The last few G+ features I would like to see | Hacker News Reader

The last few G+ features I would like to see

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29 pointssamlev20 comments

For the business market, the most important Google+ feature for Apps has to be the ability to limit Google+ sharing to within your domain. The weird thing is that they allow this for Google Docs for Apps, so it must be some sort of oversight that they haven't done this yet (or must be more complicated than it appears).

Once they do this, Google+ for Apps will really finally launch. It will be an extremely strong competitor to Salesforce.com Chatter, Yammer, Asana, and things of that nature, especially if they nail the API.

Among other things:

1) You can do very interesting things with email analytics in terms of discerning the real social network within a business. Gmail's auto-complete already uses a lot of these features to determine which address to show you on each keystroke. They incorporate time into the autocomplete ranking algorithm, as someone you've recently been emailing a lot will always bubble up. Email frequency would be an incredibly strong signal for ranking within a Google+ Apps News Feed.

2) If they nail the API, there's a ton of integration that can be done. Lots of business apps will be built around the Google+ for Apps API. Some basic ideas:

a) Index Gmail and Google Docs to build an internal "person search". That is, type in a keyword like "foo" and you'll find the rank-ordered list of people within your organization that are an expert on foo, whether it be an function name, a client, a project, etc.

b) Seriously buff up Gmail group chat to get a Campfire competitor, with much more persistent group chat history, and far easier collaboration on docs, spreadsheets, etc.

Done right, Google+ for Apps would actually be the final assault on Microsoft's kingdom rather than Facebook's. It would allow new kinds of features that Office would struggle to match.

Events and calendaring integration!

Id be sending g+ invites for upcoming events and as a side effect reminding people about their g+ accounts.

Instead i have to use facebook.

I'd like to see them develop public key encryption browser extensions and to integrate them into Google+, so people can post items that only the intended recipients can read.

Then I will be able to swear as much as I like, and upload all of the nude pictures I want, without Google even knowing.

Event invites with Google calendar integration is one feature I'd love to see. Hopefully it isn't too far off. In fact my circles appear in the "add guests" search section of my Google calendar event creation. Selecting them does nothing yet though.

#2, can you not share with the circle and with [Public]?

I'm guessing the use-case here is "I have a particularly nerdy observation I'd like to post; I want my nerdy friends to see it, and I'm happy to have random nerds (from Reddit, HN, etc.) wander by and comment on it, but I don't want to bother my family/colleagues/non-nerdy friends with it". Does sharing a post with a circle and "Public" accomplish that, or is it identical with making a purely Public post?

The latter, unfortunately. I've been in that boat so often on both G+ and Facebook.

And I'm sure you're not the only one. I want to be able to post technical (public!) stuff, but keep it from showing up in my 'family' circle. Why that's still not possible is beyond me.

Although not correct, posting to both my 'public' and 'techies' circles would be one way of addressing this issue. But alas, according to you this doesn't actually work that way.

Not just nerdy observations - think about multilingual users. I often want to make a post public in Italian, but I know that the non-Italian speakers who circled me wouldn't be interested...

Still waiting for Venn Diagram Circles i.e. set theory transformations to do something like "show only to people in both my school circle and my friend circle".

Hell, just make a decent developer API already. The existing read-only one is embarrassing. Third parties will take care of the rest.

I just don't want the "What's hot on Google+" section at the top center of my screen. It is usually some stale Youtube meme that is neither hot nor informative, but takes a few seconds to skip because it looks like any other post in my stream.

I absolutely agree with #2. A "passive public" that would "make a public post that only appears in additionally selected circles, and on your profile."

Sure, it's a "power user" feature, but don't those drive social sites?

I'm still waiting for better comments, less like facebook and more like Google's own YouTube (or ideally like reddit and HN). The fact that you can +1 something but not have it rise to the top makes no sense at all to me.

While I get what you're saying, without threading people (in my circles, at least) tend to post in a conversationally progressing manner. Without threading it wouldn't look like a conversation at all, it would be, well, what you said. YouTube comments. Do you really want that?

How about removing the "real names" policy? :)

RSS/Atom feeds. There's a few folks I'd like to read updates from, but right now G+ is too 1998 for that.

replacing open subscription channels with in-site ones is more like too 2011 for that.

Yes, please. RSS feed for public posts would be awesome.

#3 'lock this post'

Well that's nice to know. Functionally, it seems to be what I had in mind, if not exactly how I'd thought of it.

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