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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

My wife has always been an intermittent Facebook user, because she was never sure how private anything was, and the periodic UI changes confused her. She's perfectly intelligent and reasonably technically savvy, but not a huge tech nerd, and not willing to invest time into figuring out all the nuances of FB. So I was really surprised when, after trying Google+ for a few days, she said, "I think this is really going to make my family closer."

I don't know if there's a better measure of success for a social networking service than that.

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My wife and her friends (who amazingly all accepted her G+ invites and immediately started the service) like it much more than Facebook. My wife's an RN, and reasonably technically savvy, but not someone I'd call a "geek". I asked her why she liked it more and she said two things that I thought were interesting:

1) "Well, I like Google better anyway. So I'd rather use their service."

2) "It just feels better than facebook to me."

Really surprised me, considering that we're going to replace her Android phone that she's only been using for 6 months or so because she hates it so much and because she really likes to use facebook.

I'm not sure if her experience is going to be the norm, but it seems to bode well for Google.

This was nearly the same experience for me.

Background:

I am a rather technical person -- been messing with computers since MS-DOS 4 at the age of 8ish (sorry, not trying to show my epeen, just giving context) -- and was always apprehensive with social media.

Recently, when my work position became more of a project management position, I had to start getting to know Facebook -- which, previously, I've never touched at all before. This was about 2-3 months ago.

Starting with Google+, as a relatively new Facebook user, I just don't want to use Facebook anymore solely because of reason #2.

wonder if a lot of people think of Android not so much as a Google thing but as an "off-brand iPhone"

Will user A see my post? http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-RIL_CvjOmVY/ThQKTNckBYI/AA...

This has been one of the interesting aspects of it. You can direct message someone by sharing it only with them.

Also if you send something to one circle and then add someone to that circle later, they get to see everything sent to that circle.

The bottom right of that flowchart is a little scary. So anything you post, no matter how private you want it to be, can be seen by anyone that it gets re-shared to?

Nevermind: just noticed that that only applies to posts you share publically.

Yes, any user that can see your post can reshare it to people you did not originally share it to by clicking the share button.

They could also just tell person A or repost it if there wasn't a share button, though. Just use good sense.

wrong.. if you mark it as a limited share...no one outside that circle can share it..try it yourself and see...it is a new change that went into effect over the weekend

That's a good change, but that's not my point. My point is that things don't automatically become unprivate because there's a share button. Somebody has to make the decision to share these things, and they still have the ability to do so without a convenient button. The point is that users should still maintain good sense about what they post.

It would be nice if you could add a blocklist for a given post (so you don't have to remove people from circles or create temp-circles).

e.g: You and your friends are throwing a surprise party for one circle-member's birthday.

Hmm, unless the planning literally involved a cast of hundreds, I'd just create a temporary circle.

My wife was the same way.

With regards to the original blog post, I think holes are a stupid analogy since holes by definition can't overlap without modification. Personal Venn diagrams is what you should be going for, with the key being that your Venn diagram might contain some of the same people as the next guy's Venn diagram, but there will almost certainly be differences/gaps, too.

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