We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+.
On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as many non-techie non-early-adopters as possible about Circles, and many get it and love it, but several don't really understand it.
In particular, the asymmetry of circles is overlooked by a lot of people, even by some casual users who think they understand how Circles works. On Facebook, there is one authoritative list of who is in the group, and posts to the group stay in that group. On Google+, your circles are not my circles. I may have you in a "close friends" circle, you may have me in a big "co-workers" circle, or you might have all your friends in one circle. When I am browsing my "close friends" feed and see a post by you, I may guess wrong about the social context that you are sharing that message in, and make an inappropriate comment, not realizing who else received the message. (The way to determine on G+ who received a post is by noting and clicking on the gray "Public" or "Limited" in the upper right of the post) Maybe I am underestimating people, or maybe comments are just much less big a deal than posts, but I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents.
If I had to make a prediction, I'd think that the ease-of-use and clarity of FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles. I could be wrong, so it'll be interesting to see what ordinary users prefer.
There are a number of areas in G+ that seem like they're going to lead to highly-publicized mistakes, and the asymmetry of circles is certainly one of them. You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post).
I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to be fair, nothing is as easy to misdirect as a twitter DM.
Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.
It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field.
You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends.
But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most.
Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.
FB Groups will trump the power and
flexibility of Circles
FB Groups are more like mailing-lists. Useful of course, but I'm subscribed to 4 groups already, neither subscription being my choice, and I find the feature itself useless for Facebook.
FB for me (and it seems, for many) is an inherently private thing. I don't want groups outside of my real-life friends. That's the fundamental break here - I'm being followed (and following) much more widely, similar to Twitter. What Google has done is made Twitter for people who don't get why 140 characters is a feature.
So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones.
Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.
I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents
Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading".
I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.
when I first used Circles the first feature that came to my mind was the ability to make a circle public and to add other administrators to it and allow other people to 'follow' it, or add it to another circle
I think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy
That problem is related to the fact that Circles can be both used as (1)a privacy group of people to which you push stuff and (2)a filter for content published from that same group. To avoid this kind of confusion maybe Google should separate those uses more clearly or just drop (2) altogether.
Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.
I agree that the asymmetry of Circles is a cognitive issue. Facebook groups actually work more like "Places"[1], which I think is a lot more intuitive, but I don't think FB makes the metaphor clear enough to leverage that intuitiveness. I also don't think FB takes the issue seriously enough.
Finally a well balanced article after a week of non stop hyping of Google+. Google+ is just trying to do what Facebook is already doing with a few new features added to make it distinctive. Nothing really innovative or ground breaking. It is just the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it.
Regarding the circles concept, if I need to share something with a certain group of my contacts, I will prefer Email or Dropbox rather than putting it on some social network whether it is facebook, google+ or twitter.
The author seems really angry at Google and clearly wants to demonstrate how much smarter he is in comparison to the rest of the organization. Nearly every sentence is drenched with this sort of stuff:
"It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure--but I don't find it all that interesting, personally."
". I listened politely, all the while rolling-my-eyes in secret at their seemingly implausible naivete."
"I laughed, disbelieving. Facebook has a hacker culture, they're only a handful of engineers, and they develop with quick, adaptable tools like PHP."
This post isn't about Google+ or Facebook. This post is about "Look at me, I'm so much smarter than my old bosses"
Something clearly upset him pretty significantly at Google. I'm not sure he's got a clear point of view on this.
Did you finish reading the article? Towards the end he admits that even he missed the boat. In my opinion all the snark was setting up for the fact that, even though he was so confident he had things figured out, he turned out to be completely wrong. The point is that no one can really predict how this will turn out.
Totally agree. His begrudging "It's ok, I guess" conclusion doesn't make the rest of it any more insightful. It's all the worst sort of locker-room gossip.
So on the one hand this guy says FB is lean and agile because they use PHP - but produced a less than compelling response to circles.
And on the other hand he says Google's "toolchain is not well suited to fast, iterative development and rapid innovation" - but they produced a polished social product from scratch in a remarkably short time.
I'm afraid I don't ascribe much value to his analysis. Maybe there's a good reason why he's an ex-wave and ex-plus engineer, and that could explain why I think I hear an axe being ground.
The way I read it, the author was explaining his expectation that Facebook would beat Google to implementing that model. This then emphasizes his misunderstanding of the point of that quote about building it before others. Even when agile about specific features, the inertia of Facebook's existing core product can be hard to overcome; entirely unsurprising given their huge userbase. Google was effectively starting from scratch.
Google has a lot of work to do, but with a mostly blank slate and less inertia to overcome. It's also remarkable how they have used this as an opportunity for improvements across the board, a the very least visually.
I have to agree, I don't find the analysis or the train of thought particularly insightful. It seemed apparent to me that facebook being 'unable to change their core product' meant exactly what he figured out it meant 6 paragraphs later... not that they couldn't do it, technically.
Also, does he understand the extent to which Facebook actually uses PHP? "quick, adaptable tools like PHP" ... um... seriously?
Believe it or not, it is possible for Facebook to be lean and agile yet produce a less than compelling response to circles. Google's internal process has also been criticized before by other former employees, such as the infamous color survey. Your eagerness to dismiss an account from someone on the inside is a little weird and doesn't refute the points he made.
Facebook groups is a distinct feature from facebook lists.
Facebook lists are the same feature as Google circles. And the only reason you didn't know this already is that you did not care enough to look, so circles cannot be all that much of a killer feature.
To utilize "Facebook Circles" first you must put categorize some friends into a list.
Click "Create a List" and drop some friends in. I have restricted permissions for anyone not in a list. A "Good People" list for those that I'll share anything with, and a few others.
Now to utilize sharing type some stuff into your status box. Anything, but lets go with "I can have circles too."
Now click the lock icon to the bottom right of the status entry widget. It will say "Make this Visible To:" And you see have a text box you can now type your list name into. I type "Goo" and it auto completes "Good People"
You can even exclude lists! So you can have a "Friends" list and a "Coworkers" list with people who overlap, but then post status that only go to your "Friends who are not coworkers."
The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.
From the post: A few years ago, before the CEO cared a whit about social networking or identity, a Google User Experience researcher named Paul Adams created a slide deck called the Real Life Social Network. In a very long and well-illustrated talk, he makes the point that there is an impedence mismatch between what you share on facebook and your interactions in real life. So when you share a photo of yourself doing something crazy at a party, you don't intend for your aunt and uncle, workmates or casual acquaintances to see it.
In real life, the crazy party photo you would be showing your friend would be on your phone's screen or (in olden days) it would be a hardcopy photograph. Putting your phone or the hardcopy photo back into your pocket would be the end. The potential for blowback would be limited to whatever could be whipped up by your friend's verbal description of what he'd seen.
Whenever you put anything on the Internet, though, there's not really any way to control its spread. Whatever privacy mechanisms a sharing/social site puts in place will be broken by crackers at some point or part of the system will break on its own and leak information. Long before that, though, one of the people you permitted to access the controlled content will simply copy it and share it with other people.
Don't put anything online that you wouldn't be comfortable with your grandma or work colleagues/boss reading.
It amazes me that this engineer appears to not know that Google+ Circles are already implemented in the core of Facebook as Friend Lists (though without a nice UI and pushed aside over time) and that Facebook Groups solve a completely different, unrelated problem.
His point was that he was waiting for Facebook to make their pre-emptive response to Circles, and then FB released Groups. He knows full well is solves a different problem - that was the point of what he was saying.
Not only does Groups not really do the same things as Circles/Lists at all, but Facebook appears to think that Lists don't work. Zuckerberg:
Just take friends on a site, and cut them into subgroups. Sounds good in theory. But almost no one wants to make lists. We’ve been at this for a few years, and promoted heavily. Most we’ve gotten is 5% to make lists, and most don’t make more than one.
Facebook lists provide (barely) adequate functionality for users with large and/or complex social networks to constrain sharing but, like Circles, they're a PITA to set up. Fiven most people don't need them it's no surprise they're buried in the UI, particularly given they constrain rather than encourage sharing.
I don't have a Google+ account, and don't know if it solves this, but one of the failings of FB lists is that they only control what you share, not what others share about you--there's no way to set things up so that you can have your work friends, your school friends, and your close friends all tag photos of you, but only have those tags be visible by default to other people within the same circle.
A suggested improvement to circles. . .
Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property.
* Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members).
* Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin.
* Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved.
If it's any consolation, it doesn't work with javascript either. I middle-clicked the "previously described" link and it took away the blog entry that I was in the middle of reading.
And I didn't manage to read it with Javascript and IE8. It seems that it's all because he uses http://sitebricks.org/ for his site. It is also unreadable the same way.
I am a little puzzled at the importance ascribed here to the core idea of G+ Circles, as laid out in the slide deck. Mostly because we designed an identical sharing model and even gave it the same name at Etsy, without having read the deck. (Then we decided that was way too complicated and implemented something significantly simpler, but kept the name.)
Didn't read the article, design was too distracting (mouse wheeling with the mouse over the left side does NOT scroll the page). But check out that scrollbar!
::-webkit-scrollbar {
width: 10px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
border-radius: 10px;
background: #ddd;
}
Thought it must be JS but it's webkit stuff. Can't decide if silly or nice, but I think it's pretty nice.
I think it's cute that he thought Facebook would suddenly start thinking about people's privacy and that their new big product would address that issue.
They've been very clear that they think giving people their privacy by default would kill them. I wish I had the MZ quote on hand that proved that.
Perhaps Facebook just understand that for a social network to be successful you need to encourage sharing at all costs; Google+'s Circles actively constrain sharing, increase complexity and raise the barrier to entry.
Interesting post, but it seems strange to me how he properly capitalises company names such as Microsoft and Google, but consistently doesn't capitalise "facebook". Is there some point to this, or is it just stylistic?
I don't mean to distract, but wow. What a gorgeously designed clean website. I meant to read the article - and I did after a while - but the first thing I did was CTRL + U to check out the source code.
Totally disagree. No text appeared until I enabled Javascript; even then, in Firefox, the text color/typeface was so faint as to be unreadable. (I was interested enough to try firing it up in Chrome, where the text had better contrast.)
I don't know, this website was so bad I didn't even bother reading the article. The needless choice to shoot in the actual post via javascript bothered me and the javascript based content loading took forever just to load some static text, the loading of the html document itself was quite snappy.
I hardly call dedicating the entire page's leftmost 400px of horizontal space to 4 links "gorgeous" use of some of the most valuable screen real estate. It was impossible to read on my portrait monitor. Even on my landscape monitor this website seems to be designed with the assumption I keep my browser maximized. I know my viewport is smaller than most people would like to design for so I let things slide if there is a lot going on the webpage, but this was entirely text, there is no excuse if the style can't adapt. Not only did it not adapt to my browser size there was no horizontal scrollbar to bring me to the text that went off of the right hand side.
Would it help to have a visual repesentation of how each circle on google plus interactes with the others? A sort of Venn diagram attached to each post, so you could just drag the circles around to set who sees a certain post or reply. Seems some of the confusion on plus is do to the menus used to set which circle you are posting to. I know the first time I used it I didn't get it right away. Seems a visual repesentation of those relationships would clear things up.
Do we believe in a complete coexistence between Google+ and Facebook?
Google+ : Facebook :: Facebook : Twitter
Facebook allows some directionality in posting that offers you some assurance. Twitter offers you none. Google+ offers a whole other control.
The problem is, I've had to explain the difference between Incoming, Following and more. I think Google needs to be explicit in their comparisons:
1. Circles allow for directional sharing. You can target an album of photos to your family easily, or pics from the bar to your friends just as quickly and safely if you setup your default Family and Friends circles sanely.
2. Incoming shows posts from those who are sharing with you, despite you not having added them to a circle of some sort. This is like Twitter, basically, except for you can also take it a level further and share only with certain people on certain posts, depending on the type. (I think they can extend this with tags and be able to have more focused and detailed sharing patterns between people.
3. By combining the long form and discussion-prone posts of Facebook, with the public conversation space of Twitter... they have a strange mass-forum quality. I'm following Googlers that are posting about all sorts of things. I've commented, and even been added by others (and some who seem to be from Google).
I'm not sure Google has clearly articulated all of the ways that their offerings are unique or better. I hope they do, it's so funny, I thought of Picasa as neat, but for others. Today I was given an SD card and asked to copy the photos. This is for a fairly tech illiterate family. I could easily upload to Picasa from my chromebook, and then from Google+ I could share it to my Family circle. I have no doubt that relatives could use this and get value from it. I think with a slight bit more integration, Google will have a wide and fairly smoothly integrated offering, and one that brings value to a diverse set of people.
Google+ allows me to share bits of news among my friends quickly, and they want to converse about it in a smaller space that is determined based on post to an automated degree. Imagine if, instead of "adding friends on reddit", you share link on G+ to a select group of people who share those interests. It could be reddit but tags instead of subreddits, if circles or circles+tags are done right. If this is the case, why would I use Facebook, it seems like shouting... like, uh, Twitter.
If this usage of Circles is too complicated, why would G+ have a shot?
The first application for Google, should use link submissions in subredits on reddit, to filter your link submissions to target them to users that subscribe to those subreddits (as to not bore or off put others). Or that filter everyone's links submissions to only include links that appear in a subreddit you subscribe to.
It's like tags, but instead inferring link interest from reddit subscriptions.
Wonderful inside-view.
With this the "Facebook Browser" makes even more sense. Facebook is probably more scared of being dethroned on the data-gathering (therefore advertising) than losing the social "battle" itself.
Well, actually Google is probably scared on the same (money) level.
Wow, great content on his site! I ended up reading every one of his blog posts today while I was waiting for builds, etc. Also, I am going to do a careful read-through of his crosstalk code when I have a free hour or two - looks very interesting.
[+] [-] mlinsey|14 years ago|reply
On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as many non-techie non-early-adopters as possible about Circles, and many get it and love it, but several don't really understand it.
In particular, the asymmetry of circles is overlooked by a lot of people, even by some casual users who think they understand how Circles works. On Facebook, there is one authoritative list of who is in the group, and posts to the group stay in that group. On Google+, your circles are not my circles. I may have you in a "close friends" circle, you may have me in a big "co-workers" circle, or you might have all your friends in one circle. When I am browsing my "close friends" feed and see a post by you, I may guess wrong about the social context that you are sharing that message in, and make an inappropriate comment, not realizing who else received the message. (The way to determine on G+ who received a post is by noting and clicking on the gray "Public" or "Limited" in the upper right of the post) Maybe I am underestimating people, or maybe comments are just much less big a deal than posts, but I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents.
If I had to make a prediction, I'd think that the ease-of-use and clarity of FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles. I could be wrong, so it'll be interesting to see what ordinary users prefer.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|14 years ago|reply
I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to be fair, nothing is as easy to misdirect as a twitter DM.
[+] [-] ramanujan|14 years ago|reply
It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field.
You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends.
But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most.
Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardw|14 years ago|reply
So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones.
Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.
[+] [-] ajross|14 years ago|reply
Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading".
I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
I think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy
[+] [-] lmarinho|14 years ago|reply
Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
[1]: (I wrote more about this on my blog: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for...)
[+] [-] ohyes|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zem|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g123g|14 years ago|reply
Regarding the circles concept, if I need to share something with a certain group of my contacts, I will prefer Email or Dropbox rather than putting it on some social network whether it is facebook, google+ or twitter.
[+] [-] cjoh|14 years ago|reply
"It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure--but I don't find it all that interesting, personally."
". I listened politely, all the while rolling-my-eyes in secret at their seemingly implausible naivete."
"I laughed, disbelieving. Facebook has a hacker culture, they're only a handful of engineers, and they develop with quick, adaptable tools like PHP."
This post isn't about Google+ or Facebook. This post is about "Look at me, I'm so much smarter than my old bosses"
Something clearly upset him pretty significantly at Google. I'm not sure he's got a clear point of view on this.
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nfarina|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxylad|14 years ago|reply
And on the other hand he says Google's "toolchain is not well suited to fast, iterative development and rapid innovation" - but they produced a polished social product from scratch in a remarkably short time.
I'm afraid I don't ascribe much value to his analysis. Maybe there's a good reason why he's an ex-wave and ex-plus engineer, and that could explain why I think I hear an axe being ground.
[+] [-] alecperkins|14 years ago|reply
Google has a lot of work to do, but with a mostly blank slate and less inertia to overcome. It's also remarkable how they have used this as an opportunity for improvements across the board, a the very least visually.
[+] [-] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
Also, does he understand the extent to which Facebook actually uses PHP? "quick, adaptable tools like PHP" ... um... seriously?
[+] [-] bonch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parfe|14 years ago|reply
Facebook groups is a distinct feature from facebook lists.
Facebook lists are the same feature as Google circles. And the only reason you didn't know this already is that you did not care enough to look, so circles cannot be all that much of a killer feature.
To utilize "Facebook Circles" first you must put categorize some friends into a list.
https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/
Click "Create a List" and drop some friends in. I have restricted permissions for anyone not in a list. A "Good People" list for those that I'll share anything with, and a few others.
Now to utilize sharing type some stuff into your status box. Anything, but lets go with "I can have circles too."
Now click the lock icon to the bottom right of the status entry widget. It will say "Make this Visible To:" And you see have a text box you can now type your list name into. I type "Goo" and it auto completes "Good People"
You can even exclude lists! So you can have a "Friends" list and a "Coworkers" list with people who overlap, but then post status that only go to your "Friends who are not coworkers."
The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.
[+] [-] briandon|14 years ago|reply
In real life, the crazy party photo you would be showing your friend would be on your phone's screen or (in olden days) it would be a hardcopy photograph. Putting your phone or the hardcopy photo back into your pocket would be the end. The potential for blowback would be limited to whatever could be whipped up by your friend's verbal description of what he'd seen.
Whenever you put anything on the Internet, though, there's not really any way to control its spread. Whatever privacy mechanisms a sharing/social site puts in place will be broken by crackers at some point or part of the system will break on its own and leak information. Long before that, though, one of the people you permitted to access the controlled content will simply copy it and share it with other people.
Don't put anything online that you wouldn't be comfortable with your grandma or work colleagues/boss reading.
[+] [-] spullara|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|14 years ago|reply
His point was that he was waiting for Facebook to make their pre-emptive response to Circles, and then FB released Groups. He knows full well is solves a different problem - that was the point of what he was saying.
Not only does Groups not really do the same things as Circles/Lists at all, but Facebook appears to think that Lists don't work. Zuckerberg:
Just take friends on a site, and cut them into subgroups. Sounds good in theory. But almost no one wants to make lists. We’ve been at this for a few years, and promoted heavily. Most we’ve gotten is 5% to make lists, and most don’t make more than one.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/10/06/live-blogging-faceb...
[+] [-] samj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwatzman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] re|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnLBevan|14 years ago|reply
* Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members).
* Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin.
* Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved.
What do you guys think?
JB
[+] [-] megablast|14 years ago|reply
No, it should not be.
[+] [-] bobbyi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
http://i.imgur.com/9Oy37.png
[+] [-] acqq|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcfunley|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sequoia|14 years ago|reply
::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 10px; }
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb { border-radius: 10px; background: #ddd; } Thought it must be JS but it's webkit stuff. Can't decide if silly or nice, but I think it's pretty nice.
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
They've been very clear that they think giving people their privacy by default would kill them. I wish I had the MZ quote on hand that proved that.
[+] [-] samj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haakon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kloncks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben1040|14 years ago|reply
I would love to finish reading this, but his site design is preventing me from scrolling down to read the rest of the entry.
[+] [-] cbs|14 years ago|reply
I hardly call dedicating the entire page's leftmost 400px of horizontal space to 4 links "gorgeous" use of some of the most valuable screen real estate. It was impossible to read on my portrait monitor. Even on my landscape monitor this website seems to be designed with the assumption I keep my browser maximized. I know my viewport is smaller than most people would like to design for so I let things slide if there is a lot going on the webpage, but this was entirely text, there is no excuse if the style can't adapt. Not only did it not adapt to my browser size there was no horizontal scrollbar to bring me to the text that went off of the right hand side.
[+] [-] RK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathiasben|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gospelwut|14 years ago|reply
Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw
[+] [-] nl|14 years ago|reply
| People I don't like but are hot enough to screw if I got the chance
[+] [-] notarant|14 years ago|reply
Google+ : Facebook :: Facebook : Twitter
Facebook allows some directionality in posting that offers you some assurance. Twitter offers you none. Google+ offers a whole other control.
The problem is, I've had to explain the difference between Incoming, Following and more. I think Google needs to be explicit in their comparisons:
1. Circles allow for directional sharing. You can target an album of photos to your family easily, or pics from the bar to your friends just as quickly and safely if you setup your default Family and Friends circles sanely.
2. Incoming shows posts from those who are sharing with you, despite you not having added them to a circle of some sort. This is like Twitter, basically, except for you can also take it a level further and share only with certain people on certain posts, depending on the type. (I think they can extend this with tags and be able to have more focused and detailed sharing patterns between people.
3. By combining the long form and discussion-prone posts of Facebook, with the public conversation space of Twitter... they have a strange mass-forum quality. I'm following Googlers that are posting about all sorts of things. I've commented, and even been added by others (and some who seem to be from Google).
I'm not sure Google has clearly articulated all of the ways that their offerings are unique or better. I hope they do, it's so funny, I thought of Picasa as neat, but for others. Today I was given an SD card and asked to copy the photos. This is for a fairly tech illiterate family. I could easily upload to Picasa from my chromebook, and then from Google+ I could share it to my Family circle. I have no doubt that relatives could use this and get value from it. I think with a slight bit more integration, Google will have a wide and fairly smoothly integrated offering, and one that brings value to a diverse set of people.
Google+ allows me to share bits of news among my friends quickly, and they want to converse about it in a smaller space that is determined based on post to an automated degree. Imagine if, instead of "adding friends on reddit", you share link on G+ to a select group of people who share those interests. It could be reddit but tags instead of subreddits, if circles or circles+tags are done right. If this is the case, why would I use Facebook, it seems like shouting... like, uh, Twitter.
If this usage of Circles is too complicated, why would G+ have a shot?
[+] [-] notarant|14 years ago|reply
It's like tags, but instead inferring link interest from reddit subscriptions.
[+] [-] tilt|14 years ago|reply
Well, actually Google is probably scared on the same (money) level.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|14 years ago|reply