Comment by betterth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betterth | Hacker News Reader

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Yes! Leave it to Google to screw up privacy, I don't use G+ much but this right here has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would say it's intentionally convoluted to get people to have poorly set settings (more "sharing"), but let's face it, Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design (they're engineers!).

Anyway, I spent 20 minutes frantically trying to figure out how to handle gChat privacy settings while my carefully curated buddy list filled up with random names.

- Go to plus.google.com

- Find the chat box on the left side, there is a small down arrow at the top left of it

- Click on privacy settings

- MAKE SURE that only the circles you want in gChat are selected (IE uncheck the hacker news circle you made)

DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN!

I'm still trying to figure out how to get the names off my list, even though that has been set. No new names though. I'm just surprised that Google would add to my Google Chat buddy list, a totally separate product, without ever asking me if i wanted to combine G+ and gChat like that.

Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??

>DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN!

From my experience, you can do this even after you join.

Yep, it took me all of three seconds to reverse this setting (admittedly, when I had been told where to look).

I connect to gchat using a third party program, and my contact list in this program is still full of unwanted contacts that I have to manually delete.

I said do it before you join to save people in a similar situation.

Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design

This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult.

Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??

Why is this scary, other than the fact that it's different from what's happened in the past? Was the Chat / Mail integration scary too?

Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX.

They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to.

Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.)

(Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)

> I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns.

EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being:

People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

Um... Isn't that the reason "circles" in Google+ exist? To draw lines?

It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.

I don't think anyone only "reads" one community. According to interest, one participates in many?

Personally, I found all this quite confusing (and just when I figured how to "circle"; doh, limit has been reached for adding people. But, you can start adding tomorrow!)... and following the advice of sp332 and betterth, I avoided falling into blunders like Google adding all 1000+ contacts to my Gtalk or notifying each and everything that ever happens in G+ universe.

Moreover, since now people are split inside circles, am I supposed to update the circle manually everyday?

Agreed, what should be a simple thing has turned into a usability nightmare. Why is Google limited the number of people I can add? Why is there a hard cap of 5000 profiles that I can add total?

If this is supposed to be a social network, why are these limitations in place?

Their design isn't up to snuff, I'd agree. So, it appears all that research and the brain trust nets a let down.

Please be gentle

You're hinting at Google's design problem in your comment.

Good design isn't primarily about UI research and one way mirrors. It's having a design vision for what you want to be, and how you communicate that to your users. Simplicity and ease of use are important factors too.

As this thread points out Google utterly fails at this. The top comment is "I have no idea how this thing works"

Then, please explain, why is it so bad? What is the weak link in the chain? I just decided against joining the HN circle because the list of instructions to do it was too much like the instructions for editing linux config files, which I only follow out of necessity.

I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company that hires engineers). I don't think that they took design seriously at all until more recently and there hasn't been any lack of posts on HN or elsewhere talking about the growth of good web design. In short, their design has improved from 2010 and beyond due to a large push by management for updated and unified design across products, and I'd argue Matias Duarte's position on the Android team.

As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail.

That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc.

I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.

This is kind of a dealbreaker here. Especially since the chat in Google+ is indeed set to not show the Hacker News circle, but my chat in gmail is still showing everybody! And there's no visible setting to change that outside of Google+

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