With all the hype surrounding google+ it's a crying shame it's not openly available. Within a couple of days my interest will have subsided and it will be nothing but a distant memory .. which I can imagine will be the case for a lot of people.
Hopefully if it is any good, it will claw it's way back into the media spotlight, but how many people will try for a second time to sign up. IMHO the invite only plan will kill it before it gets any kind of real traction.
Edit: I'm aware gmail done well using invite only to begin with. But gmail was a leap ahead of it's competitors.
Agreed, and the 'gmail did this' argument fails. If gmail was only substantially useful with other gmail users, a slow launch would not have made any kind of sense.
About the only justification for a slow launch is to avoid buggering up the scaling or having the entire world discover some massive UX flaw almost immediately - so it's tough for them. I hope they hit a good balance.
It started to get overloaded and throw errors right before they shut down email invites again last night, so I think they're likely trying to scale up as quickly as they can.
I haven't seen any hype surrounding google+ except for HN and other similar communities. I don't think the regular FB user is even aware that google+ is in testing phase, or that google is even working on anything like it.
Heck, how many have heard of google wave outside of the geek circle?
I've been sent an invite, thanks to whoever sent that, but it turns out I can't use the damn thing because I have a google apps account set up for my domain, just like everyone else here probably does.
Plus requires a google profile in order to use it, and Apps accounts can't have profiles. Apparently someone from google has said this will be coming "soon."
WTF google? Hasn't it occurred to you that the set of power users/evangelists/early adopters and the set of people who have their own apps account on their domain might overlap a bit?
This isn't so much dropping the ball, it's bordering on an own goal.
Any googlers reading this: sort it out. Or go and bother the nearest person responsible for sorting it out, lest my disappointment spill over into murderous rage.
I used to think that it matters, but you can create circles with people who don't have plus (as long as you have their email) so I don't think it will hamper adoption.
Making it invite-only forces people to talk about it. Gmail's slow launch was done really well, and probably drove interest more than harmed it. If Google handles this well, the same thing could happen for Google+.
I definitely agree. Google+ isn't that revolutionary that people will continue talking about it months from now when it's open to the public. They should've made it open to anyone and capitalized on all the press happening.
And I don't think Google+ will come anywhere close to overthrowing Facebook. Yes, the circles thing sounds cool and all, but it sounds cool to us rationalized hackers. For normal people, they just want a place to see what others are up to, to showcase their narcissistic profile, and to make witty comments. That's all. We don't need Circles. We don't even care about privacy.. it's just something us geeks cry about. The one thing Google probably didn't give as much thought to is how the user profile will look like. They probably put too much effort on the Circles feature.. well the Circles feature ain't gonna help make you look good to other people.. a fancy profile page will though, so there goes your traction.
We're working on a startup with an app that functions very similarly to the Sparks feature of Google+. The app will recommend new things for you to read and watch based on your interests (which are stored long-term, but can be ordered, edited, removed). Now that Google+ has a very similar feature in Sparks, I need to think long and hard on whether to continue with the idea. (We are a small team with three developers and a couple other members.)
Do you think we should continue to work on this? Would you use something like Google Sparks as a stand-alone Website or mobile app? If we continue, what would be significant differentiating functionalities that Google can't easily copy and deploy? (I am considering showing a different style of recommended results from Google Sparks, e.g. long-term, evergreen articles versus newsflash, but of course Google can do that too.)
I am torn right now. Thanks a bunch for any ideas and opinions on this.
Don't be concerned because Google is competing. Be concerned because everyone I've talked to agrees that Sparks sucks, and is by far the weakest part of Google+.
I'd be a little bit concerned if I were building a web content recommendation system, and my competitor is the world's largest and best index of web content.
Can you please elaborate on this? How does Sparks suck? It's gonna be great to know some more details so we can avoid bad design decisions and possible product failure.
I haven't used Sparks, but I can say this: my primary use for a social network isn't discovering new content. There are already so many awesome ways of doing that. Google Reader or StumbleUpon or Reddit or Delicious seem like better ways of discovering new and interesting content about a certain topic. But maybe Sparks will succeed because it will be a lot simpler to use than these other options and it will be built into some people's primary social network.
Here's a quote about Sparks from the Wired article on Google+:
The signals that Google looks for in determining Sparks content is freshness, a visual component (videos will rank highly), and the degree to which the content is virally spreading on the net.http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...
It throws up a bunch of content out there when I choose a spark. I don't know how they rank the content or how relevant it is to my spark. For example, I tried "Soccer" and it threw up a bunch of results - one them was a link to http://kelviniransomes.blogspot.com/2011/06/eastern-district....
I'd imagined that when you add a spark, you get a bunch of stuff grouped under various categories and various types of information like News, Companies, Products, Blogs, etc. And in case of Soccer, I'd have wanted to see scores, league standings, etc. Basically be intelligent about the topic.
If you're a startup building another social network, I think the question to ask yourself is: what's our business model?
Unless you are well connected in the valley, have insane traction already, have boatloads of cash, don't like or need money or are doing it for charity, it's not a startup, it's just a hobby.
I think the smart thing to do now is ride the social networking wave and build something on top of it.
This will be an app to help people follow their favorite topics. Think RSS, but filter by topics instead of websites. Or think Reddit, but with only links on your favorite topics. (The topics can be more fine-grained and flexible than putting existing subreddits together.)
Of course, there will be social components on it, but the key functionality is the links to interesting articles/videos/books instead of chattering with your friends.
Can I try it? If there was something good like this, I would probably use it.
Sparks doesn't do anything interesting right now. It's like Google search results but from a tiny subset of the web, so at least right now, you need not worry about it.
Ditto, I had a side project that was evolving in the same direction as the way Google circles' deals with photosharing.
I had heard of circles previously when they leaked things last year, but I assumed it would be vapourware or a half-start like Buzz or Wave. Now that they have actually come out with the product, I'm going to have to pivot away to plan B.
On one hand, there are always going to be people who don't get on Google+, and Sparks is very basic so there's always room for someone to do it better.
On the other hand, I'm not sure it would be possible to make any money on it, other than getting acquired. I don't know that people would pay money for something like Sparks.
I find I miss the simplicity of Facebook to a degree. With plus, it's not really clear who I'm sharing what with at any given time, or what the relationships I've set up are. Facebook has one kind of relationship (1-1) and one kind of sharing (to your friends or to everybody, depending on how your security settings are configured).
It's also missing a number of essential (at least for college students) facebook features, like events and richer profiles.
I'm playing with it for now, but I don't think I can manage two social networks and since nearly all of my friends are on Facebook it's not hard to choose one. Maybe some day that will change, but network effects augur otherwise.
Edit: I should note that hangouts are seriously cool, and they might be reason enough for people to start using it.
Have you ever clicked the little padlock next to the Share input widget? You can choose between Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends only, or Customize. If you choose the last one, you can select groups of friends or individual friends, or everyone except a list of excluded friends. Facebook has gotten pretty complicated...
One of the comments I saw on Google+ is making a distinction between a "plaza" and a "warren". Facebook defaults to plaza though it can do warren with some contortion. Likewise, Google+ defaults to warren and can do plaza with some contortion.
With my wide-ranging interests and extremely, sometimes mutually-exclusive perspectives, personal beliefs, pet philosophies and operating paradigm, I prefer a social network that defaults to a "warren".
I do not have a Google+-shaped hole in my life right now.
If a) it starts to matter to non-technical Internet users and b) they tie it into search heavily (which is the Google go-to playbook for promoting properties of strategic importance), I will start caring with alacrity.
Just watch as your friends and family drag you through the don't-need-it wall carving a Google+ shaped hole.
Google+ will succeed because it's an exact clone of Facebook, but faster, more open to search engines (shocking!), integrated right into Gmail and makes it easier than Facebook to spam people.
The feature which Google is claiming to be the revolutionary new thing (Circles) has already existed in Facebook for a long time (lists and I've been using them). The problem with Facebook lists is that they are hidden, so most people don't know about them or can't be bothered to create them.
At first I thought Circles will fail like lists because it's too much work. But after playing with it for a few seconds, I realised Circles is going to be a huge win. Why? Because it's too much work and people LOVE wasting time on the internet. And it's fun dragging and dropping people into circles.
Whether you're a techie or not, you already know how to use Google+. Even if you want to avoid it, you won't be able to for long because it's going to be everywhere you go from now on.
Excuse the awful pun, but this thing's a vicious Circle.
Facebook lists are pretty much useless. Yes, you can hide all your status updates from a selected bunch of people, but if you want to show them a single one you've got to make a bunch of additional clicks and then type in the lists' name (if you can recall it). It seems as if the feature was on purpose crippled so no one would bother to use it. Simplifying the whole process should be quite easy - and that's what Google did (I guess).
That's right. By making the feature opt-in (choose who should see this), instead of opt-out (choose who should not see this), Google has made a better version of Lists.
Facebook didn't really create anything new when it launched, it was simply less annoying and more grown up than myspace. I'm already a heavy user of the Google stack (gmail, docs, maps, translate), so if G+ offers me a way to better integrate that while getting away from facebook's annoying immaturity, I can see myself as a regular user. What facebook does have right now is a reason to check it multiple times a day. G+ will get that if a lot of my friends start using it, but it doesn't appear to have that draw yet.
What makes me hate facebook is that it is closed, So yes I would switch to G+ as I see in future all my google services[mail, calenader, maps, doc] integrated into my social networks and devices with the onset Android and the Google TV, and chrome browser all well intergated, privacy is not my concern. Rather I would love all my digital services intergated witha single vendor so that it can provide me with the kind of AI services google is known for[that too for free].
Just could not stop myself from posting this comment from 'lifebyexperimentation' .. the blogger[with hands on experience ] says my point in much better manner
"Everything is smoothly integrated into one place, from Google Chat to the notification center in the upper right. I wonder if I will be able to access my gmail and iGoogle widgets from Google+? If so, then it could provide a one-stop-shop for everything and take over as my browser homepage (something Facebook never had a chance at doing). One thing I have to be thankful for in that Google+ works well internationally because it remembers my Google settings. No other company could manage this.
Overall, like any social network, the #1 determining factor will be adoption. If my friends use it, I will use it. But adoption is based upon a good user experience and a service that solves a problem, and to my surprise Google+ seems to be accomplishing just that (I actually did not expect to like it).
"
Invites are so bloody rare. Gmail was groundbreaking (and empirically offered way more space, etc) so people were going nuts for invites. This is, at best, a "bit better than Facebook". And much as people dislike it, Facebook is a pretty powerful tool, as opposed to webmail before Gmail, which majorly sucked.
I did this small service using GAE after seeing so many people manually updating graphs, it's painful. Btw, every poll works, just change the number with the poll id from YCombinator's URL.
I'd have to get a new email out there for people to add. Just to use a new social platform from Google. Because I'm using Google's email-plkatform. This doesn't make any fucking sense. As usual I might add.
Google really loves to shit on its premium customers, the ones who actually pays them money for the products they are using. At some point I was surprised to learn this, but I guess over time it's natural to get a bit jaded.
From what I can see (From demos, no invite yet, got one? :( ) Google got alot of things right that Facebook got wrong. Mostly concerning privacy and sharing. Now, like most people say, Facebook has all these settings to share stuff with the people you want to share with, but my problem is that the whole security settings thing is a MESS! If google can do that right, while providing a better android app than FB does, that's enough for me to ditch Facebook for Google+.
It's hard for me to imagine it having much mass adoption -- it's just too similar to Facebook, and its killer-feature, Circles, is of dubious value to the non-OCD, non-geek set (do normal people care about sorting their friends into various groups?).
That said, a la the XKCD comic, I could see it being personally useful to me as a way to stay in touch with people who refuse to use / have left Facebook, but have no such compunctions for a Google product. I.e., I could see it becoming a place where the "cool kids" hang out.
I'm curious what Google's response will be if G+ only gets a limited amount of adoption. Will they just give up on it, like Wave, or will they keep pounding away & improving it?
It's been noted that today's Google is like yesterday's Microsoft, incredibly aggressively moving in on any perceived threats, but yesterday's MS would keep iterating an unpopular product until it was successful, whereas Google seems to be taking the "keep trying shit until we have an instant hit" approach. (Perhaps they were spoiled by search & gmail, where they were able to introduce truly game-changing improvements over the status-quo.)
Google+ has the same buzz and expectation which was associated with gmail when it was first launched (with respect to scarcity of invites). I am based in India (not sure how location matters) and I remember I had to wait a few weeks for someone to invite me to gmail.
If that is some indication, then Google+ looks to be a winner. (I remember how I moved from Yahoo! and Hotmail email to gmail after I finally got the invite).
Yeah, but unlike Google Wave, you don't really have to explain it to people. "It's like Facebook without all the Farmville crap" seems to suffice for even the least techie of people (as long as they are already on Facebook).
FWIW, I have created a HN stream and added ~40 of you who sent emails. You should be able to signup to google+ using that. If it tells you to retry later, please do that. It works - eventually.
The next step is standardizing a protocol for inter-social-network communication. Open flow between Google+, Facebook and other small compatible networks and standalone clients :) I hope Google will do the right thing, like they sometimes do. They certainly have the position to do it, and they would be appreciated for that.
This is a bit incoherent because success and failure for Google is radically different than success and failure for people who consume Google's services. If after six months Google+ provides an important data set which enhances ad revenues, they can shut it down or let it die off (which would be more likely) and still claim success even though this would constitute a failure for people who consume Google's services.
Likewise, if the implementation favors Android over iOS this increases the odds of success for Google while increasing the odds of Google+'s failure among people who consume Google's services.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates this divergence of interests more clearly that the current hype surrounding Google+ coupled with the lack of widespread availability among people who consume Google's services.
need an option for "have an invite but they're over capacity and won't let me sign up yet"
I have no opinion yet, I was backpacking for a few days during the announcement, just got back and had these invites. To me, it's nothing more than a product name, and a damn confusing one at that. I'd have accepted google++ ;-)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but the "Send feedback" widget in the lower right is amazing. It seems to be inspired by Safari's Web Clips, and I hope it won't be long before someone better at Javascript than me reverse engineers it (otherwise I guess I will have to).
My only fear with the invite only launch is that Facebook will have enough time to announce some of it's own changes before people get an invite to Google+. Although Facebook users are unlikely to (attempt to) delete their account unless google+ gains huge popularity. Google+ may just become a compliment for must Facebook users who use circles for their inner circles (perhaps family or co-workers). With hangouts I personally would only video chat with a select group of people falling into three circles, close Friends, family, and for work. But in the end those small groups will overlap with other circle to create one circle including everyone. Let's just hope the transition to google plus happens quickly and smoothly.
Like any social network, the more (time & posts) you put in, the more you get out of it.
I don't think I'm alone when I say my aptitude for social networking is burnt out and way passed the "love" stage. It makes it hard to go into this site with a fresh mind to discover any of it's cool nooks and crannies that separate it from Facebook.
That being said I think there's still room for invention in the space. I was quite pleased and excited with turntable.fm (and now that I can use it in Canada again I am excited again). Maybe I'll end up using the "hangout" feature.
tl;dr don't really need another means to ignore my long-lost highschool friend's all-important status updates
I've gotten a lot of business from my long-lost high school friends (and long-lost high school enemies too), so each trivial status update is like a precious little gem to me.
While the UI is good with animations and a nice design, I don't see anything that will make me shift completely away from FB: I might use it for hangout as an alternative to calling over google chat/skype. That's about it.
This is why I switched from Y!Messenger to Gmail Chat. There was a good opportunity to get rid of annoying people in my list, and to handpick the ones that I really wanna chat with
I will try to do the same by switching from Facebook to Google+. It seems easy enough that my folks will be able to use it. So for one thing, I will be very active within my Family circle, given the fact that I live abroad and I share lots of photos and do a lot of video chatting with my family. Second, I have the chance to better organize my friends and acquaintances and to share relevant stuff with them.
So far I like it. I feel that Facebook benefited from people's curiosity to add everybody they'd ever encountered over the course of their lives to see what they're up to today. Google+ will likely benefit from a better-curated collection of connections that are added in a more though-through manner. With Facebook it was neat to see what somebody I knew in middle-school is up to now, but really there's no reason for me to add them on new social networks going forward. And I think part of that curation of connections is what makes a social network increase in value.
Though the rest of the features are relatively mild, I'm definitely a fan of the "hangout". I was just on a chat earlier with 4 friends - I'm in the pacific northwest, three of them were in the midwest in several cities and one was all the way on the other side of the world, in Calcutta. Quality was fantastic and smooth, especially considering our pal in India was on a tethered 1Mbps cellular connection. Needless to say, I'm sold. Google+ makes Skype look like some teenager's high school science project gone wrong.
I'm using it more than I've ever used Facebook. That's a good sign.
Circles don't have the tedium of a Facebook group. I can add a few people and go straight to talking and sharing with no need to bug them to join a group or tinker with a profile. It's functionally similar to Facebook groups, but switching contexts is easier.
I got an invite and I have to say that Google has a GREAT start here. They are doing a lot of smart things like making the UI very clean and nice. It isn't nerdy at all. It looks like a product that is trying to win at being a social network, not at trying to be search advertising or a "twitter killer".
It's as if Google realized that they succeed when their products are genuinely good, not just "good enough" and pushed out to Google's massive user base via their massive advertising platform.
Google+ solves most of the problems I have with Facebook. The circles more or less reimplement what I have been using with Livejournal for ten years now. I've been migrating as many of my contacts off of FB as I can, with the plan to cull my FB friends list and then ditching it as far as daily use is concerned.
If I am applying the Gervais Principle right, Google+ will never completely supplant Facebook. That's fine by me.
Two years ago, I had no idea what problem Google Wave was trying to solve. I'm still a little hazy.
Google+ is solving the problem of Facebook not discriminating between your drinking buddies, and your boss. That's a pretty big problem - people get fired or sued over it. The more friends you have on Facebook, the less you want to use it, as you are the victim of overshare (yay, so many food pictures) and can get yourself in trouble too easily. It doesn't scale. I bet Google+ does.
OK, Facebook might just clone Google+'s features. Yay for them. Then it's a platform war. I bet the app developers, after being bitten by Facebook's previous decisions, are going to back Google.
Wave was glitchy and slow, and no-one could figure out exactly what they were supposed to do with it. Google+ has a clear purpose, is fast, and doesn't seem glitchy. I was having a blast chatting with people from a forum I use on Wave, but the conversation crash at 300+ killed it for everyone.
edit: I put it this way in a Google+ conversation: "Wave was a good name. Sometimes it was up, sometimes it was down. And you had to rebuild any time the wave got too big."
From how much of it I have used so far it is apparent that they have been listening to complaints about Facebook and other social networking sites. It is a far better venture than Buzz ever was, but even now Buzz appears as a view able tab and I am not sure why.
Though I must say I am having more fun causing the animations on the circles to happen then anything else.
Might fail, might succeed...only time will tell! It isn't a Wave 2 that no one will understand, but still have rough edges, bugs, no API (no integration with apps besides official one), nothing major that could make ppl move from Facebook, might be hard for casual user (think your father and mother) to get a Google Profile as Hotmail users...etc!
I think it should be evaluated in terms of where it could be 10 or 20 years from now. Somehow when i think of it that way, and then i compare that to thoughts of facebook in 10 or 20 years... i have faith in google.
Looks like a mashup up of all existing google tools flavored with the tone of Social Networking...perhaps the only leverage it has is its Circle feature and Hangout...curious to see how it ll go....
I feel hangout is gonna be the dark horse feature. Imagine coming back from a hard day's work, logging in to plus, and finding 3 of your best friends hanging out over a beer ;)
While hangout does sound, I think people will still prefer to actually "hangout" with their buddies over beer than watching their buddies drinking beer over g+.....
I can see the attraction - it's a sensible idea, it's just that I can also think of it being stressful: who did I just tell I'm going to quit my job? Who should I tell that we're moving? Is someone going to get offended if those circles leak and they've been placed in the 'wrong' one?
Hopefully if it is any good, it will claw it's way back into the media spotlight, but how many people will try for a second time to sign up. IMHO the invite only plan will kill it before it gets any kind of real traction.
Edit: I'm aware gmail done well using invite only to begin with. But gmail was a leap ahead of it's competitors.