

I'm a technical lead on the Google+ team. Ask me anything. - GraffitiTim
http://anyasq.com/79-im-a-technical-lead-on-the-google+-team

======
mirkules
Seems like most of the questions are watered down, and the answers are typical
PR-speak. One of the tell-tale signs is the lack of any negative learning
experiences, for example how explosive growth forced them to consider other
architectural designs. "There's a ton of stuff to do" is neither informative
nor all that forthcoming, IMO.

~~~
aymeric
Agreed. I stopped reading after: "How many people did you work with on
Google+?"

"We're a surprisingly small team"

Useless.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I stopped reading after realizing they didn't use reddit for an IAmA.

EDIT: Directly.

~~~
aymeric
Why do you think the fact they don't use reddit matters?

On a side note: I think they managed to come up with a good UI targeted at the
use case of asking questions to one person.

~~~
Robin_Message
There's no followup, which is an essential part of asking questions, both to
deal with evasion but also to clarify what you were asking. If they don't
answer your question, you have no recourse, no call out, no opportunity to
say: "Obviously you don't know the exact number, but is it ten or a hundred or
a thousand?"

~~~
aymeric
"both to deal with evasion but also to clarify what you were asking"

Very true. They would need to add comments and allow the interviewee to edit
his/her answers.

~~~
GraffitiTim
Comments are coming; answers can already be edited

------
jsherry
Personal fave:

"How many people did you work with on Google+?

We're a surprisingly small team (esp. by Google's standards), but we try to
make up for it with passion and speed."

To which I ask, how many people did you work with on Google+?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Heh, since Google is famous (infamous?) for saying most products are small
teams, just 3 or 4 people. It sounds like they are working all by themselves
:-)

That being said, given all the products that had to co-operate somewhat for
this to be released I doubt they were 'small'.

~~~
ardit33
that's just propaganda. Their Chrome team alone is over 300 engineers.

~~~
nostrademons
It depends what you consider a team. The "Chrome" team is big, but the team
that works on the HTML5 parser within Chrome is pretty tiny, as is the team
responsible for V8, as are many of the other teams.

~~~
jeroen
How does "pretty tiny" compare to "surprisingly small"?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
The same as the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.

------
dtran
Unless you have a good reason for forcing really terse questions (even shorter
than Twitter's 140-character limit), please, please make the tiny text input
into a textarea. Or if you want to be fancy, start it off as a one-line
textarea but expand it if I start typing more. I have to write my question
somewhere else and paste it to actually be able to read it back. Otherwise,
really great job hustling to get great people for these AMAs.

Edit: I guess the questions do have to be short, but there wasn't proper
validation/notification when my question was too long (it just took me to a
blank page to reask a question).

~~~
GraffitiTim
Thanks. I think we're going to lift or lessen the constraint on question
length. We were trying to have them fit in a tweet, and also we noticed that
most interview questions are relatively short, but we've gotten that feedback
quite a lot.

~~~
kelnos
"See who I follow, and follow new people. / Update your profile."

No thanks.

~~~
GraffitiTim
We don't use those, twitter doesn't have a fine-grained permissions system.

~~~
kelnos
Wow, really? What a crappy developer platform. I question why Twitter even
bothers to put that stuff in a bulleted list when they're not even giving the
developers a choice as to what they want to use. My natural reaction is to
blame the developer for trigger-happy permissions requesting. Sorry about
that!

------
paliopolis
But why do need to use my twitter info to login !! And on top of that "anyasq"
can tweet on my behalf !Sorry !! Aint gonna happen.

~~~
GraffitiTim
Sorry, we're working on allowing other login mechanisms. The publishing
permission is so you can tweet out questions you ask easily if the box is
checked. We never misuse any permissions.

~~~
JoshTriplett
While I realize that part of this comes from the structure that Twitter's
authorization takes, which doesn't allow fine-grained permissions, ideally I'd
love to see more sites _asking_ which permissions you want to grant them. I
almost never want to allow a site to tweet on my behalf (though I don't mind
if it wants to send me over to Twitter with a suggested tweet), and I don't
want to trust the site itself to not abuse the permission; I'd rather just not
grant that permission in the first place.

~~~
GraffitiTim
We now prompt only for read access. Later on we might add back in some options
to grant read+write access in order to more deeply integrate it with Twitter.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Thank you for that; greatly appreciated.

------
keyle
I thought the point of "ask my anything" was to get answers...

    
    
         - *How many* people did you work with on Google+?
         - We're a surprisingly small team (esp. by Google's standards), 
         but we try to make up for it with passion and speed.

------
danielrhodes
"I think everyone feels the need to share different things with different
people--and the desire to be able to hear from certain circles without losing
them in the overall stream."

Personally I'm interested in the real numbers behind this. Have people
actually split up their social network into circles? To what degree? Are
people actually using the feature the way it was intended? How many posts are
public or effectively public? How do people who only know a few people on G+
(essentially everybody outside the tech scene) use the service and Circles.

To me, G+ feels like a better content sharing network rather than a social
network. For example, you can't even privately message somebody.

Now that I think about it, I wish the analytics lead on the team would do an
IAMA as well. :-)

~~~
andor
_To me, G+ feels like a better content sharing network rather than a social
network. For example, you can't even privately message somebody._

There are two ways to send private messages: 1) The chat, which you have to
enable for circles or individuals. 2) You can contact anybody with a private
message by sharing a message just with that person. To find out if a message
you received is private, you have to check the sharing details, though.

------
GraffitiTim
Twitter login now prompts for read-only permissions, instead of read+write. I
think that was the most popular suggestion from the HN crowd. Thanks all.

------
aneth
I submitted a question, but there was no confirmation screen, just a screen
asking for a new question. Hopefully it got submitted because it's important:

"Like many, I spend my days logged in to a G Apps for Domains account and all
my primary emails are there. How can I use Google+ and how can people share
things with me?"

------
shapeshed
is there a God?

------
run4yourlives
If you're going to spam my favourite technical website with pr for an
application that I'm not even allowed to use, are you at least going to send
me an invite?

Seriously, there's a lot of people that are on the "in" already here, but for
the rest of us, either let me see what all the fuss is about already or STFU
with the incessant "I'm cool you're not" posts about this thing.

~~~
choice
Hey everyone, let's all completely stop talking about G+ until run4yourlives
gets an account.

~~~
run4yourlives
Too late, somebody invited me as a result of that comment. :-)

Point still stands though. I'd prefer that we not turn this site into a "look
what I have that you don't" PR session. It's so much more than that.

Especially since you can provide a wonderful amount of feedback to the team
by, ironically, using Google+ itself.

~~~
sorbus
It's one of the biggest pieces of mainstream technology news right now, and
though that might be because of the exclusive aspect of it (remember the PR
firm that offered invites to other PR firms as a way of getting contacts?),
it's also because a battle between Google and Facebook will be really
interesting, leading to everyone with an opinion writing an article. It will
probably blow over in a week or two - just like the Bitcoin stories did,
though they lasted for several months. Or the Color stories (slight resurgence
as the company continues self-destructing, but it's the first I've seen of
them on HN in months).

It's a really standard cycle on HN - not the first or last time it will
happen. If it gets too irritating, then someone will write a browser extension
to hide all stories about Google+, or adapt an existing extension (as they did
with Bitcoin and a bunch of other topics that briefly took over the site).

