
Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing - thesash
http://thesash.me/how-google-got-its-groove-back
======
jasonkester
So what do you actually need to do to accomplish this? I followed the link to
the Google+ page and it's just a giant wall of confusion.

I see a circle with a link in the middle saying "Add Circle". Is that what I
want to do? I would have expected to see something along the lines of "Add
_me_ to this Circle" so that I'd be part of it.

Anyway, I clicked the "Add Circle" link, and got a string of progressively
less parseable pages full of people's pictures that I can presumably drag and
drop places. I just makes no sense whatsoever.

So first point: Google+ seems to have a terrible interface.

Second point: Assuming that somebody here (the author at least) must have
interacted with that page in a way that created some form of value to his
life. What are the steps to do so?

~~~
sp332
Go to <https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts> and, in one of the
"Hacker News has shared a circle with you" posts, click the blue "View shared
circle" button. Name the circle and voila, you now have a circle in your
Google+ account with all the HN people who signed up on
<http://hngp.axxim.net/>

Edit: I forgot to warn you that several hundred people will add you to their
circles, and you will get notifications when that happens. You should probably
go to <https://www.google.com/settings/plus> and preemptively disable those
notifications before you are drowning in them.

That's all you need to do to get the results mentioned in the article, but you
might get a lot of unwanted noise in your Google+ stream from this circle. If
that's a problem for you, go to your Google+ "home" page
<https://plus.google.com/stream> and find your new HN circle in the left-hand
column. When you click it, you get a stream made from that circle, and you can
change the "volume" of the circle using the slider that appears in the upper-
right. Now when you browse your normal stream you won't get noise from the HN
circle.

~~~
felideon
Doh. And now I have a whole bunch of people showing up in my chat client. Is
there a way to disable that? I see the options for 'Who can start a Messenger
conversation with you?' but they are somewhat limited and that's not the
option I'm quite looking for.

~~~
betterth
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??

~~~
jrockway
_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?

~~~
mkl
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.)

~~~
AbyCodes
_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?

~~~
polyfractal
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?

------
lhnz
This is a smart move. There are many interesting directions and questions.

(1) Can we choose to give a particular search weight to different Google+
groups that are against our profile? I'd like to see what Hacker News thinks
the search results should be and I'd like to see what my friends think the
search results should be.

(2) Following from the previous point, I believe Google could effectively turn
this into a sort of auto-generated "sub-reddit" system that does not require
link submission, instead being powered by "+1". Or how about the top +1's from
the group this day, week, year? The only things missing would be (a) comments
by group users, and (b) some generic Google way of searching for public groups
or tying these to internet communities.

Aside:

(4) What happens when spammers start adding themselves to the hngp.axxim.net
Hacker News circle and then when we add this circle to our Google+ we start
getting sponsored search results? Can we stop this? An active profile with a
high average karma seems to me like an acceptable solution for a higher
quality group but I guess we can't get that information easily... I wonder if
the guy who created the Hacker News circle will allow us to update our profile
in the circle to include our Hacker News username?

~~~
jaredsohn
>allow us to update our profile in the circle to include our Hacker News
username

FYI, the Hacker News username is already an optional field that was added
after some people had already added themselves; not sure if you can update
your profile or not if you didn't include it earlier.

------
antimatter15
I'm the maintainer of the Google+ Hacker News Circle (Well, the script/cron
job that makes a circle from hngp.axxim.net). I increased the frequency to
every five minutes to keep up with the new growth.

It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that
the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only
share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to update.

~~~
chaosmachine
It looks like there may be a problem:

"You've reached the daily limit for adding to your circles. You can add more
tomorrow."

This happened when I tried to add any of the circles with 1000+ people. The
one with 990 or so worked.

~~~
bad_user
It also happens to me.

~~~
mcnairz
I actually just got it to work. If you click on the "Add Circle" link when the
circle had <1000 members it will work. Then you can update tomorrow to get the
full list.

------
richbradshaw
I added myself to this circle when it was first announced. Today I've gained
over 1000 followers! Wondered why and found this post. Interesting to see that
89 votes and 34 comments leads to around 1000 people taking action. Makes you
realise how big this community is!

~~~
slaven
Me too - I'm afraid it's just a bunch of marketers or spammers who found it as
a way to broadcast directly to HN crowd. I guess we'll know soon..

------
mkr-hn
Being able to weigh results by G+ posts has made discovering new and
interesting things inevitable, not just easy. Sometimes I find new and
interesting things that aren't even related to what I was searching for. It's
like StumbleUpon in the early days.

For example, I needed a Top Posts plugin for WordPress. I drowned in a sea of
plugins, spam, and blog posts with the default search. Social weighting put
the perfect plugin right on top. And it's been the same for every query I've
tried so far.

------
unreal37
How do you add yourself to the Hacker News Circle? I added the circle to my
stream. Anything more I need to do?

~~~
zalew
<https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts> it's just a page. if I
understand correctly what's going on on the page, we need to add people to our
own circle every time they publish the updated circle.

//edit:

it looks fine except people who write public posts in their native language
which I do not understand. I hope the author thought about spam prevention or
we'll get lots of 'funny videos and pictures' profiles in there soon.

~~~
UK-Al05
Google should automate this, so you follow a circle it automatically gets
updated when other people join it.

~~~
mkr-hn
They need to separate functionality. Right now you aren't following a shared
circle. Adding a shared circle creates a whole new circle that you can modify
however you want. I want it to work more like Twitter's lists. Not that I mind
the 2000+ circlings I've gotten from shares. :)

------
brown9-2
Am I the only person that thinks that the results shown in the Google search
for "jQuery" are horrible search results?

The results are:

1) a Google Plus post on "CodeAcademy teaches jQuery"

2) a Google Plus post on "15 Resources to Get You Started With jQuery from
Scratch"

3) a Google Plus post on "Is there already a jQuery Plugin that provides a
Google+ Circles...?"

If you were to search for just the word "jQuery", what are the chances that
any of these are what you were looking for?

This really doesn't seem like an instance of knocking it out of the park.

~~~
esrauch
He explicitly clicked on the "see personal results" link at the top of the
search results, the screenshot is _not_ what it looks like if you just type
jquery into the box and click search. You can see the "Personal" title at the
top of the results that has an X on it, and on the left hand side of the page
"Personal" is selected.

------
wmeredith
Ah, and now I have a compelling reason to try Google+. Well played, Google,
you creepy SOB.

------
mladenkovacevic
Thanks! This is bound to liven up my stream. I will refrain from adding myself
to the HN circle though as I'm currently only a wanna-be hacker. But I do have
have a fear of other wannabe hackers adding themselves to the circle and maybe
polluting my stream with content that isn't as high quality as I'm used to on
HN. (no upvote/downvote mechanism)

~~~
notatoad
when you add the circle, you're adding a copy of the circle and can remove
people from your copy any time you want. at least, that's my understanding of
how G+ works. so if some goof that you don't like starts posting, you should
be able to just remove them.

~~~
jaredsohn
except if you update the Hacker News circle, you'll need to remove them again.

------
joshuahedlund
In general people seem to be finding a lot of value with these new "random"
connections of people who share their interests in tech things or just
"interesting" things. It strikes me that all of these people existed before,
but none of us knew we "wanted" to be connected to them, we just happened to
be at the right place and the right time. I can't wait for the first social
network to help us connect to interesting people we don't know _without us
having to take arbitrary external steps_. Google circles, Twitter suggestions
for who to follow... these are baby steps to a future with great potential.

------
clone1018
Hey guys, I'm the owner of hngp.axxim.net, I kinda forgot about this project,
but tomorrow I'll be adding in google authentication (to manage your
visibility and stop spammers) and fix the site load speed (did someone say
ajax?!) and some other neat, but needed features.

------
Frostbeard
So, apparently there is a limit to the number of add-to-circle actions you can
perform in a day. I added the circle and then removed it, and when I went to
re-add I got an error: "You've reached the daily limit for adding to your
circles. You can add more tomorrow."

------
vosper
It says a lot about the UI and concepts of Google+ that the tech-savvy HN
crowd have spawned such a long thread trying to understand how to use it.

------
agscala
Beware if you add yourself to this list, your phone will go crazy with google+
notifications while it processes all the people following you

~~~
thesash
You can turn off notifications when people add you to circles here:
<https://www.google.com/settings/plus>

------
drinkzima
Isn't the whole point that if these Hacker News G+ results are good they
should be shown to everyone and if they aren't then they should not.

This isn't a 'social' problem it's a ranking problem, right?

~~~
abrahamsen
Yes and no.

Yes, in that part of what you do is to tell Google "I trust these people" and
give them higher ranking than random "search engine optimized" pages.

No, in that someone who follow the hacker news circle and search for "android"
will likely prefer results about programming and marketing android
applications, which are not the optimal results for the general public.

So the social graph does to things: it states trust (improves general quality
of results), and it states interests (improves specific targeting of results).

The later obviously is more likely to work for interest based circles like
"hacker news" than for your Family or even Friends circles.

~~~
jrockway
The example Google gives is that you can now type "photos" and see pictures of
your family and friends. Instead of going to some other site and navigating,
you just type your desires into Chrome's URL bar and the Right Thing
automatically shows up. (There are some internal goals for this, but I'm not
sure which ones are public... but this will only get cooler as time goes on.)

------
caw
Can I get an additional explanation of what to do?

> "I added myself and followed the circle"

I followed the group and added myself through hngp.axxim.net/insert, but do I
have to add the ~650 people to my circle, or is just following the page
enough?

~~~
barlo
You need to add everyone in the shared circle to one of your circles for
things they share to show up in your stream.

~~~
caw
Thanks for the information. So I'd have to periodically go and update that
group in order to get everyone's feeds?

------
andrewem
Looking at the linked Hacker News Circle on Google+, the first person listed
in the circle is "Paul Graham", who's pretty clearly not pg. The linked Paul
Graham says "wow. so many people have me in their circles", and another user
suggests it's because of pg [0]. I'm curious what percentage of the people are
linked to the right profile.

[0]
[https://plus.google.com/114939270563299965266/posts/7UHfjBcD...](https://plus.google.com/114939270563299965266/posts/7UHfjBcDXRQ)

------
instakill
I wish I knew how you felt, but sadly it seems there are quite a few people
that don't have search personalization as an option available to them [yet?].

------
asto
The barrier to entry to get oneself added to this list doesn't seem to be
much. I added part 1 of 2 of the circle and already my stream is being flooded
with stuff like this -> <http://imageshack.us/photo/my-
images/442/gplushn.png/>

Information overload in a language I don't even understand!

------
johnkchow
I now see the true potential with personalized search. Just gives me the
goosebumps (in a good excited way). Thanks for sharing!

------
bluena
Great, but it's polluting my gtalk contacts

~~~
prez
Go to G+ chat -> privacy settings and uncheck the HN circle.

Had the same problem, took me a while to figure how to fix it.

~~~
bluena
thanks

------
jcurbo
Yesterday the HN circle was in the 600's, today it's in the 800's, I guess
it's catching on because of this story.

------
sunchild
I can't find this feature. I guess it's because I'm logged into a G+ account
via Google Apps for Enterprise?

I find Google's rollouts for Google Apps customers a huge source of confusion.
You'd think they'd get that under control by now.

Anyway, looks like a killer feature that will slowly become indispensable.

~~~
estel
It's not yet rolled out to all users, regardless of whether they're Apps
customers.

~~~
sunchild
I see. I was able to find it on my non-Apps for Enterprise account.

------
niels_olson
Hmmm... I don't know. My Flickr account is associated with my Google account,
and I have pictures of eczema on my flickr account that someone requested
permission to publish, yesterday, but when I search personal results, those
pictures are nowhere to be found.

------
villagefool
I would rather hold on to what's left of my privacy and simply search Hacker
News directly.

------
mkr-hn
And don't forget that if you want to keep the circle to sort later, but don't
want it in your main stream, you can dial down the weight of posts from it (or
remove them completely) on the circle's stream.

------
Osiris
I've been trying to add the shared circle but it keeps telling me that people
could not be loaded and fails. Has anyone else had that issue and been able to
resolve it?

------
twodayslate
It would be great if you could subscribe to a circle and have it auto-update
(keep adding/removing people).

------
pessimist
So what happens when spammers start adding themselves to the Hacker News
circle?

~~~
stephank
I wonder why the HN account name field is optional, for getting in the shared
circle.

Currently, it looks like anyone can add themselves just by having an email and
G+ account. Someone already mentioned OAuth, and it'd be great if proper auth
against both G+ and HN was required to be added to the circle.

On the other hand, it's also not that hard to selectively toss someone out of
your copy of the circle, even right from the stream page.

~~~
Feanim
HN doesn't provide oauth api (or any api for that matter)

------
aestetix_
The feature I'm really waiting for is pseudonym support. Vic Gondotra promised
it several months ago at Web 2.0. I don't feel comfortable using Google+ at
all right now, given that my account, among others, was suspended.

------
electic
All I can say is: WOW!

------
joelmaat
I love this!

------
Johnyma22
Meh.

------
badclient
Google's Social Strategy: (1) Destroy Google Search (2) ????? (3) Profit!!!

~~~
VikingCoder
You apparently missed this:

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAAL...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAALU/ZFkWokAloIM/s1600/Toggle.png)

~~~
badclient
You apparently missed the overlarging bloat that google search has become in
the past few years.

~~~
freehunter
And this is a step to correct that. Search is hard, and its getting harder.
SEO is ruining search, real human crowdsourced referrals offload the parts
where algorithms cannot perform.

~~~
badclient
Algorithms are also written by real humans.

~~~
freehunter
And are designed to make judgements in the absence of humans. No one can
prepare a computer for every use-case mankind can possibly think of. We're
orders of magnitude more clever than a computer can deal with.

------
lubujackson
I'm not seeing what's so amazing about this, sorry... Google is basically
hijacking the conversation off of HN and then making that searchable by its
members, so what's exciting about that?

~~~
mkr-hn
It's not pulling anything from HN. This is an index of HN members who have G+
accounts.

