle you’ve been put in by other people.
@Sigivald: Thus the issue is, how’s Google monetizing G+? Because it’s not free to run, and Google isn’t in this business to not make money.
The same way Google makes all of the rest of it’s money: advertising. The amusing thing is that, unlike Facebook, Google doesn’t even necessarily need to sell ad space on Google-plus in order for it to be profitable. They could use the same model as they do with GMail, where they mine the content of the mails sent in order to better target the ads they sell in other places. In fact, I’d be very surprised if they do eventually sell space on Google+. It would be fairly out-of-character for them.
I’m joining this discussion a bit late. Yeah, Google+ seems like a centralized, cleaner version of Diaspora.
But now I’m curious. How important is it to people here that they have complete control over their data, to the point of hosting it themselves? Is it enough that you can download it easily whenever you want?
I know one of the main benefits Diaspora seemed to have going for it (for me, at least) was that you could host it yourself, like WordPress. Is that actually a big plus for most people here?
@Tom Forest
Sadly it’s not longer true: Goobuntu had Mac support in the past but no more.
Number of Mac desktops is actually pretty small among engineers, but in marketing department they are used almost exclusively.