I'm a technical lead on the Google+ team. Ask me anything. | Hacker News Reader

I'm a technical lead on the Google+ team. Ask me anything.

anyasq.com

122 pointsGraffitiTim39 comments

Seems like most of the questions are watered down, and the answers are typical PR-speak. One of the tell-tale signs is the lack of any negative learning experiences, for example how explosive growth forced them to consider other architectural designs. "There's a ton of stuff to do" is neither informative nor all that forthcoming, IMO.

Agreed. I stopped reading after: "How many people did you work with on Google+?"

"We're a surprisingly small team"

Useless.

I stopped reading after realizing they didn't use reddit for an IAmA.

EDIT: Directly.

Why do you think the fact they don't use reddit matters?

On a side note: I think they managed to come up with a good UI targeted at the use case of asking questions to one person.

There's no followup, which is an essential part of asking questions, both to deal with evasion but also to clarify what you were asking. If they don't answer your question, you have no recourse, no call out, no opportunity to say: "Obviously you don't know the exact number, but is it ten or a hundred or a thousand?"

"both to deal with evasion but also to clarify what you were asking"

Very true. They would need to add comments and allow the interviewee to edit his/her answers.

Comments are coming; answers can already be edited

Answers like "We're a surprisingly small team" would never fly on Reddit

Personal fave:

"How many people did you work with on Google+?

We're a surprisingly small team (esp. by Google's standards), but we try to make up for it with passion and speed."

To which I ask, how many people did you work with on Google+?

Heh, since Google is famous (infamous?) for saying most products are small teams, just 3 or 4 people. It sounds like they are working all by themselves :-)

That being said, given all the products that had to co-operate somewhat for this to be released I doubt they were 'small'.

that's just propaganda. Their Chrome team alone is over 300 engineers.

It depends what you consider a team. The "Chrome" team is big, but the team that works on the HTML5 parser within Chrome is pretty tiny, as is the team responsible for V8, as are many of the other teams.

How does "pretty tiny" compare to "surprisingly small"?

The same as the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.

I believe "pretty tiny" is smaller.

Unless you have a good reason for forcing really terse questions (even shorter than Twitter's 140-character limit), please, please make the tiny text input into a textarea. Or if you want to be fancy, start it off as a one-line textarea but expand it if I start typing more. I have to write my question somewhere else and paste it to actually be able to read it back. Otherwise, really great job hustling to get great people for these AMAs.

Edit: I guess the questions do have to be short, but there wasn't proper validation/notification when my question was too long (it just took me to a blank page to reask a question).

Thanks. I think we're going to lift or lessen the constraint on question length. We were trying to have them fit in a tweet, and also we noticed that most interview questions are relatively short, but we've gotten that feedback quite a lot.

"See who I follow, and follow new people. / Update your profile."

No thanks.

We don't use those, twitter doesn't have a fine-grained permissions system.

Wow, really? What a crappy developer platform. I question why Twitter even bothers to put that stuff in a bulleted list when they're not even giving the developers a choice as to what they want to use. My natural reaction is to blame the developer for trigger-happy permissions requesting. Sorry about that!

But why do need to use my twitter info to login !! And on top of that "anyasq" can tweet on my behalf !Sorry !! Aint gonna happen.

Sorry, we're working on allowing other login mechanisms. The publishing permission is so you can tweet out questions you ask easily if the box is checked. We never misuse any permissions.

While I realize that part of this comes from the structure that Twitter's authorization takes, which doesn't allow fine-grained permissions, ideally I'd love to see more sites asking which permissions you want to grant them. I almost never want to allow a site to tweet on my behalf (though I don't mind if it wants to send me over to Twitter with a suggested tweet), and I don't want to trust the site itself to not abuse the permission; I'd rather just not grant that permission in the first place.

We now prompt only for read access. Later on we might add back in some options to grant read+write access in order to more deeply integrate it with Twitter.

Thank you for that; greatly appreciated.

Worse, it's asking for my Twitter credentials even when I'm signed in to Twitter already.

I thought the point of "ask my anything" was to get answers...

     - *How many* people did you work with on Google+?
     - We're a surprisingly small team (esp. by Google's standards), 
     but we try to make up for it with passion and speed.

"I think everyone feels the need to share different things with different people--and the desire to be able to hear from certain circles without losing them in the overall stream."

Personally I'm interested in the real numbers behind this. Have people actually split up their social network into circles? To what degree? Are people actually using the feature the way it was intended? How many posts are public or effectively public? How do people who only know a few people on G+ (essentially everybody outside the tech scene) use the service and Circles.

To me, G+ feels like a better content sharing network rather than a social network. For example, you can't even privately message somebody.

Now that I think about it, I wish the analytics lead on the team would do an IAMA as well. :-)

To me, G+ feels like a better content sharing network rather than a social network. For example, you can't even privately message somebody.

There are two ways to send private messages: 1) The chat, which you have to enable for circles or individuals. 2) You can contact anybody with a private message by sharing a message just with that person. To find out if a message you received is private, you have to check the sharing details, though.

Twitter login now prompts for read-only permissions, instead of read+write. I think that was the most popular suggestion from the HN crowd. Thanks all.

I submitted a question, but there was no confirmation screen, just a screen asking for a new question. Hopefully it got submitted because it's important:

"Like many, I spend my days logged in to a G Apps for Domains account and all my primary emails are there. How can I use Google+ and how can people share things with me?"

is there a God?

Deleted comment

We're not republishing content and I don't think we're ripping off r/iama. I think there's a lot of advantages to the "Ask me anything" concept being its own site, as I mentioned in the previous thread. And reddit also isn't the first to implement that idea.

I love feedback about AnyAsq but I think the most important thing about this link being on HN is the opportunity to ask questions of someone on the Google+ team and see his answers.

If you're going to spam my favourite technical website with pr for an application that I'm not even allowed to use, are you at least going to send me an invite?

Seriously, there's a lot of people that are on the "in" already here, but for the rest of us, either let me see what all the fuss is about already or STFU with the incessant "I'm cool you're not" posts about this thing.

Hey everyone, let's all completely stop talking about G+ until run4yourlives gets an account.

Too late, somebody invited me as a result of that comment. :-)

Point still stands though. I'd prefer that we not turn this site into a "look what I have that you don't" PR session. It's so much more than that.

Especially since you can provide a wonderful amount of feedback to the team by, ironically, using Google+ itself.

It's one of the biggest pieces of mainstream technology news right now, and though that might be because of the exclusive aspect of it (remember the PR firm that offered invites to other PR firms as a way of getting contacts?), it's also because a battle between Google and Facebook will be really interesting, leading to everyone with an opinion writing an article. It will probably blow over in a week or two - just like the Bitcoin stories did, though they lasted for several months. Or the Color stories (slight resurgence as the company continues self-destructing, but it's the first I've seen of them on HN in months).

It's a really standard cycle on HN - not the first or last time it will happen. If it gets too irritating, then someone will write a browser extension to hide all stories about Google+, or adapt an existing extension (as they did with Bitcoin and a bunch of other topics that briefly took over the site).

Cool, can I bags this line on the next google+ article?

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