

Google+ scores your relationships with your friends - rouli
https://plus.google.com/115843262251226261497/posts/d9e2HvPBB44?tab=yX

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fourspace
It's not curious that the scores are not commutative; they shouldn't be. For
example, I guarantee you that pg is more interesting to me than I am to him.

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baddox
Assuming you're not personal friends with pg, the "friend score" between you
and pg should be low. This shouldn't be an "interest score," since presumably
the goal is that Google+ users would establish strong 2-way relationships.

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esrauch
Everything that I am getting from trying out google+ is pointing to it being a
Twitter killer not a Facebook killer; the lack of things like private
messaging (yes you can post with only one person able to view it, but it's
pretty unlikely that they would ever notice that you wrote it). The whole
system is geared towards 'share to group' rather than 'communicate with
individual x'; even the video chat is. I don't think it's correct to say that
they care about strong 2-way relationships.

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Hixie
Isn't GMail a sufficiently powerful "private messaging" feature? You can send
a message from anyone's profile if they've enabled the "Send mail" feature.
Plus GMail already supports a federated protocol, so you can use this profile
"send message" feature with any other mail system you want.

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esrauch
Maybe it's just me, but email just feels way more formal and personal. I would
have no qualms writing quick one-offs like "That was fun last night, we should
do it again soon" on facebook, but I would never send an email like that.

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cgranade
Maybe, however, Google is trying to change that. E-mail is a perfectly fine
choice for the protocol for such messages, but the UI has to change. Look at
what they've done in the other direction, brining Talk and Buzz logs into
Gmail inboxes, for instance. Why not reverse that and export certain kinds of
mails received in a Gmail account out to the Google+ UI?

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smokey_the_bear
My top two relationships are two different accounts for my brother, and they
have the same score. I wonder if it knows they're the same person.

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klbarry
That is certainly an interesting idea.

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LiveTheDream
Facebook also does this, for example by analyzing which pictures you and a
friend are both tagged in. Probably there are other signals like wall posts,
likes, and profile views.

You can see the result of this by the order of friends in the search box.

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streeter
But Facebook doesn't expose this anyway. Google has at least shown signs that
it has or will use this data (I'm thinking of the 'Did you mean Dave' or 'Did
you forget Dave' feature in Gmail). Thats where the really cool stuff can
happen. Especially if they let you auto-add people to Circles.

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bergie
The scores seem to be in the same order as people are shown in the top-right
corner, and on <https://plus.google.com/circles>

I only saw 5-6 different score values there, so most people are ranked the
same.

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cantbecool
I noticed the same ranking too. The people in my top 5, I speak with on Google
Talk frequently.

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pagefruit
It'd be awesome if Google+ also tried to suggest ways of organizing your
friends into circles (similar to how Gmail suggests people to add to emails).

In general, I think the Circles dataset will be really interesting, as I don't
think anybody else has this kind of labeled groups data. (Have people actually
been separating their friends into different Circles?)

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doc
Am I the only one getting a 400 error? Based on the posts, it seems it was
working only 30 minutes ago.

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rouli
I removed some parameters from the request out of privacy concerns. You can
see those scores if you use a tool like firebug while loading the homepage.

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hammerdr
This seems to indicate that the score has been around for a while because it
is closely tied to GMail+GChat instead of Circles usage.

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Aqwis
Am I the only one who can't figure out how to retrieve this? Is the underscore
supposed to be replaced by my user ID? In that case I get only gibberish when
I wget the page.

Edit: Nevermind that, figured it out through Inspect.

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Aqwis
Looking at the file, it strikes me that it doesn't seem to be quite what you
think it is, namely a "relationship score" between Google+ users. People that
I've never communicated with on Google+ but mailed previously have a score
(and the people I've mailed most frequently have the highest scores), while
people I've only communicated with on Google+ but never mailed don't have one
(the fields are empty). Organizations that I've mailed also have scores, and
they obviously don't have Google+ accounts.

It looks more like a "relationship score" for GMail that doesn't take into
account Google+.

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rouli
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. Maybe it's due to the fact that I'm
not a native English speaker, but I never meant to insinuate otherwise (after
all, Google+ is very very young and the score should come from somewhere). I
just wanted to share the fact that Google+ makes this score available.

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Aqwis
Sorry for misinterpreting you. For the record, I'm not a native speaker
either, which might be a source of confusion.

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United857
It appears that they use gmail and/or gtalk data (frequency?) as input
factors; as some of my top scored friends I chat/mail with frequently but are
yet not on Google+.

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kelnos
The annoying thing about this is that I was forced to sign up to G+ using a
GMail account that I don't use for anything except Picasa. I use my Google
Apps account for everything else (email, chat, contacts, etc.), but G+ doesn't
support GApps accounts yet...

So the end result is that G+ really has no idea how to rank my relationships
with my friends.

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keeto
The same scoring data is used for the "Sort by Relevance" option on the
Circles page.

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alnayyir
My mother was #4. Zed Shaw was #7. The guy I worked on HNOfficeHours with is
#1.

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jquery
Not sure if this is an appropriate place to ask, but here it is anyway. If
anyone has an invite, please send me one. I really dislike Facebook and want
to give this a whirl.

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ololo
Why do you dislike Facebook? Never understood that

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jquery
I had an app with over 2 million monthly users. One day I got an email saying
that one of the ad networks I was using had violated their ToS and I needed to
replace them. The email said I had 3 days to do this. The cautious person I
am, I turned off the ad network within 10 minutes of the email being sent.

Five minutes after I turned off the ad network, Facebook shut down my app.
Users trying to visit my app saw a Facebook 404. Facebook refused to give an
ETA for bringing my app back up. When it finally came back up 4 days later,
its traffic was utterly crippled. Facebook never apologized or admitted any
wrongdoing. They have NO respect for developers on their platform. Their
platform is unstable, and if their comments at Velocity Conf 2011 are to be
believed, they are _proud_ of this fact ("we move fast and aren't afraid to
break things").

