Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dredmorbius 4436 days ago
Circles for incoming content are fundamentally broken as they don't allow topical categorization of content.

If I can subscribe to feeds, and set a preference for specific individuals on those feeds, I get a vastly superior information product. You can roughly approximate this via search in G+, but only roughly.

The lack of ability to follow people's topical posts (that is: show me +JohnDoe's post to SomeCommunity) was simply idiotic.

Reddit, subreddits, friends, RES dashboard, and RSS feeds give me much of what I was hoping for from G+. And a hell of a lot more utility.
1 comments
dragonwriter 4436 days ago
> If I can subscribe to feeds

You can, if people create them -- Google+ calls named feeds "Pages". You add the Page (originators categorization) to the circle (receivers categorization) you want, and that's how G+ supports classification from both ends of the communication.

link
dredmorbius 4436 days ago
What I can't do is create a topic or keyword, and subscribe to that, with a preference for posts from specific individuals.

Nor can I subscribe to a Community, but only highly ranked posts (useless without downvotes), and/or of people I find compelling.

The Pages route is too many levels of indirection to be successful. Google and Silicon Valley understand that one click can be too much friction, let alone multiple, among several individuals.

I've never subscribed to a page. Hell, what a "page" is is utterly opaque to me (with 25+ years of tech experience).

G+ had a number of useful tools, probably Hangouts at the top of the list, but "Hangouts" UTTERLY FAILS TO COMMUNICATE TO ME what this is. "Group Video Chat" does. And that's what it is.

I've said before and I'll say it again: that should be spun out as its own product, and ultimately be geared to take on WebMeeting and related products.

Edit: Additionally: reddit has ubiquitous RSS. You can tag '.rss' to virtually any URL that's a valid Reddit page (front, subreddit, user, search, URL search etc.) and get a feed based on that. You can also subscribe to specific posts, which is pretty awesome -- through reddit's own notifications system (which blows Google's out of the water).

link
dragonwriter 4436 days ago
> G+ had a number of useful tools, probably Hangouts at the top of the list, but "Hangouts" UTTERLY FAILS TO COMMUNICATE TO ME what this is. "Group Video Chat" does. And that's what it is.

Group Video Chat is a function of Hangouts, but its not all what Hangouts is -- in fact, its the second key feature noted in most Hangouts marketing. (Hangouts integrates iMessage-style individual and group messaging and group video chat and live broadcast video, "Hangouts on Air").

> I've said before and I'll say it again: that should be spun out as its own product

It pretty much has been for a while -- its got its own mobile app; its directly linked for actions from Gmail, etc. You can get to it through the G+ interface, but its not really tied to G+ as a product (vs. platform) now.

> and ultimately be geared to take on WebMeeting and related products.

That's actually one of the many marketing angles Google and its partenrs (Vidyo, etc.) are already taking with Hangouts and offerings integrating with Hangouts.

link