First Night With Google Plus: This is Very Cool
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that said, I think they could make a fortune out of paid support.
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=100175
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=103438
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=91182
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=88452
On the other hand, i never had problems with google that were not solved in a reasonable timeframe (but i am still waiting after 9 months for facebook to unspam our domain that was an empty page). Adsense will even assign a human to correspond with if you have enough traction.
I can't express how sick i feel doing facebook apps in the past year, it has been nothing but disappointment and anger (but still makes the money due to huge traction).
Google has a much better track record of fostering developer ecosystems and a much better understanding of how to deal with app spam. Hope they do their best to create a good web app ecosystem.
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-s...
In the case of the translation APIs, they were clearly broken and facilitated content spamming, and the replacement APIs appear to be serviceable.
It almost feels like a political issue--with all of the longterm controversy and animosity that Facebook has stirred up amongst us, we've been quietly waiting for something like this to happen. I'm glad to see that so many of us appear to be rallying around what appears to have the potential of being a "Facebook killer".
I shouldn't be so emotionally invested, but after years of Facebook acting like assholes to all of us, I hope Google lays complete and utter waste to them. Facebook has under no uncertain terms been trying to swallow up the web, and before seeing this level of competition I thought they stood a chance of accomplishing that goal. Perhaps not anymore.
I deleted my Facebook account a long time ago, and I honestly am not interested in social networking after that experience. I'm not sure whether I want to do the Google+ thing long term, but I'm definitely going to join if for no other reason than to get all of my friends to. Maybe I can get some of them to migrate completely. I trust Google a hell of a lot more than Facebook. (Perhaps I shouldn't, but I do.)
I wonder what this holds for their upcoming IPO? People are fickle and can ditch a service rather quickly (MySpace, hotmail/yahoo->gmail). Even with the wealth of photos and memories Facebook has accumulated for many users, I don't think it will be able to retain them by touting that data alone.
This is going to be very exciting to watch. What a good show you've put on for us, Google!
You can't use apps, look at friends apps, or do anything else interesting.
Facebook has made itself a social address book, and dragged down everyone who bought into their "platform".
I suspect they noticed a lot of people look at a profile, say "oh look an album", start clicking through and then decide they were done and go back to their feed. This design makes it more likely you will return to where you left off (without having to push back a million times) to finish reading the profile that you were already looking at.
Yes, the advantage you point out is valid. It just comes with a whole pile of downsides and I can't believe they would do that for that one minor use case. I was with a friend the other day who was getting so irritated that when I said "just hit f5" to restore the old interface she was so happy she made me dinner in gratitude.
The only other advantage I can think of is that the previous-photo button is more mobile-friendly.
Did you hit the gym too?
The speed of their product has improved impressively and the mobile site has achieved commendable parity with the "full site", but they're really not delivering new experiences. And that's a little bit damning. Great technology products can create mind-blowing new experiences and the lasting companies deliver those experiences regularly.
Plus looks cool, though. I've been Skyping for years, but the way they show you seamlessly jumping from the news feed to a video chat strikes me as something new. I'm intrigued by "Sparks". At least for me, Facebook is a deadzone when it comes to real discussion - if Google can make a format that combines social networking with Reddit-like discussion, they'll take over.
This is a design flaw of all previous social networks, including Facebook and I believe it's what led most of them to become irrelevant for the users, because it really weakened and diluted the types of relationships you can have on Facebook.
I also don't think this is something you can just patch up later on. They tried it with Lists and Groups, and it didn't work. Google+ has this built-in from the beginning and it's why I think it will succeed. I've actually noticed this is a huge problem about a year ago and I've been thinking ever since how this could be fixed. Google's solution is similar but even better than what I thought was the solution. It surprises me how well they got this.
My FB friends are all people I've known at one time in real life. Not necessarily friends but certainly people I've been friendly with. The recommendation engine does quite a good job of flagging new people that I know (amid lots I don't) and letting me choose to reconnect with them or not.
Why do you think it's only mediocre? What's keeping it from being good?
Little inanities like that.
I didn't know you could do that. Thanks!
You cannot have, say, a smaller group included in a larger group like for example: your former classroom colleagues group included in the larger group of all high-school colleagues from your school, included in yet another larger group of all people you know from your city from the same generation (useful in a small city were you know most such people).
Then, there's the interface.
I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists. I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list. Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List. And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.
And then, their biggest problem (I think) is the legacy.
People have been building huge lists of friends without thinking about organizing that list. People now post updates and engage in conversations like on Twitter - as if their message will reach their hole list and even people outside of it as well.
Embarrassing comments are a minority, as people in general are aware that their coworkers or family will see their drunken pictures (except many teenagers that don't give a shit, but someday they will). So it's a lot of self-censorship, not to mention the vanity contest.
On the other hand if you knew that your message will reach only your friendly-neighborhood buddies, I don't think you'll show much restraint, since sounding smart or cool is useless and even condescending to people who actually know who you are; getting much nicer and exciting conversations.
I haven't tried Google+ yet, but I'm excited that Facebook may finally have some competition, much needed IMHO.
I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists.
Account->Edit Friends, each friend has "Edit Lists" next to them on hover
I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list
Click the arrow beside Most Recent on the News Feed, then you can filter by any list
Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List
One person can belong in as many lists as you want them to
And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.
Click the lock beside the share button -> Custom edit -> Specific People -> Type whatever lists you want
-package it as a completely separate product with its own url (gmail.com, maps.google.com, etc.) before gradually integrating it into search results and other products. -make them optional (i.e. Google Instant, Gmail Labs) -do a test run on a small subset of users (which Facebook does only to test before they scale, seemingly never to determine if the change will piss off users)
In short, maybe continually tweaking core features like Messages, the Timeline, Photos, etc. isn't the only way or even the most effective way they can leverage their almighty graph.
Based on this article: http://news.oneindia.in/2011/06/13/tech-facebook-growth-rate...
If I am reading it right they are saying there is negative growth rate is the US and Canada, but still positive growth rate in emerging markets resulting in an overall positive but declining growth rate.
Adoption will be slow I reckon as people don't have a huge reason to move this, but thanks to its integration, we will see a number of people use it almost unknowingly.
I like Google's full on approach here, and feels more complete than buzz and even wave.
Meanwhile, Joe has been sharing a ton of geocaching and hiking posts with his "hiking" circle, but you don't even see it since he didn't know that you liked hiking, he only knows you from a party. His alternate interests are hidden from you because you weren't in the right circle on his end, completely out of your control.
It still demonstrates the issue with circles based on what content your friends would be interested in. Circles seem to make perfect sense to me for security (you don't want to see your mom posting photos of you partying maybe), but for interest based valuations it seems like you pretty much always want it to be public (at least public on your profile page, even if you don't particularly want it to show up in other peoples 'feeds')
It wouldn't be creepy if the interface picked up on behavior similar to how Gmail suggests people to cc on emails based on past email use patterns. People are ready for that.
Surely they'll promise availability in a month from now or so, but it's going to take several months or years anyway.
The changes seem to be up for my Google Apps account. Investigate your site settings panel.
What happens when you visit http://plus.google.com/ ?
Tell you what: when we expand the field trial to include Apps users, and I get some invites, I'll hand extras out to HN readers with Apps accounts. If you fit this description, write to me on reddit:
It's so they make sure it's a very polished service by the time it gets on Google Apps.
But my world depends on my primary email. I get notifications on my phone from it. I have my calendar, my Picassa, my documents on it and I also use Google Talk quite a lot lately.
And because I did the recent migration, I cannot have a parallel regular Google account tied to this email address; it used to work fine this why with some minor pitfalls.
If you don't have a Google Apps account that you really depend on, you can't feel the same pain I do :)
Is Google+ supporting the relevant 'Distributed Social' protocols, like OAuth, Salmon, FOAF, Activity Streams, so that I can interconnect from other social networks (like Diaspora)?
If not, then no matter how shmancy fancy it is, it is not something we should want.
I can email from yahoo to gmail to myownmailserver. Social Networking should be no different from this. Remember the times when you could only send messages from Compuserve to Compuserve and vom AOL to AOL? Why repeat the same thing with social networking?
/rant
-jsl
If Twitter goes under, I'm not going to want my tweets back or my friendlist back. I'm going to want Twitter back.
Also the "average" person won't maintain 2 social profiles and will gravitate to where the users already are. If Google wants to compete in social it's need to do more than just "sharing". They must have features that people need to use. These features may come. I don't know what that is? Deep personalized search integration? Beat Facebook to their inevitable Skype/video integration? time will tell.
The MySpace to Facebook transition shows that exactly this happened. I was in high school at the time, and I definitely remember people mentioning having both a MySpace and Facebook account, and wanting to get people to switch over to Facebook. I don't mean "tech people", I mean normal folk.
As for compelling features, I think Circles is a killer. When your relatives are on Facebook, a good portion of your personality has to leave Facebook. You have to think about what you're going to say, and generally stick to the blandest possible expression of who you are. If Google+ enables people to say what they want to who they want, it will be a hit.
I still dunno if Google+ will be a success, but if it is, I suspect it will be more due to the actions of early adopters than to Google.
Any guesses as to how long it takes for Facebook to copy G+ circles?
Create a system-wide setting in the Android Market around whether to allow this and then if someone wants to get more granular they can use Google Plus. Their email would be masked so that I could not see the address but it would let me contact my customers.
I think this would help address some existing issues while giving Google's android market a way to be very different from the existing app stores.
But I'm not so sure about you proposed. Google needs to be very careful here and not turn Google+ into a spam fest of apps, the way Facebook has become. Google's main priority should always be the user, not the developers here. And as they said, Google+ should be much more about life-sharing rather than sharing how you got 5 more coins in some game, or whatever.
However, the design is good and I think this is the first true competitor to Facebook. I personally would really like to see Facebook have so strong competition, especially on features like privacy which Google+ has done right.
Edit: I just can't see how a sizable group will switch to this and either abandon facebook or maintain two profiles. Granted, these things have happened, but after Wave and Buzz I just don't see google as capable of doing this.