
Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus - nl
http://rethrick.com/#google-plus
======
mlinsey
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.

~~~
ramanujan
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.

~~~
guptaneil
Why sort everybody into just one circle? Most of my contacts are sorted into
multiple circles so that I have more fine-grained sharing control. G+ also
makes it fairly easy to create new circles on the fly for when I want to share
a message with an even more specific group. I think of Circles more like tags
that I can use to control visibility of my posts.

~~~
masklinn
> I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my
> posts.

That's exactly what they are: a visual interface to tags and tagged social
graph nodes.

------
g123g
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.

~~~
icarus_drowning
It is quite obvious that Google+ is far, far from perfect, and I don't think
that it is going to make even the smallest dent in facebook's market-share.
But that doesn't mean that many of the features that make it distinctive--
_including_ Circles-- aren't a positive step forward. (If anything, if the
"defining features" of + serve no other purpose than forcing facebook to
integrate similar features, I'd call it a success).

Indeed, suggesting that Google+ is simply some sort of "copy" of facebook plus
a few new features is a pretty short-sighted view of the service, as the
_entire model_ of Google+ is hugely different: instead of viewing one's social
graph as one monolithic entity, Google+ views it as a series of graphs that
are often intersecting and often entirely different. And that is very useful,
especially for people who might want to be able to share things with their
coworkers that are entirely different than what they share with their friends.

I'm not going to argue with the assertion that a great deal of Google+'s early
"success" is simply due to "non stop hyping", rather than the service's actual
strengths. But that doesn't mean that the strengths it does possess are
somehow frivolous or meaningless. They simply aren't.

Simply put: sure, _you_ might be happy sharing with email/dropbox, but a great
deal of people would rather that our current social networks had a more
granular view of sharing/following/etc. (this includes me). And I hardly think
its fair to criticize them the way you have-- it is more than just "the early
adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still
using it" (indeed, many of the early adopters have been very critical of the
service, even noting when facebook or twitter is superior-- see Jeff Jarvis'
comments about how difficult it is to follow live events on G+[1]).

It is still far too early to tell whether G+ is a 'facebook killer'-- I
strongly suspect that it isn't. But that doesn't mean that unfair poo-pooing
of it simply because it is over-hyped is the right response. Both Twitter and
facebook could learn a great deal from what Google has done, and I genuinely
hope they do.

As I said above, if that happens, I for one will consider G+ a rather
startling success.

[1]:[https://plus.google.com/105076678694475690385/posts/JSWreaGr...](https://plus.google.com/105076678694475690385/posts/JSWreaGrBY9)

~~~
eco
A friend of mine made a bookmarklet to sort by time which helps
<[https://github.com/uxp/gplus_sort>](https://github.com/uxp/gplus_sort>). It
should still be something Google+ offers though.

------
cjoh
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.

~~~
hackinthebochs
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.

~~~
carbonica
Personally, I think you're right, but you sort of take a risk when you go for
hyperbolic sarcasm. I'm not sure how much of the first paragraphs he believes;
much of it, if he did, somewhat discredits him in my eyes as an engineer (let
alone as an unbiased source). The takeaway certainly doesn't depend on whether
the preceding paragraphs are gospel truth, but one's judgement of the author's
credibility, in my opinion, does.

------
foxylad
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.

~~~
code_duck
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?

~~~
heydenberk
I stopped reading exactly there.

------
parfe
_Facebook already has circles!_

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.

~~~
nck4222
"I had originally assumed that he meant facebook would lack the agility to
make the necessary technical changes, so central to their system. But I was
wrong--the real point was that they would not be willing to change direction
so fundamentally. And given such a large, captivated audience you could hardly
blame them."

Facebook has always been about sharing every post with every person. You're
right, the only difference is that g+ puts the UI in your face. You're forced
to put people in circles, and it's stupidly simple. Facebook hides the
feature, and in a community filled with highly technical early adopters,
someone needs to write multiple step instructions to explain it.

~~~
parfe
Care to write up a Google+ version for the same result that is not "Multi-
step"? The only reason people weren't doing this on facebook before is because
they never cared to.

~~~
orangecat
I'm reminded of Time Machine in Mac OS X. From a technical perspective it's
inferior to dedicated backup software, but from a user perspective it's
infinitely better because people actually use it.

------
briandon
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.

~~~
tbh2347
It's not about the technical restrictions, the edge cases. It's about what a
user expects when posting, the overall experience when sharing.

There will be the occasional embarrassing reshare, but for the most part users
will (in theory...) feel more comfortable sharing more sensitive information
if they better control who sees it. I found this post on technical vs social
privacy interesting:
[https://plus.google.com/116222833568410151476/posts/QDwkrxrp...](https://plus.google.com/116222833568410151476/posts/QDwkrxrpqXg)

~~~
billswift
The problem is that on the Internet you _don't_ have that control. How and
where you post something can influence how it can spread, but nothing can
_control_ how it spreads, just ask the RIAA. The problems are mostly caused by
people who "feel more comfortable" because they wrongly think they can control
it. As many people have said, "If you don't want it to get out, then don't put
it on the Internet."

~~~
tbh2347
There's no control just like there's nothing stopping people from recording
your conversation in real life and passing it around the office. Sure, on the
Internet things are easier, but it's the same concept that you can make it
socially difficult to reshare certain things.

Saying "If you don't want it to get out, then don't put it on the Internet" is
coloring things too black and white. What about those tech articles that you'd
like to share, but don't want to annoy your non-technical friends with? What
about the nonsensical updates that you're _okay_ with people seeing but _would
rather avoid_ having certain people see?

Not everything that people post are naked pictures or incriminating evidence.
There's just some things that are socially awkward to share, and that's where
"control" comes in.

------
spullara
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.

~~~
Angostura
Do you know anyone who knows how to use Friends lists?

~~~
swaits
I use it on each and every Facebook post. Not sure how people live without it.

~~~
samlevine
The post everything to everyone on their friends list. ;)

~~~
swaits
Ahh right, the people I hid. :)

------
JohnLBevan
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.

What do you guys think?

JB

~~~
JohnLBevan
One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards
circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my
feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so
I have two options: 1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my
other friends 2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see
(including people who follow me but whom I haven't circled as I don't know
them). The first option excludes my followers, the second spams my friends. I
could create another circle of followers and message them and the techies, but
that doesn't sit comfortably, especially as I don't know which of my posts
caused those people to follow me (perhaps a music video I favourites on
youtube caught their eye and now they're getting spammed with HN links).
Having some way where I could create circles to publish stories to, but have
others subscribe to those would be handy - I then publish to my "tech stuff"
circle, and anyone who cares to subscribe to "JohnLBevan.TechStuff" sees it,
whilst it's hidden from others (to prevent annoying them - not for security).
Again, I'd welcome your thoughts. Cheers, JB

~~~
esrauch
That's interesting; it seems to me that if circles aren't actually intended to
be used from a content driven perspective (eg person X is an amateur
photographer and also posts about geocaching; they don't care who reads either
but they don't want to spam people that are interested in only one or the
other) then that is how circles would be (you 'tag' your own posts and people
who follow you subscribe to just some of your tags).

I actually think that definitively shows that the intent of circles is just
security (person X doesn't want his mom seeing his drinking photos) and that
the possibility of sharing content based on what the reader is interested in
really just comes for free with that (though in a roundabout and inconvenient
way; the provider has to determine what content the reader is interested in).

~~~
JohnLBevan
Thanks esrauch - agreed, they're just there for security at present, but have
a lot of potential to be a lot more with just a few tweaks to existing
functionality. One of the big differences of having circles which could be
used as tags is these posts could also be shown to public and not to those in
your circles other than those who've subscribed to the tag. I believe one
reason Twitter's so popular is it allows you to post whatever you like and
people choose to be interested - if someone tried to make the facebook status
public and put the same stuff in there that they put on twitter lots of their
friends would end up blocking them.

------
megablast
Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on why javascript is required to read a blog entry.

No, it should not be.

~~~
bobbyi
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.

~~~
jerrya
I see this at many sites, including, most frustratingly of all, within
Google's various help sites.

I don't know enough Javascript to understand why that behavior is so often
created. Is it so hard to respect the "classic" "canonical" middle click
behavior?

~~~
dmit
It's a WebKit issue: <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22382>
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=255>

~~~
jerrya
Wow. Seems like such a simple and obvious problem and fix, it's educational to
see how long it has taken to _not_ get fixed.

------
mcfunley
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.)

------
sequoia
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.

~~~
steilpass
Well I gave it a try. But I am missing something:

<html> <head> </head> <style> ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 10px; } ::-webkit-
scrollbar-thumb { border-radius: 10px; background: #ddd; } </style> <body>
<div style="background:red; margin-top: 1000px;">hi</div> </body> </html>

~~~
riklomas
Try adding a background color to your ::-webkit-scrollbar

------
wccrawford
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.

~~~
BANANARCHY
If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

------
samj
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.

~~~
cbs
_Perhaps Facebook just understand that for a social network to be successful
you need to encourage sharing at all costs_

Unfortunately it also discourages meaningful sharing. My G+ "stream" is
already home to discussions and photos the likes of which would never have
popped up in my facebook feed.

------
haakon
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?

------
kloncks
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.

~~~
ben1040
Meanwhile, it's absolutely unusable on my Honeycomb tablet.

I would love to finish reading this, but his site design is preventing me from
scrolling down to read the rest of the entry.

~~~
kloncks
Here you go: <http://www.ihany.com/article-through-hn-not-mine/>

(Page not public. Not taking credit. I'll take it down in the morning.)

~~~
ben1040
Thanks a ton!

------
mathiasben
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.

------
gospelwut
There really should be a feature (lab) to let circles inherit.

Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw

~~~
nl
_Friends > Friends I like > Friends I want to screw_

| People I don't like but are hot enough to screw if I got the chance

~~~
gospelwut
That might warrant an entirely new circle. I suppose it's up to your tastes
though.

~~~
JohnLBevan
Perhaps Google Venn's required?

------
notarant
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?

~~~
notarant
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.

------
tilt
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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
stickfigure
This article should be titled:

Former Google Engineer Builds Uncrawlable Blog Website

------
Terry_B
I can see G+ quickly becoming the best way to share links, videos etc amongst
friends.

The part where G+ becomes your social life like Facebook currently is for many
people...I just can't see it.

~~~
est
> I can see G+ quickly becoming the best way to share links, videos etc
> amongst friends.

And a redundant of them. This is like Friendfeed, where you get reposts from
different sources every damn minute.

------
nvictor
how the hell did he get that scrollbar?

------
bonch
I think Google+ will be a social network for techie hipsters and other early
adopters seeking a Facebook alternative, but the novelty will wear off, and
the mainstream will barely notice. Just my initial impression. There isn't a
compelling enough reason for Facebook's 750 million users to switch.

~~~
sunchild
With social networks, what really matters is how users think they should use
the graph. It matters whether it's a personal or professional graph. That's
why social networks are "balkanized" across personal/professional lines.

I find G+ especially useful in a "semi-professional" use case. G+ is just an
extension to gmail that adds some easy ways to organize work groups.

For example, a meaningful percentage of my gmail activity is sharing links and
info with project teams. It's more intuitive to me to create a circle for each
team and post to them via G+ than it is to prepare an ad hoc email to them
each time. Also, I'd rather organize that conversation as a private stream
with discussion, etc. It avoids clutter in my gmail inbox.

I also spend a lot of time chatting and talking on Skype. Now that I can
organize group video chat via G+, I can cut Skype out of my workflow. I don't
like using the Skype client at all.

I realize that solutions to these use cases existed before G+, but G+ provides
a unified interface that has a powerful effect on my willingness to organize a
graph inside Google.

I can see Google+ taking off for enterprise users of Google Apps, once it's
released to them.

------
marknutter
Best part of the article: Game of Thrones reference. Or maybe I'm just excited
for tomorrow..

