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Comment by v21 | Hacker News Reader

The headline says "Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+", but actually most of these features are about making your Google+ experience better, not your gmail experience better. In other words, this smells more of corporate policy than product improvement.

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Not sure how you're coming to that conclusion. It gives you G+ data when you look at a contact in Gmail. It automatically updates your contacts' info. It seems like a really good set of pretty obvious integrations that makes all of the products better, to me.

More data is not necessarily better. This just destroyed the usability of chat. And I care about chat a lot more than G+, so if one of the two needs to go, it's going to be G+.

For this to not be a major regression, at least you would need to be able to limit the import to only to some circles. It would even fit in better with the Google+ ideals of treating different groups of "friends" differently.

Completely agree. I assume that's coming. It's another obvious use of Circles.

You can select which circles appear in chat (but only from the G+ chatbox as far as I know).

Ah, under "privacy". Not exactly the most intuitive process, but at least it's possible. Thanks!

I just tried it. Changing it in the G+ chatbox also changes it in gmail. Which is good, because I use the gmail one (since I have gmail open all the time) and not the G+ one.

Am scared of the potential surprises that'll come along.

I shared a google map (you know those created your maps things) and I didn't realise that it showed up on my g+.

All I thought was, wtf. I shared it from google maps and didn't have any intention of whatever circles it went to, to know about it.

Super confusing and worrying.

I'd say being able to search Gmail by Circle is pretty clearly an enhancement to Gmail, not an enhancement to Google+..

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