That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use.
I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off.
I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.
Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
As for now, here are my options :
- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing
- not publishing anything
Sadly, it often comes to that last option.
Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying.
Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.
What is lacking is 'channel negotiation' between the sender and the receiver. The sender knows what he sends - the receiver knows what he wants to receive - neither of them has the full information and they need to collaborate on defining the channel connecting them.
For example the sender can sort their messages into out-channels (as it is partially implemented in Google+ via circles) and the receiver can chose what out-channels he subscribes to (which is not present in Google+) - this is the classical publish-subscribe design pattern.
What I would like to see is a bit more - I would like the receiver to be able to also apply some additional sorting logic to the subscribed channels, and he could choose the results depending on the mood - or he could some of it also copy directly to his out-channels. In short what I would like to see is a 'social routing' - but that would probably require that the user has full control over his node.
I'd actually rather a de-centralised platform. And prefer a glorious feed organiser.
Very simple open comment/status feed APIs would be more beneficial for the community at large with a pub/sub mechanism that was easy to understand and utilise.
Add an RSS feed for a news website, add a Twitter feed, or friend, add a Facebook (channel for a better word), or whatever. Organise these somehow. Integrate privacy controls. This would probably suit a next generation browser rather than an online silo.
May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
Yup, that's a killer. I have people who follow me for personal stuff, a few people who follow me for kayaking stuff, a couple hundred people who apparently follow me for tech/entrepreneurial stuff and some people who follow me for interesting links to French content.
But the tech people have only a limited interest in kayaking, none of the kayaking people care weird French TV series, and so on. So anything I say is going to bore someone. At least Google+ circles make it easy to restrict 99% of the "adorable child" photos to my immediate family. But that only works for those followers I know personally, not the couple hundred strangers who follow me for one reason or another.
How not to be boring, rule 101: Thou shalt not obsess about one's hobbies to people who are not interested.
Twitter works a bit better, because I can have several independent Twitter accounts: one per language that I write in, or one per enthusiasm, or whatever works for me.
But Google+ forces me to publish only that subset of content which is interesting to almost all my followers. And that's very nearly the null set.
That's really interesting... I wouldn't object to starting a blog on the stranger points of financial valuation, but there is no way I would tie my real identity to it.
I want to be able to forget the stuff I do now, in the future.
Yeah. For precisely this reason, I maintain two Twitter accounts: business me and personal me. It kills me that Google+'s Circles were only about privacy control, not targeted sharing.
The people in your Circles have no idea which Circle they're in.
And you have no way of knowing which of your post topics they're interested in.
Google failed to grasp the distinction between author and content.
This was pointed out by many, many people very early on (myself included), and remained one of the huge failings of the services from day one. Certainly one of my own frustrations.
"Pages" and "Communities" were bolted on later to try to address this, but were both poorly designed and communicated (I still can't tell you what "Pages" are supposed to be). UI/UX on many of these features was also poor.
The point isn't to limit the viewership, but to target the people you annoy with your notifications.
Sharing to a specific circle only implements privacy control, but it's much too heavy handed - nobody else can see it. Also, you can't change sharing options after the fact, so choosing the right options becomes particularly important.
I think the problem is more that just because random person X "has me in their circles", I've no idea whether they're interested in my posts about cheese or my posts about Latvian clog dancing or my posts about C++, so I can't assign them to my topic-specific circles for targetted notifications.
You can easily create Google+ "pages" to solve exactly this problem. They have the added bonus of not requiring "real names", so you could be using a pseudonym or something if you wanted
"Pages" were never (and still aren't) communicated well. The name, for starters, sucks.
They seem to have been created for marketing purposes. Using them to topically divide my posts ... never occurred. Literally, until the past day or so.
You're right, that's something I didn't explored enough, thinking of pages like intended for brands.
I'll play a bit with this to see if it's well integrated enough, since when you click on someone name, you reach post list rather than about section (I would not have people think I don't publish anything, not realizing there are many pages).
I've tried pages, but it's indeed not what I would. I can't find a mean to even just make them appear on my profile, other than making a manual link in "about" page description.
You can totally post to circles though, and then only people in that circle of yours would see it.
G+ is great for passions, Twitter for perceptions and FB for people. Check out Guy Kawasaki's Book, "What The Plus". It's short read and really helped me get the most out of it.
This has always been the top problem with Google+ for me.
Maybe I want to hear about your code or your religion but I really really don't have the time and energy to wade through your cats, politics, etc.
So, what's wrong with using circles for option 1? You'd rather like to have the posts public, but only to people with french browser settings? IMO that's asking a bit much, it's a functionality I'd expect from a good blogger platform but not a general purpose social media platform.
Note that I often feel G+ to be off as well, but for other reasons. One issue that sprung into my eye lately: There's absolutely no notification about new messages if you don't have any G+ apps or extensions installed. The logged in google page shows me notifications, which do not include messages, but rather useless clutter I don't care about. Is this Google's way of forcing people into installing their browser extension? It seems a rather big oversight to me.
Oh I see, 'subscriptions' as a counterpart to 'circles'. That's not a bad idea, it would also translate pretty well to Youtube channels. I guess they didn't introduce it since it would confuse many users 'what's the difference between circles and channels?'. They could have made it as an optional feature for publishers, i.e. only shown to users who enable it in preferences.
edit: Users who subscribe to a feed would always see the feature if the publisher has enabled it of course
I apologize for the shameless plug, but we're at the early stages of solving some of the problems you mentioned at http://NowVia.com
It lets you create topic-based "channels" that people can follow. So you could have one for 3-D printing, and when you add to it, you know everyone following it is specifically interested in 3-D printing. I'd love your feedback if you decide to have a play :-)
> publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
On google+, it's the publisher who decides which people are in which circle, not the reader who decides in which circle he wants to be (and circle names and person list are totally private).
So, if you publish to a circle rather than publicly, only people you added in circle will see your content. It's not guaranteed they actually care about it, and those who care about it and you don't know won't be able to see the content.
As others have mentioned, circles are meant for privacy (I want to publish this to my family, that to my close friends), not to separate content (I want to publicly talk about politics, I want to publicly talk about cats).
I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off.
I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.
Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.
As for now, here are my options :
- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of
- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing
- not publishing anything
Sadly, it often comes to that last option.
Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying.
Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.