

Andy Hertzfeld tells about the team behind Google+ Circles - dirtyaura
https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts/FddaP6jeCqp

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orky56
You've got to hand it to him for being so classy and humble about it. It's
much easier to be quiet and take the praise. Only when someone is modest
enough and truly believes that others deserve credit does he/she actually
advocate for other people on his/her team.

~~~
espinchi
Humble? Look at the first two sentences after the introduction: "I am indeed
the main individual behind the interaction design and implementation of the
circle editor. I conceived, designed and implemented a compelling prototype
for it almost single-handedly". And then, the first sentence of the following
paragraph "Steven Levy's excellent Wired article got the story right - I wrote
the circle editor and then recently widened my focus to the overall Google
Plus user experience."

In my opinion, in order for me to believe Andy is actually humble, the last
sentence, "Suffice it to say that Google Plus is the creation of large,
talented team that I'm proud to be a part of", should have been the first one.

~~~
brown9-2
I think you are missing what he is actually doing - he states that the part he
is wholly responsible for is just one tiny part of the whole, and that all the
other credit given to whom is wrong. His first statement is meant to be a bit
ironic.

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StavrosK
I was impressed with the fact that this post was on plus. It's like Twitter,
only with no size constraint and with discussions right on the post. I'm
excited to see how its usage will pan out.

~~~
neilk
Or exactly like LiveJournal circa 2002.

~~~
michaelchisari
Except without nested/threaded discussions. I don't know why the social web
loves flat comments so much.

~~~
DannoHung
Flat comments ensure a narrative thread.

~~~
Groxx
Like Twitter encourages? Or maybe you're referring to YouTube comments.

~~~
DannoHung
Okay, Twitter is more like a disassociated bag of nodes in a partially
connected non-directional graph where half the edges don't connect to the node
they're intended to connect to.

YouTube is a pack of raving howler monkeys with the occasional howler monkey
researcher at the periphery. And, in fact, YouTube used to have threads, but
they were still threads full of howler monkeys.

I'm talking more like your classic bulletin boards producing high quality
content, like MetaFilter, Something Awful, and the like.

~~~
Groxx
We agree on the sites, but I don't see what the conversation being flat has to
do with it. Reddit is famous for the AMA threads, those are threaded.

~~~
DannoHung
Yeah, but try reading an AMA after it's been finished. It is really hard to
find everything from the Askee.

I'm not intrinsically opposed to threads, but I'm not sure they're super
beneficial outside of technical contexts or in an environment where people are
expected to break a larger conversation off into it's own little set of
discussions to keep the high level conversation easy to understand.

------
Bud
You've got Andy's name wrong, twice, in the headline. It's "Hertzfeld", with a
t, and no i.

~~~
dirtyaura
Doh. Thanks for pointing it out, maybe I learn and get it right next time. It
seems that I can't edit the title to fix it.

------
staunch
Anyone interested in technology who hasn't read the stories on his site are
missing out: <http://www.folklore.org>

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nikcub
It was nice of him to announce this using a service he single-handedly built
in a weekend

~~~
algorias
Subtle trolling always works best

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justlearning
" I conceived, designed and implemented a compelling prototype for it almost
single-handedly, and then wrote a fair percentage of the production ......but
that's pretty much as far as it goes."

That's some modesty!.

~~~
guptaneil
For only the circles editor. His point is that he had very little to do with
the rest of Google+ and nothing to do with the rest of Google's redesigns.
He's still taking credit for the significant work he did on Circles, as he
should.

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mark_l_watson
I thought that the UI was done in GWT, but that was a guess, and I was
probably wrong. Anyone know?

~~~
neilk
Whenever a new Google site comes out, everyone always asks this question. I
can only assume it is asked by people who only know Java and are terrified of
JS (which seems to be GWT's primary audience, despite the framework's other
advantages).

If you want to know, just pop open Firebug or Chrome's Inspector and search
for the string "__gwt". I don't see it in Google+.

To my knowledge GWT is not actually used that much within Google. Most of the
things it solves for developers are solved in other ways within Google anyway,
and if you want really low-level control GWT is not the best option.

~~~
grimlck
[http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-
toolkit/msg/37bf75...](http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-
toolkit/msg/37bf75b622b32584)

has a list - just eyeballing it, it seems like about half of the major
javascript apps from google are GWT. (the other half would likely be closure)

~~~
_sh
There is an overlap: GWT itself uses closure.

~~~
eneveu
That's interesting. I've done my fair share of GWT development, and I didn't
know about this, so I tried to find more info.

I've searched through the GWT source code, and I found no mention of the
closure library (closure tools / closure compiler). There are obviously some
mentions of javascript "closures", but that's all I found.

According to [https://groups.google.com/group/closure-library-
discuss/brow...](https://groups.google.com/group/closure-library-
discuss/browse_thread/thread/bf3731cee9d8a57c) , no code is shared between GWT
and the closure library.

Where does GWT use Closure?

