I really hope they kick facebook's ass - Google is a company which allows other smaller companies to grow and build on their system, they're inclusive ... it's near impossible to build a serious business on a facebook app (outside of farmville type games) - any serious app (photo sharing, better socialization etc.) that gains any kind of popularity on facebook gets shut down without compromise.
It almost feels like a political issue--with all of the longterm controversy and animosity that Facebook has stirred up amongst us, we've been quietly waiting for something like this to happen. I'm glad to see that so many of us appear to be rallying around what appears to have the potential of being a "Facebook killer".
I shouldn't be so emotionally invested, but after years of Facebook acting like assholes to all of us, I hope Google lays complete and utter waste to them. Facebook has under no uncertain terms been trying to swallow up the web, and before seeing this level of competition I thought they stood a chance of accomplishing that goal. Perhaps not anymore.
I deleted my Facebook account a long time ago, and I honestly am not interested in social networking after that experience. I'm not sure whether I want to do the Google+ thing long term, but I'm definitely going to join if for no other reason than to get all of my friends to. Maybe I can get some of them to migrate completely. I trust Google a hell of a lot more than Facebook. (Perhaps I shouldn't, but I do.)
I wonder what this holds for their upcoming IPO? People are fickle and can ditch a service rather quickly (MySpace, hotmail/yahoo->gmail). Even with the wealth of photos and memories Facebook has accumulated for many users, I don't think it will be able to retain them by touting that data alone.
This is going to be very exciting to watch. What a good show you've put on for us, Google!
It's how facebook started, and it's how facebook will finish ... Zuckerberg's mantra appears to be 'kill anyone that looks like competing' rather than 'collaborate and succeed' ... My gut says that the collaborators will win the day.
I hate facebook's photo-sharing. There are only two things it does reasonably OK-- resize large photos and caching the photos you're likely to view next. The new interface overlay with the black background is really annoying, I don't know anyone who likes it and quite a few who hate it passionately.
I'm not a huge fan of the overlay, but it's obvious that the advantage to it is not during the time that you are actually looking at the photos, the advantage is when you finish looking at the photos you are back on the page that you started on.
I suspect they noticed a lot of people look at a profile, say "oh look an album", start clicking through and then decide they were done and go back to their feed. This design makes it more likely you will return to where you left off (without having to push back a million times) to finish reading the profile that you were already looking at.
I wonder if they noticed how angry people get when don't figure out that to go back to the album they have to click on the album name as it appears way in the bottom left corner in the area that looks bolted on like it doesn't belong. I wonder if they noticed how annoying it is to not be able to visit the album selection page from viewing a photograph. I wonder if they noticed how many people have to scroll down in order to see the comment thread. I wonder how many people have trouble finding or using the "like" and "comment" buttons given that the way they appear here is different from every single other instance in the entire application.
Yes, the advantage you point out is valid. It just comes with a whole pile of downsides and I can't believe they would do that for that one minor use case. I was with a friend the other day who was getting so irritated that when I said "just hit f5" to restore the old interface she was so happy she made me dinner in gratitude.
The only other advantage I can think of is that the previous-photo button is more mobile-friendly.
Google do have a preannounced path throught deprecation to termination and they claim [w]herever possible, the documentation includes suggested alternatives designed to help you achieve similar functionality — whether it’s a new version or related offering.
That is right, at least not yet. I have a vague recollection of reading some details of how the substitute API would work, but that must be spurious since Google have officially left the matter open to now.
On the other hand, i never had problems with google that were not solved in a reasonable timeframe (but i am still waiting after 9 months for facebook to unspam our domain that was an empty page). Adsense will even assign a human to correspond with if you have enough traction.
I can't express how sick i feel doing facebook apps in the past year, it has been nothing but disappointment and anger (but still makes the money due to huge traction).
Google has a much better track record of fostering developer ecosystems and a much better understanding of how to deal with app spam. Hope they do their best to create a good web app ecosystem.
"Cool" is actually a good adjective and a sign that Google will be competitive in "social". I like Facebook, but they haven't done anything particularly compelling (i.e. provoking me to say "Hey, cool") for me since they added chat years ago.
The speed of their product has improved impressively and the mobile site has achieved commendable parity with the "full site", but they're really not delivering new experiences. And that's a little bit damning. Great technology products can create mind-blowing new experiences and the lasting companies deliver those experiences regularly.
Plus looks cool, though. I've been Skyping for years, but the way they show you seamlessly jumping from the news feed to a video chat strikes me as something new. I'm intrigued by "Sparks". At least for me, Facebook is a deadzone when it comes to real discussion - if Google can make a format that combines social networking with Reddit-like discussion, they'll take over.
That's how I feel as well. Actually I never really thought Facebook's interface was that good - mediocre at best. But one thing I thought was cool was the way it handled recommendations. But because Facebook had this design flaw built in of allowing anyone becoming your friend, and then sharing everything with everyone, the recommendation engine has become a bit useless, since now it's more of a way to discover other people, rather than connect you to your real friends, the way it used to be in the beginning.
This is a design flaw of all previous social networks, including Facebook and I believe it's what led most of them to become irrelevant for the users, because it really weakened and diluted the types of relationships you can have on Facebook.
I also don't think this is something you can just patch up later on. They tried it with Lists and Groups, and it didn't work. Google+ has this built-in from the beginning and it's why I think it will succeed. I've actually noticed this is a huge problem about a year ago and I've been thinking ever since how this could be fixed. Google's solution is similar but even better than what I thought was the solution. It surprises me how well they got this.
>the recommendation engine has become a bit useless, since now it's more of a way to discover other people, rather than connect you to your real friends
My FB friends are all people I've known at one time in real life. Not necessarily friends but certainly people I've been friendly with. The recommendation engine does quite a good job of flagging new people that I know (amid lots I don't) and letting me choose to reconnect with them or not.
They don't let you do simple things ...
you can't search your posts, you can't search your inbox (used to be able to, but it never worked right, and now they've taken it away) ... hitting enter submits your comment so to make a paragraph you have to hold down shift when you hit enter (wtf?) ... sometimes links open in new tabs, sometimes they don't so if you're scrolling through your news feed and get to, say, 2 days ago, then you click a link which doesn't open in a new page ... you lose your place and have to scroll through 2 days worth of posts again ...
Well, first of all groups are flat categories for messages, not tags.
You cannot have, say, a smaller group included in a larger group like for example: your former classroom colleagues group included in the larger group of all high-school colleagues from your school, included in yet another larger group of all people you know from your city from the same generation (useful in a small city were you know most such people).
Then, there's the interface.
I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists. I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list. Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List. And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.
And then, their biggest problem (I think) is the legacy.
People have been building huge lists of friends without thinking about organizing that list. People now post updates and engage in conversations like on Twitter - as if their message will reach their hole list and even people outside of it as well.
Embarrassing comments are a minority, as people in general are aware that their coworkers or family will see their drunken pictures (except many teenagers that don't give a shit, but someday they will). So it's a lot of self-censorship, not to mention the vanity contest.
On the other hand if you knew that your message will reach only your friendly-neighborhood buddies, I don't think you'll show much restraint, since sounding smart or cool is useless and even condescending to people who actually know who you are; getting much nicer and exciting conversations.
I haven't tried Google+ yet, but I'm excited that Facebook may finally have some competition, much needed IMHO.
Some good points, some odd ones (why would you really need a hierarchy of groups inside of other groups?), but the interface part is mostly wrong/exists already.
I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists.
Account->Edit Friends, each friend has "Edit Lists" next to them on hover
I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list
Click the arrow beside Most Recent on the News Feed, then you can filter by any list
Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List
One person can belong in as many lists as you want them to
And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.
Click the lock beside the share button -> Custom edit -> Specific People -> Type whatever lists you want
I've actually been wondering what the hell facebook has been doing with all of these engineers. Most of the changes I've seen on facebook have been pretty minor, no significant feature launches in the past couple years. I guess they do only have 1/10th as many employees as Google does, but it still doesn't make any sense to have a couple thousand engineers and no visible progress; I feel like they must have a lot going on internally that is unannounced. If we don't see any big moves by facebook in the next year (especially if Circles manages to have a successful public launch in the immediate future) I would be really surprised.
facebook has hit that incredibly difficult point where they can't do anything cool anymore. the outrage that happens every time they introduce even the slightest change is huge; if they try to do anything cool they risk alienating a huge portion of their users. at with their current growth rate, they don't need to change anything.
Maybe they're doing it wrong, then? Google adds features that fundamentally alter my web-experience all the time, but nobody minds because they either
-package it as a completely separate product with its own url (gmail.com, maps.google.com, etc.) before gradually integrating it into search results and other products.
-make them optional (i.e. Google Instant, Gmail Labs)
-do a test run on a small subset of users (which Facebook does only to test before they scale, seemingly never to determine if the change will piss off users)
In short, maybe continually tweaking core features like Messages, the Timeline, Photos, etc. isn't the only way or even the most effective way they can leverage their almighty graph.
There's been a couple stories lately about them having negative growth rate of users. It's not really clear if that translates into a negative growth rate in pageviews or whether their pageview-per-user is still increasing..
are you sure that's a negative growth rate, or a declining growth rate? i'm pretty sure their net growth rate is still positive, even if it's slowing down.
If I am reading it right they are saying there is negative growth rate is the US and Canada, but still positive growth rate in emerging markets resulting in an overall positive but declining growth rate.
I hope the idea of circles catches on, and that they are very expendable, I would like to have for instance a Circle called Music where I could add those friends which I share music with and that it would become a central hub which we could all update. I like this idea, rather than the mess that is the Facebook news feed.
Adoption will be slow I reckon as people don't have a huge reason to move this, but thanks to its integration, we will see a number of people use it almost unknowingly.
I like Google's full on approach here, and feels more complete than buzz and even wave.
Agreed. My problem (and it may just be mine) is that my 100 or so friends on Facebook (mostly IRL friends) are not that active on Facebook groups. They will update their status and post photos but will not share content on groups. I am part of a number of groups around my interests (tech, photography etc) but tends to be me and maybe one or two others that contribute content. Very little discussion occurs. I wonder if Google+ will change that with the ability to add in non friends around an interest (ala twitter) but without broadcast to all.
What I would like is the circles feature to encompass this, so that you would have the equivalent of Twitter wide spread for instance a circle on Node-JS, a music circle which I share with friends as previously mentioned and another wider circle of friends which is more like facebook, a more general taste circle. I think this makes a lot of sense, and I want these groups to be explicit, I don't particularly want any groups to be "We thought you might be interested in Penguins seeing as you are in the Linux group"
I agree... this may hurt/help Google group making. Either people will add non-contributors to a group and get bored with others' lack of contribution, and by extention Google circles. (To combat this, it'd be great if Google helped curate or edit circles, like with listservs. Non-content posters would be flagged for me and I could opt into auto-removing non-contributors or just being notified that they are diluting my circle.)
Or, it will result in better curated lists of people -- similar to twitter, where you really only want to follow someone (and up your following count) based on the quality of their content.
Bubbles have nothing to do with this. You're talking about a list of people you chose to see updates from. This has nothing to do with algorithmic surfacing of content. It's your own fault if you make a circle called "Liberal Bros" and only ever visit that one.
That's not what he means. Hes talking about making a new friend at a mutual friends party, lets call him Joe. You look at Joe's profile, and all you see on Joe's profile are photos of him drinking.
Meanwhile, Joe has been sharing a ton of geocaching and hiking posts with his "hiking" circle, but you don't even see it since he didn't know that you liked hiking, he only knows you from a party. His alternate interests are hidden from you because you weren't in the right circle on his end, completely out of your control.
I'm not on Google+ so I can't really say for sure, but I understood Sparks to be more like a global stream that you subscribed to. I didn't understand that Joe would write his hiking posts into the Hiking Spark unless he was sharing something he thought strangers would be interested in.
It still demonstrates the issue with circles based on what content your friends would be interested in. Circles seem to make perfect sense to me for security (you don't want to see your mom posting photos of you partying maybe), but for interest based valuations it seems like you pretty much always want it to be public (at least public on your profile page, even if you don't particularly want it to show up in other peoples 'feeds')
Oddly enough, at the end of Pariser's TED talk, he called out facebook and Google to allow users to control what gets through their 'filter' and what doesn't. This is definitely bubble-ification, though at first glance it's the user who's in control of it.
The Circles idea would be good if it auto generated people who should be included in Circles based on use patterns(mentioned here "It is a shame that there aren't any recommendations for people that ought to be grouped together automatically into a common Circle.")
It wouldn't be creepy if the interface picked up on behavior similar to how Gmail suggests people to cc on emails based on past email use patterns. People are ready for that.
Unfortunately I'm going to just watch people say about how cool or awful Google Plus is; because I'm a Google Apps user and am accustomed to being considered some kind of second-class citizen.
Surely they'll promise availability in a month from now or so, but it's going to take several months or years anyway.
Except that they claimed last year that google profiles would be available in a few months. We still don't have it. There has been no official update on the matter either.
Google Apps has a transition plan to make them all first-class Google Accounts. I enabled it in my domain, and I might have read some emails saying that they were all transitioned automatically in the last month, not sure though.
The changes seem to be up for my Google Apps account. Investigate your site settings panel.
Nope, even those who have made the switch are left out in the cold (even me, and I work there.)
Tell you what: when we expand the field trial to include Apps users, and I get some invites, I'll hand extras out to HN readers with Apps accounts. If you fit this description, write to me on reddit:
Looks like Google Profiles are a no-no for Google Apps users. A shame really since my enthusiasm for this will probably wear off before they sort this out...
But my world depends on my primary email. I get notifications on my phone from it. I have my calendar, my Picassa, my documents on it and I also use Google Talk quite a lot lately.
And because I did the recent migration, I cannot have a parallel regular Google account tied to this email address; it used to work fine this why with some minor pitfalls.
If you don't have a Google Apps account that you really depend on, you can't feel the same pain I do :)
Why is everyone jumping through hoops now, just because BigCorp is holding up another free fish? You are still in the fuckin' pool!
It is only bigger and has other bling
Is Google+ supporting the relevant 'Distributed Social' protocols, like OAuth, Salmon, FOAF, Activity Streams, so that I can interconnect from other social networks (like Diaspora)?
If not, then no matter how shmancy fancy it is, it is not something we should want.
I can email from yahoo to gmail to myownmailserver. Social Networking should be no different from this. Remember the times when you could only send messages from Compuserve to Compuserve and vom AOL to AOL?
Why repeat the same thing with social networking?
Google+ looks amazing but if you think Facebook won't have these features copied within six months you are wrong. In particular the circles features which seems like the most compelling feature.
Also the "average" person won't maintain 2 social profiles and will gravitate to where the users already are. If Google wants to compete in social it's need to do more than just "sharing". They must have features that people need to use. These features may come. I don't know what that is? Deep personalized search integration? Beat Facebook to their inevitable Skype/video integration? time will tell.
Also the "average" person won't maintain 2 social profiles and will gravitate to where the users already are.
The MySpace to Facebook transition shows that exactly this happened. I was in high school at the time, and I definitely remember people mentioning having both a MySpace and Facebook account, and wanting to get people to switch over to Facebook. I don't mean "tech people", I mean normal folk.
As for compelling features, I think Circles is a killer. When your relatives are on Facebook, a good portion of your personality has to leave Facebook. You have to think about what you're going to say, and generally stick to the blandest possible expression of who you are. If Google+ enables people to say what they want to who they want, it will be a hit.
Short term there may be some cross over, as with MySpace and Facebook, but long term the average person will only maintain one personal "social" profile ie I don't include linkedin(business) or Twitter(broadcast/news) as a personal social profile (I know me not including twitter as social is asking for trouble but its a different kind of beast). MySpace is effectively dead after being sold today for a 10th of the price News Corp bought it for.
Facebook already has the exact same functionality in friend lists. They're only a small ui tweak away from parity in that respect. As for the drag and drop into circles, it's cute but realistically it's not a big part of day to day use.
Could Facebook really scale a massive group video-chat service to all (or even half) of its users in that timeframe? This might be advantage an (initially) smaller socially network has over a big one - highly resource-intensive things like videochat and real-time video watching are more feasible.
Features don't make the social network; customs do. FaceBook copied Twitter with its status messages in Twitter's infancy, and yet they didn't manage to kill Twitter.
I still dunno if Google+ will be a success, but if it is, I suspect it will be more due to the actions of early adopters than to Google.
Even if people wont move in droves to this, its still easier to get started with this because of circles and privacy features. For example, previously our tight nit group of college friends used to engage using email threads. Now hopefully we can move on to this.
Agreed, my group of friends organise stuff using email threads. Events (theatre, concerts etc.) are put in a Google Calendar for us all to see. It's really useful to e.g. keep track of people's travelling plans, birthdays and other such stuff. Unfortunately, Calendar does not have some desirable features such as seeing that an event is added, changed or deleted and by whom. I hope some of these features will be available in Google Plus.
I posted this in the comments of the article; but what I would like to see is a link between Google+ and Android Market such that each application I publish creates a dynamic circle. The dynamic circle would contain anyone that has installed my application, if they have chosen to allow it.
Create a system-wide setting in the Android Market around whether to allow this and then if someone wants to get more granular they can use Google Plus. Their email would be masked so that I could not see the address but it would let me contact my customers.
I think this would help address some existing issues while giving Google's android market a way to be very different from the existing app stores.
I also think using +1 on the Android market (especially the web one) will greatly help with app discoverability. Just imagine +1'ing an app on your phone or on the web (maybe after you install it?) and then your friends being able to see it.
But I'm not so sure about you proposed. Google needs to be very careful here and not turn Google+ into a spam fest of apps, the way Facebook has become. Google's main priority should always be the user, not the developers here. And as they said, Google+ should be much more about life-sharing rather than sharing how you got 5 more coins in some game, or whatever.
I'd only be afraid of checking the wrong box and sharing with one or more of the wrong circles. This could easily become much more then a fun social experience. I am very excited to see where it goes. With Facebook I'd be hesitant to add co-workers as friends or to make certain posts. Now I feel I may be able to keep family, friends, and work life separate in one spot. Facebooks goal of being a one stop website may have a strong competitor here and o truly hope it does.
Google+ is cool. I got an invite from a friend interning with Google and have been playing with this as much as I can, but it is boring right now as I have few friends to connect with on it.
However, the design is good and I think this is the first true competitor to Facebook. I personally would really like to see Facebook have so strong competition, especially on features like privacy which Google+ has done right.
Does anyone know what the plan is on letting it loose in the wild? I know it took me a long time to get a gmail account back in the day. I hope/imagine within a week or two they fully open the doors.
I'm absolutely in love with the idea of "circles." Although my opinion may sway when I finally get my hands on it, it seems as though there's a lot of value in being able to distribute my personal content to specific groups (granted this is possible on Facebook, but it seems like Google is curing the lazy factor). Can't wait to get my hands on an account and see what it's like. I just hope that their scarcity model doesn't box people out. I wanted wave to work so well but when none of my friends/colleagues could get an invite, it made it, well, pointless.
I think this has potential. Facebook over took Myspace because it solved the biggest flaw Myspace had, it was messy. Facebook offered a simple clean alternative. Now Google+ solves the biggest flaw Facebook has, confusing privacy controls. Perhaps that's enough to migrate people from Facebook? Who knows. I know I'd like to post something for on Facebook for my political friends without the fear of getting my parents foaming at the mouth.
Am I the only one who sees this going nowhere? I can't imagine this gaining any significant traction at all.
Edit: I just can't see how a sizable group will switch to this and either abandon facebook or maintain two profiles. Granted, these things have happened, but after Wave and Buzz I just don't see google as capable of doing this.
