> 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.
Doesn't g+ solve this with the whole "circles" idea? You control which groups you share with.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Don't you get recruiter spam through Linked In? What about the more general advertising and marketing industry? They survive off such a model.
> 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.