Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

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For me the dichotomy becomes which groups really see what... you have:

    - family & close friends
    - acquaintances & loose friends
      - school alum
      - social groups / clubs
    - those who you might work with/for
      - linked in, you failed this audience
    - interests beyond clubs, outside acquantances

No social network does a good job at allowing a person to share with those groups as desired. What I share on twitter is far more techie than what my friends/family on FB care about (mental note, disconnect twitter from fb). What I follow on twitter doesn't line up with what I post (I also see way to much to actually track twitter or fb, I pop in every few days, and only see the top of the feed). most of the people on FB are more acquaintances or past friends from social groups, and some family.

The reality is that what will probably "win" will be a few discrete social networks... one for your career (probably not linkedin), a new one for your family and close friends, facebook for your loose friends and acquantences... and something closer to bulletin boards and/or webchat for social interest groups (probably not meetup).

I don't think the one site to rule them all will survive in the long run. And those groups trying to do so with facebook, twitter and pinterest are failing... those trying to build business models that aren't bought are failing.

> No social network does a good job at allowing a person to share with those groups as desired.

Doesn't g+ solve this with the whole "circles" idea? You control which groups you share with.

I think linkedin's groups solve it a bit better. The problem with circles is that the people in a given circle don't necessarily have me in a circle. I can really just group the input feed, not the output feed. It's more consumption than distribution focused.

> The problem with circles is that the people in a given circle don't necessarily have me in a circle.

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you mean here. If they don't want to 'follow' you, why would you expect to send them things?

> I can really just group the input feed, not the output feed

You can choose which circle(s) you wish to share with, is that not controlling your output feed?

People can filter their input (who they have in their circles) and their output (which circles they share each piece of content with).

I suppose you can't follow a chosen subset of a single users output, unless you can do something fancy with tagging.

Incorporated entities expect to be able to send things to people who don't 'follow' them.

Don't you get recruiter spam through Linked In? What about the more general advertising and marketing industry? They survive off such a model.

I suppose they would, although that sounds pretty horrible. "Companies can't spam people" isn't a problem with a design to me.

> Don't you get recruiter spam through Linked In?

Yes, the rate of which makes LinkedIn just an inbox for job offers for me, not a social network.

Sorry, I actually forgot about g+, since none of my friends/family/acquaintances actually use it... mostly followed industry people's posts for a while, but I get most of that on twitter.

G+ was a really nice imo way to work through it... too bad nobody used it in practice. I also hope that they work through a few of the issues I have with hangouts, mostly in taking over Google Voice duties, and the limited UX on the desktop (searches from contacts for SMS don't show up before random strangers in G+).

I remember having an idea to make something like G+ as a response to the "which groups really see what" issue shortly before G+ launched. Glad I didn't try executing on that one. Having tried G+ though I think it's too cognitively complex to categorise a few hundred contacts into various subgroups. Most users aren't going to bother. I imagine facebook takes an automatic AI type approach as to which posts it shows to which people so techie posts are more likely to go to techies. Anyone know if that's the case? Might be a gap to do that stuff it facebook is not already on it.

> I think it's too cognitively complex to categorise a few hundred contacts into various subgroups. Most users aren't going to bother.

I actually think the fact that you have to specifically put people into circles when you follow them makes it pretty straightforward. It only takes a moment, I like the inline dropdown interface to check the circles you want to add them to, and while it does take a few minutes to wrap your head around the first time you use it (probably not a non-tech-Grandma-ready interface), once you get it, it's easy and works well (IMHO).

That's just it though. G+ did most of what was listed here without the annoying app/game requests and a better interface. They had cross-platform text and video chat long before Facebook did either.

But in the end, the only thing that matters on a closed communications platform is where the people are. Most people won't bother switching platforms and in order for any competitor (G+ or otherwise) to take off is for everyone voluntarily migrate over.

> without the annoying app/game requests and a better interface

Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'm willing to bet that would have changed if they reached the level of engagement that Facebook did.

I've found the G+ interface to be mostly unusable, so there's no way I would use it for anything serious.

Same here. Regardless of how sensible their model was, I couldn't find a way to get myself to be willing to spend time on their UI.

It was just bad. With something like Facebook rises up from being unknown, its UI was pretty much vouched for early on (otherwise someone else would have won out). Google didn't have to survive competition. They just picked a UI, and I'm sure they followed lots of good UI principles and had lots of experts, but it was completely unappealing.

They also forced everything to integrate with G+ in really useless ways, which made me dislike it before even trying it. It didn't have any material problem in my life that it solved that would have made me put up with the UI. FB did: it was required for mainstream society, and it let me message my friends and others easily on the computer.

I believe the issues were more in terms of not being able to stage/market the product appropriately...

If "Google+" was first an initiative to create a universal single sign-on across all their own product lines (OAuth/OpenID), to better unify "profiles" which they did some of but didn't push it... and allowed the individual communities to continue to grow on their own (YouTube, their Blog thing, etc)... actually kept reader and extended with their own comment system etc.

By going that route, they could have made your "Google+ Profile" the center of your presence/contacts for the different social hubs. In the end, this is what happened anyway, at the cost of cannibalizing a few products, and alienating others, instead of doing the profile first, then offering "follows" across the sub-communities in a single interface later.

I think google's engineers are/were skilled enough to go this route, which would have been less "pure" architecturally, but more organic and better received.

I'm also still pissed that I can't have "tracker1" for my Google+ profile URL.. my old google profile was "tracker1" and half the first two pages of results on google search for "tracker1" are references to me.

I won't say it does a great job, but Facebook does allow you to categorize your friends by "close" vs" acquaintance" vs "alum" and so on. It's worked pretty well for me insofar that I get notifications whenever a close friend updates and when I want to share with everyone-but-X.

Not so good as a subject matter filter though. I can create a list of only tech people on FB, but if a tech friend wants to post about his puppy to everyone, not so much I can do about that.

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