Google Plus

2011-06-30-GooglePlusLaunches: Google Plus is launching, their new Social Networking product line. Google Circles (Universal Canvas), Google Sparks, Google Hangouts (Video Chart), Instant Upload, Google Messenger (Group Messaging).

Google Circle-s

Came out of PaulAdams deck.

• Joshua Porter notes competition with/from FaceBook (Facebook Groups). And... it should be noted that Paul Adams left Google in December and now works at Facebook.

Jul01'2011: Dave Winer thinks categorizing your posts (to send to different Circles) is too much work and will fail.

• I Commented (not having used it yet): I think some key ideas (opportunities? challenges?) are:

  1. categories probably work best as "operational" - in other words, not based on some abstract label of "really good friend" vs "current work friend" vs "past work friend" or junk like that, but rather "people I don't mind having see pictures of my kids", "people I don't mind having see my political rants", etc. - the super-challenges part here is that it's hard to keep the number of categories small, and it's hard to pre-define them. (Right now non-Facebook-types get this by the nature of having different silo social graphs for different specialized services.)

  2. categories are different for your "outbox" vs your "inbox". For my outbox, those personal-privacy-trust items from #1 apply, for my inbox it might be about what "priority" I put various streams into, or other categories of "similar" content ("VC blogs", etc.).

  3. categories are person-stream-specific for both inbox and outbox, so even worse than person-specific.

  4. categories are asymmetric. (This is pretty obvious.)

  5. any given stream (inbox and outbox) might belong in multiple categories.

  • The standard Circles pitch of treating "parents from my kids' soccer team" as a different Circle than "guys from Ny Tech Meetup" seems awfully coarse.

Jul18 update:

• I got my invite and joined
• I've added a bunch of people, putting them into the default set of circles
• I've been reading a bit.
  • I wish this pulled in RSS feeds like FriendFeed
• I've commented on some other peoples' posting (Discussion Forum, a lot like FriendFeed)
• I've only posted 1-2 items of my own.
  • am I going to dump FlickR for this? If I were to dump Twitter for Google Plus, then I guess I'd dump FlickR at the same time (though I'd have a big legacy of stuff to figure out what to do with, or maybe I'd just leave it there and let my account downgrade to free next year, and just pick up Google Plus photos with the present).
    • Is this a matter of loyalty to people who no longer work at FlickR? A desire to avoid going too far into Monoculture?
  • am I going to dump Twitter for this?
    • Twitter auto-publishing to FaceBook is the only way I stay visible to some old friends who are FaceBook-type-people.
    • can I easily archive my Google Plus posts? No API yet...
• another thing that would pull me over - a widget so that I could embed a Google Plus thread on every page of my WikiLog. (My current plan is to embed DisQus in the next couple months...)

This Google Chrome extension is supposed to provide some integration with Twitter and FaceBook, but I can't get it to work because their server is overloaded.

• Aug5 update: now working! (of course that doesn't do me any good on my Nexus One, but mostly ok)