A Google slide presentation that explains some of the thinking behind G+ | Hacker News Reader

A Google slide presentation that explains some of the thinking behind G+

slideshare.net

74 pointsAndrewDucker12 comments

This is actually quite good. Around slide 100, he started bringing in some very interesting numbers. Among them:

  - using facial recognition, they determined the average number of unique people in your Facebook photos is 6.6, against an average friend count of 130.
  - 80% of Skype calls are made to 2 friends

He makes a very strong point about caring about these "strong tie" relationships, both from the point of view of the user, and of Google (the company making use of the relationships you cultivate).

This has implications for how you analyze Plus's success. If Plus ends up with a couple hundred million users, but an average friend count of 30 or so, I suspect Google will be just as happy, or happier, than if they achieved Facebook's level of friend count.

From a business point of view, what Google will care about is pageviews and pageviews/user (because that determines the #of ads they can show).

It may be that having fewer friends makes you update more and check more often (because it's more relevant). Or it may be that having more friends causes you to check back.

Another metric that drives revenue is how long you stay an active member -- that also might be better the more intimate your relationships are.

People have to stop saying this. Google isn't so blind as to think every product's sole purpose is to drive pageviews.

I'm speculating just as much as you are, but I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that a big part of Google+ is to drive usage of its other products. Once people start sharing directions, collaborating on documents, and so on G+ will be there to introduce users to one product after another. Sure, social ads may/will be important, but saying "what Google will care about is pageviews" is simplifying it immensely.

That's why I prefaced it with "from a business point of view" -- to imply that it isn't the "sole purpose", but it's certainly looked at. I'm not saying that they will game the system by forcing page-views when not needed by the product, but that they will judge success based on usage, not average friend count.

There were a lot of insightful comments when it was first discussed 8 months ago : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867807

Some more context:

Paul Adams, the author of these slides, was Google's social research lead in the UX team at the time. According to Dhanji R. Prasanna, who worked on Google Wave and Google+, Google feared that Facebook might see the slides and copy the Circles idea ( http://rethrick.com/#google-plus ):

I asked the obvious question--"While I agree that Circles is a very compelling feature, this slide deck is public. Surely someone at facebook has seen it, and it won't take them long to copy it?"

I was met with a sheepish, if honest look of resignation. They knew the danger of this, but were counting on the fact that facebook wouldn't be able to change something so core to their product, at least not by the time Emerald Sea got to market.

[...]

Many were visibly unhappy with his slide deck having been published for all to see (soon to be released as a book). I even heard a rumor that there was an attempt to stop or delay the book's publication.

The fear only increased when Paul Adams left for Facebook in December 2010 ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/20/paul-adams-googler-whose-pr... ). Happily for Google, Facebook's response, "Facebook Groups", missed the point. Google predicted correctly that Facebook wouldn't be able to change something so core to their product.

It's already happening. In the future we'll know thing like who out of our friends has bought this bad, who has bought this brand, who bought competitor brands, what do people think of this brand, and we'll have ways to communicate with them to find out more. Understanding sociability will become a core requirement for designing online. Almost all of us will need to become skilled in social web design. (Slide 33)

I don't want that. I don't want random sources or websites knowing who I am, who my friends are, and who bought their products and who didn't. I want to remain anonymous and protect my data. Of course, I won't be someone who visits these websites, I prefer markets and anonymity.

Circles work when I know what kind of posts my friends like and when they know what I like, but what about when we don't know what each other likes?

I want to share my posts with all my friends and have them decide what they want to see. I want to tag my posts or have my friends tag my posts. Then, they can follow my posts with certain tags or hide them from their stream. I want to see what they post in certain circles and join or subscribe. It's like twitter lists, but instead of lists of people, it would have a list of posts.

I'm quite amused by the deck's opening story about the horrors of 10-year-old kids on Facebook seeing gay men dancing with towels wrapped around them in a bar.

The problem of needing to partition one's social groups is very real, but the moralization in the deck rubbed me the wrong way.

Then again, San Francisco is a city where people bring their children to the gay pride parade, so maybe I'm just a wacko liberal with an incredibly biased perspective. :)

We can only stay up to date with 150 ties, and roughly at best...it is true, and it is interesting to think about who the closest people to us are.

Mixing social groups really doesn't work. It is kind of strange.

I want to give this a more detailed look a bit later, but it's quite interesting now. I wonder if it says anything about people who have thousands of friends, and why they do...

150, the Dunbar's number[1]. That is indeed the natural number for any traditional communities (villages, tribes, etc).

I think an important distinction is between "real" contacts, and the people you like to read stuff from every now and then. Circles can help organizing those, and not just ensuring that information doesn't leak between your distinct friend groups.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

Thanks, I saw this last year but couldn't find it after G+ came out. It clearly indicated their intention to do something like G+; they practically even have similar verbiage and branding (in particular circles). Facebook must have very much seen this coming... I'm very curious what they're next step will be.

Facebook made Groups according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2749559

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