Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+ | Hacker News Reader

Google Reveals Its Stealth Social Project, Google+

mashable.com

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This is exciting and all -- and much as I would love to see a serious competitor to Facebook, I still don't know how I would convince any of my non-techie friends that they should switch to this.

Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests. Although it looks like a big discussion group, the news feed is really a giant personality-defining display for vain people. I saw a programmer friend post annoyance over some Android API today and I suspect that this was more than just a spontaneous exclamation -- he was communicating that he is smart (to non-techies) and that he is "cutting edge" (to fellow programmers).

Privacy? I have the feeling that most really don't care very much. But ironically, I think the privacy-thing could actually work in facebook's favor. Here is why: I use fb a lot even though I don't like their privacy policies. I trust google more than facebook. Still, it bothers me when it says "logged in" in the google bar at the top because google watches my searches. When I am on facebook I behave like I am in public. I don't hope for the best and write secret stuff anywhere. But with all the google searches I make through a day, I am giving google a lot of very personal information that I would not like anyone to see. I would hate to see something that I was searching for somehow show up in a stream for my friends to see because I accidentally clicked a +1 button or similar.

Finally, there is the fact that even if I can export my graph from fb to g+, it's worthless until my friends do the same. And I just don't see that happening before they come up with some truly ground breaking feature that will allow me to get laid with any friend I choose by clicking on their picture :-)

If Google has enough money to develop self driving cars, there has to be some for the development of remote seduction.

Yeah, but who wants to seduce a car?

i just got an invite and am instantly bored. i already have a news feed, i already have a way to share pictures, i already have a place to share links and i already have a way to chat with friends.

on the + side (hah! get it??), the ui looks nice, so hopefully this means google with start paying more attention to the look and feel of their applications.

I distrust Facebook so much that I dont have a news feed, I dont have a way to share my pictures (because who wants to share 1024x768 resolution pictures with their friends? ffs why do I then have a 15mp camera?) and I have skype to chat with friends.

Google+ is refreshing, it shows social networking can be better.

as a camera buff, why dont you just use flickr?

also, if you distrust facebook, what makes you trust google? they've had plenty of privacy issues in the past in regards to social networking (buzz, etc).

Google+ launched an hour ago in private beta, isn't it a bit early to call it refreshing and better? :)

I use Flickr, but none of my friends who aren't photographers do... so when I update my stream nobody sees it (unless I use a Flickr-Facebook bridge app, which is clunky and doesn't plug in nicely).

There's a lot to be said for having your content pushed to your network in a way that's easy to use.

In fact, Buzz's integration of "external feeds" is much better done than FB. I'd hope this applies to Google+ also.

Its refreshing with competition, perhaps even on the privacy parts different actors could make each other respect their users more.

I dont like the UI of flickr (cant even use it, and Im a comp-sci major) and it doesnt integrate well with Facebook (tagging), where most of my friends are, sadly. I guess flickr might have improved since I last gave it a chance, but still something doesnt feel good about it. The same for picasa.

Yea I dislike Picasa as well. I was disapointed to see Google+ integrating with it. Although there really isn't an alternative...

Couldnt agree more with you. Perhaps this is the thing for us non facebook users to use amongst ourselves :)

There are certainly many people who avoid or hate facebook.

All Google needs is a beachhead, right? For Facebook it was Harvard and then Ivy League schools. Perhaps for Google their beachhead is the Anti-Facebook people.

Once it grows a bit, people start writing apps that abstract FB and G+. Think: iPhone app with a Newsfeed feature that just seamlessly merges your FB and G+ feed.

The existence of apps like that will make it trivial for people to have a G+ profile in addition to -- even if never instead of -- their Facebook account. And then it's up to Google to grow more and more mindshare.

Maybe it'll always be an also-ran. A Facebook lil brother. But I wouldn't just write it off. We've seen this story before.

> because who wants to share 1024x768 resolution pictures with their friends? ffs why do I then have a 15mp camera?

Hundreds of millions of people, apparently. Anyway, you can download the high res image nowadays via the link below the picture.

I too noticed that people don't seem to care about their picture resolutions, or perhaps they just do not know about it, they dont see resolutions. The hundreds of millions see pictures.

Hm...what's wrong with sharing 1024x768 resolution pictures with friends?

any words on how you got that invite? is there some place one can sign up?

Ah, when using a vpn, plus.google.com offers a "give us your email here" field... didn't on my cell a few hours ago

I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about the wall being a place for vanity. But it's still a self-censored place for vanity. I guess the question is whether people will go to Google+ to tell that dirty joke they don't want to say in front of their aunt, if they'll just not say it, or if they'll say it anyways, on Facebook.

Hangouts is going to drive adoption. It's chat roulette without the roulette.

or tinychat

Actually it's just Stickam. One that encourages you to be a leet idler.

I think it would be a good practice to decouple it from google accounts - I think most people see a distinction between gmail and twitter/facebook . Most won't lose crucial information if their facebook account is stolen, in contrast to gmail. I for one don't want the two accounts to be detectably connected. Gmail=serious/work stuff, Social=fun

Also, the one thing i that could hamper its adoption is that google tends to make its products overly complicated ("for the computer-literate, not soccer moms")

I don't think the news feed/wall is a place for vanity. It really depends on the user. Your example of the guy trying to look smart+cutting edge makes sense. For me though, I like to keep my Facebook free of tech/coding stuff even though that is a large part of my life. It has no relevance to my Facebook friends so it should not be there. I put that type of stuff on twitter, and on twitter I do not follow people who I am Facebook friends with (and do not allow them to follow me).

In other words my entire online life is compartmentalized. It makes sense for me to do this even though it can be tedious. Circles would make this a lot easier by the looks of things, giving me one place to post everything, simply choosing who sees what content.

Getting people to use Google+ when they already use Facebook and/or Twitter though is Google's biggest challenge.

Personally, I've got about half a dozen interests that I only want to share with people who find it relevant or interesting, like your example about tech/coding stuff. I don't share that either but I would if I could better control who it goes out to. This feature sounds great to me.

That's exactly what I was getting at. And I think most people are in similar situations. But Google+ and Circles will only work right if all your friends use it. Otherwise it'll be just another network to update with specific content.

They've got an answer for that: you can add someone who doesn't have an account to a circle, and they'll get your message in email.

Still, it bothers me when it says "logged in" in the google bar at the top because google watches my searches. When I am on facebook I behave like I am in public. I don't hope for the best and write secret stuff anywhere. But with all the google searches I make through a day, I am giving google a lot of very personal information that I would not like anyone to see. I would hate to see something that I was searching for somehow show up in a stream for my friends to see because I accidentally clicked a +1 button or similar.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I think Google+ looks pretty neat. It's more along the lines of what I am looking for in a social network than Facebook is. But I do not plan to use it for the exact reasons you mentioned.

My searches are private. Anything I do on a social network is public. I do not want the two of them mingling. I don't want the possibility of an accident. I don't want a single entity to "own" my search and social data.

I really wish someone else had created this.

The solution is simple: move away from using Google for searches. There are alternatives like Bing, Yahoo and Duck Duck Go.

Don't Yahoo and DDG use Bing for their search results? If so, Bing is the only alternative on your list.

Hm, looks like Alta-Vista is still around...

The results come via a rebranded Yahoo! search, which itself consists of rebranded Bing results.

I believe DDG uses a variety of sources for results, including but not limited to Bing.

I'd add https://ixquick.com to the list.

Also, using a search engine directly is not the same thing as using it through one of these intermediaries (especially while logged in).

Or if you like Google's service, as I do, but care about your privacy, as I do, you can use Scroogle: http://www.scroogle.org/

It's a secure (SSL), anonymous (no cookies), ad-free Google interface. You can make it the default in your search bar in any browser either by hand or through an extension. Note that the results are much more minimal (no links to similar articles, cached versions, etc.), which you may prefer, as I do, or not.

or just use Facebook.

"I really wish someone else had created this."

You mean like any number of startup social networks each year that fail because they can't get the traction which Google is more likely to? It's sad, but that's the way it is - there are innovative and good social networking sites out there, but without the backing that a Google product has they keep failing.

>I really wish someone else had created this.

I'm with you. If anyone but Google had made this I would be ecstatic. Heck, even MS.

Google is in no way targeting people who are happy with Facebook. Neither do they need to compete with Facebook. They are enhancing their existing products very intelligently across the board. Mass adoption isn't necessary, that will come over time with people using more heavily integrated Google software. Eventually they'll get everyone, via mobile / Google Mail / Google Docs / Google Search or some other venue. Facebook is in no danger _right now_. But long-term they have no chance.

It's too early in the morning for this kind of doom and gloom.

I think the whole thing is more about finding new stuff. New people, new interests. So you don't have to convince your non-techie friends.

Everybody reading you posts is like nobody, or at least nobody new. You have to get it to them somehow and here it won't happen just because you have a cool profile picture.

Your searches? It won't show up in your feed, it will only count in your interest. Deeply hidden, like it is already. Google seems to be good at this.

They are targeted so right on the spot, where the whole social discovery-networking can get better, that I think it could fly without everybody exporting and etc..

Maybe it could get everybody laid, as it won't be starving on your current friends of friends network. :)

First start by telling them they don't have to switch. There's no reason one can't use both. Facebook would never have gotten past Myspace if users had to switch.

on a side note, the mobile app is live in android market. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.app...

"Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests."

I totally disagree with that. Facebook sorely lacks such a feature, and the lack of it has led to "spammy" messages from so called "friends" you barely even know, or care about in your list.

Google+ seems to solve a lot of issues with Facebook. And I think even non-techies can be relatively easy convinced to use it once they see how it works. Basically, Google+ looks like a huge leap over Facebook because of all those neat products tied together. People will switch from anything as long as there is a big leap in benefits, and I think Google+ offers that.

Don't you just hide friends with consistently boring messages? I do, and people I know do. It's a big stick, compared to some more subtle faceting, but it mostly works fine, while putting some pressure on the reader to accept a certain amount of tedium in those people I still want to listen to. There's also event spam, but that one category you can filter out separately (i.e., "ignore events from person X").

Facebook already has a conceprt of groups. I frequently share my updates/pictures with only to select set of groups. It's just that it is a bit hard to use it. Nothing that facebook can't fix. Don't know what is so great about this.

The problem is that friend groups in Facebook are an afterthought at best and horrifically broken at times. To the point that they're nearly useless. I've had multiple instances of Facebook deciding to ignore my default post settings for a type of post or album, posting it wide open when it should have been restricted to a certain friend group (mobile apps are especially bad about this, IME).

Things I want to share with friends of family may not be things I want coworkers seeing. I don't want to share photos of drunken antics with bar friends with my grandparents. I don't want updates about a sick relative to become office gossip.

Yes, the feature sort of exists in Facebook to kind of get this functionality, but there is a massive appeal in a network that treats the idea that not all acquaintances are equal as a core concept. And because it's a central value of the network, I have a lot more faith that it should actually work than the Facebook model, which has already failed me plenty of times in the past.

The problem with FB groups is that both you and the friends that you want to share the link/photo/message with have to agree to be part of that group. I usually put my friends in multiple groups/circles, i.e. they could be a work colleague but also a eating out enthusiast. This multiple categorization can easily get messy and definitely doesn't scale to hundreds of friends.

Hopefully, with Google+ Circles my private categorization of my friends is not shared with them. They should only see what I share.

It's actually called list. Groups in FB is something different. Try creating a friend list and then you can share it with only that list.

You can't share with lists alone. Facebook sharing options are friends, friends and networks, Friends and their friends and so on. Or you have to add each friend individually. It's just weird how lists are pretty much useless in facebook.

Sure you can. In the status update thing, click the padlock and choose "Customize" and then "Specific people", and you can enter lists of friendlists.

(Granted, it's not very discoverable)

Yep, my default sharing option is "Friends Only; Except: Work"

Only bummer is that you can't do fancy options like that with the Facebook iPhone app. You can only do your default, the normal options like Friends Only, or specific groups.

Although the feature is not as advanced as circles, you can make wall posts on Facebook visible to only certain groups of friends. Google+ forces you to pick a circle (or everyone), rather than just defaulting to everyone.

I think Facebook's biggest failure is that they've never educated people on how to use Facebook well, and honestly, they have likely inadvertently encouraged bad practices with their emphasis on growth.

For example, why do you have friends on FB you barely know in reality? You should only have your genuine friends on Facebook. This simple rule solves the "annoying status update from someone I don't care about" problem, which is the most frequent complaint I hear about Facebook. I actively delete people a few times a year who I don't expect to see again.

I instantly dismiss people who complain about this as morons. Why add people you don't know and _then_ complain about it?

If you only add your actual friends, Facebook is a pretty good experience. It's not perfect, you still have a to block a few apps, but once done it's not a bad place.

If you are in the high school - college - internships - jobs life stage that lots of Facebook users are in, you have a high friend turnover rate. You meet lots of people who you want to add on Facebook, then later maybe you want to keep them around so you can see what they're up to but don't want their posts mixed in with posts from your current close friends. And there's a thousand variations and stages in between.

Well I respectfully disagree. I don't think it's too hard to figure out if someone is really a friend or just someone you've met a few times. And if add them just to "see what they're up to" then sure, you're going to get noise.

I also think if you're adding people to your Facebook that have anything to do with your employment you're insane.

But maybe it is because I am 30+ that these distinctions to me seem very clear.

"If you are in the high school - college - internships - jobs life stage"

Read: Not you.

The whole problem is that the word "friend" has about a hundred shades of meaning in life, work, and love. Facebook's biggest problem -- perhaps their only problem -- is that they refuse to acknowledge that fact.

Indeed. If you don't use Facebook (and I was one of the last hold-outs in my social group), the "friend" terminology will lead you to believe that the people you attach to are actually friends, of which you can only have about 20 real ones. Then you hear that people have 120+ on average, and you think the whole world has gone mad. Facebook friends are, as a whole, just people who have meant something to you at some point in your life.

Twitter was better about this, in that following someone is a one-way connection, not a two-way one. Google+ lets you have it both ways: putting someone in your circle means you'll see their public posts (Twitter), if that person puts you in their circles, you'll see their private ones (Facebook).

so, you regularly reject the friend requests of people you've recently met and/or people who you see from time to time but who you do not consider one of your BFFs?

I do, yes. I email or message the person to tell them this and why. A few people find it strange, most aren't bothered.

It would seem I am majorly in the minority in how I use Facebook. I figured fellow hackers would be similar, but it apperas not.

They used to strongly discourage adding non-friends.

I remember when adding people you had to enter something for "How did you meet this person?" and if you checked "I don't know them", it would close the box and say "Well why are you adding them?"

That sort of thing goes out when advertising and paying for games and such via the system come in. People having many connections means that if someone lets you app in or "likes" the page directed to by your ad then you get a change to advertise to all those people on that one person's list of contacts. This is attractive to the advertisers, and makes paying money to facebook a better value proposition.

Facebook want you to be connected to as many people as possible because this network of connections is essentially what they sell. Just like Google, with facebook you are the product that is sold to the advertisers (the difference being that currently with facebook your friends are the product too, though that difference is set to vanish if Google can get the social thing right enough to attract a critical mass of users).

"Facebook want you to be connected to as many people as possible because this network of connections is essentially what they sell."

I agree, but I also think that eventually, this devalues Facebook.

It's like you had this party with all your friends, and then all your coworkers and former classmates and people you met at conferences and people who share your interest in banjo music all showed up too.

And eventually, it wasn't a party anymore; it was just a random collection of people. And you started thinking, "wouldn't it be nice if I had a place for just me and my friends?"

> And eventually, it wasn't a party anymore; it was just a random collection of people. And you started thinking, "wouldn't it be nice if I had a place for just me and my friends?"

Aye, I think that is what Google is going for. They might be early to the game though: have enough people got to that stage that FB will see a large number trying Google's offering just for that reason?

It's a failure in interface design and there's no reason to innovate the interface because it strikes at the core of their revenue stream which is all about hyper connectedness when the real value is in the type of the relationships.

It reminds me of search engines proclaiming "2,800,000 results returned". Really? Most searchers never go beyond the first couple pages in the query result set. Who cares? Likewise, other than playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, who wants to see all these tertiary relationships that mean nothing?

Google does have powerful friend grouping features, and you can hide your information/posts/photos/etc from any category of friends you want. You can hide them from specific friends, and you can hide individual items in the same way. And the news feed can be filtered easily as well (although without as much fine grained control as content you produce).

Overall, I think that Facebook needs to do a better job of educating its users about these features, and make them more prominent, but I find these features are certainly quite adequate.

>Still, it bothers me when it says "logged in" in the google bar at the top because google watches my searches.

well G watches your searches anyway, even tunes the search results to your search history, as its cookie dependend, not log in dependend. see http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...

I find I feel a sort of stage fright at the thought of posting something for my 800 facebook 'friends' to read.

Why not group your friends, and restrict your posts by default to people you actually care about? The rest won't be aware they are even being filtered.

That's essentially what Google+ does. Twitter isn't designed for posting to different audiences, and Facebook won't let me show certain posts of my wall to certain people but not others.

Facebook does allow you to do that. It takes a bit of work to filter people out individually or put them in groups, or "circles" if you like. For example, some of my friends are excluded from all my facebook posts as a group by default. I include them only when I want to.

I think Google+'s problem might be that it takes too much work to curate circles. Most people might just settle for Facebook because you don't have to think!

If it makes you feel better, most of them surely have their wall set to only show the friends they interact with, and not all friends.

You make a really good point about the fear / miss-conception people will have about having search tied to their profile.

I really hope Google realizes that and draws a big fat line between searches and social profiles, and then makes it really apparent to their users.

Making people think they're sharing their everyday searches with their social circle is enough to completely kill this before it even gets started.

I really don't think this will be an issue. Think of how often you browse Facebook just looking at people and reading info. This is not information I would like to have public any more than I'd like people knowing about what I search for.

People won't give this a second thought, and hopefully Google will do a good job in keeping the concepts clearly separated.

Facebook browsing habits don't even come close to the level of personal that google searches do. Even hardcore facebook stalker behaviour pales in comparison to some of the questions people ask google.

Anyways, I don't think it's necessarily something people will be alarmed about, I just think it's something that should be made extremely clear because on the off chance people do start to worry, and how fast FUD can travel. It really could kill what looks like a great platform it that happened.

Yeah, google sucks at marketing. It looks like "circles", "hangouts" and "plus" are all kitchy code-words that the engineers thought up.

They have no "Unique Value Proposition".

Their value proposition is - don't let your mum see what your college roommate tags you in.

"Still, it bothers me when it says "logged in" in the google bar at the top because google watches my searches."

I think Facebook does the same - or at least attempts to, through the use of cookies (via embedded apps, and the Facebook comment system).

I think it's about time Facebook had some serious competition - and I'm hoping that Google+ could provide a good alternative.

In relation to the Myspace, Facebook provided an iterative progression. Since its introduction, social networking has obviously become so much more important. I think it's far more difficult for Facebook to iteratively change the paradigm its developed because its users aren't used to change. User re-education is difficult.

From what I've read, Google+ is going to offer some valuable features missing from Facebook. The circle idea appeals a lot - and I like the sense that the platform seems to be geared as one tool in a suite of social utilities, rather than an all encompassing monolith.

"Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests [..]"

I don't agree - some people might want everyone to read their posts, but I think that's a small subset of the general population.

Re. your example; on the flip-side, I think an awful lot of the non-techies will quickly get bored of hearing about about Android API woes. Circles will provide them with a way to choose, and choice is something which is almost universally lauded.

From plus.google.com:

> Google+ is in limited Field Trial Right now, we're testing with a small number of people, but it won't be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we'll make sure you're the first to know when we're ready to invite more people.

WHY?! WHY are they doing this again? They did this with Wave. Google, you cannot launch a social network while explicitly disallowing social networking! This is so frustrating.

Worst part is their sign-up page has gone MIA - 404

It's back up: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/

gogogo !

gives a 500 error

It also gives an insecure script warning in the latest version of Chrome unstable, which made me laugh since I just started seeing those today.

Write only your first name on the "First name" field.

I don't know if this is the bug, but after trying three times with my full name, when I did this the 500 went away.

In fairness, Facebook did the same thing.

Not all 'private invites' are created equal. Facebook isolated it to a single campus at a time. This meant all your friends were on Facebook, or none of them were. See the difference?

Not really. Facebook opened it up to entire colleges at a time. So once you were able to get on, most of your friends were able to, too.

I bet those inside Google+ at this early stage can invite others in as well.

There's a very big difference between A) being the only person in, with the ability to invite any of your friends in and B) everyone else already being in. Even if you could invite all your friends in, the only motivation for them to accept and actually join is you (not an entire network yet, until they all accept) which is never going to be enough motivation.

Currently those inside + at the moment cannot invite others. It will probably change soon, but I think the initial rollouts are still going on, so for the time being I cannot invite others.

Out of curiosity, do you know or have a hypothesis for why you were invited? It seems like there are a decent number of people here who have been invited, but many who have not, with a similar trend for #googleplus on twitter, and I've yet to discern a sensible pattern.

Friends of Google employees? That's how I got my invite...

My friend is a summer intern at Google (this year and last). He got myself and our entire Wave "crew" invited.

What was FB's initial college roll out? Tens of thousands of users? I suspect Google would have several times that many in the few minutes of a full roll out.

Well, Harvard's UG enrollment is about 7k.

FB's initial roll out was to people in the same (real life) social circles. You can't do social networking with a bunch of random people across the world.

This hits a nail on the head. Facebook knew the primary target for it's initial growth. Who is Google+ targeting first for early adoption?

Google does so many things for many different people. Opening it up to the world outright is technically dangerous, but Facebook had a very natural progression for rolling out because they had identified and located their market. Google isn't so lucky. + is designed at the Facebook user base, but isnt considering the history or the trajectory of Facebook users.

I'd imagine the only reason google cares about social at all is because it is a significant source of revenue in an industry they want to own (advertising).

All that said I'm going to set up an account when it's my turn.

They really didn't. Facebook had a small target audience originally. You also had to know somebody to get it. Rather than having a closed beta, they were building scarcity and exclusivity at the beginning.

The exclusivity was also emphasized by everyone knowing it had come out of Harvard at the very beginning, which had and has a social cachet that Google Plus won't.

No. Facebook created a collection of small social networks centered around existing real-world communities, then finally linked up all of those small social networks into a single, larger social network. This allowed them to reach saturation on a campus-by-campus basis, until they had finally progressed far enough to reach a tipping point in society at large.

But you can't make the same development with Google's demographic. People you know with a Google account are disparate - friends, online colleagues, family? Filtering down through the geeky to the end user makes sense for them I think.

Maybe Google will be smart enough to let people through in groups that they believe to be socially linked by their online exhaust. They've got a decent sense of these things already.

Otherwise, it's really not the same thing at all.

They're hoping to do the same thing they did with Gmail: use artificial scarcity to their advantage.

It'll work if the people there get invites - that way it'll gradually expand until it opens up to everybody.

It's more natural with an email client, though, because email is already federated, so interoperable with the existing email system. This doesn't appear to be.

> Oops... you need a Google Profile to use this feature. Google Profiles is not available for your organisation.

Come on, Google!

According to Chris Chabot (Developer Advocate at Google), "We're only just starting down the road of the Google+ project, but we love our Google Apps users so please stay tuned"

[from comments on http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus/]

Yeah, this is really annoying. My invite is stuck in limbo right now because it's tied to my Google Apps email address, which won't work with Google+.

Google recently forced users to make their Profiles public, and announced that it was going to delete private Profiles. If Google+ requires a Profile, then count me out.

yep. as we have buzz in several month http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-com... :)

I found a workaround to bypass this error message: open anybody's profile and "switch accounts" from there. Details at http://codebistro.com/2011/07/09/google-oops-you-need-google...

I think Google simply sucks at anything remotely related to social networking.

Me too, maybe they'll be saved by the "hangouts" and photos features?

I use email to network socially. gMail is a pretty good email client.

> WHY?! WHY are they doing this again?

Maybe they want to work out the kinks before having 10 million users instantly. The privacy aspect of this will be very important, and the Buzz launch is an example of how opening up to everyone at the same time led to a large backlash.

Google Buzz is a good example of how forcing an active account on everyone at the same time led to a large backlash.

There's a pretty wide gulf between opening up and forcing it on people. You can't build a social networking sites if it isn't open to people in your users' social networks. But you also can't build a site people trust and want to use by forcing it on them.

Curiously, I've heard that FaceBook also started by forcing an account on everyone - Zuckerburg scraped the online student database so that everyone at Harvard automatically had a FaceBook account. (Or rather, he scraped it for FaceMash and then used the data again to start FaceBook.)

You can get away with a lot more when you're a college student project than when you're a multi-billion-$ corporation.

It is different. Buzz was forced on to anyone who logged into Gmail.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register...

It does not seem like the Facemash data was reused for thefacebook.

Still I am curious, what circles would I get based on all the data google has ever collected from me.

As far as I can tell, none. See here: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...

Page 6, specifically: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...

Yet again I'll be in a situation where I (potentially, hopefully) get invited but everyone else I know won't be, so I won't be able to use it. I think having this be invite only, especially where _Google_ is the entity doing the invites is a recipe for disaster.

Now, if they make it so that invited users can invite a good amount of other users (say, 100), then I think they _may_ be able to salvage this. If not, I'm not predicting a good outcome.

Exactly. This is the same mistake they made with Wave, and it turned out horribly.

I actually enjoyed the idea/concept of Wave, but I never had any reason to login and actually use it since I only had one other person I knew with an account. The same will happen to Google+.

This. The product description is extremely appealing to me - it tackles exactly what I find to be most wrong with current social network software. If I could, I would begin using it immediately and would probably get 60-80 people in my network to do the same and try it with me.

If this product gets any traction, it seems like a near certainty that Facebook will launch a "Circles" UI for their groups feature, very quickly, no?

I understand why Google is taking it slow, but if the idea sounds like old news by the time Google lets me invite people, I suspect they're going to seriously compromise their odds of user adoption.

A product's launch (which this is, effectively) seems like a poor time to be coy about who you want to actually have access to said product.

I totally agree. Wave died partially because when I got it, my friends didn't have it. And by the time the last of them got it, the rest of us didn't care any more.

Had we been able to all get on at once, we might have found a killer app for it and never given it up.

Wave died because no one (not even developers) understood what it is or what applications could it have outside of mail.

Wave was great for project management. It was project management without the rigid structure.

I am still hoping for something like wave to do organized work.

I think there was an open-sourcing of the code behind Wave.

Yup, it's in the Apache incubator.

Or the use case centered around friends when really it seemed more suitable for a business network.

This sentence is baffling to me. Do you not know what Wave does? Really? Or do you NEED a marketing person to tell you how to use a product?

I'm guessing he needs a product to be intuitive enough that he doesn't need a marketing person to tell him how to use it. Wave was pretty far from that.

My ex-Googler friend and I (both of us developers) excitedly started using Wave together, but soon gave up. It was neat, but we couldn't think of anything we needed it for. So this isn't a matter of ignorance.

I was, however, happy to see that some of the cool parts, like simultaneous realtime editing, made their way into Google Docs.

Worked great for me as a substitute for setting up a forum. It was a lot easier to just make a wave and invite other people on google to discuss things.

That's exactly what happened with Wave for me as well, but I wonder if the same will happen to Google+? I didn't really see a use for Google Wave... it was just so awkward...

From the blog post:

That’s the Google+ project so far: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and mobile. We’re beginning in Field Trial, so you may find some rough edges, and the project is by invitation only

It worked pretty well for Gmail.

Your friends didn't need Gmail for you to be able to use it. But they did need Wave. And they do need +. There's a big difference between open protocols and closed systems.

I also wouldn't be surprised if its launch as an invite-only beta release was in part because of it pioneered large email storage.

It appears that you can interact with non-Google+-enabled accounts to a limited extent; they receive your posts as emails.

That might be the point that lets Google+ succeed: you can sign up and interact with your friends immediately, and then when they join Google+, you get to do more.

It will definitely help with the "I have an account but nobody else does" phenomenon.

Gmail concept won't work for plus as what is a social network without a network. If they have load issues they should start with influencers (like they did) and then keep letting them invite their friends. Then their friends can invite their friends and let it grow from the seed. It is wacky that my friends have to get an email update rather than experience the network with me.

Uh, what was GMail then?

When it first came out, the chosen few got invites, and they invited friends. Rinse, repeat.

Don't you think it's kinda silly to think these "build hype" signup processes kill products?

Github did the same in fact they recommend people to do it, and they're very successful.

I agree it's a little frustrating but it's the kind of frustration that makes you go back when the site is open for signups and signup. Nothing bad... Google Wave might just be an exception of this technique and people didn't use it because of the complexity of the product not because it made them wait to get an invite.

For me, it's the kind of frustration that makes me go, "Eh, I feel like I've looked at that before and it annoyed me, though I don't remember why. Probably not worth my time."

The social in Github's "Social Coding" is just icing on cake. Their core product is git hosting. People pay them to have private repos. This is not the case with G+

Wave failed exactly because both of its complexity and its artificial scarcity Google created.

The slow release of Gmail accounts was an example of a great hype-building process. OTOH the product was groundbreaking (they offered a huge amount of storage compared to competitors), and it isn't 2004 anymore.

Well: when I entered my name & email in the form provided, it got a 500 internal server error. When G's servers are overloaded, you know there's ginormous demand. And you know there're bugs still - they don't even call it beta! it's limited Field Trial. This is the way they rolled out GMail, which seems to be doing ok.

Hint to Google: If your servers are overloaded, "Please go back and try again" is a really dumb thing to ask people to do on your 500 error page!

They have a kind of loose definition of what they call beta. Consider how long GMail was in "beta" when in reality it was pretty much a finished project.

It's true that the invite system worked for gmail, but it's a bit different because gmail still has fundamental value if you are on it and literally none of your friends are.

The only way to get away with this is to provide massive value for those users when nobody else is around. If a social network only becomes valuable when many others are present, then yes, it will most likely fail.

"Google, you cannot launch a social network while explicitly disallowing social networking".

It worked for Facebook.

Facebook's method was different. Though, they launched to limited users at once and expanded, but it was launched to a linked group/college at once. So, they already had people they knew on Facebook.

That is a problem. What is the use of the photo sharing, Hangout is there is no one else to share it with.

If Google did not want to launch it to everyone at once, they should have probably gone geographically!

I am curious what price would an invite hit on ebay.

Facebook sort of did that too, by allowing only college kids at first. I think it's the right idea. It only became stupid with Wave when they started giving out millions and millions of "invites". At that point they should've simply made it public.

But really, Wave was a fundamentally flawed project for multiple reasons: bad market fit, clumsy/complex UI, bad marketing, etc. I had a bad gut feeling about it since I saw the demo (which took 1 hour! That should've been a sign)

Google+ looks very exciting and it seems like they've addressed many issues social networks have had through out the years, including Facebook. The lack of a Circles like feature was a design flaw of all social networks so far, and I believe it led them to ultimately become irrelevant because of the sheer number of people that became your "friends" on those social networks, which ended up spamming you. Circles seems to fix this, and the other Google+ products looks awesome, too.

Maybe the invites they release will specifically be to people who signed up with gmail accounts that have a significant number of contacts who also signed up. That's what I'd do: do your small scale test, but make it as meaningful as possible with highly connected beta testers.

It's just an infrastructure problem. Hardware scaling is hard to get right. So it's easier for the engineers to have it released by small increments. This way you can slowly adjust hardware as the need arises. If any problems show up, it will be easier to track it down and fix it.

(cross posted from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2706219)

I'm very excited to try this out. Context (AKA "Circles") is the biggest feature Facebook still hasn't gotten right. By mirroring the way we think about our social graph in real life, Google is making a huge step toward converging Online and Offline identity. It will be very interesting to see how Facebook responds to this... they might finally have a competitor.

I agree. Circles seem really well thought out. I also like the hangouts idea, especially auto-switching focus based on speaker volume, which is again similar to offline interactions.

Circles is not well thought out if the demo is accurate in only allowing one circle per friend.

I haven't seen the demo, but the indications from the press is that circles can (and should) include groups of people.

Why is Gormo's comment dead? He was right, mshron misunderstands his parent's comment. The concern is that people can only be a part of one circle.

Right, I misread it. Also, I'm playing with it right now and you can put people into multiple circles.

Thanks for the update.

A friend can be in multiple circles.

There is no such restriction.

It's the feature I hear the most people complain about Facebook and Twitter lacking, that's for sure.

I agree. It is somewhat ironic that Paul Adams who promoted this idea so forcibly whilst at google now works for...facebook.

The problem I see with user-defined groups implementation is conversations. If I share an item with my "work friends" group, and someone replies to it, who can see the reply? Is it only my work friends, or can the replier choose others to expose her reply to? What about people in my work friends list that she doesn't know or follow or is followed by?

This already sort of happens in Google Reader. Sometimes I comment on something a friend shares, and some random person I don't know will reply to my comment. It's not terrible, but it is unclear and kind of destroys the sense of a private place/conversation.

I think the solution is have discrete "places" instead of multiple lists that interact in increasingly complex and unclear ways.

In Google Reader, comments on items are visible to everyone that can see the item.

Edit: this is meant merely to inform, not judge how it is or should be.

Right, but that still leaves me not having any idea who can see my comments. Which is fine in Google Reader because I don't expect any level of privacy there, but in Google+, esp. after having explicitly set up Circles, I might expect some level of privacy which doesn't include people outside of the Circle I'm commenting in being able to see my comments.

With a "Place" metaphor, if you have a private place, nothing would leave that place, and only everyone visible in the place would be able to see any of your content. I think this is just a much more intuitive way to handle groups. It can be more flexible, too, because you could very easily create new places with varying levels of privacy, but the exact level of privacy would always be known to the occupants of the place.

If it works like advertised only people in your circle can see the comment. Which leads to a weird experience for the commenter. To them they're essentially talking to just you while you're talking to your own circle. I'd be interesting in seeing a breakdown on how the circles intertwine. For example perhaps you have Jill in your coworkers circle and I have her in my friends circle. So presumable our communications are separate. But what if I move her to my coworkers circle and you're also in my coworkers circle? Are the names of our individual circles significant?

Yes, that is another great illustration of how complex and unclear this system of individual lists is.

Now imagine the same scenario under the Places metaphor. You go to the "Work Friends" place and share an item. Jill, who is also in that place has access to the exact same list of people that are in the place and so knows exactly who she is talking to when she comments on that shared item. No confusion.

Google+ works in the way you describe (when you comment you know who can view the post).

Well, that's encouraging, but I think part of the problem is that I didn't know that. And I think part of why I didn't know that is because "Circles" isn't actually a metaphor that helps me understand how it works.

Places, OTOH, is, and I think the metaphor is flexible enough to add other interesting functionality, too.

Edit: Also, can you elaborate on how that works? Is there a list of names attached to each shared item?

See the help here (hopefully it works for people not in the trial): http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&...

I'll quote the relevant part:

> If a post was shared with a limited group of people, you can click Limited at the top of the post to see the profile pics of up to 21 other people who can also see that content, as well as the total number of people on the post.

I'm in the Field Trial. My understanding is that anything in a post can only be seen by the people who can see the post. Thus, if you share with a circle, people who do not know each other can see each others replies. It is all about who you chose to share to in the first place, they are the people you are trusting the information to.

I would need to test this more fully, but that is my understanding of it.

That's basically how Google Reader does it, too. The problem is, as you said, if I comment on something someone shared, I have no idea who can see that comment. I was definitely a bit weirded out the first time someone I'd never met replied to a comment of mine on someone else's shared item.

In Google+, the list of people with whom an item is shared is visible.

So it that's true, then it's no better than what Facebook has with lists, etc.

I think the +1 feature is born just because of this, so they will be able to recommend you new content or friends, based on your interest. Something where they could beat fb and twitter, as they don't seem to get it so intuitively.

Twitter is already all about this, and even if facebook started the whole 'like' thingy, they are in a heavy situation. They can't just roll out a whole new kind of content discovery feature, where you met strangers and their content. (think about reddit, hn..)(or could they?) I am not sure, they are so tied to this just my close friends and friend of friends feed, that it would really confuse the users.

The +1 is maybe just a temporary solution, till the time your browsing history will count more. (hence chrome) But the path is pretty clear now what is a social network really good for and how it is used.

I'm playing around with the trial. Some thoughts:

1) Extremely slick interface. Facebook beat MySpace in part because it was relatively clean; Google+ wins here by a mile. That reason alone makes me root for it.

2) It's Google's umpteenth foray into the social arena, so naturally most people are comparing it to Facebook. But its use cases strike me as being more comparable to Twitter than FB.

3) People can be categorized into contexts and multiple contexts. This is the killer feature. I find myself wanting to just eliminate the "Friends" circle wholesale and just have a different circle for each cluster in my social network.

4) I might be misunderstanding how sharing/the feed works. But, if someone is in any circle and you are viewing that circle's stream, I think you see whatever they share. I'd like something finer-grained than that. I have one friend who I both bike with and play board games with. If we get into a conversation about a ride on a weekend, doesn't the model inherently mean what I see in the board game stream gets polluted with the bike conversation?

> I have one friend who I both bike with and play board games with.

I think that's your problem. If you keep your social circles separate you don't have to worry about this, online or off.

I think this has huge potential. The problem with Facebook, at least for me, is that I have a ton of friends that post pointless shit. < 10% Is stuff and people I actually care about.

Now with features like Circles I can put my REAL friends in one circle, family in another, and all the noise and acquaintances(networking etc.) in a spam filter circle.

This is going to be awesome.

You can create friend lists on Facebook. I don't use them (I just hide people who spam) but they seem to do what you want..

pretty much only thing you can do with lists on Facebook is assign people to lists.

The feature exists but it's inadequate for properly filtering content.

Friends list on facebook are painful things to use, edit and apply to various posts. Each action tends to be multi screen bonanza and are never ever on by default, and things can still slip through. If facebook would clean up their groups functionality (which I doubt since it goes against their goals) then it would be a better competitor to google +

On Facebook, why don't you just hide the people you're not interested in?

Thats not how its works. For me the problem is the content, not the people behind it.

But if their content is all being funneled off to a "spam/noise" area, are you ever going to actually check that area? If not, they're effectively hidden.

From the demo you have to choose one and only one circle for each person. To me this is a huge problem. A lot of people hang out with some coworkers off-hours and they should be able to put these people into more than 1 bucket.

I'm hoping this is just a limitation of the demo.

I think so. Check this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnv1Mbj1jKw&feature=relmf... They pull the same people into different circles. (People don't fade out)

This is only a limitation in the demo. In the actual product, you can place friends in multiple cirlces.

The problem with this is going to be convincing all those people you care about to join Google+, and/or posting their interesting content there instead of on Facebook.

I have the same problem, too much spam, but about this solution having a huge potential... I feel like a lot of people feed on that "spam", i.e. gossip, to fill their lives, and make them more interesting. I think that's one reason why facebook is so popular and people spend so much time on it - there's always something happening, relevant/important or not.

Besides, FB has been offering features like this for a long time already, all the people that I know that actually care about privacy have neat friend lists and post only for specific groups of people, have limited profiles/walls, etc.

Seems like they're trying to avoid the "NYT problem" - the minute they open a new product, the NYT and other pubs write it up, everyone floods it and sees if they like it... gives them no ability to tweak / improve the service iteratively with real life users (which is so important for social services, where alternative agendas are a huge issue) before the world rushes in. So I think a limited-access launch is totally understandable, if a bit frustrating for those of us who expect we should be able to see everything on day one.

This thing is pretty neat though: http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/

Indeed, I really love the use of Maps API.

When I saw some of the cool effects using Circles/Loops whatever it's called, I was excited, thinking they had done it in CSS3. But sadly, all Flash.

Happily, that's just a mockup. The real thing is HTML.

That's a nice demo, beats a video that I have to sit through.

Also, I'm liking the features; it also adds a few points in the 'pro' column for Android phones when I decide on a replacement. (I currently have an iPhone, and while the web version of this stuff might still work, I'm guessing it'll be even neater on Android.)

Google advertises on their site a native iPhone (OS4) App as "very soon". But no native App for Blackberry, WebOS and Windows Phone. For that devices they list a web client.

If Google+ (plus.google? How to spell it?) is a success I am uneasy how much control Google is getting over the whole IT industry.

Reminds me of Prezi (prezi.com) which I've tried out in the past that provides this same effect for presentations.

Exactly what I thought.

""" Oops... you need a Google profile to use this feature. Google Profiles is not available for your organization. """

Grr. Google /really/ need to fix their authentication scheme.

Same here. I hate them for that.

It's frustrating that they don't let you switch for different services. I have my own domain under Google Apps I use for "work stuff" as well as a Gmail account I use for stuff I don't care about.

If I visit YouTube after using my work account I get that crappy error page. There is no reason my YouTube session should be tied to what email account I'm looking at. I don't see why at the very least it can't say: "Hey, you're logged into two accounts, would you like to switch?"

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-multiple-sig...

There may be some glitches, but I'm actually grateful for the ability to log into multiple accounts at the same time. I still remember, one year ago, the headaches of logging out / logging in all the time (or using an Incognito tab)...

Google only added multiple sign-in last year ( http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-multiple-sig... ), and, when you use it, there is a big yellow alert message that explains the limitations:

"Not all Google products support multiple sign-in. When switching between Google products, the account you’re currently using may change.

Google products not listed above will default to the first account that you signed in to using your current web browser session."

So, yeah... It's frustrating, but I understand how integrating multiple sign-in in all their apps might take some time.

There is actually a hack to get around this - I don't know if its still there but I did it a couple of hours ago and it worked:

1) Copy the link from the email (right click on the red button in the email and save link location) 2) Open another browser or incognito tab that you're not logged into. 3) Create an @gmail.com account or use an existing one if you have it and paste the link in the address bar once you're logged in.

It seems like the invite is just the token in the link, it's not specifically linked to a given email.

The hangouts feature seems like a big win to me. Group video chats in the browser from someone like Google can really change things.

I disagree. Social networking, unlike skype or email, requires low cognitive load--you come to hang out on your own terms. While group video chat is a convenient feature when you need it, it's not going to fundamentally change the game.

I disagree. You go to a hang out when you feel about socializing.

You never get bored in a group chat, and the youtube integration just makes it much better. Just look at turntable.fm

I miss this kind of chatting from facebook so much. (ok there is something like this with groups. I read somewhere that is the second popular on the site, right after photo sharing.)

I suppose we're both going on anecdotal evidence, and the actual usage of social networks is probably diverse enough to accommodate both our views.

You should check out tinychat ;)

I was sure that something like this already existed, but the fact that it's embedded within a social network and is a service by Google makes it a whole lot more appealing.

Tinychat is relatively small (check Alexa rank). If embedding it into a social network turns out to make such a big difference, be sure FB will add it, like they incorporated many novel features of Twitter.

Not sure why you think tinychat is small- Its over 10m uniques a month and a top 600 site in the USA - http://www.quantcast.com/tinychat.com

It also is embedded in facebook- where its the biggest video chat app, nearly 10m fb users.

Alexa suggests otherwise: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tinychat.com# US traffic rank is >1400

Alexa is a estimate and a poor one at that. Quantcast is directly measured.

Anything else?

Perhaps this will make facebook better. Competition can often improve product quality. For google this might, however, turn out the same way that Microsoft's grab for web applications is going. First to market is hard to break.

Microsoft produced a search engine which is on Google's level and a Map that can compete with Google Maps. But As they were not much better, I had no reason to check it out regularly and compare. But I am on Google's services 40+ times a day. If they want to get my attention, they will get it.

> First to market is hard to break.

Tell that to friendster. Er, myspace.

Does that really count as competition?

Circles is very interesting, its could solve a work/life/parents social battle I fight, however the demo only allows you to add a person to one circle, I hope this is just a demo limitation, as my sister is also my 'friend'.

AFAIK you can put people in several circles.

Do you have a link?

Try it ;)

I'm afraid it might not be... and that's a deal-killer. You can't mess up the most important feature of your social network like this. Now faced with having to choose one particular bucket people will just throw everyone into one big bucket or not use the site at all.

    > I'm afraid it might not be

What leads you to that conclusion? Any article I've seen hints at the opposite.

I'd be shocked if, as you note, they intentionally cripple one of the core components of this site.

The demo example doesn't allow multiple buckets, but in fairness the demo is presented as a puzzle with one correct answer.

I went and looked back at the Techcrunch article and it appears that some of the people in their "bike geeks" circle still appear in the top dragable area of people, so maybe they didn't screw this up after all. It seems really bizarre for them to miss something like this in the demo. It is a demo, after all.

    > It is a demo, after all.

It's a goal driven demo that seemingly exists solely to show off the animations.

I would agree that a more free-form demo would be interesting, and could be less confusing, but it wouldn't fit as well with the rest of the tour page, IMO.

I think we are talking features here, when the only important thing is the product. I doubt people are going to micro manage their circles. It's too much work. "Should I put you into 'best friends' or 'love you guys'. Circles are going to become a very little managed feature. Personally I would create four categories: "Friends" "People I know" "People that are interesting" "Family".

I'd add Coworkers, Drinking Buddies, Biking buddies, Dev buddies, ... this really has potential. I don't want to share holiday photos of my girlfriend in a bikini with developers I've never met but that are in my gmail contacts. Similarly I don't want to share geeky code stuff with people I met through my girlfriend. That example only involves two out of the dozen "circles" in my life.

Hopefully you don't have to wait that much until it becomes automatic based on your iterests ("sparks").

It is just a demo limitation (I'm using the product right now).

I'm also wondering if your friends will be aware of what group(s) you've put them into. Like, will Fred be able to see that he's in my "Work" group, but be jealous because he can see that Peggy is in both "Work" and "Drinking Buddies"?

No. One of the videos makes this clear.

Can't even click +1. Gives me the error "Oops... you need a Google profile to use this feature. Google Profiles is not available for your organization." since I am logged into a Google Apps account. Google itself force-merged my personal account into the Apps account, so there's an indication of how well they get 'social' in people's lives. And yes I worked there for many years.

How did it force-merge? I have both a personal and (free) Google Apps accounts and it never complained. I just use different browsers for each account.

This is a solid move on Google's part. Not half-baked like Wave was. Its more evolutionary than revolutionary but it makes the 'package' of Google services a bit more valuable as well.

It will be interested to see if this impacts the IPO plans of Facebook. This does seem to be a direct assault on their home turf.

Your "evolutionary vs revolutionary" insight is key. Google's most successful products are all evolutionary: search, mail and maps. If Google+ substantially improves the social networking experience then Facebook might have some serious competition. Just like Hotmail had some serious competition from Gmail. Or Yahoo Maps had serious competition from maps.google.

The HTML5 system allows users to drag-and-drop their friends into different social circles for friends, family, classmates, co-workers and other custom groups.

That "HTML5" there is simply for buzz effect. Seriously, come on already...

The demo wasn't that smooth for me, my mouse would slow up considerably on a friend which I assume wasn't intentional. Like hitting some grass on your bike!

(running chrome on an i5)

The demo is using Flash.

There are different kinds of media coverage in SV. There's the excited, this is cool buzz, and then there's the look what big player X is doing sort of coverage. This feels like the latter. People are talking about this, but I don't get the sense that anyone is pumped up about it.

The Url below the keep me posted link on plus.google.com is: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/

services.google.com/FB

I really would love to know what the FB stands for.

Form builder?

Feedback?

Friends Bunch?

As usual, Google Apps users, are left behind once again. I really don't understand why Google will not once and for all unify google accounts and google apps accounts.

Supposedly they already did that, and yes I did the "merge the accounts dance", and still, no Profiles for me, and therefore, no +1 and no Google+.

Google, I'm paying for my google apps. I don't want to have another free account just to play with your new features (and I really hope this is not going Buzz way... which I also never saw in my gmail...)

I am quite impressed, but one thing that is severely broken is the number of duplicate names in the list. Basically if a person has two email addresses, then they show up twice. This would not be a big deal, but the email addresses are hidden, and it is impossible to tell which is an old/work email address rather than a personal one. I hope this is fixed soon.

> ... the email addresses are hidden, and it is impossible to tell which is an old/work email address rather than a personal one. I hope this is fixed soon.

Skype 5 has been broken in this way, showing a half dozen indistinguishable items naming the same person when you try to add someone to an existing call.

It still is broken, months later.

What I'd like to know is if I can use Facebook Connect to port my graph over (doubt Facebook would allow this) -- or if this means starting from scratch yet again.

Its probably more likely google buys Facebook! So don't hold your breath on facebook letting any of there data slip into google+.

Well, Facebook does allow you to download your profile[1], so Google could just write an importer for that.

[1]: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/07/1250242/Facebook-Imp...

Last time I checked, you could only see the names of your friends in Facebook's profile export archive -- there were no metadata whatsoever (e.g. IDs or profile links). I don't think names themselves are enough to port your social graph.

Well, for Gmail users, it shouldn't be hard to match names with specific people, if they have them in their contacts.

I don't know exactly what's the file format from FB backup, but it might be possible to identify linked users based on similar content (as long as both users have already uploaded their profile to Google+).

Ask Apple what negotiations with Facebook are like when your goal is to copy their entire dataset and build a competitor. Nobody would be stupid enough to allow this with their own business.

There is no facebook import option yet.

Import to hotmail or windows live and then import into Google+ done.

I think Google's unending efforts to enter social networking space might become successful this time. Big hurrah to circles and hangouts!

The most urgent thing I needed on Facebook - "Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself - just like real life"

Might just call it a better version.

heh.. somewhat ironically, minutes prior seeing this post I noticed the "+1" next to every search result. after exploring it told me that my "+1" will be used all over the web including ads. (am assuming this is part of Google+)

I immediately searched for a way to turn it off.

https://profiles.google.com/+1/personalization/

you can disable +1 to prevent the ad personalization.

Android app is on the market. Note it eats 8MB of phone memory and can't be moved to SD.

Are you really concerned about 8MB? Are there even Android phones on the market today that ship with less than 8GB of space?

By default, Android phones store apps on an onboard storage location that is separate from the SD card. On some older phones there is not a whole lot of space here. For example it didn't take a whole lot at all for me to fill up my Nexus One's app partition.

It wasn't until 2.2 that the option to move apps to a encrypted location on the SD card was added, and even then it's an option that has to be enabled by the developer who released the app.

Newer phones these days have more onboard space and this shouldn't be nearly as big an issue. I upgraded to an HTC Thunderbolt on Saturday and it has roughly 2GB available for onboard apps.

Wow, why do they make the user manage this at all? The distinction sounds like an enormous misfeature to me.

It's one of the things that dissuaded me from getting an HTC Android phone two years ago (got an iPhone with 32GB instead). I'm glad they're moving towards fixing it.

That ship? Maybe not, but my 1.5 year old G1 is full and I'll have it for a while still.

My Optimus V has a tiny amount of on-board space, so 8MBs is actually a big deal.

Some apps can't move to the SD card, moving there means things like notifications from that app won't work any more. It's a terrible architectural decision, but my understanding is that it is a limitation of the VM, so they're stuck with it now.

> Are you really concerned about 8MB? Are there even Android phones on the market today that ship with less than 8GB of space?

I have a brand new Samsung Galaxy S II. It's a 500 GBP (800 USD) phone. It has 2GB of memory.

The first gen and second gen android phones (which may be less than a year old) typically have 128 and 512 MB.

So yes, having 8MB x (amount of apps that can't be stored on SD) taken from memory until you uninstall the app is huge.

I love how the ratings are all about being able to download it, but not use it.

+100

I just hope that Google will see this and internally realize what's ACTUALLY broken in the Android Market and solve the real problems that exist.

I REALLY hope they see these comments and think "I sure wish there were a way to communicate with my users...." Which is a problem all of the Market publishers have been complaining about for over a year.

I feel like Facebook was a trial, and we all learnt a lot about social networking, we've all made mistakes and it would be nice to re-create your network with hinessight from scratch. This is perfect timing by Google, with Facebook on the edge of an IPO and people largely disillusioned by their service. As long as they 100% lock down the privacy options, get that wrong and it's a waste of time.

Circles would make great sense if we can push some circles into other circles. Close friends into friends and friends into general connections.

Well yea. Sounds good in the UI. But I wonder if that is even implementable in their current data model.

It seems everything is based off the grouping "Circles" aspect. Which if they get it right it will be a home run for the rest of the projects they build off of it. I personally find the Huddle feature the most valuable. This is something I've wanted for a long time, but no one has built...except for GroupMe. Which I'm not a huge fan of.

Group video chat seems really cool. Now I just need to convince enough friends to use this too...

Have been waiting for the day when I can share information that is relevant to the portion of my friends that know or actually care what Im talking about... How has facebook not integrated this before (other than going into privacy settings each and every time)?

I like the idea of Google Takeout allowing you to download all of your data easily from:

Picasa Web albums and photos Your Google profile Google Buzz Google Contacts Stream

That alone would make me switch to circles.

too complex to use may affect usage negatively. too many features is not always good. trying to mimic real live brings the complexities of real life to the web.

check this:

"With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let specific buddies (or entire circles) know you’re hanging out and then see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until teleportation arrives, it’s the next best thing."

imagine a jerk that noone loves intruding all the hangouts. but everybody too polite/dependant to unfriend

I'm sure they'll allow private video chats. Hangouts is for when you are specifically "browsing". It'll be just as if you lived right down the street from your mother, siblings, aunts, coworkers, friends...

It currently is this way in the text world though. That annoying guy who argues with everything you post on Facebook or Twitter. And the worst part is you can't un-friend him because he's your weird uncle.

In Facebook's privacy settings you can specify that your updates are visible to "Everyone; except person X". The annoying guy doesn't see your posts and stays calm, works brilliant.

Then remove him from the circle.

that's like removing a guy from the circle in real life. not always easy

As I understood, the circles feature is especially suited to solve such "cant unfriend" problems, by letting you create an entirely similar circle but without the person you want to politely get rid of, and simply never tell him, so he'll never find out and you can graciously avoid the blame of "unfriending" someone.

I don't think he knows when you remove him from a circle, I don't think he knows the name of the circle too.

Correct.

> imagine a jerk that noone loves intruding all the hangouts. but everybody too polite/dependant to unfriend

When you enter your hangout, you specify what circle(s) see the announcement. So just make a "Everyone but Jerk" circle and post to that. He'll think you're never in your hangout.

comments make sense, but then i think it'll be a bit complex to admin those circles. complex for general public, not us of course

"Your Browser is no longer supported." (from plus.google.com)

Well, okay. I'll live without you, Google+. (Running Seamonkey 2.0.14, which advertises Gecko/20110430. Out of date since.. 3 weeks.)

Found a signup link that works: http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/+/learnmore/forum/

The one on the front-page has been fixed now.

For those of you with an Android device, there's an app called "Google+" on the Market right now. I can't say if there's an app for iOS, WP7, etc.

You can install the app without an invite, but cannot use it.

EDIT: The "Learn More" button in the app cycles you back to the "You need an invitation" message box. So the app itself is completely pointless if you haven't received an invitation.

Nothing on iOS

Their group chat is called Huddle. I think this will have a negative impact on project management startup huddle (www.huddle.com).

Do people trust Google more than Facebook? and could that be a factor in adoption? My gut says probably not to both questions.

I personally trust Google way more than Facebook (and most of my friends do as well).

While I don't fully trust either, I rather give away limited data to Google rather than Facebook.

Biggest factor in adoption is product perception. People associate Google with finding information. Not with playing. They associate Facebook with games and pictures. They associate Twitter with celebrities and gossip. Apple with trendy devices. It's extremely hard for any of these companies to leap into another area and break that cognitive barrier no matter how good the product is. Especially when the product is deeply connected to the existing popular product. A lot of people think integration is an advantage but only if it's integrating related things. For something totally different it's better to create a new brand.

Are you freaking kidding me? Facebook, with its lax policy and 3rd party ecosystem (especially in the first years) is basically prostituting people's data.

Nice to see this, it feels like they got it

The mobile app I saw a couple of months ago was pretty slick. I hope they've made good progress on that too.

I dislike Facebook like anybody, but this will not take off any more than Buzz or Wave I'm afraid. This will be that side thing that people may or may not notice when they search. This isn't the site people will flock to when they wake up to see what their friends have been doing.

PROTIP to invite your friends:

Post something in your "feed", and "target" them, entering their email address. They will receive an email telling them about your post. When clicking the link to view the post, they will be prompted to register.

This worked flawlessly for all my friends.

After reading an article or two on Google+ I searched out the support pages and found them much more informative so I thought I would share.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2706918

Did anybody notice that you can workaround needing an invite by clicking "Take the Tour" and then "Join the Project" on their demo website?

http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/

I think you're already in. That just asks me to sign up for the waiting list.

Thanks, guess it was a false alarm.

One of the nice things about the product is its whimsical nature — a puff of smoke and a -1 animation appears when you remove a friend, and when you remove a social circle, it rolls away off the screen.

Where do I sign up???

You can meet the rest of us that what to sign up by the Bike Racks.

BIKE GEEEEKS!!!! Mount up.

Are they going to support open protocols for DiSo? Salmon, OAuth, Activity Streams, FOAF and such? They support XMPP with Google Talk and gave Jabber a big push by doing so.

-jsl

The problem with Facebook is that your network is too small and constricted, people want to expand and reach many many people, not stay limited within their circle. Think about it, you already talk to most of the people who are your closest friends in real life via phone and chat. You don't need yet another way to contact them. They should have taken the opportunity to bring down the barriers of the closed social graph.

Instead Google makes another Facebook with a different UI. It looks like a cleaner Myspace that will be embraced by a small set of techy users. No way will this ever be cool.

Damn but I really like their new designs though, very clean! They've got a lot of good people there doing big things and Hangouts looks cool. +1

Wave looked pretty cool when it was revealed too.

Group video chat alone will suck me in.

This is going to kick off a new era in social networking, which we all will be a part of :)

YAWN - Yet Another Way to do Nothing

BTW, thanks for giving up on Google Health. This is way better.

works or fails, the UI definitely looks good.

Might be the end for Rapportive?

I would love to see a live cam feed inside Facebook today.

That would be interesting.

Doesn't Google already know enough about us and our habits already?

I'll take Google over Facebook on that point any day.

So...iPhone app?

what a terrible name. "plus" what does this mean for ordinary people.

David Winer's sentiments hit home for me. Google is too big to organically build a social network.

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/06/28/googleYawn.html

However, this poll would suggest people think otherwise: http://www.wepolls.com/p/884244/Will-Googles-new-social-vent...

I can not see intersection of circles!! i.e. one person in multiple circles. :O how can they miss that ?

Anybody knows about 3rd party apps? Sure uncle Google has considered us developers ...

They didn't say anything yet. But yes, I'm sure they'll have some exciting API for us to toy with.

AppEngine + Social Circles + Spark interest graph = drools

Looking at this: http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/ it seems the data will be available through an api (i presume oauth )

That's very interesting and informative, thanks for sharing :)

Who's Melissa?

Noone will care, and noone will use it. If it won't help you get laid, or boost your ego, it'll be useless. We human beings are not rational.

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