So what do you actually need to do to accomplish this? I followed the link to the Google+ page and it's just a giant wall of confusion.
I see a circle with a link in the middle saying "Add Circle". Is that what I want to do? I would have expected to see something along the lines of "Add me to this Circle" so that I'd be part of it.
Anyway, I clicked the "Add Circle" link, and got a string of progressively less parseable pages full of people's pictures that I can presumably drag and drop places. I just makes no sense whatsoever.
So first point: Google+ seems to have a terrible interface.
Second point: Assuming that somebody here (the author at least) must have interacted with that page in a way that created some form of value to his life. What are the steps to do so?
Go to https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts and, in one of the "Hacker News has shared a circle with you" posts, click the blue "View shared circle" button. Name the circle and voila, you now have a circle in your Google+ account with all the HN people who signed up on http://hngp.axxim.net/
Edit: I forgot to warn you that several hundred people will add you to their circles, and you will get notifications when that happens. You should probably go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and preemptively disable those notifications before you are drowning in them.
That's all you need to do to get the results mentioned in the article, but you might get a lot of unwanted noise in your Google+ stream from this circle. If that's a problem for you, go to your Google+ "home" page https://plus.google.com/stream and find your new HN circle in the left-hand column. When you click it, you get a stream made from that circle, and you can change the "volume" of the circle using the slider that appears in the upper-right. Now when you browse your normal stream you won't get noise from the HN circle.
Silly error... I don't (currently) use G+ on a daily basis, so this error message is a bit facile - I haven't even touched G+ today, so either the HN shared circle is too big, or it's reached it's own daily limit.
Doh. And now I have a whole bunch of people showing up in my chat client. Is there a way to disable that? I see the options for 'Who can start a Messenger conversation with you?' but they are somewhat limited and that's not the option I'm quite looking for.
Yes! Leave it to Google to screw up privacy, I don't use G+ much but this right here has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would say it's intentionally convoluted to get people to have poorly set settings (more "sharing"), but let's face it, Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design (they're engineers!).
Anyway, I spent 20 minutes frantically trying to figure out how to handle gChat privacy settings while my carefully curated buddy list filled up with random names.
- Go to plus.google.com
- Find the chat box on the left side, there is a small down arrow at the top left of it
- Click on privacy settings
- MAKE SURE that only the circles you want in gChat are selected (IE uncheck the hacker news circle you made)
DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN!
I'm still trying to figure out how to get the names off my list, even though that has been set. No new names though. I'm just surprised that Google would add to my Google Chat buddy list, a totally separate product, without ever asking me if i wanted to combine G+ and gChat like that.
Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??
Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design
This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult.
Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??
Why is this scary, other than the fact that it's different from what's happened in the past? Was the Chat / Mail integration scary too?
You're hinting at Google's design problem in your comment.
Good design isn't primarily about UI research and one way mirrors. It's having a design vision for what you want to be, and how you communicate that to your users. Simplicity and ease of use are important factors too.
As this thread points out Google utterly fails at this. The top comment is "I have no idea how this thing works"
Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX.
They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.
I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.
I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to.
Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.)
(Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)
> I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.
Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns.
EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being:
People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.
I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.
Um... Isn't that the reason "circles" in Google+ exist? To draw lines?
It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.
I don't think anyone only "reads" one community. According to interest, one participates in many?
Personally, I found all this quite confusing (and just when I figured how to "circle"; doh, limit has been reached for adding people. But, you can start adding tomorrow!)... and following the advice of sp332 and betterth, I avoided falling into blunders like Google adding all 1000+ contacts to my Gtalk or notifying each and everything that ever happens in G+ universe.
Moreover, since now people are split inside circles, am I supposed to update the circle manually everyday?
Agreed, what should be a simple thing has turned into a usability nightmare. Why is Google limited the number of people I can add? Why is there a hard cap of 5000 profiles that I can add total?
If this is supposed to be a social network, why are these limitations in place?
I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company that hires engineers). I don't think that they took design seriously at all until more recently and there hasn't been any lack of posts on HN or elsewhere talking about the growth of good web design. In short, their design has improved from 2010 and beyond due to a large push by management for updated and unified design across products, and I'd argue Matias Duarte's position on the Android team.
As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail.
That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc.
I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.
Then, please explain, why is it so bad? What is the weak link in the chain? I just decided against joining the HN circle because the list of instructions to do it was too much like the instructions for editing linux config files, which I only follow out of necessity.
This is kind of a dealbreaker here. Especially since the chat in Google+ is indeed set to not show the Hacker News circle, but my chat in gmail is still showing everybody! And there's no visible setting to change that outside of Google+
The setting is unfortunately hidden. You need to click on the little arrow that's next to the chat login next to stream to find it. If you're not signed into chat first do so then click the little arrow again. From there you can add and remove circles from your chat.
The "Hacker News Circle" Google+ re-shares an updated circle every 5 minutes. Clicking "Add Circle" allows you to copy that circle into one of your own.
I just made a straight copy called "Hacker News" in my circles where I dump the shared circle.
All this is implementing a feature that Google+ desperately needs: a public circle that users can subscribe to rather than copy into their private circles, like Twitter's lists.
(Note: I am not the creator of the Hacker News Circle, just a user)
Same exact experience here. Should I add the Hacker News circle to my friends circle? Acquaintances circle? Family circle?
At this point I can hear some Googler with a 160 IQ chiming in that, algorithmically, it doesn't matter whether Hacker News is a person or a group of people; the effect on personal search is the same. This misses the point. People think in metaphors, and if the metaphor is broken they assume the product is too.
With so many brilliant people at Google, and Facebook nipping at their heels, I am shocked at how bad G+ remains months after it launched.
The Hacker News Circle is a Google+ page that publishes the shared "Hacker Circle."
The Hacker Circle is a circle that has been shared publicly. This means you can look at the list of people in the circle, add any that look interesting, or, as I did, add the entire circle as one of my own personal circles.
But like the posts say, your own circle can't be updated by someone else. The page will periodically release an updated version of the circle, and if you want all the latest people, you need to go back to the page and re-add the circle.
To add yourself, visit the link as instructed in the posts.
As far as I can tell, when I do a search, social results should automatically show up. I must not have this feature turned on yet, or maybe I need to turn it on and can't figure out how.
I might be wrong on something, I don't even use G+ much, it's just how it seems to me on a few minutes of looking at it.
I made an HN specific circle so that it could easily be limited or turned off. Getting a flood of messages from several hundred people can be a bit annoying.
This is a smart move. There are many interesting directions and questions.
(1) Can we choose to give a particular search weight to different Google+ groups that are against our profile? I'd like to see what Hacker News thinks the search results should be and I'd like to see what my friends think the search results should be.
(2) Following from the previous point, I believe Google could effectively turn this into a sort of auto-generated "sub-reddit" system that does not require link submission, instead being powered by "+1". Or how about the top +1's from the group this day, week, year? The only things missing would be (a) comments by group users, and (b) some generic Google way of searching for public groups or tying these to internet communities.
Aside:
(4) What happens when spammers start adding themselves to the hngp.axxim.net Hacker News circle and then when we add this circle to our Google+ we start getting sponsored search results? Can we stop this? An active profile with a high average karma seems to me like an acceptable solution for a higher quality group but I guess we can't get that information easily... I wonder if the guy who created the Hacker News circle will allow us to update our profile in the circle to include our Hacker News username?
>allow us to update our profile in the circle to include our Hacker News username
FYI, the Hacker News username is already an optional field that was added after some people had already added themselves; not sure if you can update your profile or not if you didn't include it earlier.
I think the idea is great, but I'm not sure Google has fully figured out what to do with it's social search.
I may like to know in search what all the Hacker News users like and dislike, but I'm not sure I'm really intereseted in everything they write on their google wall (even if mostly are probably great posts :) ).
I'm the maintainer of the Google+ Hacker News Circle (Well, the script/cron job that makes a circle from hngp.axxim.net). I increased the frequency to every five minutes to keep up with the new growth.
It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to update.
I'm worried seo spammers will start adding them to this circle. Does HN support some OAuth you can use to verify that those who add themselves are actual HN users? If you could require minimum karma points that would be awesome.
I actually just got it to work. If you click on the "Add Circle" link when the circle had <1000 members it will work. Then you can update tomorrow to get the full list.
Agreed. They need to introduce a different "class" of circle that people can add/remove themselves from at will, or just subscribe to. Maybe you could call it... a group.
I added myself to this circle when it was first announced. Today I've gained over 1000 followers! Wondered why and found this post. Interesting to see that 89 votes and 34 comments leads to around 1000 people taking action. Makes you realise how big this community is!
Yeah, same here, I'm not sure if putting a circle public like that is the best choice, it'd be nice to be able to have access using your HN account somehow. We'll see how it goes. I wonder if others will start adopting this 'sharing a circle' method to promote their stuff.
Being able to weigh results by G+ posts has made discovering new and interesting things inevitable, not just easy. Sometimes I find new and interesting things that aren't even related to what I was searching for. It's like StumbleUpon in the early days.
For example, I needed a Top Posts plugin for WordPress. I drowned in a sea of plugins, spam, and blog posts with the default search. Social weighting put the perfect plugin right on top. And it's been the same for every query I've tried so far.
https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts it's just a page. if I understand correctly what's going on on the page, we need to add people to our own circle every time they publish the updated circle.
//edit:
it looks fine except people who write public posts in their native language which I do not understand. I hope the author thought about spam prevention or we'll get lots of 'funny videos and pictures' profiles in there soon.
They need to separate functionality. Right now you aren't following a shared circle. Adding a shared circle creates a whole new circle that you can modify however you want. I want it to work more like Twitter's lists. Not that I mind the 2000+ circlings I've gotten from shares. :)
I wish posts had a native language the are posted in, since I have friends in Mexico that post things both in English and Spanish, I have no desire to grok their Spanish posts, so the ability to filter circles or the main stream based on certain things is something Google+ as a whole needs.
The only other thing you need to do, other than add the circle to your profile, is occasionally go back to the circle and add it again (to the same circle in your profile) to get the newest list of people. Unfortunately, adding a shared circle only adds a copy of it at that moment, but not a dynamic one that updates itself.
It's not so bad though, because adding a circle to an existing circle simply adds in people not already in there.
I just found out about G+ adding limit. I tried to add the new circle that was just published and it said I have added too many today. Try again tomorrow.
He explicitly clicked on the "see personal results" link at the top of the search results, the screenshot is not what it looks like if you just type jquery into the box and click search. You can see the "Personal" title at the top of the results that has an X on it, and on the left hand side of the page "Personal" is selected.
Thanks! This is bound to liven up my stream. I will refrain from adding myself to the HN circle though as I'm currently only a wanna-be hacker. But I do have have a fear of other wannabe hackers adding themselves to the circle and maybe polluting my stream with content that isn't as high quality as I'm used to on HN. (no upvote/downvote mechanism)
when you add the circle, you're adding a copy of the circle and can remove people from your copy any time you want. at least, that's my understanding of how G+ works. so if some goof that you don't like starts posting, you should be able to just remove them.
Hackers are not that elite, it's probably the least elite club. If you want to make or tinker with things you're probably welcome regardless of education or background. However being just plain offensive is another matter.
In general people seem to be finding a lot of value with these new "random" connections of people who share their interests in tech things or just "interesting" things. It strikes me that all of these people existed before, but none of us knew we "wanted" to be connected to them, we just happened to be at the right place and the right time. I can't wait for the first social network to help us connect to interesting people we don't know without us having to take arbitrary external steps. Google circles, Twitter suggestions for who to follow... these are baby steps to a future with great potential.
Hey guys, I'm the owner of hngp.axxim.net, I kinda forgot about this project, but tomorrow I'll be adding in google authentication (to manage your visibility and stop spammers) and fix the site load speed (did someone say ajax?!) and some other neat, but needed features.
So, apparently there is a limit to the number of add-to-circle actions you can perform in a day. I added the circle and then removed it, and when I went to re-add I got an error: "You've reached the daily limit for adding to your circles. You can add more tomorrow."
Yes, in that part of what you do is to tell Google "I trust these people" and give them higher ranking than random "search engine optimized" pages.
No, in that someone who follow the hacker news circle and search for "android" will likely prefer results about programming and marketing android applications, which are not the optimal results for the general public.
So the social graph does to things: it states trust (improves general quality of results), and it states interests (improves specific targeting of results).
The later obviously is more likely to work for interest based circles like "hacker news" than for your Family or even Friends circles.
The example Google gives is that you can now type "photos" and see pictures of your family and friends. Instead of going to some other site and navigating, you just type your desires into Chrome's URL bar and the Right Thing automatically shows up. (There are some internal goals for this, but I'm not sure which ones are public... but this will only get cooler as time goes on.)
Can I get an additional explanation of what to do?
> "I added myself and followed the circle"
I followed the group and added myself through hngp.axxim.net/insert, but do I have to add the ~650 people to my circle, or is just following the page enough?
Looking at the linked Hacker News Circle on Google+, the first person listed in the circle is "Paul Graham", who's pretty clearly not pg. The linked Paul Graham says "wow. so many people have me in their circles", and another user suggests it's because of pg [0]. I'm curious what percentage of the people are linked to the right profile.
I wish I knew how you felt, but sadly it seems there are quite a few people that don't have search personalization as an option available to them [yet?].
The barrier to entry to get oneself added to this list doesn't seem to be much. I added part 1 of 2 of the circle and already my stream is being flooded with stuff like this -> http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/442/gplushn.png/
Information overload in a language I don't even understand!
Hmmm... I don't know. My Flickr account is associated with my Google account, and I have pictures of eczema on my flickr account that someone requested permission to publish, yesterday, but when I search personal results, those pictures are nowhere to be found.
And don't forget that if you want to keep the circle to sort later, but don't want it in your main stream, you can dial down the weight of posts from it (or remove them completely) on the circle's stream.
I've been trying to add the shared circle but it keeps telling me that people could not be loaded and fails. Has anyone else had that issue and been able to resolve it?
I wonder why the HN account name field is optional, for getting in the shared circle.
Currently, it looks like anyone can add themselves just by having an email and G+ account. Someone already mentioned OAuth, and it'd be great if proper auth against both G+ and HN was required to be added to the circle.
On the other hand, it's also not that hard to selectively toss someone out of your copy of the circle, even right from the stream page.
The feature I'm really waiting for is pseudonym support. Vic Gondotra promised it several months ago at Web 2.0. I don't feel comfortable using Google+ at all right now, given that my account, among others, was suspended.
And this is a step to correct that. Search is hard, and its getting harder. SEO is ruining search, real human crowdsourced referrals offload the parts where algorithms cannot perform.
And are designed to make judgements in the absence of humans. No one can prepare a computer for every use-case mankind can possibly think of. We're orders of magnitude more clever than a computer can deal with.
I'm not seeing what's so amazing about this, sorry... Google is basically hijacking the conversation off of HN and then making that searchable by its members, so what's exciting about that?
I see a circle with a link in the middle saying "Add Circle". Is that what I want to do? I would have expected to see something along the lines of "Add me to this Circle" so that I'd be part of it.
Anyway, I clicked the "Add Circle" link, and got a string of progressively less parseable pages full of people's pictures that I can presumably drag and drop places. I just makes no sense whatsoever.
So first point: Google+ seems to have a terrible interface.
Second point: Assuming that somebody here (the author at least) must have interacted with that page in a way that created some form of value to his life. What are the steps to do so?