Google releases Games for Google+
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
Clicking on that "Game" tab on Google+ will be just like opening Steam and seeing all your friends' activity and going "Cool, which game do I play now? Is there anyone online right now?" and I love that!
Most of us hate this kind of stuff. I know I do. It's super annoying. Furthermore, as a game developer, it would kill me a little bit to "sell out" like that.
However, this is why Zynga is worth a bazillion dollars. They understand the power of "virals". Have you ever talked to a Zynga employee? "Virals virals virals". They are one of the few companies who really understand the power of converting social pressure into profit.
Really?
I remember when I first joined Facebook, and my News Feed came to be quickly dominated by Zynga items, and my notifications came to be dominated by reminders to see how fast I can type A-Z.
I remember last summer after I joined Facebook as an intern, when the head of the newly-created Games team announced that they would collapse all the Zynga notifications into "Bob and Sally are playing Farmville."
Now, I don't remember the last time I saw any Facebook game spam.
I hear people say this a lot, but is it true?
(Just checked my last 300 feed entries. There was one notification about someone beginning to play Jeopardy. Spam machine indeed.)
On the other hand. Those polls are The Evil now. Absolutely no way to get rid of them (w/o using external scripts).
the serious answer is that it keeps you constantly aware of the game, increasing the overall probability that you'll sign up.
Sounds like a winner to me. I won't have to keep blocking every new game that comes along.
I keep looking, and it keeps not being there.
Later, when I could spend a bit more time I went back and was presented with a screen explaining that games would need access to my information and tried to paint as rosy a view of that as possible[1]. I clicked through to play Angry Birds and was presented with specifics of what that particular game wanted to access: too much. Why?! I can play Angry Birds on my phone or tablet and not give anyone my info. I declined.
1. "Games on G+ are social" or some such nonsense. Of course games are social! Giving up my private info does not make them more social. The cited examples of showing you which friends have been playing the game you're looking at could (and should) be done by G+ itself, not the game app.
Games are a big deal, though. They'll keep people on G+ even when there's nothing immediately social to do, and increase interactions between people, this time in a non-spammy way.
It was super hard to get in for the first couple of weeks, and then it suddenly became a non-problem.
A couple of months later and Facebook kept getting better and MySpace kept declining mostly due to the spammy nature of people's horrible HTML tastes (read: Geocities).
Now Facebook seems like a similar case to me. The games were getting spammy, the quizzes my friends took to find out which character from Sesame Street they were are were getting spammy, the layout kept changing every week, and I kept finding annoying bugs.
I expect the same story to be repeated. Google Plus is the next iteration on social networking. They learn from the previous' mistakes (just like Facebook learned not to let people add HTML to decorate their profiles). Google Plus is imo a more polished, more thoughtful iteration on Facebook. SO I am not too worried.
Google has invested a lot in this move, and I hope and trust they will continue to improve it for a long time.
I don't know, I'm just not that excited about it. I have more acquaintances than I do on Facebook, making it feel more like Twitter.
The primary reason is that my "following" circle is completely overwhelming my friends, family, etc, circles. I'd love to be able to look at all my circles except Following (or rather, to be able to view some subset of my circles at a time). Clicking to view "Family", scrolling down and reading, then back to the top and clicking "Friends", and then "Acquaintances" is tedious.
In addition, an option to view more condensed posts would be helpful for viewing my Following deluge. As it is, each post gets a few paragraphs and a handful of comments. This is often nice, but sometimes I'd like to scan it more quickly, and if it could be just the person who posted it and the first few sentences, I'd love it.
I seem to have developed a kind of bimodal distribution of contacts in Google plus that represent the extremes of Twitter and Facebook: a bunch of people I know really well (family), and a bunch of people I don't know at all (Vic Gundotra, etc). The problem is both groups are getting equal billing in the stream. Which means that right now anything my family members post is so far down in the stream I barely see it.
Another aspect of the same problem is a need for filtering on hash tags. Eg: I tried following Romain Guy because I'm interested in Android. But 9/10 posts he makes are about photography. I want to follow him but only see things he posts about Android. EDIT: thinking about it, there might be some useful cross pollination between this problem and sparks - it would almost solve my problem if I could just say "only show me things Romain Guy posts that are relevant to my sparks".
I feel like the two functionalities (twitter-like asymmetry, and facebook-like keeping track of your friends) are at odds. Either an option for all but "following" in the stream or else making the stream selection on the left as checkboxes instead of a radio group could really improve things.
Then uncheck the Following circle. Let me know if you have any problems with it. I'm in the process of making it work with multiple-accounts so if you have multiple accounts, it might not work.
As for GData / AtomPub and REST... AtomPub was designed specifically to be a restful protocol, and GData is heavily based on AtomPub... but also has a JSON mode, so you get your wish there.
Anyway, the point I was getting at isn't about any one (or two or three) specific items of how they implement their API... just a hope that they stick (mostly) to established / open standards. By the same token, I hope Google are - or become - involved in the Federated Social Web initiative and adopt the work that comes out of that. But that's just me...
If you don't want to do that, then let me just pass as a parameter a nonce and then, if the user clicks agree or whatever, allow me to use that as the password.
Just skip the consumer secrets, token, two or three step authentication and HMAC based authentication. It is a social media system, not a stock-trading application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTYzyIcp0mY
All in all, it looks well done. I want to be absolutely sure I don't see Puzzle crap if I'm not interested, but their statements so far are in the right direction.
If you think games are important to your platform, I really think that having game-specific APIs and features for game developers to target is both useful and simple.
I've always thought a Facebook meets xbox live would do well.
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My biggest reason for not using G+ more (I prefer twitter) is that a single conversation / thread can take up too much room in the feed. I rarely have the time to wade through / scroll down constantly -- the composite circles tend to help a bit.
Say Mr. X social media adds a few of your publicly listed friends. And some add him back. Then Mr. X adds all their friends by looking at their circles (both ways). This includes unlisted people. They add all of them. Again, some of them add them back without double-checking. This is reinforced when Google+ shows contacts in common. You think, hey this is a friend of a friend. Often they have more than 2 contacts in common.
It's either spreading like fire or my friends are particularly vulnerable to this, wich I doubt as most are tech-savvy.
I hope Google takes care of this issue before the Zyngas creep up and make the service as trashy as Facebook.
Edit: reworking examples to make it a bit more clear.
I don't see how that leads to spam. Friendship isn't symmetric in G+. Media sociopaths can follow me all they want. If I don't follow them back, I don't see a word they write in my stream.
This happened to me several times in the last few weeks.
EDIT: I am aware of this so I don't add them anymore, but many of my contacts, perhaps most, keel falling for it. And I cant escape the constant notices of MR Xs adding me on G+ even when I'm not in G+. I can't tell G+ not to notice me of spammers adding me and just do it for actual friends. BTW, downvotes? Wow...
There's your problem. Why on Earth are you adding people that you don't know at all? I'd like to see you back up your "So most people just add them" statement with hard evidence. I for one, do not "just add" people just because they circled me. I first check to see if they are someone I care about at all.
Now, Google shows maybe 100 or so recommended users, which is below my threshold of "fun number of people to add at one time". I say "maybe 100" because, interestingly, Google+ no longer shows the number of recommended users. I wonder if they removed this feature because of visual clutter, or were finding a lot of people abusing the feature like I did.
Don't add anyone you don't know. Or, if they 'seem' interesting, banish them to a dark circle that you visit perhaps once in a few weeks.
Even if you do the right thing, you get those notices. And even if only some of your friends fall for it, it spreads. And I don't blame them, it's a hassle to check.
Edit: and of course, I am not publicly listed! But they can bypass that by adding friends who have their list of contacts public (a default!)