[jenius]

Yeah I really like this, and I also like how google is not giving up. I do think it has potential, and if google can hit it, it will be huge for the company.

I think the piece that's missing is integration from other third party services - I would use my google+ account a lot more if I could post to it from apps I use often like twitter, instagram etc. There's always share to twitter in almost every app, which makes it easy. But to share anything to google+ i always have to go all the way to their site, which isn't worth it since many of my friends don't use it anyway.

[ed209]

One of the most hotly discussed API feature requests [1] but I'm nervous about it. I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?...

[cshenoy]

> I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.

I always wondered why the Google+ team didn't implement that from the get go but after reading that, that's probably the biggest reason as to why they haven't.

[Lewisham]

This is the reason:

https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/FXaGHpa1...

It's a not very thinly-veiled shot at frictionless sharing and the like.

Having seen the hellhole my Facebook stream has become (while I've tried hard, it's almost impossible not to end up with unintended consequences for Apps and such), I'm on Vic's side.

[mindcrime]

I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.

Me either, but - IMO - the answer to this isn't to leave out the "write API," but rather the answer is to give users better filters and the ability to define their stream to meet their own desires. Of course doing so with a simple and intuitive UI is the tricky part, but hey... those G+ engineers make a lot of money, they should be able to come up with something, no?

[ed209]

> they should be able to come up with something, no?

no! :)

Probably the hardest thing in social media is noise filtering via a UI (it's hard for Google, it's hard for Facebook, it's just a hard problem).

For my own (app) selfish reasons, I'd like to see a write api for comments first as that doesn't cause issues on the same scale as writing posts to the stream. Could be a nice place to start.

[Jach]

Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering, Google has a lot more in-house experience with that than Facebook I imagine. I think even something as simple as a personalized Naive Bayes filter would go far.

Ad hoc groupings of people in your Lists and ad hoc set operations on your current groups (school intersection friends, union of all groups filtered where profession = X or Y, etc.) is something a write api would let a budding entrepreneur develop an app around and potentially make a lot of money.

[ed209]

> Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering

Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.

Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.

I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.

[mindcrime]

Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.

The problem is, that's not even the right approach. It's built on a faulty assumption - that "who" is the sole determinant of whether or not I'm interested in something. That's not even close to true, unfortunately. I have plenty of social-network connections for whom I value their posts on certain topics and have less-than-zero interest in what they have to say about other things. For example:

"I follow Bob, and I want to see Bob's posts on technical topics, but NOT Bob's posts on religion."

Or more generally:

"I follow all these people, but regardless of who posts what, I never want to see pictures of cats."

I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.

I don't know, I think a solution that was 80% effective would be incredibly valuable. I don't see this as something that's "all or nothing."

And my personal take is that, in the case of G+, the Circles thing is a good start, but they need a way to specify "excludes." Whether those excludes should be explicitly defined by the user, or whether they can use machine learning to figure out what I don't want to see is an open question, granted. But I'd take some UI for specifying "exclude this topic" (while acknowledging there is some inherent fuzziness in this) in the meantime.

[kooshball]

> Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.

Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem like that's just me being pedantic but the result is that user end up with mail they do not want to receive, and mark it as spam. This is similar to how I respond to news feeds except I dont have an easy "mark as spam" button without blocking that person forever.

G+ should implement some sort of rating system to rank items that I liked and push those ones similar to it higher on the feed.

[rys]

Why should the UI or API get involved with filtering what's inherently the human's problem?

[obituary_latte]

Giving up?

This is all just part of the master plan. If/When Facebook implodes, there is already a place set up for everyone to go. Google has the staying power to weather a long lull in usership; there are other properties to support them. Facebook has 1 angle and history shows that to be a dangerous position--one bad decision can bring the whole thing crashing down a-la Digg.

I'm surprised no one seems to see this.

[RobAtticus]

I'm not saying Facebook is here to stay and has nothing to worry about, but Digg is a pretty poor comparison. What does it take for someone to switch news aggregators? Pretty much nothing. I just need to find another site that has links/discussion I find interesting.

What does it take for someone to switch to another social network? Actually quite a bit. One, I want my friends to be there too. That alone is pretty difficult, and a common complaint with G+.

But I think the real roadblock is probably photos. People love their photos. Can you imagine the work some people would have to do just to move that all to a new network? Some people I know have thousands of photos of themselves, and have posted thousands of photos. That is no small task. It helps keep people tied to Facebook, in my opinion.

Certainly I think Facebook could be usurped, but I don't think it's trivial and it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially.

[gurkendoktor]

> it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially

I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would introduce laws for that at one point. Also, it would be cool if a social news site could parse the ZIP dump of your data you can request from FB.

[obituary_latte]

What I meant with the Digg comparison is an "implosion" scenario whereby Facebook does something disastrous to itself which causes a mass exodus, as opposed to something better coming along to supplant it.

I think it would be very difficult for it to happen any other way. Indeed, the points you make reinforce this idea.

[bborud]

I'm having a hard time imagining what Facebook could possibly do to cause a mass exodus.

[jedc]

Part of me wants this, too. But the other part of me hates it when a majority of my Facebook timeline is just updates from apps, games, and other crap that get automatically shared. This is a delicate balance.

[raldi]

On G+, you only see your friends' game update crap when you're on the Games tab.

[jedc]

True. But while I'd like to see some third-party auto-updates, I don't want to see all of them. This is the balance that needs to be struck.

[dredmorbius]

But you can't delete the games tab.