Poll: What do you think of Google+?

With all the hype surrounding google+ it's a crying shame it's not openly available. Within a couple of days my interest will have subsided and it will be nothing but a distant memory .. which I can imagine will be the case for a lot of people.

Hopefully if it is any good, it will claw it's way back into the media spotlight, but how many people will try for a second time to sign up. IMHO the invite only plan will kill it before it gets any kind of real traction.

Edit: I'm aware gmail done well using invite only to begin with. But gmail was a leap ahead of it's competitors.

We're working on a startup with an app that functions very similarly to the Sparks feature of Google+. The app will recommend new things for you to read and watch based on your interests (which are stored long-term, but can be ordered, edited, removed). Now that Google+ has a very similar feature in Sparks, I need to think long and hard on whether to continue with the idea. (We are a small team with three developers and a couple other members.)

Do you think we should continue to work on this? Would you use something like Google Sparks as a stand-alone Website or mobile app? If we continue, what would be significant differentiating functionalities that Google can't easily copy and deploy? (I am considering showing a different style of recommended results from Google Sparks, e.g. long-term, evergreen articles versus newsflash, but of course Google can do that too.)

I am torn right now. Thanks a bunch for any ideas and opinions on this.

I find I miss the simplicity of Facebook to a degree. With plus, it's not really clear who I'm sharing what with at any given time, or what the relationships I've set up are. Facebook has one kind of relationship (1-1) and one kind of sharing (to your friends or to everybody, depending on how your security settings are configured).

It's also missing a number of essential (at least for college students) facebook features, like events and richer profiles.

I'm playing with it for now, but I don't think I can manage two social networks and since nearly all of my friends are on Facebook it's not hard to choose one. Maybe some day that will change, but network effects augur otherwise.

Edit: I should note that hangouts are seriously cool, and they might be reason enough for people to start using it.

I do not have a Google+-shaped hole in my life right now.

If a) it starts to matter to non-technical Internet users and b) they tie it into search heavily (which is the Google go-to playbook for promoting properties of strategic importance), I will start caring with alacrity.

Invites are so bloody rare. Gmail was groundbreaking (and empirically offered way more space, etc) so people were going nuts for invites. This is, at best, a "bit better than Facebook". And much as people dislike it, Facebook is a pretty powerful tool, as opposed to webmail before Gmail, which majorly sucked.

Maybe add an option for "haven't got an invite yet"

update: got one :)

Small plug: you can see a graph of the results here: http://hackernewspoll.appspot.com/2712967

I did this small service using GAE after seeing so many people manually updating graphs, it's painful. Btw, every poll works, just change the number with the poll id from YCombinator's URL.

It'd be much more useful if they'd integrated it with Apps accounts prior to launch.

Apps customers still can't create Profiles, never got to use Buzz etc etc, despite being promised Profiles 'in a few weeks' back in March.

From what I can see (From demos, no invite yet, got one? :( ) Google got alot of things right that Facebook got wrong. Mostly concerning privacy and sharing. Now, like most people say, Facebook has all these settings to share stuff with the people you want to share with, but my problem is that the whole security settings thing is a MESS! If google can do that right, while providing a better android app than FB does, that's enough for me to ditch Facebook for Google+.

It's hard for me to imagine it having much mass adoption -- it's just too similar to Facebook, and its killer-feature, Circles, is of dubious value to the non-OCD, non-geek set (do normal people care about sorting their friends into various groups?).

That said, a la the XKCD comic, I could see it being personally useful to me as a way to stay in touch with people who refuse to use / have left Facebook, but have no such compunctions for a Google product. I.e., I could see it becoming a place where the "cool kids" hang out.

I'm curious what Google's response will be if G+ only gets a limited amount of adoption. Will they just give up on it, like Wave, or will they keep pounding away & improving it?

It's been noted that today's Google is like yesterday's Microsoft, incredibly aggressively moving in on any perceived threats, but yesterday's MS would keep iterating an unpopular product until it was successful, whereas Google seems to be taking the "keep trying shit until we have an instant hit" approach. (Perhaps they were spoiled by search & gmail, where they were able to introduce truly game-changing improvements over the status-quo.)

Google+ has the same buzz and expectation which was associated with gmail when it was first launched (with respect to scarcity of invites). I am based in India (not sure how location matters) and I remember I had to wait a few weeks for someone to invite me to gmail.

If that is some indication, then Google+ looks to be a winner. (I remember how I moved from Yahoo! and Hotmail email to gmail after I finally got the invite).

If you need an invite, please email me at lists at anands dot net. I have a few, will add you all when they re-open invite feature.

Please say Google+ in the subject and it would be helpful if you spell out your email in the body.

I will add it once they re-open invite.

https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/PhJFJqLy...

The next step is standardizing a protocol for inter-social-network communication. Open flow between Google+, Facebook and other small compatible networks and standalone clients :) I hope Google will do the right thing, like they sometimes do. They certainly have the position to do it, and they would be appreciated for that.

>"Google+ will succeed"

>"Google+ will fail"

This is a bit incoherent because success and failure for Google is radically different than success and failure for people who consume Google's services. If after six months Google+ provides an important data set which enhances ad revenues, they can shut it down or let it die off (which would be more likely) and still claim success even though this would constitute a failure for people who consume Google's services.

Likewise, if the implementation favors Android over iOS this increases the odds of success for Google while increasing the odds of Google+'s failure among people who consume Google's services.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates this divergence of interests more clearly that the current hype surrounding Google+ coupled with the lack of widespread availability among people who consume Google's services.

need an option for "have an invite but they're over capacity and won't let me sign up yet"

I have no opinion yet, I was backpacking for a few days during the announcement, just got back and had these invites. To me, it's nothing more than a product name, and a damn confusing one at that. I'd have accepted google++ ;-)

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but the "Send feedback" widget in the lower right is amazing. It seems to be inspired by Safari's Web Clips, and I hope it won't be long before someone better at Javascript than me reverse engineers it (otherwise I guess I will have to).

My only fear with the invite only launch is that Facebook will have enough time to announce some of it's own changes before people get an invite to Google+. Although Facebook users are unlikely to (attempt to) delete their account unless google+ gains huge popularity. Google+ may just become a compliment for must Facebook users who use circles for their inner circles (perhaps family or co-workers). With hangouts I personally would only video chat with a select group of people falling into three circles, close Friends, family, and for work. But in the end those small groups will overlap with other circle to create one circle including everyone. Let's just hope the transition to google plus happens quickly and smoothly.

Like any social network, the more (time & posts) you put in, the more you get out of it.

I don't think I'm alone when I say my aptitude for social networking is burnt out and way passed the "love" stage. It makes it hard to go into this site with a fresh mind to discover any of it's cool nooks and crannies that separate it from Facebook.

That being said I think there's still room for invention in the space. I was quite pleased and excited with turntable.fm (and now that I can use it in Canada again I am excited again). Maybe I'll end up using the "hangout" feature.

tl;dr don't really need another means to ignore my long-lost highschool friend's all-important status updates

While the UI is good with animations and a nice design, I don't see anything that will make me shift completely away from FB: I might use it for hangout as an alternative to calling over google chat/skype. That's about it.

I take it like a fresh start.

This is why I switched from Y!Messenger to Gmail Chat. There was a good opportunity to get rid of annoying people in my list, and to handpick the ones that I really wanna chat with

I will try to do the same by switching from Facebook to Google+. It seems easy enough that my folks will be able to use it. So for one thing, I will be very active within my Family circle, given the fact that I live abroad and I share lots of photos and do a lot of video chatting with my family. Second, I have the chance to better organize my friends and acquaintances and to share relevant stuff with them.

So far I like it. I feel that Facebook benefited from people's curiosity to add everybody they'd ever encountered over the course of their lives to see what they're up to today. Google+ will likely benefit from a better-curated collection of connections that are added in a more though-through manner. With Facebook it was neat to see what somebody I knew in middle-school is up to now, but really there's no reason for me to add them on new social networks going forward. And I think part of that curation of connections is what makes a social network increase in value.

Good job Google.

Though the rest of the features are relatively mild, I'm definitely a fan of the "hangout". I was just on a chat earlier with 4 friends - I'm in the pacific northwest, three of them were in the midwest in several cities and one was all the way on the other side of the world, in Calcutta. Quality was fantastic and smooth, especially considering our pal in India was on a tethered 1Mbps cellular connection. Needless to say, I'm sold. Google+ makes Skype look like some teenager's high school science project gone wrong.

Liking it quite a bit so far: http://bitoftech.mkronline.com/2011/06/30/google-plus-first-...

I'm using it more than I've ever used Facebook. That's a good sign.

Circles don't have the tedium of a Facebook group. I can add a few people and go straight to talking and sharing with no need to bug them to join a group or tinker with a profile. It's functionally similar to Facebook groups, but switching contexts is easier.

I got an invite and I have to say that Google has a GREAT start here. They are doing a lot of smart things like making the UI very clean and nice. It isn't nerdy at all. It looks like a product that is trying to win at being a social network, not at trying to be search advertising or a "twitter killer".

It's as if Google realized that they succeed when their products are genuinely good, not just "good enough" and pushed out to Google's massive user base via their massive advertising platform.

Google+ solves most of the problems I have with Facebook. The circles more or less reimplement what I have been using with Livejournal for ten years now. I've been migrating as many of my contacts off of FB as I can, with the plan to cull my FB friends list and then ditching it as far as daily use is concerned.

If I am applying the Gervais Principle right, Google+ will never completely supplant Facebook. That's fine by me.

Google Wave poll two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354

From how much of it I have used so far it is apparent that they have been listening to complaints about Facebook and other social networking sites. It is a far better venture than Buzz ever was, but even now Buzz appears as a view able tab and I am not sure why. Though I must say I am having more fun causing the animations on the circles to happen then anything else.

Might fail, might succeed...only time will tell! It isn't a Wave 2 that no one will understand, but still have rough edges, bugs, no API (no integration with apps besides official one), nothing major that could make ppl move from Facebook, might be hard for casual user (think your father and mother) to get a Google Profile as Hotmail users...etc!

Personally any Google service that requires me to completely log out of my Google Apps account to use is no good to me.

No opinion (yet). I could not use it.

-Edit- I was unaware of the real meaning of the black bar on top of HN. Joke removed..

From the little I managed to use it I thought it was unbearably slow, then I found out it was the Chinese Government's fault: http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/06/30/google-plus-china/

So if it were fast, I'd use it!

I don't care about it. Facebook is fine for my family to talk to me and see pictures. I don't use anything else on it.

As for social tools twitter is ok.

Now can we have github replace twitter and have that timeline do something for us devs - now that would be awesome

I think it should be evaluated in terms of where it could be 10 or 20 years from now. Somehow when i think of it that way, and then i compare that to thoughts of facebook in 10 or 20 years... i have faith in google.

Looks like a mashup up of all existing google tools flavored with the tone of Social Networking...perhaps the only leverage it has is its Circle feature and Hangout...curious to see how it ll go....

I feel hangout is gonna be the dark horse feature. Imagine coming back from a hard day's work, logging in to plus, and finding 3 of your best friends hanging out over a beer ;)

Have used it, not really getting an "Aha!" moment.

I'd love to comment - Ive registered my interest but dont have an invite...if anyone felt kind, my email is in my profile ;)

I think the circles thing is a bit stressful. Making me sort my friends out is "making me think" and not fun.

What you think about android? Google rocks. But what you think about orkut? Wait and watch.

I think you need another option: Don't like it, don't need it, but will end up using it

1st thing they should do is to drop the ''Google'' and call it Plus-Its clean

Great idea. The mixing of circles in Fbook is a show stopper for me.

If anyone has an invite, (pretty) please get in touch!

Liked it, Loved it, Will shift to it.

Still can't seem to find an invite.

Does Hacker News have a black bar at the top because of Google+?

(The same thing happened to my Google today: the top bar turned black.)

a new thinking in social networking

Google+ will succeed

I like the overall very positive response from those who used it. I m interested in it as an apps platform, but i haven't got an invite :(