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Comment by jeffclark | Hacker News Reader

"There should be a private messaging option in G+," said another user.

Love this. There is a private messaging option (it's email) but people are trying to replicate Facebook with a Google logo on it.

Will that help or hinder it's growth?

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There's the integrated Gchat, as well as email. You can also address a post to a specific person only.

So... that's at least three private messaging options. You're proposing another one? How does Facebook do it, exactly?

The quote is from the article.

Seemed as though by "Love this." you meant to endorse the sentiment. Were you saying you love the fact that a user made the sentiment? If so, why?

Also, as I have never been on FB, I was genuinely curious as to how they implement private messaging. rwolf's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2751654) in this thread is a little bit enlightening, but not completely.

He was being tongue in cheek, or sarcastic. Private messages in FB are basically like emails. You have a private inbox that you can decide (based on your privacy controls) if/who can send private messages to you. This inbox is in a "Messages" section which isn't connected to your wall or profile in any way.

Aha. I yet again fail to detect irony in text. The entire comment makes so much more sense in that light, perfect sense in fact.

Which quotes the comment stream under a Google+ post. Very meta.

Not only that, but you can make a post that has only one recipient. Private messaging is a special case of "I can send this post to specific recipients." Facebook's private messages exist as a separate thing in part because of how hard it is to control the audience of your Facebook posts.

yeah, I actually prefer this for the use case of "I have a stupid link to share with one or two people, then we might have a few back and forth comments, each only a sentence or two long."

I think it's a nicer forum for that than even threaded email clients, but at least one friend thought it was weird to be doing it in g+ rather than email, so we'll see.

Except there's no good 'record' of private posts you've received. If someone sent me something a week ago that I want to refer to, it's a bitch to find it again. This is why I'd rather see some gmail integration, essentially Facebook messages backed by your real gmail account, but with a simpler, prettier frontend integrated into G+ when you just want to fire off quick messages without context switching out of G+.

Sounds like a search problem. A thousand +1s for adding search.

I do think that G+ is going to have some very tricky issues to navigate ahead in terms of integrating with other services. Private messaging is a decently amusing one (I wouldn't be surprised if some thin layer on top of email is introduced for that), but what about something like Facebook Events? They're a very compelling, very sticky, bit of engineering. Google Calendar has the functionality required, but it's not presented in the right way for this use case. but do you want to go that far? How much of GCal gets pulled in to the G+ interface? How much of the GCal underpinnings do you expose? All/Some/None?

Google has all the engineering bits and bobs in place for pretty much every Facebook feature, but it's unclear whether the vision is of G+ as a bit of glue between services, or whether it's the veneer on top of all the services. It's also not clear which would be best for users in the long-run.

It seems that, for G+, this is just the beginning, and I do not envy the G+ team :)

DISCLAIMER: I'm a Google Intern, but have no dealings with any teams here, nor do I know anything about future features.

> "and I do not envy the G+ team"

I certainly do. Seems like an amazing opportunity to do really cool stuff!

A lot of people I greatly respect do a heck of a lot of work, and the G+ team fits in that model!

I'd love to work with them too, but I think maybe when things have calmed down a bit :)

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