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Google+ Growing As a Social Backbone
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google+ has added 20 million users in just 3 weeks. According to the article, no other site has recorded such high growth in such a short time period. Twitter did something similar once, but in months, not weeks. It's especially surprising considering that access to Google+ is by invitation only. Why is Google+ growing so quickly?"
A recent article at O'Reilly Radar offers a possible answer to this, calling Google+ "the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone," but one that requires openness from Google to really flourish and supplant Facebook. The growth of Google+ will be helped by their acquisition of Fridge, a startup company focused on group sharing. Meanwhile, recruiters and marketers are already eyeballing the growing social network and licking their chops.
Critical mass is important here, but looking good.
Maybe it's because it is invite only. I mean if something is exclusive, lot of people want in.
Why is Google+ growing so quickly?
Because it's not Facebook...
If you go over here,, you'll find out the biggest reason it's getting popular.
Hint: It's not facebook.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Since when are unique visitors automatically assumed to be registered users? Don't get me wrong, I think Google is getting this one right... but this "unique visitors" info is getting misreported all over the place today.
I intend to use Google+ the same way I use every other social networking site. I'll create an account to claim my own identity, then disable as many features as possible, then post a message that states that I do not use the service and that if you want to talk to me, you should email me.
Apparently, if you throw enough money at something, it happens. Especially if someone can operate at a loss until it prospers. Microsoft and their X-Box strategy was a good example.
Google Plus is able to leverage the fact that there are a lot of Gmail users and a lot of people who use facebook--people already have a relationship with the company and already have familiarity with the kind of interaction they offer.
Plus, it's not orkut.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace fill some need, but people want something different. If Google+ is just the same again, maybe it'll fail. There may be something important with exclusivity: a social network that is more tribal and walled could be what people are looking for.
Their selling point is, basically, that they'll respect privacy and all those other things that we, the tech geeks, care about. After that, they'll use their Google brand, the widespread dissastisfaction with Facebook's frequent UI and ToS changes, and our own social pressure to pull people in. But really, see Swordgeek's post. http://xkcd.com/918/ is exactly what they offer. And why they've got all these people interested.
I still don't get Google+ What's the selling point ?
It's not facebook...
that's a difference from what most people use facebook for. even with it's circles. it's handy in the way that you don't need to have a g+ account. just like for twitter you don't actually need a twitter account, you'll be linked the good stuff anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Users are great, but posts are the lifeblood. I've not seen any posts in my Google Plus circles that weren't either meta or cross-posted to Facebook.
Bet you're just the life of every party!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
o I think it is pointless to use it as many of my friends will never join Google + due to privacy and tracking issues of putting your data with Google...
So that means I will have to check two sites or choose to cut off the people that matter,, something I would rather not do, so.
I won't sign up with Google+
After it was revealed that Google would remove ALL your Google accounts -- Gmail, Adsense, Docs, etc. -- for violating the Google+ TOS, it became clear to me that this was a Friendster clone I was better off not using.
If I wanted a bureaucracy to decide for me what's appropriate for me to say and do, and punish me severely for violating the rules, I'd build a time machine and go back to the Soviet Union.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
In addition to this users versus people who actually use the service, there is an issue of how many protocols end users will tolerate. Twitter has at least a 100 million users following at least on account. If I am a bussines I might register with google in case it takes off, but would continue with Twitter because that is where my customers are. Facebook probably has the same number of really active users, but in that case the 500 million number is reasonable to quote because that is the number of people who can acess facebook content.
This is not like the growth of android because buying an Android phone does not mean that you can't communicate with Apple or MS users. Sure a MS phone can consolidate all the incompatible services, and there are apps that consolidate on other phones, but users are not flocking to MS phones, and Twitter and Facebook are pushing proprietary apps to stop the consolidation.
In the end Google+ is just another attempt by Google to create a monopoly on the web browser by provided all the services a user will need in one place. This is not a bad thing, but I do not believe in consolidation for the sake of consolidation. It is better to encourage the best products.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I liked it at first when I got an invite. However they then suspended my account because I wasn't using my real name, I was using an Internet monicker I've had for awhile. I personally still do not want to give my real name out to any social media site and would like to continue to blog/tweet/share/whatever under my Internet pseudonym so I can further control who I want to see the things I share. I know I can limit stuff with circles in Google+ but I want that extra level of privacy.
I understand it's their service and they can enforce what they want and they can feel free to choose to do so. However I disagree with them so will not be continuing with their service. Back to just Twitter for me.
It'd grow a little faster if Google would get off their butts and port Profiles over to Apps.
They've only been promising it's "right around the corner" for 2 years now.
Why is Google+ growing so quickly?
Because it's not Facebook...
I'm sick of people proffering this and only this as a reason to Google+ growth. There is something more to it, after all, iTunes Ping isn't Facebook either. Why didn't they balloon up to 20 million in two weeks?
There's features that are importantly different like friends can't post on my "wall" in G+ and managing and restricting circles is easier for me in G+ than managing and restricting lists was in FB. Google did some things wrong at first and they've corrected some but I'm hoping for a much lighter UI at some point. Or even just the option to not have all the circle animations.
Furthermore the "autofacerecognition" crap that Facebook made opt-in by default was really scary for me personally. I don't doubt Google's ability to do something similar but so far the privacy problems have been negligible compared to getting Zuckerpunched with something worse and worse each month. All of Facebook isn't bad, in some ways G+ is much like it. But at least take the time to enumerate what the advantages are to you.
My work here is dung.
I sure hope you posted your MySpace message using sparkly bubble text.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
What I want to know is, how is it that google+ keeps growing? I thought they stopped accepting new users. I don't have an invite yet, but I haven't really tried to get one, because every time I've gone to the website in the last few weeks, it always says "Already invited? We've temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon." So if they aren't accepting even invited users, how is it that they continue to grow? Is there some secret way to get in now?
Google+ may be invitation only, but once you're in you can invite anyone you like so it isn't like there's any real limitation. Of course, so far I've only invited close friends and I might keep it that way.
Pages in Google+ load far, far quicker than Facebook. The contact circles has me intrigued, especially if it will allow me to target messages to specific groups. And so far there are no social games. Those are all great points, but so far Google+ isn't terribly different than Facebook and so there's no real compelling reason to use it. Especially since the vast majority of my contacts are on Facebook and I'm not about to send out a bunch of invites.
The Android app looks quite sloppy, although I realize we're at the early stages right now.
For now I'll just wait to see where this goes, but I'm not yet convinced that Google+ is going to unseat Facebook. Google has probably already gotten too big for it's own good and is afflicted with some of the stigma that Microsoft has faced for a long time and now Facebook is experiencing.
Given Apple's unreal marketing machine I wonder what would happen if they introduced a proper social network. In the eyes of consumers they seem incapable of doing any wrong.
Their selling point is, basically, that they'll respect privacy and all those other things that we, the tech geeks, care about
Not quite, some of us actually care about privacy from google as well, and we still aren't racing to create google+ accounts.
So, honest question, do you take pride in, "not really using any social networks but kind of sort of using them just so you can claim your online identity," or do you honestly see absolutely no benefit in being able to send out mass messages to friends conveniently segmented into various groups, being able to video chat with multiple people at once, being able to organize social events via a pseudo-permanent single web location, and being able to quickly, effectively, and openly communicate with various people on various shared interests with various levels of privacy?
I'm not asking to be snarky. I understand that you can do many of these things with e-mail lists and what not via some time and effort to set up. But is there absolutely no appeal to you to have such capabilities (and more) centered in one easy-to-use website location?
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
There are just a lot of well-informed nerds in the universe now, especially with the development of web pages like slashdot, arstechnica, gizmodo, wired, lifehacker exc exc. And so, it's a good product. Yeah. Google + has a couple of bugs, but it is getting tons of publicity. ...and there are a lot of tech geeks out there
and if they have a couple friends,
and those friends have a couple more friends,
if one goes, two will too. Eventually.
Maybe a celebrity,
that's 100,000 more.
To be truly exclusive,
it must have an awesome fan-base.
Let's see if it breaks 50 million.
Why is Google+ growing so quickly?
Because you publish 5 articles a day about it?
You know, I am starting to think that a lot of folks only opened up FB accounts begrudgingly. I know a number of people that preferred MySpace over Facebook until MySpace decided to start cloning Facebook's "features" and UI. I also know a number of people who only started a Facebook account to be in on various party/event invitations and only started using it as their primary social media platform when everything else became too bloated and kludgy to use.
Finally, a number of folks I know never started their own accounts. Rather, their girlfriends or friends or family members started one for them, and they only took it over to keep the originator from jacking up their reputation by posting random stuff under their identity.
I wonder if a large portion of FB users never really wanted to use FB at all, but only got pulled into the service by what they would consider, "not their fault," circumstances. It would explain the large love-hate relationship that recent statistics seem to imply, along with the wholesale, "Fuck you Facebook!" movement that is coinciding with G+'s birth.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
My profile was suspended because they insist on people using their "legal" names. They tell users signing up to use the name that people know you by, but their appeal form demands you either provide a government ID or some other "official" evidence of your name like a link to a college directory.
I then go to the discussion board about profiles and virtually every recent thread is people complaining about being suspended.
Good job, Google. Just as evil as Facebook. More interested in being able to connect everyone's doings with their "legal" identity than they are at creating a social networking site for their users.
Liberty in your lifetime
To use your Internet moniker on sites that require a legal name, file a "professionally known as" or "doing business as" form with the state to link your Internet moniker with your primary legal name. I presume that's how Lady Gaga gets away with being "Lady Gaga" and not "Stefani Germanotta", a name she doesn't use in part for fear of being confused with Gwen from No Doubt.
I am new to social networks, with Google+ so this may be the naivety that speaks, but I don't think you have to disable your account just to use e-mail. You can have lots of benefits from participating in Google+ to see cool things that scientists and techies (in my case) share with others, to get updates from family members and see a cute video of your friend's newborn. None of these has to replace personal e-mails.
For me, it's lots of fun following Sergey Brin, Linus Torvalds and a number of scientists or science writers and even science comedians. These people are truly creative, in the way that I can appreciate.
This didn't change my e-mail usage patterns one bit.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
And right there your argument, such as it was, falls apart. There are no "various levels of privacy." This is one:
None.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Can anybody tell me how to get a RSS feed --> G+ ? It works the otherway around. This would be quite an oversight on googles part if its not possible.
Great idea, in reverse. I'll set up an email auto-responder that if you want to talk to me, message me on Google+.
I can tell you and I will be great pen pals... sorry you'll be the only one of us getting all the spam.
I8-D
Why wouldn't he be? He shows up with his scale cardboard cutout model of himself, plants it in the middle of the room, attaches the sign stating "If you want to party with me, I will be at..." and of course he includes his home address where there is a party every night.
Maybe you should utilize the fact that it is in Invite only beta and request that as a feature.
Can't say I'm super-impressed.
Maybe you're not, but artists and journalists are flocking to Google+. Let me give you just one example of the former: read what Trey Ratcliff wrote. 40.000+ followers on G+ and half as many on his Facebook fanpage. As to journalists - countless examples. This video might explain why: Google Plus on Rocketboom.. Pay attention to the twitter part, or to what Ratcliff says in the interview. Communication is simiply more fun on G+ - and far more effective. On facebook, you can't chose who among your 300 "friends" sees what you want to say. Facebook "filters" (well, censors) your post to a select people based on various past indicators. You have no control over this process whatsoever. On Google+ you are in control. And thanks to control over what you see (direct links to circle streams, the ability to "mute" discussions) you don't have to listen to the flood of stupidity that is overwhelming on Facebook. That also makes it easier to follow others, share content, etc. - as you can see in Ratcliff's example.
As a google apps customer, I don't have access to profiles...which means I don't have access to google+.
Let me be clear; I am a paying customer, and I don't have the access the freebie users do.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
because e-mail is eminently private.
When he does have parties, I bet they're vastly more interesting than the "let's invite everyone we've ever seen" parties.
I have absolutely no idea what most of the things you said mean, and the half I did understand I don't care about.
Why not just ignore G+ and let your friends add you to a circle by e-mail... then they can share stuff with you and G+ will send it to your e-mail address.
please... tell me where Google has violated your privacy? They do not share your data with advertisers or partners. they make it easy for you to hide information, they provide the ability to remove your data. they give you a dashboard that covers all the services they provide and let your remove data.... they even let you hide your profile from search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al.
You don't have access to integrated profiles, but the last I knew there was nothing preventing you from using your apps email address to create a standard Google Account (just like a Yahoo mail user would do), and create a profile using the Google Account, rather than the Google Apps Account.
Is that no longer possible?
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I don't have any figures to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet that this was also true of Twitter, Gmail, video games, and the Internet itself in the beginning.
Le français vous intéresse?
Slashdot is probably one of the few sites I'll find more than a handful of those that hold my views, but I consider "Social Media" today a worrisome development. When I was a young fellow dialing in on a 9600 baud modem, using BBSes and cavorting around on the nascent Net, privacy was one of the main appeals. I loved having a separate life, anonymous on the internet and this appreciation continues to this day. I'm RanceJustice here and a few other places, but I'm also a dozen different aliases and handles as it suits me. It seems completely counterproductive to merge meatspace in its entirety with the digital world, much less do so via a medium that basically treats me as the product selling anything it knows about me. However, I do try to keep aware of these things and look for benefits, lest I miss something useful and new - I have no intention to be the old man yelling that I don't need email because writing letters is good enough....
I haven't really found any benefits though, for the most part. I enjoy forums immensely and I generally consider any website that is based upon user-submitted or created content is typically some form of a forum. Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Yelp, and others basically fall into this category, besides "the chans", and hobby-specific forums like World of Warcraft. Just like with "normal" blogging, I can see the value in microblogging services...for a very small amount of uses. Its a good way to broadcast information that others wish to see - if you're in the middle of Oslo today, its probably great to be able to send a tweet letting friends and family know you're safe and with pics or video of the carnage, location aware so that someone can get an ambulance to the right place. However, 90% of microblogging content seems to be useless, self-indulgent "Orange juice is yummy" "I am taking a shit", way to spew your thoughts onto the internet. Retweets and references become a game of tag and serve to make less content look like more, and there's the continual drive to acquire more followers. There isn't room to espouse deep concepts and explain them properly, so people tend to just put out what's on their mind. I have an Identi.ca (StatusNet is superior and open source compared to Twitter. I'm glad sites like Identi.ca exist) account, but is pretty much unused because I have a mental filter that says "If all my friends were in a room together, would it be important enough to say?" or "If I was standing in the crosswalk of a major city, would it be beneficial to shout it to strangers?", and the vast majority of the time the answer is no. Now, maybe this is just because I'm a private person overall and most of my friends don't live close enough to me that any location-dependent tweets would be worthwhile (ie. 50% off otoro box lunches at Japanese restaurant today only!), but I believe I have a filter where others do not that doesn't want to chatter inanely to the whole world in SMS-sized bites.
Finally we come to true "Social Media/Social Networks" like friendster, orkut, makeoutclub, MySpace, and the dreaded Facebook. While all the previous things, even Twitter, can be done via alias these seem to be set up to merge your entire real world life with the virtual and that is a bloody appalling prospect to me. Facebook seems the worst of all, but it has almost become a way of life in America where it is integrated into everything. Every "news" network and just about every form of entertainment has some link to it and it is becoming a disease. Take for instance the Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood game, where there is an item that you can only unlock in said game if you go on facebook, friend the developers/publishers and play their Facebook game. You're supposed to interact with everything, and of course, there's always something watching. Activision wants you to link your Battle.Net account to Facebook and you can set up World of Warcraft to announce on Facebook and Twitter whenever you achieve something in game - adding to their exposure of course. Many c
There's a difference in privacy between paying a trusted company to host your email (possibly encrypting it after reception), and using a free service which is paid by mining your data, even if you trust Google not to give it to third-parties.
That said, I use Google Apps for my email, but that's because I'm too poor and cheap to pay for a decent host or for someone to redirect my email (I cannot send it directly from my home connection since my ISP has submitted its IPs to the PBL, and doesn't offer an SMTP proxy for home contracts).
Dilbert RSS feed
The signal to noise ratio on the receiving end is absolutely not worth the time and investment. Nor is the whole privacy and data farming concern. I don't generally have anything worth throwing out into the river of information in the other direction, either. The difference is that while most of the people in my feed will post things anyway, I realize that I'm not posting anything of real value and will therefore simply not post it.
Yes, people may occasionally post something with a degree of value, but it is always drowned out by the inane and self-involved comments. I am not willing to put up with 300 posts about your cat, child, lunch, repeated talking points on illegal immigration, or amateur photography for that one comment that my stir a discussion or be somehow useful.
Because of my former projects, my identity will be falsely claimed by someone else should I not do it first. I also recognize that for many people, going to Facebook and searching for someone is the absolute only way they know of to attempt to contact someone. So it does serve as an index, of sorts. And that's what I use it for. If someone searches for me via some key information, they'll see a note that tells them how to contact me.
The problem with social networking is that it's rather anti-social. It's not about discussion or community or friendship. It's about me. Look at me. Think about me. Listen to me. See how cool I am? See how many friends I have? See how many comments I get on what I post? See how often I post? See my Klout ranking? See how many tweets I've written? See how many photos there are of me? Take my quiz. Indulge my passive-agressive vague comments about things in my life that you don't care about. Help me build the brand that is moi.
If I have something of value to say, I will email you and those it involves. I might even IM you. Hell, I might even call you. Or come visit you. That doesn't sound anti-social, to me. I don't assume that everyone needs to know everything about me at all times of the day. I don't need to mass-broadcast everything. I can give some thought to my communication and direct it at those to whom it is appropriate. I'd expect the same consideration, in return. Six hundred people on your friend list don't need to know your everything or how your relationship is going. Your best friends might, though. So call your best friend and talk it over with them. Don't broadcast it to everyone.
And yes, I understand that Google+ facilitates a better use of social networking than others have before, by the implementation of circles. I'm in favor of that. I'm in favor of narrowing your band of communication and focusing it as much as possible on the relevant audience. Although, it's unfortunate that we think of people we know as an "audience". And therein lies much of the problem - most people use social networks as a stage on which to perform for an audience. Not a tool for communication. And when it comes to communication, the proprietary social network system doesn't really do much that the distributed and non-proprietary email system doesn't already do.
Ultimately, the problem with social networking is over-exposure. Haven't we all had a friend that we became roommates with? Or a girlfriend that we let move in with us? The proximity and over-exposure to people can have a severe negative impact. When you have to make at least the slightest effort for someone's attention or company, you tend to get along and have some respect for each other and enjoy each other's company. When they're constantly within arm's reach, piling up dirty dishes in the kitchen, taking a dump with the bathroom door open, leaving their clothes all over the floor of your home, and constantly yapping on the phone all day -- they become an annoyance. You don't appreciate their company. You lose interest in and respect for them.
Likewise, I get along with my neighbor, because we just talk occasionally. Sometimes we help each other out with a chore or check each other's mail while out of town. I like my ne
I once thought that I'd utilize some social networking tools as simple ways to keep a stream of interesting things to check out from interesting people, when I had a moment to fill. Unfortunately, even the most interesting people can't help but have a terrible signal to noise ratio. I've found that almost everyone I attempted to follow on Twitter or Buzz or elsewhere because they were "thought leaders" or "content curators" or "conversation starters" utilized these social networking tools the same way everyone else does. To post inanity and drivel.
Scoble, for example. He tends to be one of the most popular guys on any of these networks. He usually has something interesting to say and posts plenty of interesting links. Unfortunately, he also posts plenty of inane comments, location updates, photos I don't care about, and so on. There is some signal there, but it's floating in a sea of noise. These people often also use the same account for personal content. So even if you're incredibly interesting, I'm having to spin through all the updates about you and your friends and your life just to get to that great link about a technology or current event that you have an interesting quip about.
What I discovered was that even the most interesting and well-spoken or well-written among us become less so when the distance from conception to distribution is reduced. I follow the RSS feeds of these people, but not their social networking and twitter feeds. When they have to sit down and put some thought into something, it turns out more interesting and without the noise. A blog post becomes more valuable and thoughtful and worthwhile than a twitter post or social networking post. A full article often becomes more meaningful than a mere blog post.
This isn't anything new. That is why editors exist, after all.
I will concede, however, that Google+ and "circles" might alleviate some of this, eventually. If Scoble (just the most ready example in my head) has the tools to separate his meat posts from his quips and his personal communications and is willing to utilize the tools that way, then things could improve. Of course, will everyone else that you follow be just as thoughtful in their use? Or will they just continue to spam the shit out of every single contact they've ever had with an animated cat photo or passive-aggressive comment about someone they're in a relationship with?
On facebook, you can't chose who among your 300 "friends" sees what you want to say. Facebook "filters" (well, censors) your post to a select people based on various past indicators. You have no control over this process whatsoever.
Technicality: I don't disagree with the spirit of your statement, but it is possible.
I have my friends in friend lists based on where I met them. Considering this isn't used by almost anything I've seen (although it does show up when using facebook messaging in a third-party client like Pidgin), I suspect most people don't even know it's there. The mechanism to set these groups is also not terribly obvious.
When I go to the 'post status' box on the main page, there's a lock icon telling me I'm defaulting to "friends of friends". Clicking it gives access to a dropdown list including "Customize". From there, "Make visible to" "Specific people..." gives me a text box to start typing in names, along with a similar box to refuse access to certain people or groups. If I type in the name of the friend group, it adds that group as a single entry.
That process is entirely retarded, the UI designers should be shot, and to my knowledge, you have to do that with every single post that you want given non-standard permissions (unless you save it as default), but technically, it exists. It may as well NOT exist for non-techies, and of course for anyone who doesn't know it's there, but it's possible. To my knowledge, it's been there for years.
Works for me. When your account is deleted or there's any number of problems that impede your use of the service or use of proprietary communication tools, you can go ahead and just email me. Oh, and unlike on every social network (except maybe LinkedIn), I actually will be the only one *not* getting spam. It's unusual to have a day where a piece of spam has found its way past the filtering and into my inbox, while about 99% of the social networking updates are direct spam, a quiz, inane self-promotion, random drivel, drama, application spam, and so on -- not to mention the actual in-page advertising carried by the social networks themselves.
Also, nice try to "one of us, one of us" me - but I don't really care if you use a social network or not. It's fine if you want the chore of wading through all the cruft for very few diamonds and substituting various means of communication with a proprietary service offered by a data-mining and advertising company (ie, all social networking services). That's your choice. Just as it's my choice not to participate and set a minimal bar for people looking to use up some of my time by *gasp* asking them to email me, instead.
Nobody asks to be snarky. It just happens, embrace it.
Carol vs. Ghost
That's pretty spot-on and you said in one line what sadly took me a couple paragraphs to convey elsewhere, in this thread. Social networking seems to be very anti-social, to me, because it is less about "you and I should have a conversation" and more about "let me broadcast my every thought and action to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who surely must find me absolutely fascinating". It is impersonal, thoughtless, inane, and self-serving.
There is rarely something one needs to say that must be broadcast to every friend, family member, colleague, ex girlfriend, acquaintance, or schoolmate from twenty years earlier. There is rarely something that needs to be said to all family members or just all colleagues. Certainly not enough that you need an entire social network to facilitate it.
Social-networking seems to be all about the broadcaster. Despite being touted as otherwise, it's mostly unidirectional. I will have a conversation with you, but I won't sit idly by and consume the bits of scrap that you throw out every hour or two, like I'm some fan subscribed to the Ashton Kutcher fan-club.
It seems to me that social networking is a tool developed to answer the wrong problem. How do I communicate with hundreds of people as simply and efficiently as possible? Well, I would posit that you should be instead figuring out who among those hundreds are people you actually need to communicate with?
Frankly, social networking has a lot more in common with blogging than it does with socializing.
Your parties must suck, if you put them together the way people utilize their social networks. Why invite meaningful, interesting, fun people that you know well and want to be around and spend time with when you could invite every person you've ever shared a school with, met at a conference or convention, dated, met through an ex, or worked at the same company with? After all, it's not the quality of the party or the guests that matters as much as the number of people who attend, so your ego can be boosted, right?
please... tell me where Google has violated your privacy?
There is no "circle" for what Google is allowed to see. Google gets to see it all.
I have no desire to upload a pile of data about me into a website run by the worlds largest online advertising company.
A website which exists for the sole purpose of gathering data about me, building profiles on me, and monetizing them.
They do not share your data with advertisers or partners.
I do not want to share it with Google.
To be fair, artists and journalists will flock to any place that they can get more eyeballs and attention. That doesn't exactly bode well for a social network. Haven't we already had three or more big social networks that were all about meaningless popularity by watching that little number by your name increase? Telling me that a bunch of brand-building attention-whores are flocking to a place that makes it easy for them to broadcast widely to the masses of sycophants doesn't particularly stir my interest as much as it would if you told me that they were avoiding it, because it caters more toward meaningful one-to-one or one-to-a-few real relationships than mass-appeal brand-building "look at all my followers" self-indulgence.
Of course, the clever part about Google+ is that they're implementing what I've been saying should have been implemented for many years, now. The question is how people will use it. I have a feeling that attention-whores and the navel-gazing tech-industry pundits who are all about their "brand" and "followers" and "klout" will continue to use it like they do every other service. I can only hope that their use of it that way does not inform the use of the rest of society, who may finally have a chance to grow out of their former social networking usage and land into Google+ with a bit more of a grown-up mindset where it truly is just a tool to facilitate meaningful relationships and communication instead of another "talk at me" device.
This post is spot on. Well said.
I signed up primarily to reserve my name and make sure my google data was private. I couldn't believe the amount of data that had unintentionally accumulated on my Google accounts; cleaned that up (locked it down).
Good idea about hanging a shingle that says 'nobody's home'.
Isn't iTunes a free service that people already use?
I mentioned "People who don't buy into the iTunes ecosystem" for a reason. I can think of three things that would lead to the use of iTunes software, all of which involve buying something from Apple: having bought a Mac, in which case iTunes is the default music player; having bought an iPod, for which iTunes is the primary music library manager; or having bought something on iTunes Store.
to insinuate that it isn't one of the most heavily used music players is ludicrous.
Is iTunes software still "one of the most heavily used music players" among people who don't own a Mac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad, and who don't shop on iTunes Store?
It's about identity.
There is a reason I have multiple accounts on Google's services. And that is because my identity on Youtube is different from my identity on Blogspot and that's different from my identity on Google+. I don't need them merged. I don't want them merged. I made them separate and I want to keep them separate. Google has been showing signs for some years that it doesn't want to accept that. That's too bad: lots of people really want multiple accounts on Google's services and will bend-over backwards to do it.
Fortunately, many of them are corporate (i.e. *paying*) customers, which is posibly why they've done multiple-login. Which is technologically clever, though not documented well enough. But it needs much wider implementation (for example, on the G+ Android app).
In other news, Google announced that it expects to stop crawling the web in 2015, since all the data on the internet will be stored at Google servers anyway.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
A G+ invite is, essentially, spam, unless the person in question explicitly asked for it. I do not have the habit of spamming people. I think I've only sent out two unsolicited G+ invites so far, and those went to the people whom I know well enough that I am certain they won't consider it an annoyance.
Scoble is a bullshit artist and nothing more. You could just as well follow Britney Spears. Actually, she might have some intelligent things to say, compared to Robert Scoble. Probably.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I tried the groups on Facebook a while ago. It claims you can segregate messages that way, but I found any time that I included a link it'd get shared to everyone anyway.
Someone dig up Netcraft, because we need confirmation that Facebook is dead.
Imagine if he'd had an android — all contacts, appointments, etc from his phone, gone.
And he did nothing wrong! (Though even if he did, I think loss of your personal data from your damned phone is too much). Why tempt fate and risk account deletion just to use a social network?
Strange that he could log in to write this:
https://plus.google.com/114035521237052233054/posts
weird... and I thought it was an invite I sent to my friends and family because I wanted them on the site too.
Family and close friends are one thing. Acquaintances and colleagues are another.
+1 :-D
Because it sucks less than Facebook.
Which is why Google+ has a flood of subscribers. They make what we really want to do easy.
http://www.madinah.com/ is an Islamic Social Network, abiding by the highest Islamic principles
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I hope nobody does international business travel and wants to use their profile/google services while travelling
In their infinite wisdom, google has decided to "personalize" your services for you. So for example, my profile is set to English, but I'm an expat living in Korea. Even though I go to:
news.google.ca to do a news search, searches that worked fine only a few days ago, no longer work..
yes do an archives search for simple basic words which would otherwise returns thousands of hits suddenly turns up empty.
Why?
Because google news is only now searching Korean language newspapers when I do a news search. Forget the fact that there are English language newspapers in Korea, those don't even count.
Log-out, searches work just fine, returning proper results.
I can find nothing in the settings to turn this off, and if it isn't fixed right away, I'll be deleting my google+ account.
This kind of personlization is garbage, and shows absolutely no forethought. How about the business traveller who suddenly goes overseas for something, things will be half/not working and showing up in languages he doesn't speak.
Superb.
To me the strangest part of TFA (the computerworld one) is that G+ "ranked in the 42nd spot among social networking sites." Apart from the humour value of 42, I would have a hard time naming 41 other "social networking sites" -- in fact I doubt I could even name a dozen. Who are they?
I went to the "hitwise" site and couldn't find this number, or what the other sites are. For that matter, I don't know how they collect the data they claim to.
Many companies filtered out FB access. Natural move is to switch to what's not banned - G+ :-)
-- "In theory, theory is the same as practice, but not in practice."
How does this compare to the growth of Facebook in its first 3 weeks, adjusting for the size of the internet between now and then?
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
I'm from the same era, I do the same things.
Under different aliases I've leaked enough information to have various identities joined together, but I comfort myself with the naive pretense that since I've kept these identities separate and *not* directly identified myself in any way, that this was a choice consciously made that ought to be respected by Data Galore.
I do a lot of searches on Google because certain patterns of letters amuse me: I like to make up obscure code names for little projects with multiple puns embedded. I do a lot of serious search. And I do a lot of peripheral search because I read something and I go "I can't believe (a) some guy said that or (b) what some guy said".
This presents some problems for the people who believe that what you search is what you are. My search background is probably pushing into the 100,000 territory. On a rampage, I've done 1000 searches per day.
If you listed out the 100 strangest things I've searched for over the last decade, by the standards of someone who might have only made a few hundred searches in their life (all of which returned prebuilt search results), such a person might think I'm the next unibomber in training. I spent half a day once reading about Hafnium nuclear isomers. What well-mannered person would be poking his nose around in something like that? I also spent half a day once going pretty far down the JFK conspiracy-theory rabbit hole. I emerged unscathed, but you'd never know if from my search history.
The notion that you are what you search for can only lead to the worst forms of thought control. Especially if you are also *any chosen subset* of same. Subsetting is, of course, a time-honoured tradition for wielding the scarlet letter. Just ask Michael Moore or Oliver Stone.
"Are you now or have you ever been a searcher of names of radical apparatchiks?" Yes, your honour, including "Ayn Rand" and "CIA Bush cocaine", "Cardinal Ratzinger", and "Soros conspiracy". Or were you meaning to exclude the searches conducted while I was singing to myself "lulululu lulululu" to the theme of Twilight Zone? It appears my search history begs for a soundtrack.
In some forums more than others I push the envelope on conventional norms, or dial sarcasm up so high, I'm not sure myself by the time I'm done what I've lampooned. Some times I try to pull off a trick shot. Sometimes I try and fail.
If you asked me, "what exactly did you mean by such and such a twisted circumlocution reeking [on the surface] of antisemitism?" in many cases I'd be as stumped as my interlocutor and I'd have to resort to my baseline attitude "I was probably trying to say that racist people suck shrouded in a garden-path pretense of saying the opposite".
Here's the thing. People won't think unless they identify you as one of their own. If you can get the thinking and the identifying far enough out of sync, you might occasionally manage to put over a forbidden concept into a walled mental garden. (With about the same shooting odds as dropping a field goal from mid court; it's a bad shot, but cool when it drops.)
In other cases, the lynch pin of my diatribe might come back to me; if it comes back to me, there's no guarantee it makes sense or that what I set out to accomplish actually worked; and even if I'm pleased with the verbal device in retrospect, I'd need a ouija board connection to Douglas Adams with his phantasmal head stuffed into a seer-stone hat to help me translate the layers of backspin to the average dipshit who believes in a) ouija boards or b) seer stones.
Count my vote for "you are what you search" or "you are what your pseudonyms spout" as the WORST. IDEAS. EVER. I'm not keen on signing up to a social networking Stonehenge, because I just don't hew to the self-identity police. At the same time, I consider myself hardcore about authenticity in everything I write, under any guise. Authenticity, however, is a slippery concept since humans are emotional creatures. Authenticity of the moment
Why not a social third rib?
Or a Social big toe
Or maybe a social thumb? Thumbs are pretty useful
The facebook process is entirely retarded, and facebook officially want everything you post to be public, so I doubt it's ever going to be made more visible and usable. Plus facebook have a habit of changing the default privacy settings around, and over-riding your previous settings to be more public. Google+ circles is a really intuitive way of segregating who you know into different groups. I have a circle of people I'm 'following' - i.e. like Trey Ratcliff who's an awesome HDR photographer and has been posting shots from paris recently, or Wil Wheaton. It's rather twitter like. I also have circles for my family, and IRL friends, another circle for members of a gaming forum I'm on (who've signed up en-mass), and another circle called 'err' for people who I've followed for posting cool stuff, and have now circled me back. I choose who gets to see what I post for every post easily, and of course, there's always public if I want to make it visible to people who I haven't circled yet. Plus - no Zygna! Thank God.
This video puts it better than I can.
There are other really useful features of google+ though, like hangouts - it uses the same video plugin as google talk video, but it lets you do up to 10-way simultaneous video chat. It's really simple, and it works really, really well. It beats the crap out of skype premium.
Another dead handy feature is I can easily choose who can tag me in photos - it defaults to your circles, but you can make it smaller than that. Handy for making sure only people you really really trust can tag you in photos - you can select nobody at all if you like.
Anyone who circles you, but you don't circle back, their public posts and stuff sent to the circle you're in ends up in a circle called 'incoming' - so you can see it if you want, but it's not in your main stream. You can also block someone if they're annoying or spamming, and they'll vanish entirely as far as you're concerned.
Admittedly, the mobile client is a bit featureless for posting links and videos - you can do status updates and upload photos on the move really easily, but not much else. Hopefully that will improve, after all, google+ has only been out in field test for 3 weeks. also, you want to turn off most of the email notifications otherwise you just drown.
Two really good extensions for chrome are:
start google plus that allows you to integrate facebook and/or twitter posts into your google stream (or put them in a specific circle), and cross-post stuff from google+ to them if you want to, easily.
google plus me that lets you collapse posts+comments down, so they don't clog up your stream (it shows how many unread comments are in that collapsed post and you can hover to see contents) - handy when you follow felicia day! It also has a list mode, where they are all collapsed which really allows you to focus on just one post at a time.
Overall, I'm using google+ far, far more than I ever used facebook, and seeing a ton of interesting stuff linked on there. Knowing I can easily keep stuff well away from co-workers, and not post geeky stuff to my family they're not going to be interested in is so much better.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Wouldn't it HAVE to be growing?
This is about as meaningful as saying your toddler is growing. What else is it going to do? The only way IS up.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I completely agree with everything you wrote - group management is a nightmare on Facebook. It is easy to choose "friends" or "friend of friends" as a default option for your posts. However, there is an additional layer on top of that: Facebook's own algorithm that selects whose stream your post will appear in. This is not transparent to the user at. Even if you don't want to segregate your contacts into different groups, you have no control over who sees what you say. We don't know how the algorithm works (there are plenty of educated guesses though). In fact, they can add a simple filter to prevent any post mentioning Google+ appearing in your friends stream - and we wouldn't even know about it! A lot has been said against Facebook (changing TOS, privacy settings, allowing 3rd parties to get users's information, etc.). In my opinion, however, this is the worst thing about Facebook: you have no control over who sees the things you share by posting. Everything about facebook is about control. They control who sees your post, they control how much you can post (420 characters!), they control whose posts you see in your stream. On G+ you are in control of all of that.
So yes, precisely as you said, they have a rudimentary system for contact segregation that is a nightmare to use. But even if you are not concerned with that, you just your contacts to see what you post, that's not possible. Of course, they see what you post on their walls. But when you write a Note, how many of your contacts will see it in their stream? Nobody knows.
What are these "friends" you speak of?
Kind of like NPCs and henchmen.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I wouldn't say it's viral, but it's not good publicity. And there are more stories of "spam masters" at Google + suspending/deleting accounts without accountability. Here's a post on Google + about "Skud" (who WORKED at Google) who lost her account because she used her nickname instead of her Christian name. And Google knew her by that nickname; she's been keynote at conferences and introduced as her nickname —links provided so you can see her story and G+ users' reactions to Skud being deep-sixed by G+ spam masters. (She's on twitter too: @skud)
Note, people are asking Cutts for more of an explanation about Dylan than "I looked into it", and Cutts is ignoring them (or repeating the party line that he looked into it). But Dylan isn't shutting up about it. If nothing else, that's terrible PR. Cutts should either work it out with Dylan in private so that Dylan stops talking about it, or say what the TOS violation is. Because people really don't give a shit about "Dylan"; they want to know it won't happen to them.
Guess there's always fb.
I wasn't aware of that--unless you're talking about the "top news" sort/filter, which I agree, I have no idea how that works. I always set it to "most recent" and read it that way. If that's not what you mean, I've neither noticed, nor heard about it before.
Well... I wouldn't send an invite to someone I do not want to share information with in a social setting.
I hate being a me too, but damn, this was a good post!