Google+

I'm apparently in. If you want an invitation, I can "add you to a circle", which I think will generate an invitation. PM me with your email address (or just post here) if interested. So far, I'm ... nonplussed.

Interesting... I've never heard of it, 'til now. After taking their tour I have to admit being rather nonplussed, too.

I'll try it out. Anything that threatens the world domination of Zuckerbook is worth supporting, IMHO.

(tonycpsu) (at) (gmail)

Okay Tony, I've "added you to one of my circles", which may or may not generate some sort of invitation for you.

Try me-
stewbrownsays gmail

Hmm, I really wonder if this is going to gain enough traction to really take off. I do think the competition is good. But how many little icons are we going to see at the bottoms of ads now?

Orkut anybody?

It's a bit surprising to me that Google+ isn't particularly well integrated with Buzz. For example, Buzz has all kinds of import features, e.g., from Twitter, but there's nothing like that for Google+, and Buzz posts don't automatically end up on your Google+ wall posting tab.

What's clear is that they're trying to match or exceed all of the various Facebook features. Picture sharing and tagging. Etc. There are a couple new and very good things. They've got multi-user video conferencing. They've got multi-user mobile-phone instant messaging (but not integrated with Google Talk). They've got sharing of favorite posts (but not integrated with Google Reader).

So, as it turns out, "adding you to my circle" is not the same thing as "inviting you to Google+". For those of you to whom I over-promised, I'm sorry. You'll get in eventually. Somehow. In the meantime, here's pretty much all you need to know.

Wave's failure, IMO, stemmed largely from "hey, this could be cool, but no one else has it" and then the early adopters gave up. Google+ so far seems to be making the same mistake, tho it would seem to matter slightly less.

I'd definitely like an invite! I'm as big a fan of Google as you'll meet, but I'm skeptical about the future of this one...

If, at some point, I get true "invitations" to hand out, I'll post something here. Right now, I'm afraid, I have nothing. (I thought I did, but I didn't.)

You know, Microsoft has this Live thing, and it's got social features that are similar to Facebook

It does ? Last time I looked Live was a bunch of barely related services under the same name with very little integration between them, let alone social features.

It's a little more integrated now, but not a whole lot, and it sucks ass. (I'm forced by my company to use the messenger for "internal" IM.)

I was exposed to some of it when I tried out my Windows Phone 7 a few months back. I'd sign in and check now, but for some reason it's rejecting the password my IM client is using right now to access Windows Live Messenger. There was a place to upload photos, status postings, longer blog style posts, manage contacts/groups, and Messenger was used for IM style chat.

And yes, it seemed to be pretty disconnected from everything else and internally held together with a bit of duct tape. There wasn't even a way to integrate "Windows Contacts" with "Windows Live Contacts".

My comment though was mostly a friendly jab at Tony, wondering why he wasn't a Live user yet if he wanted to support something other then Facebook

Unless there is a single web page that you can point me at that shows me all that data in one place it is neither:

a) social
b) in any way anything like Facebook

Did I mention that Google+ doesn't appear to integrate with Google Reader or Google Buzz? Google+ also seems to have its own chat thing (video chat in the browser plus group-IM for smartphones) that appears to be unrelated to Google Talk.

I find this baffling since Buzz got this right (or, at least, less wrong) from day one.

http://home.live.com is apparently it. Can't check on the current state, since my passport login that is working just fine for messenger isn't working on any other MS services. They must have taken a page out of Google+'s book and turned it all into invite only

Yahoo also has its 'Updates' service where you can 'get connected' to various contacts. I see a couple of my friends posting stuff on there, but mostly I ignore it.

Ironically the entire contents of home.live.com for me are updates telling be about all the stuff that my friends have shared with me on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and MapMyRide...

Update: now they're allowing people with accounts to invite more people. I've now invited all of you who've mentioned your interest here or via PM. We'll see what happens.

Even if this is better than Facebook the problem will be Facebook has even people who barley can use a computer signed up like some of my family. I will still have to use Facebook if I want to interact with them then I would be maintaining two things.

Google's overall strategy is clearly that they want to flat-out kill Facebook in the same way that Facebook flat-out killed MySpace. You can't fault them for ambition.

Meanwhile, the amusement of the day: Randall Munroe (xkcd.com), changed his profile photo to be the generic Facebook icon. This caused one of the Google+ devs to follow up "I was halfway into investigating this as an ACL bug before I realized."

Thanks, Dan. I'm in!

To that I say "good luck with that." Not going to happen. The only thing that wouldn't surprise me is to find out that Google is shutting this down sometime down the road because it didn't pan out as they'd hoped.

But I can see why they're making this play. For many people, Facebook might as well be an alternative to the internet. For years I've compared them to AOL, where loads of members just sign in and don't do anything else with their connection. These people will search for this or that on Facebook and consume all their content there. Plenty don't ever visit google.com. I don't know of any other site that has (ever) had this AOL effect on any significant number of people.

Is Google+ a better Facebook? It's going to need to be a whole lot better to knock Facebook off its perch, and it's not like Facebook is standing still. One prong is clearly the video "hangout" feature, which apparently allows others to join in arbitrarily, if you publicize the "hangout" to the public. They're trying to one-up Facebook on time wasting. That's pretty audacious all by itself.

One interesting data point comes from a buddy of mine who's a whole lot younger. He complained "Facebook is where all my high school friends are" (who he apparently doesn't want to deal with). He prefers Twitter, otherwise, because that's where his current friends and colleagues are.

It's also interesting to see how LinkedIn has somehow survived by positioning themselves as the place where you link with your "professional" colleagues (and where they've also tried to clone the Facebook experience).

Will Google win? I have no idea, but it's interesting to see what happens when Google sets their corporate might at attacking a problem.

It can be 100x better and still not make a dent at all in Facebook. I don't think it's going to achieve critical mass. It's like jumping back to 2002 and trying to beat eBay. No one could have done it then. Google would be better off waiting around for a potential social-esque collapse. Not going to happen any time son, but imagine all the millions they'd save.




Do you mean to say that LinkedIn has changed up its site to more closely match Facebook or are you implying LinkedIn in itself has always been modeled after Facebook? Because it predates Facebook by at least a year and was already popular in professional circles before Facebook had much of any following at all. AFAIK, it's always been about business relationships.



That's true, though I won't follow this too closely. I have no desire to visit Facebook and the only Google services I use besides search, are the corporate-oriented ones, like Apps. And then really only Calendar and GMAIL for IMAP/POP on a few domains.

Thanks for the invite, Dan. I've invited my closest friends and family members, but I suspect very few of them will join and do anything on there.

I've spent about two minutes on there, so I'll need to give it much more of a try and see what I think. I wish I had a little more free time, but sadly I don't

Frankly, I don't see this lasting very long, but who knows, maybe it'll make some headway. The problem I see is that the social space is not like the smartphone OS space. With these social sites, it's always one at a time because there's essentially zero interoperability. There's only ever one service that's big at a time, and people only switch to a new one if everyone else they know uses it. I just think Facebook finally hit that point of mass adoption that has made it impossible to catch.

Basically I'm saying there's no second place in this race. LinkedIn is basically a different service, as you guys have discussed (and Tony, I agree with Bruno, I don't remember LinkedIn as anything buy business-focused, but I have a bad memory for some things).

Other quick notes about Google:

- I don't like the new black bar. It's very jarring with the light blue theme of everything else, including the Chrome browser its self.

- In general, it seems like the new Google theme is modeled after the GDGT redesign

- I'm sad that Google Health is being shuttered. I had high hopes for that, since somebody desperately needs to bring that field into the digital age and fast. Microsoft still has their product, right?

Looks like they turned off invites again.

Darn. Do you think invites I've already sent will work?

Probably not.

I don't know how the official invite process works, but you can get people in just by adding them into a circle and sharing a post with them. It triggers an email and the red button gets you to a signup page that has let everybody in I've tried it with so far.

Yeah. Thats how I thought it worked but it seems to have been disabled again.

Thanks, Dan. I haven't had a chance to play with it much, but it does look pretty nice, if a bit rough around the edges.

My guess on the lack of Buzz integration is that they're going to silently kill Buzz off once Google+ is widely adopted -- not only because it contains most of Buzz's functionality, but also to avoid the negative mojo Buzz received when it launched.

The lack of Reader and Talk integration is more puzzling -- those seem like no-brainers.

Re: whether Google+ will succeed, I think it's important to remember that, as flawed as Myspace was, it still took Facebook a couple of years to become the top dog. Facebook has its own flaws, particularly in the area of data stewardship, so I think Google is wise to emphasize the ability to control what you share with whom. And, to riff off of the point that Dan's friend made about high school friends on Facebook versus college friends/colleagues on Twitter, perhaps Google+s weakness of not having anyone on it yet is actually a positive thing for some people who want to start fresh without defriending a bunch of people.

Folks who've already sucked their entire lives into Facebook probably aren't going to be leaving any time soon, but I think there are a lot of reluctant Facebook users out there who will give it a shot.

I really like that G+ has fixed many of the things I hated about Facebook. Example: arbitrarily long posts. I also like the Circles thing. Yes, Facebook also has a form of group ACLs, but G+ makes it a lot easier to add and remove groups when you're about to do something. I also like that you can follow somebody without them needing to follow you back (like Twitter, unlike Facebook). There are a lot of good ideas in G+.


The former. LinkedIn now has text status updates and you can comment on your friends' posts. Just like Facebook. That was definitely not there in the beginning, but Facebook borrowed/improved the idea from Twitter, and LinkedIn followed suit.

Circles are just the way I would have done it. I really like the ideas around which G+ has been designed, compared to FB.
I hope it takes off.

A couple coworkers and I did some edge case testing of the circles/sharing features this morning. In most scenraios, it worked in ways we expected it to work, but there seem to be some idiosyncrasies in how G+ handles posts that weren't immediately obvious.

One of the more surprising things we learned is that visibility settings in individuals' profiles seem to control how messages propagate through those individuals. We set our test up so that I was in a circle with coworker A, who was then in a circle with coworker B (but I was not in a circle with coworker B.) My expectation was that, if B then posted a message to his "extended network", I would see it in the "incoming" bucket in my activity stream, but that didn't happen. It turns out that in order for that propagation to happen, A had to change his profile so that B's existence in his circles was visible. This behavior kind of makes sense (especially if A doesn't want his association with B to be known) but it certainly does limit the extendedness of the "extended network."

Another thing we noted was that if you post something to someone in a circle and then remove them from the circle, they can still see it -- it doesn't go back and erase history, unless you delete the actual post. That's probably the way most people would expect it to work, but it could have gone the other way I guess.

We also stumbled across the "disable reshare" option in the sharing UI, and I kind of like that. Doesn't prevent someone from cut/pasting, but in a circle of people you trust, it could be useful.

Anyway, there are a lot of moving parts -- hopefully someone will (or has) put together an easy-to-understand cheat sheet so people know who sees what in all of the various combinations of post types, profile visibility settings, and circle memberships.

One thing that I dislike about G+, and virtually every other "stream" interface I've seen, is the newest-first chronological sorting. I understand that presenting posts oldest first on something like a blog is totally impractical, but with something like G+, I should be able to view unread posts (or posts with unread replies) and then see just those, ordered oldest to newest, so that I'm reading things in order. Then when I've read the posts (maybe I click on them to mark them as read or something) they disappear from the unread view.

Then there's the issue of posts popping back up to the top because someone replied to them -- that should be configurable, too.

Judging by the number of friends who are suddenly signing up, they've reenable the invites again...

The ones I'd sent out last night before they were closed off were still valid. Perhaps you're just seeing the people who had invites but hadn't signed up yet?

It's growing on me. I've been surprised that Google, of all companies, has a product that's more attractive than Facebook. They're not known for their design, but I'm kind of appreciating the look. They seem to be coordinating it with a redesign of their other apps too, though GMail still looks the same for now... *edit* and there we go */edit*

Yeah. Thats what I meant. The emails started working again as invites.

In unrelated news, Facebook seems to have changed slightly and now you get an even more annoying realtime feed box on the side! Nothing at all to do with Google+. Nope >.>

Dense. Hah.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Yeah. I actually felt motivated to send feedback about that.

Hit me with an invite. john at bjorgen dot net

Thanks!

Do you have a Gmail address? In the not-entirely-documented world of G+invitations, that seems to matter.

If anyone can send one to msaeger (at) gmail (dot) com

Thanks!

I started getting that view a couple weeks ago. Damn annoying- they pulled the 'poke box' and events link for that garbage.
For some reason it's back to normal for me since yesterday.

Weird. I guess its all part of the phased rollout of "features" on Facebook. I only started getting it today. Its also very recently that I had that "feature" for where it attempts to do bad facial recognition on photos and auto tag me. Thankfully you can disable it...

Yeah, that first invite failed. The address I listed forwards to my Gmail, but here's the real thing:

jbjorgen at gmail dot com

Whenever Google next turns invitations back on, I'll see what I can do.

I don't care what they think it means, either way I'm a little pissed off. The "Preview" theme balloons everything up to take up WAY more space that is possibly necessary. The "Preview (Dense)" theme squishes it back down a tiny bit more, but still takes up far more room than any current theme.

Why on earth do they think this is a good idea? I already go to great lengths to minimize any wasted space in GMail when I'm using my netbook. With these new themes, I won't be able to fit 7 lines on the screen. These themes are just a terrible way to present information. If they were providing more info and needed space to do that, I'd say fine, but all they're doing is pretty much doubling the vertical space that one email entry takes up in the inbox. Why?

The previews are handy, though. At least then extension writers can get a head start on fixing the stupid new design. I like the look, but I hate the layout.

Whenever you have spare invites, I would love to check it out. julfhelsingius at gmail dot com.

Sent one earlier, btw.

Hmm - haven't received any invites, only a circle sharing message from Andy, but that did not trigger an invite. I wonder if it is because I live in a non-english-speaking (according to Google) country, where they aren't piloting yet...

When you clicked through from the sharing message did that not take you to the login screen for Plus then ?

That was how I got "invited". But the whole experience seems to be very variable...

No, I got a "to register your interest, leave your email address" page.

Were you logged into Gmail before opening the page ? (no idea whether that makes any difference or not)

I got this the first time I went to it. I did leave my email.
About a day later I tried the link again and found I could register.
I can't remember the specifics of the process, though.

I was logged in, yes, didn't seem to help.

Well, I had left my email a day or two before trying Andy's link.

If anyone has any spare invites I'm quite tempted to try this - unlike Wave, quite a few of my friends seem to rate Plus.

My address is just my username @ gmail.com

Cheers

Rory

I'll send one your way!

edit:
hmm curious. About all I could do was to 'add you to a circle'. I can't seem to find any 'invite' button or even a tally of who I've invited or how many invites I have left.

The invites have been down since the evening of the Google+ announcement.

Floodgates may be open again. 2 people directly invited me, and a few others had me in their circles. Emails came in just a little bit ago for it.

Yeah, invites appear to be working now.

But it still doesn't seem to accept "Dutch" people

Not working right now - message says over capacity for now...

Oh, god. Me, too, I guess. Lowest priority for me, though.

Strange, I'm not having any problems. Maybe they ran out of disk space again?

I'm loving it, by the way. Here's what sold me:

- went out with wife and friends on July 4th
- took photos
- next day, noticed that those photos had uploaded to Picasa Web Albums in the background automatically
- quickly and easily shared those photos only with the people I wanted to

It took about five seconds to share them, and that was amazing. After that, I was thinking "so long, Facebook."

I was pseudo-requesting an invite.

That's pretty cool, though.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'll send one along.

I'd like to give G+ a shot too. So, could someone send me an invite? Thanks in advance.

der ( dot ) blitzen ( at ) gmail ( dot ) com

Cheers,

Peter

Invite sent.

Great, thanks a lot!

Cheers,

Peter

Did you do anything to upload the pictures, or just put them on the computer? If nothing, that scares me.

The Google+ Android app will auto-upload pictures taken, and put them into an album that is private to only you. Those setting can be changed in the app, but the default is for the upload to a private album.

Like Ben said, it's all automatic, but nobody else can see those photos until I explicitly share them. Even if I never did, I'm happy to have my photos going off to a safe location in case something bad happens to my phone or I accidentally delete a photo or something.

I'm really really loving this feature.

Yeah, that's a pretty handy feature.

I'd like to see more finite control over what appears in my Stream. For example, I never want to see someone's check-in. I've actually been removing people from my circles if they check-in because I don't care that you
"Lunch.

Peabody's Bar and Grill"

Fortunately removing them from my circle doesn't change what I can view from them. It just removes it from my front door. I can still see their content if I go to incoming or to their page manually.

I agree, Google needs to improve the stream significantly, or at least give better options or a choice of default. I really dislike the Buzz-like way that things can pop back up again.

I've actually always been impressed with what Facebook chooses to present to me. I really wonder what algorithm it uses to decide that. I know a lot of people hate it and want the strict timeline, but I like it.

Caleb, I like your solution, and I think Google should borrow another feature from Facebook and let you keep people in a circle, but have the control to hide that person from your stream. I really like that I can do that in Facebook.

What some people are doing is creating two sets of circles: circles that categorize people for outbound messages and circles that categorize them for inbound messages. When you separate this, you can now effective keep a short list for when you're busy in addition to following everybody else.

The amount of pain involved in effectively tracking all your friends twice is leading many to suggest that you want some sort of set arithmetic so you can say "this set equals everybody minus these losers" or equivalent. Presumably Google is working on such a thing, but the question is whether such a thing would be in any way usable.

Why do I get the feeling that Google+ is just the start of some nerd's dream of making everyone in the world use Venn diagrams on a daily basis?

Has anyone figured out if you can make the instant upload album in Picasa public?

You cannot. I'm certain Google does not want that possibility. There's no doubt that it could be horribly abused. I can see people sneaking onto a friend's/sibling's/whoever's account and changing that setting without the person knowing. That could potentially lead to a great deal of embarrassment.

I suppose they could set up some checks or something, like have it send you a text message when the setting was changed, but I think Google would like to avoid any chance of the potential fiasco that could lead to.

I just want the photos from my phone loaded into an album my friends can see. I don't really like what google+ has done to my Picasa albums. It added instant upload, photos from posts, scrapbook, and profile pictures. What the heck do they need all these folders for?

Today I took a picture from instant uploads put it in a post so the photo gets moved to photos from posts then I deleted the post but it leaves the photo in photos from posts.

I don't really see the big deal. I'll agree it's a little messier, but not that bad. I don't see "scrapbook, and profile pictures," by the way, just the other two.

They're simply not going to make it possible to change the permissions on that album. If you want a service like you're talking about, PicPlz might be the thing you're looking for.