

Google+ Demo - cskau
http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/

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kyro
I'm really looking forward to trying this out, and here's why:

With Facebook, I felt as if I was on this huge football field with all of my
'friends.' I could lean in to whisper with a friend here and there, or even
put on some face paint and huddle together with like-faced friends to form a
group. But everyone could still see me, and I could see them – I just had to
peer down the field. I can't _really_ say things to my group that I'd normally
say in private because with all these people on the field with me, someone
would certainly overhear us!

With Google+ the structure is different. Rather than a field, it's more like a
big building with many rooms. Each room can be decorated and tailored to a
specific group of friends who hang out there. Best part is once I'm in the
room, I can close the door and be myself! I can go up two levels, change hats,
and walk into a different room.

tl;dr Google+ lets me fully engage my various social sides, whereas Facebook
never really let you as you were always in the eye of the public.

Edit: One thing I did notice that I wish they would change is that it seems as
if a friend can only be placed into one circle. Often times there's a lot of
overlap among my social circles and friends may be part of at least two
different groups.

~~~
dirtyaura
I'm testing Google+ as we speak. I can confirm that you can add people to
several circles. However, I haven't yet been able to test how people in those
circles see an item that you share.

As far as I've understood, Circles are your personal aliases for groups of
people and they are not visible to other people. This is really useful in
certain situations, but it can also create some confusion when people are
commenting and discussing about your photo, as they don't have clear
visibility who else is seeing the photo and their comments.

~~~
dirtyaura
Okay, tested also how Circle is visible to a receiver. It seems to be like I
explained above, i.e. Circle is your private alias for a group of people.

The receiver account was not part of Google+ so things might work differently
when sharing between Google+ users. The photo just shows Visibility:
"Limited", no visibility who else is seeing the photo.

~~~
rictic
If you click or hover over the `Limited` then you can see who it's shared
with.

disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Google+

~~~
dirtyaura
It doesn't show them for non-Google+ users, but I assume that Google thought
it's a marginal use case in the long run ;-)

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andrewguenther
There are several reasons I am hopeful for this.

1\. It looks CLEAN While in my opinion one major reason Facebook ended up
beating out Myspace was its wonderful interface, I feel like recent renditions
have just lost that simplicity. I want connecting with my friends to be
simple, not a bombardment of Farmville updates and a poorly designed messaging
system.

2\. Sparks Hopefully Google will succeed where Facebook has failed in actually
making keeping track of your interests, well...interesting.

3\. Circles Friend management in Facebook has always been one of my biggest
complaints, Circles seems to be a legitimate approach to making organizing
your friends a little bit more intuitive.

I am very excited to see Google+ roll out to the masses, and I do hope it is
successful. Not because I want it to take Facebook down, but I think it
wouldn't hurt to make them break a little sweat and think about their users a
bit more.

~~~
checker
Circles is awesome. I can't believe Facebook hasn't done it yet. Hopefully you
can drop friends into more than one circle.

As far as Huddle goes, I hope it's easy to go from a normal text straight into
a Huddle. Also, typing status is very helpful in a chat room to avoid the
inevitable conflicts that occur when people happen to type responses at the
same time.

Sparks looks somewhat like Google News filtering. I'm not sure if I'll use it
if that's all it ends up being.

Hangouts could be interesting, but because it's many-many communication like
Huddle, the conversation flow could be difficult to maintain. I hope it works
out.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
Based on the demo you can only put friends in one circle, but I hope that's
going to change or just isn't properly reflected in the demo; I have plenty of
people I would consider to be in multiple circles. The easiest example of
which is a "co-worker" who is also a "friend".

~~~
mey
Oddly enough, I hope this maps to the gmail groups concept, since I already
have people mapping along those lines in there, and winds into my android
device as well.

Google seems to run into the large corporation octopus issue where knowing
what the left and right hands are doing is a difficult task.

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mattwdelong
A little tangent here, but does anyone else find it increasingly difficult to
manage multiple sessions on the Google platform?

I keep having difficulty not knowing which google account I'm logged into,
having issues enabling/disabling features before I have access to a feature X
and then, I find out feature X is not available with google apps hosted
account; but it's available with my gmail account.

There really isn't a solution other than using chrome, incognito window and n
browsers per google account. I sure it's a minority of the google user base
having this issue, or I'm sure it would be dealt with. Anyone else experience
this, and have a solution? I'm just short of abandoning data in all my
accounts but one, and moving everything over to it (and forward emails).

~~~
jroid
Go here, accept the conditions
<https://www.google.com/accounts/MultipleSessions>

On the right top menu, Switch Accounts, sign in to second account, (may need
to accept conditions again). At this point, you will be able to switch back
and forth, between the two accounts

~~~
mattwdelong
I've done that and have been using it - it has many limitations but it's a
small step in the right direction.

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Dove
This looks to me like Don't Be Evil showing up as a competitive advantage.
Facebook seems want my data and my network for its own exploitation; Google
seems to actually be thinking about what's best for me.

~~~
naner
Facebook makes advertising money through user profiling and only from within
their site. Google makes advertising money just from the fact that you're
using the web. Google is able to do _more_ though profiling, but they have the
flexibility and hindsight to do it less intrusively. Remember, Google's
properties are more spread out than Facebook's (and AdSense is almost
everywhere). So with Google you don't even have to be logged in for them to
advertise to you.

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kno
I think one of main Google problem is Brand Fatigue, people are tired of
Google this and Google that. Why not call it friend something or give it a
generic name like Baboo, Facebook or something fresh that will give the
impression that it is something new.

~~~
irahul
Had Google called it friend something, at least I won't have bothered. The
only reason I am looking at it is because of brand Google. Granted that Google
would have called it something else and I would have still used it, but that
would be only because it's Google. Majority of people I know don't have Google
brand fatigue - they love brand Google.

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v21
That's the best web demo I've ever seen. I'm a jaded person, but I clicked on
all the things and did all the stuff and felt pride at using their
(impressively easy) interface. Serious unexpected design chops from Google!

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Vraxx
Honestly, I'd be open to trying this JUST for the circles. Too many times I've
had to restrain myself from posting certain things because of the wide range
of "friends" I have on facebook.

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markbao
Really well done, interactive demo.

~~~
levesque
Extremely well done. I didn't bother reading about all the features, but the
demo made me go through all of it. I'm now excited about instant photos.
Success, google.

I liked the huddle text input, you don't choose what gets written... pogo
boots vanilla beetroots?

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JanezStupar
I adamantly insisted through the whole Facebook is a Google killer period,
that when Google decides and turns its eye towards FB's turf - they won't be
able to compete. For two simple reasons:

1\. Google has more of everything. 2\. When Google commits to something they
don't give up after a failed attempt. They learn and come back meaner and
badder.

What I like about this service is that it offers (not in beta mind you) actual
value as it seems. And I mean that in a productivity sense, not just vanity
shots and addictive "click like an automaton" games.

I believe that it is time for someone to hire me as a strategist.

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earle
Flash instead of HTML5.......

~~~
whatever_dude
Just this "demo". Makes sense considering some of the animation and
interactivity they have on the small windows. I doubt the actual product uses
Flash for anything other than, maybe, sound and video (as does
GMail/YouTube/etc).

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rheide
Can't put 1 friend into 2 circles? Great job on simplifying my social life..

~~~
shriphani
I just tried this out. Yes I can add people to more than 1 circle easily.

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alorres
This is great. The circle groups and the group chat is awesome. But I'm
wondering how many groups you'd be able to create (would there be a limit?)
and how the center stage of group chat works? It said in demo that the person
talking or the loudest would be center but what if 3+ people hit the same
volume level, or if like tinychat, there are multiple people talking? Would
love to get a reply from someone in Google+ beta.

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vibrunazo
I'm specially interested in the potential of a developer API for this new
Google Sparks. Since users _explicitly_ list their interests. If google let's
developers access user's interest graph with AppEngine. Then we can do some
really really cool customized user experience with it.

My brain is going crazy with ideas after reading about this. Just imagine the
possibilities... hmmmmm :)

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fastfinner
Yesss, finally I'll be able to get off Facebook! Even though I use Facebook
lists, circles seems a lot simpler and functional. For me, photos, and
comments and discussions generated off photos is really important, so I need a
social network that my friends are also on. The only other service that all my
friends share is GMail, so this is really great.

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Pistos2
The "Keep Me Posted" button brings me to

<https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/+/learnmore/notifyme.html>

which is a 404. I had to manually delete "-GB" to get a 200.

~~~
JulianMorrison
It worked for me after coming back a minute later, perhaps they had a
transient fault.

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whatever_dude
Whatever can make them close down Orkut faster, I'm down.

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RyanMcGreal
Bad sign:

> 404\. That’s an error.

> The requested URL /intl/en-GB/+/learnmore/notifyme.html was not found on
> this server. That’s all we know.

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mitrick2
Tried to add myself to the waitlist, and got a 500 server error. When the
waitlist fails, it doesn't inspire confidence.

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kylemaxwell
Very slick use of Google Maps underlying tech, it looks like. Similar to
Prezi, too.

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signa11
this is very _nice_ , although seems to be overlapping with couple of
independent offerings. to me, for example, sparks == instapaper, instant-
upload == path/color etc.

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bennesvig
The functionality feels really similar to Prezi.

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curiousfiddler
Loved the hangout feature. Really!

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crag
Good luck. When my grandma joins I'll take a look. She's on Facebook. ;)

~~~
txxxxd
Hah, I had the opposite reaction. Finally a social network where I don't have
to accept friend requests from my relatives =)

~~~
tvorryn
And even if you do accept them, it should be much more convenient and less
awkward. That's what I'm looking forward to. I still want to keep up with my
family but they don't care about machine learning and don't need to know
everything that I'm doing with my friends. Circles sounds great for all of
that.

