First thoughts on Google+
Jul. 17th, 2011 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesSetting aside the gender/real name privacy issues (which are serious ones, but I'm willing to wait and see if Google listens to reason), the things that have struck me so far:
I don't like the interface in a number of ways, but mulling it over, what they mostly boil down to is that my primary mode of interacting is on the assumption that I am making a permanent record which I can readily access at a later date, while Google+ seems to assume that whatever is posted is ephemeral. My LiveJournal is just that -- a journal. I can readily go into calendar mode and find entries from months and years past, or use tags to pull up posts on particular topics. I can readily skip back 10 or 20 or 50 entries on my own journal or on any filtered view of my flist, without having to look at all the entries in between, by simply editing the url from a back x entries button. I can do the same thing on other people's LiveJournals. And there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do this in Google+. It's much more akin to an unlimited text form of Twitter than any sensible blogging platform. I see no point in expending effort to create content that will effectively disappear within a few days.
I presume from comments I've seen that this behaviour is intended to mimic Facebook. I've never used Facebook, primarily because of their All Your Privacy Are Belong To Us attitude, but also because the few times I've followed a link there and not immediately got the "you can't see this unless you join the hive" block, the interface gave me a headache. Sometimes literally. Ick.
What it's not doing in mimicry of FB is sending me constant notifications of what my friends, acquaintances and random strangers with otherwise interesting blogs are doing right now in various games. This is good. I got a tiny taste of that on the MySpace account I own and avoid going anywhere near, and was not impressed. I thought I was going to have to decamp from LJ because it looked as if they were going down that route in pursuit of the FB demographic, although fortunately they seem to have stopped at merely repeatedly nagging me even on my paid account to try their shiny new games system.
I *really* like the +1 button. I'm a Usenaut, and I remember the days when "AOL!" was slang for "me too!", and why. I like having a way to say "AOL!" that provides feedback but doesn't take up screen real estate out of proportion to the semantic content.
The sharing system is largely good, although Google made the same privacy cock-up as LiveJournal did when LJ introduced it. You don't enable one-click sharing on locked posts if you have given any thought to privacy issues. Yes, I *know* that anyone with malicious intent can easily share by a simple copy-and-paste operation. The problem is the thoughtless rather than the malicious sharing, and also I'd prefer to make it much harder for malicious sharers to do so with verified attribution.
I'm finding the flist filter system, labelled "circles" in Google, much more unwieldy in Google's implementation. That's partly because I'm used to the LJ codebase's way of doing it, but at the moment I think it's genuinely unwieldy for some operations. I suspect that will improve as they tweak in response to feedback, but at the moment I can't give useful feedback because I'm having trouble formulating what's "not what I'm used to" and what's "this is a genuine issue". There are some things that I think I may like better once I get used to them. I'm still not sure whether to treat friends, acquaintances and following as nested or separate circles, or indeed as overlapping. That will change with time, I suspect.
Addendum -- I probably want to create a circle whose function if not title is "people I don't normally want to read because the fannish world is large and my attention span is small, but I want to be able to find them again when appropriate".
Further addendum -- how do we create the functional equivalent of LJ communities and/or Usenet newsgroups? I want an Eastercon community, and a rasfc community, and a Redemption community, and an afp community...
If there's an easy way to change the security setting on an individual post after posting it, I'm not seeing it. If there's an easy way, or indeed any way, to change the security settings on a selection of post or all posts at once, I'm not seeing it. I've never used the "all posts" option on LJ/DW, but I've seen people have a good reason to use it, and I've occasionally changed the setting on individual posts.
I expect to find hangouts useful once both I and the people I wish to hang out with get that up and running. The obvious use here is writer collaboration, both co-writing and discussion. I have a potential co-editing job which will be made much easier by being able to discuss stuff while looking at the file in Google Docs, and while I've done this using Skype, hangouts are a potentially good alternative. I think it could provide a good place for realtime discussion amongst the rascafarians. However, it appears that hangouts require the use of a live webcam to enter, and I have no use for webcams for most of the stuff I'd want to use hangouts for. I don't need to *see* the people I'm interacting with for most of my likely uses, I only need a voice channel, and the video channel will simply eat bandwidth for no good reason. I don't like the inability for even the creator to kick users from a hangout. No ability to moderate is an invitation to trolls.
Post titles are A Good Thing, and I would like them please. This falls under "this is ephemeral, and I want a journal."
I haven't enabled chat yet. I don't actually like having an open chat client that offers a presumed invitation to random people to open a conversation with me, because it's very distracting to have live chat suddenly appear when I'm working. It's not been an issue with Skype and Gmail chat, because the only people who ever message me on those are people whom I'm either working *with*, or who don't mind being told "can't talk now". The circles feature could be good for being available to some people but not others, but I don't have the time and attention span available to deal with cock-ups, so I'm leaving it off for now.
[Inspired by something that just happened] Are we getting email notifications every time someone who already has us in a circle changes the configuration of circles they have us in? Because that is an instant breach of the "nobody knows what circles you have them in" ethos. If I get a notification that someone has added me to a circle when I know that I already am in one of their circles, that tells me that my circle status just changed. Right now that's just people fiddling with their setup, but eventually it's going to cause the Drama Llama to drop by for a visit. And that's one feature of LJ I don't want to see Google+ try to emulate.
ETA1:More nitpicking -- my email address as used with this account is extremely public. My mobile phone number is something I might want to share with an extremely limited group of people. *Separate* privacy levels on the two means of contact would be nice, please.
ETA1.1 I do have separate privacy levels. I just have an interface that makes it look as if I don't.
ETA1.2: No, I was almost right the first time. :-( As noted in the reply to a comment below, what I was seeing was a box that offered my email address, already filled in with the gmail address for this account, and then a line offering a box to fill in my phone number, together with a drop down menu that offered privacy settings. This made it look as if the privacy setting applied to the whole list.
Some further poking suggested that in fact if you change and save the privacy setting on the email line, you can then fill in the phone line and save that separately.
Still further poking reveals that going back to edit the privacy setting doesn't seem to work. It simply changes the setting for the top item in the list, and I can find no way to change which item is the top item short of deleting lines entirely and adding new ones. this is a rather more roundabout method than I would like. - Reported via the feedback form.
I don't like the interface in a number of ways, but mulling it over, what they mostly boil down to is that my primary mode of interacting is on the assumption that I am making a permanent record which I can readily access at a later date, while Google+ seems to assume that whatever is posted is ephemeral. My LiveJournal is just that -- a journal. I can readily go into calendar mode and find entries from months and years past, or use tags to pull up posts on particular topics. I can readily skip back 10 or 20 or 50 entries on my own journal or on any filtered view of my flist, without having to look at all the entries in between, by simply editing the url from a back x entries button. I can do the same thing on other people's LiveJournals. And there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do this in Google+. It's much more akin to an unlimited text form of Twitter than any sensible blogging platform. I see no point in expending effort to create content that will effectively disappear within a few days.
I presume from comments I've seen that this behaviour is intended to mimic Facebook. I've never used Facebook, primarily because of their All Your Privacy Are Belong To Us attitude, but also because the few times I've followed a link there and not immediately got the "you can't see this unless you join the hive" block, the interface gave me a headache. Sometimes literally. Ick.
What it's not doing in mimicry of FB is sending me constant notifications of what my friends, acquaintances and random strangers with otherwise interesting blogs are doing right now in various games. This is good. I got a tiny taste of that on the MySpace account I own and avoid going anywhere near, and was not impressed. I thought I was going to have to decamp from LJ because it looked as if they were going down that route in pursuit of the FB demographic, although fortunately they seem to have stopped at merely repeatedly nagging me even on my paid account to try their shiny new games system.
I *really* like the +1 button. I'm a Usenaut, and I remember the days when "AOL!" was slang for "me too!", and why. I like having a way to say "AOL!" that provides feedback but doesn't take up screen real estate out of proportion to the semantic content.
The sharing system is largely good, although Google made the same privacy cock-up as LiveJournal did when LJ introduced it. You don't enable one-click sharing on locked posts if you have given any thought to privacy issues. Yes, I *know* that anyone with malicious intent can easily share by a simple copy-and-paste operation. The problem is the thoughtless rather than the malicious sharing, and also I'd prefer to make it much harder for malicious sharers to do so with verified attribution.
I'm finding the flist filter system, labelled "circles" in Google, much more unwieldy in Google's implementation. That's partly because I'm used to the LJ codebase's way of doing it, but at the moment I think it's genuinely unwieldy for some operations. I suspect that will improve as they tweak in response to feedback, but at the moment I can't give useful feedback because I'm having trouble formulating what's "not what I'm used to" and what's "this is a genuine issue". There are some things that I think I may like better once I get used to them. I'm still not sure whether to treat friends, acquaintances and following as nested or separate circles, or indeed as overlapping. That will change with time, I suspect.
Addendum -- I probably want to create a circle whose function if not title is "people I don't normally want to read because the fannish world is large and my attention span is small, but I want to be able to find them again when appropriate".
Further addendum -- how do we create the functional equivalent of LJ communities and/or Usenet newsgroups? I want an Eastercon community, and a rasfc community, and a Redemption community, and an afp community...
If there's an easy way to change the security setting on an individual post after posting it, I'm not seeing it. If there's an easy way, or indeed any way, to change the security settings on a selection of post or all posts at once, I'm not seeing it. I've never used the "all posts" option on LJ/DW, but I've seen people have a good reason to use it, and I've occasionally changed the setting on individual posts.
I expect to find hangouts useful once both I and the people I wish to hang out with get that up and running. The obvious use here is writer collaboration, both co-writing and discussion. I have a potential co-editing job which will be made much easier by being able to discuss stuff while looking at the file in Google Docs, and while I've done this using Skype, hangouts are a potentially good alternative. I think it could provide a good place for realtime discussion amongst the rascafarians. However, it appears that hangouts require the use of a live webcam to enter, and I have no use for webcams for most of the stuff I'd want to use hangouts for. I don't need to *see* the people I'm interacting with for most of my likely uses, I only need a voice channel, and the video channel will simply eat bandwidth for no good reason. I don't like the inability for even the creator to kick users from a hangout. No ability to moderate is an invitation to trolls.
Post titles are A Good Thing, and I would like them please. This falls under "this is ephemeral, and I want a journal."
I haven't enabled chat yet. I don't actually like having an open chat client that offers a presumed invitation to random people to open a conversation with me, because it's very distracting to have live chat suddenly appear when I'm working. It's not been an issue with Skype and Gmail chat, because the only people who ever message me on those are people whom I'm either working *with*, or who don't mind being told "can't talk now". The circles feature could be good for being available to some people but not others, but I don't have the time and attention span available to deal with cock-ups, so I'm leaving it off for now.
[Inspired by something that just happened] Are we getting email notifications every time someone who already has us in a circle changes the configuration of circles they have us in? Because that is an instant breach of the "nobody knows what circles you have them in" ethos. If I get a notification that someone has added me to a circle when I know that I already am in one of their circles, that tells me that my circle status just changed. Right now that's just people fiddling with their setup, but eventually it's going to cause the Drama Llama to drop by for a visit. And that's one feature of LJ I don't want to see Google+ try to emulate.
ETA1:
ETA1.2: No, I was almost right the first time. :-( As noted in the reply to a comment below, what I was seeing was a box that offered my email address, already filled in with the gmail address for this account, and then a line offering a box to fill in my phone number, together with a drop down menu that offered privacy settings. This made it look as if the privacy setting applied to the whole list.
Some further poking suggested that in fact if you change and save the privacy setting on the email line, you can then fill in the phone line and save that separately.
Still further poking reveals that going back to edit the privacy setting doesn't seem to work. It simply changes the setting for the top item in the list, and I can find no way to change which item is the top item short of deleting lines entirely and adding new ones. this is a rather more roundabout method than I would like. - Reported via the feedback form.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-17 11:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-17 03:56 pm (UTC)Explain +1 to me. Google wants me to download video, slowly, and then decipher spoken words (I suppose, not having done it), instead of being willing to tell me anything in print. Of course, if I were a proper sfian, I would just push the button and see what happens....
Mary Anne in Kentucky
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-17 05:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-18 05:17 pm (UTC)Mary Anne in Kentucky