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Comment by sssparkkk | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who is a bit disappointed with the slow speed of development of G+? When it launched a lot of users were quick to point out some of the larger issues they were having, and as of yet not much has been done to fix them.

Have a look at their what's new page: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#... - mostly rather small tweaks, nothing yet that improves their circles concept (e.g. allow us to define which circles show up in our default feed).

Also, with regard to their new product 'huddles'; why haven't they integrated this with google talk? A lot of my friends use google talk, practically none of them use huddles. So instead of improving the groupchat on google talk (and maybe just release an iphone app already!) they roll out this new product that locks out desktop users. Anyone care to explain to me why they might have gone this route?

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> Am I the only one who is a bit disappointed with the slow speed of development of G+?

Yes, definitely. When it came out I was blow away by the utility of the Android app which pushed my photos up to the cloud into an online gallery where I could instantly show them and share them. There were a whole lot of rough edges but I was sure they would get dealt with in short order - the functionality I was seeing was a break through, a killer app for me. But several months later, ALL those rough edges are still there. The G+ app still is not optimised for tablet in any meaningful way. There is no way to have have a hang out using your phone or tablet which is a huge use case. It just seems to be crawling along, presumably they are busy doing stuff but it doesn't seem to be focused on rapidly improving the user experience the way I was hoping.

this! the feature set of g+ is bizarre: huddles? hangouts? no use for it. games? no use for it; plenty of alternatives. photos? nothing new; plenty of alternatives. sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated.

circles are nice but limited.

events? where on earth are events? google calendar integration?

is it a social network or a work network? what's the point of g+?

the content of g+ is sparse compared to fb: e.g., friend of friend actions are private on g+, but visible on fb.

"sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated."

Poorly thought out, poorly implemented too.

You go to your Stream, and you see the aggregation of all your circles' streams.

You got to Sparks, and you see ... the same six or eight advertisements for canned sparks since the day you joined. How useful is that once you've seen it for three seconds? Yet they spend engineering time and electricity keeping this non-contribution up.

Wouldn't you expect to see the aggregation of your individual sparks when you click on Sparks? Of course you would. It's the same fucking thing as your stream, it's just search instead of posts.

(Yes, I sent feedback on that.)

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