Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Sure the light box makes it harder if you go that way. Click on the Album name -> Edit Album -> Edit Photos.
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... (discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867807 )
According to his blog ( http://www.thinkoutsidein.com/blog/ ), he now works at Facebook, and focuses "on researching and designing better ways for businesses and people to communicate and interact". My guess is that Facebook is already preparing its response...
Its clear they've tried not just to 'clone' Facebook, which I appreciate.
I love the circles philosophy and UX.
One problem is the restriction on invites. Google+ is valuable to me if I can share things with others, just like I do it in FB right now. They have to enable invites soon or the early adopters will get bored and leave forever.
Album management is great and it pulls/pushes your pictures from Picasa.
The album UI is also great.
I just found that the navigation bar of gmail is now extended so I can see notifications and comment on them without going to Google+
It's a FB killer :o
Things are going to get interesting in that space. If the people that I relate with get into Google+ I wouldn't need to check my FB. And they can get more people in by pluging it to Google Apps users.
From the presentation, Google Circles sounds like a great UI for the already existing group tags funcionality. The group tags are also already used for sharing in Picasa.
I'm not sure if I would want that as I normally don't update my Contacts groups.
When I first heard the news about Google+ today, my initial reaction was wow, Google is going to fail again. I mean, with Wave, and then Buzz, and I figured this was just another in the line of failures.
However, after looking into it and reading about it, it is actually very cool looking. I look forward to trying it out live when it's ready.
Buzz was a blatant twitter clone, and I disabled it as quickly as I enabled it - whereas I'm actually finding myself excited to try this.
I don't know anyone who really likes Facebook; they've alienated users with privacy missteps and stupid interface changes over and over and over. But everyone keeps using it because that's where everyone else is. Somehow you have to break that cycle.
If anyone can do it though, it's probably Google. They effectively broke the back of the fat-and-lazy AOL Instant Messenger (at least in my experience) when they built chat into Gmail. Once they did that, AIM went from a "must-have" on most of my friends' computers to something they barely remember their login information to anymore.
Here's hoping they can find some leverage to get a critical mass of users over from Facebook.
I think that Google can leverage adoption by targeting android users and creating a good application for them.
EDIT: Orkut still is really popular here in Brazil but the majority of my friends migrated to Facebook and do not login in Orkut anymore.
Also, Circles might help mitigate the network effect advantage of Facebook. Even if only one of your real-life circles (say your early adopting tech nerd friends) sign up at first, it can provide some functionality while it is still being more widely adopted by other groups.
Overall this seems to be very well thought through with some fresh ideas.
So it's like a reverse twitter, where you choose who can follow you?
However, they choose which of their circles see the things they post. So you can follow whomever you want, but the people you follow may not necessarily broadcast to you if you do so.
Email is easy to bootstrap because any client can talk using SMTP. Social does not have a protocol - although that might be cool if it did so we didn't have the "all your data are belong to us" problems of Facebook and Google.
A social network is only as successful as the number of friends using it.
Facebook did well on this by opening up things campus by campus ensuring that all your friends in your university were all allowed to use it at the same time.
That might be a smart way to ramp up.
Also remember that Facebook started out very privately, too.
Circles addresses something like 70% of my gripes with Facebook. Of course, we still haven't seen Google successfully build a social network, so nothing's really been addressed until everyone joins the party (or doesn't). Google+ looks interesting though.
Too bad my primary Google account is my Apps account for my primary domain, and since Apps accounts don't have associated Profiles anymore, I don't get to play. Then again, I'm still dealing with the fallout of the transition to "The New" Google Apps, having already used my domain email as a Google account to sign up for really exotic things like Google Reader, so perhaps I don't need yet another new plaything at the moment.
I will add that I think the Huddle and Hangout components may offer—in the case of the former—good competition both on Android and in general to iOS Messaging/BBM (the only hang-up that has me short of sold on iOS messaging is people don't yet think of their Apple IDs as communication accounts/channels, their Gmail accounts on the other hand...), and—in the case of the latter—someone not only to compete with Foursquare, but perhaps to answer the question from normal folks: Why "check in" anywhere to begin with? (Because you've arrived at the "anywhere" you just "Huddled" over meeting at, your phones already know it, and if you acknowledge their requests to "Hangout" together, even more of your friends may show up. Or something. That last part's a little hazier for me. What if you want to broadcast to the world that you're enjoying your new favorite tea spot, but you don't want to say which 5 people you're with and risk persons 6 and 7 whom were specifically not invited showing up? In any event it seems to me a more human workflow than "Go places, check in, get points/kittens/whatevr."
It's not a very revolutionary concept, though. Livejournal had friends lists almost a decade ago, for instance.
search > social
Yeah, it would be really interesting to see which of my other friends would make it into the "Midget porn" circle, or into the "How do you kill yourself?" circle or the "How do I get rich?" circle, all these based on our collective Google searches.
What's even better, is that there is technically nothing stopping Google from keeping your employer from finding all the great ideas you've been giving away on HN, if you've somehow associated your HN account with a circle... unless said employer comes directly to HN, obviously.
What's funny is that everyone (Google included) got preoccupied with the tech demo UI for Wave, but the really interesting stuff was happening under the hood. If you look at what Wave was trying to do with sending arbitrary data between federated servers, all tied into contact management and privacy controls, it basically would have been the perfect foundation for a social network. In fact if you look at projects like OneSocialWeb[1] or Diaspora, they're similarly built on top of XMPP with an approach not entirely dissimilar to what Wave was doing.
I really, really think Google missed the mark marketing wise with Wave, and I wonder how much, if any, code has carried over to Google+.
Its not like Google's gonna get people to divest themselves of Facebook (not in the near future anyway), so they've got to position themselves as an auxiliary rather than an alternative.
It's mentioned in the Google+ help centre: http://www.google.com/support/+/
- You can only have add a person to one "circle". If I wanted to add someone to two or more, I'm SOL. Maybe they will change this.
- A "circle" can only contain a certain number of users before it runs out of room. I haven't seen how it deal with this - does it shrink the circles as you add more? What happens if there are 500 people in one, would they be a bunch of 1 x 1 pixel dots? Or does the circle just say "You can't add any more people"?
2) I also thought this and decided the circles probably just get really big. We will see however!
Like showing the last people online or the most frequently interacted with etc.
Huh? Yes you can. (I just did.)
1. launch a social platform, but restrict signups to the point where nobody with access has any contacts on the service
2. keep it locked down until the buzz/hype is all gone
3. open it up to everyone and let them wonder why there was any buzz/hype in the first place
If they dont let early adopters use the platform and give the crucial early feedback, they might as well throw in the towel now.
First, this seems much more carefully thought out. The promotional material is beautiful, simple, well targeted and clear. Restraining from a full public launch shows they have learned from Buzz which failed in part because they got things wrong early and didn't correct fast enough. This shows a much needed loss of arrogance.
One other thing that makes it different: 500k Android activations per day. It will be very interesting to see if this gets pushed out as a default installed app to Android devices. Google never leveraged Android well to promote Buzz and I never understood why. Hopefully they won't be so shy this time around.
Oh really? Tell that to a bunch of my friends who are either forced onto dial up, or 1.5Mb internet.
Not everyone lives in a big city.
No one expects an instant success. But even if this week’s launch evokes snark or yawns, Google will keep at it. Google+ is not a product like Buzz or Wave where the company’s leaders can chalk off a failure to laudable ambition and then move on. “We’re in this for the long run,” says Ben-Yair. “This isn’t like an experiment. We’re betting on this, so if obstacles arise, we’ll adapt.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...
Another annoying case of "do no evil" not implying anything about actually pushing the state forward or helping. I'm not altogether that interested in the greater of the two silos, although I am excited by a state of play other than facebook moseying down the field palming the ball in one hand.