Google+ Wastes No Time: Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Zynga On Board | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Wastes No Time: Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Zynga On Board

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80 pointstilt29 comments

For indie developers...well, who knows. There might be a lot of finicky things with handing over you game to Google+. Becoming the new Kongregate? I sort of hope that stays outside of Google.

Moreover I feel like this goes against the whole the of Google+, the majority of my friends hardly post substantial things to begin with; I don't think this will change their behavior much.

Google says "we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web"

I don't quite understand the richness in playing Angry Birds or Farmville. Real life is not like these games and therefore, people are momentarily attracted by this alternate world. I wonder if real farmers would play farmville?

Would real soldiers play Call of Duty?

Yes, they do. My brother served in Afghanistan (Canadian infantry) and they most definitely played Call of Duty during the lengthy periods between missions.

Yea, I remember when there were sales restrictions on a certain FPS in some country, because it let you play as Terrorists and shoot at US Troops, it was the US soldiers there that were most annoyed because they wanted to play the game! I wish I remembered more about the story, to find a link.

From September of 2010: Sales of new 'Medal of Honor' video game banned on military bases http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09...

If I recall, the biggest objection came because one could play as "The Taliban" instead of unnamed/ambiguous "terrorists."

The point of these games is to have the farmers play Call of Duty and the soldiers play Farmville.

At the very least, real people do play the Sims.

Hrrm... I don't know, I feel like there are a lot of things they could have spent time on that would be more important /useful than supporting Angry Birds, etc.

Better stream content filtering / control? Shared circles? Nested circles? Better integration with GCal, Google Groups, etc? Improving Sparks? I mean, as much as I like + so far, I wouldn't say there aren't still a lot of things that I hope they're going to address. And Angry Birds was, unfortunately, not at the top of my list. :-(

Be grateful! Thanks to improvements like these, Google + might be able to survive amongst the common folk long enough to make the features you desire.

True, and I should have mentioned that point. I certainly do acknowledge that my tastes and needs aren't representative of the rest of the world. :-)

Well I'm thankful I closed my Google+ account now. The wave of mass spamming was completely relentless ... even after I closed my account. I literally disabled emails (to prevent the wave of spam I was hite with), then I decided to leave, and then request no updates after leaving O_o they just kept coming.

Somehow I think they are going to take the same approach of mass spamming Facebook did, I guess games are the best way to do this and create stickiness...

EDIT: spam = 20-30 unwanted emails a day. And I kept getting them after I left, I had to fill in a second form to get them to stop. I know of atleast one other person this has happened to aswell. Not sure if its fixed now or not.

Interesting. I've not had that experience at all. A handful of followers who, as best I could tell, only wanted to alert me to their fantabulus products, but hardly anything momentous.

What I wonder now is why this happens to some but not others. "I'm not very cool", of course, is one plausible explanation. :)

Or position. I've been running the online branch of a news organisation, so a lot of the people who are in my direct network are journalists, people trying to get attention from the media, and of course advertising agencies.

I used G+ for about 3 weeks from launch and I found it a horrible experience. Basically none of the people I want to keep in touch with use it, everything else was spam. I'm also known under a pseudonym so I didn't see any point of using the service.

I found it more of an highly opinionated Tumblr clone (lacking the flare of Tumblr) than a Facebook clone.

Wait, that's not "spam" as traditionally understood. What you're describing is targetted email intended specifically for you. You're saying essentially that people who wanted to find you, could. That's a bad thing from an anonymity perspective, I guess, but it's a rather different problem than "spam".

I don't think so. If someone is spamming a thread they are over posting, I view it the same way.

I can remember at one point having 200 Facebook emails in one day. Tell me that isn't spam.

I often hear people moanign abuot 'Facebook spam' and have heard others moan about 'Google+ spam' as well. Sure you signed up, and might nto truly unsolicated, but its the quantity thats the issue.

A daily update similiar to what linkedIn does is what I would prefer.

Based on your comments here, it sounds like your circles mainly included professional contacts. Have you used twitter in a similar fashion? How were the spam levels there?

Edit: My question sounded sarcastic when I reread it. I don't have any newspaper-industry contacts on twitter or google+, so I'm curious about the extent to which the network influences their sharing habits.

My EDIT: Most of them use posting tools, like ping.fm. So all networks are spammed equally. They just use social networks as spam aggregation tools

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LOL I used twitter for a while, but I found it very intrusive and stopped using it. That was before I started working for 'big media'.

From a personal level I didn't see much value from it. I still have a professional account but I only check that once a week or something.

I don't have a desire to be instantly upto date like some people, I can wait a week and really I have IM, work email, personal email, cellphone, work phone, facebook, tumblr, all buzzying constantly.

I don't need more crap what I need is more time. If someone would build a social network that address information overflow that'd be great.

(just misspelled 'network' as 'betwork' ... theres an idea for someone that loves maths, build a social tool to share sports betting odds amongst friends, liek a better tipping game or something)

I'm not sure I follow. I've disabled notifications except for people adding me, mentioning me, or sharing with me directly and only receive emails for those. Particular people spamming your feed? Put them in a different circle and dont check that one as much. People who are not in your circles and are sending you things you don't want? Block them.

Also games looks like it's going to be contained to one place, so if you don't want to see it you don't have to.

As I noted in my other reply, alot of my friend are journalists and people in advertising agencies. The circles things breaks down when business and play over lap like that.

The email thing is probably fixed now. It wasn't jsut that it was also when I quite the first time people where still hassling me for invites. I signed back in and all my networks and even my profile picture where still active (a day later). I had specifically removed the connections and data before closing, I shut everything down.

I assume these where teething pains but I still wrote a stern reply.

You are aware that you can turn off all e-mails from G+ to your account in your settings, right?

If you reread what I typed I did, and then after I quit I was still getting them.

That sounds like a bug... turning them off worked fine for me. Have you filed feedback?

Anyone gotten access to the API yet?

Facebook and Zynga are pretty much symbiotic now so Zynga has serious leverage, but any chance Facebook will start locking up smaller developers with exclusive deals?

My understanding is that they kind of do -- any game which allows in-game purchases must do so using facebook credits. You can set up a different "instance" of a game, but to allow interaction with the FB players, you have to tie it in to their currency.

This means any emerging viral/social type game will be effectively locked in to facebook. (Those with clout, like Zynga, are able to negotiate better terms.)

well, the google translate api is still scheduled for shutdown dec 2011 http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/overview.html... google wastes its and our time with games from yesterday ... well at least we know now what their priorities are. in a way i pitty google, they were great once, now they are just ... facebook

my understanding was that google was having problems with too many folks using the translate api and pretending it was original content. that would make terrible input for google translate to learn from.

Google is supposedly launching a payed version of the translation API: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-s...

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