Be Excellent To Each Other

Lots of stuff here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus/ I'm still digesting it. Some interesting aspects, certainly, but that was also true of Buzz and Wave.

UPDATE: Beexers on Google+ with short URLs

http://gplus.to/bobbyaro
http://gplus.to/devilman
http://gplus.to/gazchap
http://gplus.to/govyard
http://gplus.to/malabarfront
http://gplus.to/pupil
http://gplus.to/richardgaywood
http://gplus.to/thexboxvision

(this list may quickly drift out of date. It might be more efficient if you add those people, then go looking through their Circles to find other beexers.)

Wave was great

Invite only at the minute though. Anyone had one?

I wish Wave had taken off that Rosetta stone plugin would be ace right now. Instant translation as you type letter by letter.

I'll ask in the office, tomorrow. It wasn't mentioned today, but it was fairly quiet.

Looks promising. Really hope it takes off.

Looks good and sounds like something I'd like to use. My friends however, won't.

Is that because you haven't got any? Hahahahahhaahhahaha!! Etc

That's a BOOM!

Like the look of what I see so far. There's still unanswered questions, and obviously google is not doing this out of charity. Presumably it's not intended to become a horrible den of marketing and monitizing bullshit like facebook has become, even if there will be an advertising angle.

Why do they insist on invite-only? For Gmail, I could understand, as obviously that was just a client for email. But all of their social things have severely lacked purpose and application when nobody you know can get access, and have duly died a lonely death.

Totally. All it means is a guarantee that the product will run out of steam before getting critical mass.

It's going to have to offer something incredible in order to tempt people away from facebook. If fb does fine for now, why would people feel the need to move? It's like google is the standard for searching, facebook I'd imagine are a bit too big now to really compete with them. But who knows. I'm not sure how things flow in the world of social networking.

I'd say it adds an air of exclusivity, and people are less likely to complain about problems with it through fear of being punted off it. Or somesuch. A bit like those exclusive shopping websites that exist, where you have to be a member to buy exclusive stuff with discounts. Either way, it's going to have to compete with Facebook which is set to roll out it's version of linked in soon. Which is going to be interesting. The amount of money involved in companies doing things to monetize facebook is boggling, so I doubt that any PE enterprise will slay the saved cow, but that's another story. I like gmail, and many of the tools it provides. Advertisements are a fair pay off for that.

Um... Google will want people to tell them about problems. That's the point of a beta phase.
There are plenty of reasons for keeping the number of people down.

I'm sure there are plenty of logistical reasons for limiting the number of initial users, but past Google social projects have only led to failure with this approach, and unless they play it very smoothly I can't see anything different happening here either.

I'm more than happily to be proved wrong, of course.

Which ones?
Buzz is the only recent one I can think of, and that needed more testing (to stop it being shit), not less.

Wave too? The 'wave' of hype was long past by the time access was opened up to everyone.

Worked for Gmail though.

I disagree - Wave was too complicated for ordinaries, and could have perhaps done with more fiddling before opening up. The wave<>email bit should have existed from the start, fo sho.

It didn't seem to know whether it was a work based sharing app or a social networking one, and was indeed too complicated.

I think the 'invite-only' thing is really just to build up the hype. That certainly seemed to be the case with Wave.

Nailed it:

Yup.


Is Buzz toast now then or what?

They don't say.
I'm a bit confused about why Wave has been lumped in the "social networking" group by lots of news reports this morning. No wonder people didn't 'get it'.

"Is it a normal website?"

"no"

"ah, so it's social networking then" seems to be the order of the day. You know, for twits.


...the term is purely and simply this season's "web 2.0". It's all bollocks as usual, I've been on a social network for a good 20 years. It's called the fucking internet.

No, it's more than that -- Google didn't describe Wave well at all. I'd argue the fault was more its end than with the public.

I'm not sure it was social networking, but it was certainly a social app. But it couldn't interface with anything but itself, few people had it, and those who did get an invitation didn't really know what to do with it.

Buzz had to answer the question ‘Why would I use this instead of Twitter?’ and couldn't.

This will have to answer ‘Why should I use this instead of Facebook?’, and with invitations fragmenting groups of friends, I'm not entirely sure it will, never mind that there's little compelling reason to switch in itself.

Sooo.. what is it?

Every time I went to use it, I had technical issues with it. Even though it was invite-only, it didn't seem to cope well with even a restricted number of users.

Wave was annoying for me because:

1) Very few people I wanted to us it with had it at the time
2) It had no integration with Gmail (at least to begin with), which seemed odd to say the least.

Whereas Buzz had rather too much integration with Gmail.

Yer man here seems to totally bum it, but also explains clearly why it is good:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fi ... y_cool.php

I like this comment:




Now, so long as signup is a piece of piss, and from your gmail/youtube/blogger/whatever account, 1 click gets you up and running, I see no reason why the full rollout shouldn't do well. They'll need to be almost there already though, as Facebook and so on could easily come up with inferior but vaguely useable feature equivalents which would, to the idiot, make it not worthwhile changing.

The idiots are a good case for Google+ though, as the AOLisation (the moment when the online thing you like gets swamped with idiots) won't happen immediately and we'll have a few months of our dumb uncle not trying to get involved in our online life. And when he does, he goes in the dumb uncle ring.

The name is interesting too, they clearly want this to be closely tied with their main thing, whereas lots of people still haven't a clue that Youtube and Blogger are now part of the hive mind.

I do think Hangout sounds interesting. Reminds me a lot of Beacons, the new Xbox dashboard feature coming later this year that will let you set a "yeah, I'm playing a single-player game right now, but I'm up for invites to the following games" message. We have a new etiquette problem here about when it's appropriate to initiate these sorts of conversations, and I'm glad companies are looking to address these problems.

I like Kirkpatrick too (the author of the RWW post GY linked to), his head is screwed on right.

We're probably already fairly sure it's not another load of old shit then.

As far as the beacons/invites/hangous invite to play this or that issue goes, I find it interesting that people seem to find phone calls unobtrusive but a small popup to say 'this mate of yours fancies some Halo' which you don't even need to acknowledge is considered improper at times. I mean, you're playing XBox, you've friended the guy, he wants to play a game. Join if you want to, or if you feel obliged send him a reply when convenient. Or, you know, pause.

I don't. I feel bad ringing people, and I don't like answering calls much either. Phone calls are like physical post for me now -- they almost always bring bad news. Friends tend to text and email instead. This is even more true of video calling.

The popup isn't intrusive -- but people feel bad about saying 'no', I think.

I never find a call from a friend or anyone I know obtrusive, it's coming to something when you daren't try and speak to someone for fear of bursting their bubble.

DocG - Fair enough to the second one - to the first, I'm the same. Every time I hear the thing ring, I know the caller isn't going to enrich my life and I often pause in mid trip to pick it up, thinking "but I was.....doing...something...." and my heart sinks a little. To be able to be stopped in your tracks doing anything by what could be anyone for what could be any reason and you won't know till you stop and find out but you can't not because the conditioning to the insistent bloody ring is supreme seems oddly barbaric.

Also I did a couple of years in callcentres. <shudder>

So yeah, Google+ - already better than the telephone, and that did quite well.

It's not the communication with the person so much as the having to stop what you are doing to have it, as is usually the case. Now, a phone call you are expecting, when you are expecting it, on the other hand...

It seems promising, however I have a couple of issues.

Hangouts: Am I weird in that when i'm at home in my pants, I don't want to video chat with anyone? I like the social barrier between the user and the machine, I think that is part of what makes the internet so good, the freedom of expression, removal of social pressures, ease of access etc... I don't want to make sure i've done my hair and put my makeup on before I sit down at the computer in case someone wants to talk to me. Obviously I don't have to use it, and can see why people would want to, but just saying that it doesn't feel like something for me.

Google profiles and the link between what I do and who I am. I like the separation of those things. Google is what I use to do stuff, Facebook and Twitter (and here, and other forums etc...) is who I am and what I talk about. Putting all that into one place feels like too much of an invasion to me, for a reason I can't put my finger on.

I read a well-reasoned essay once that argued that the social acceptability of a ringing telephone interrupting whoever you are calling regardless of what they are doing was a social anomaly and would eventually fade away.

No, you're very normal. I don't want to see your pants either. You're backwards, though, because Hangout solves this problem by indicating "I'd like to chat / I don't want to chat" to people who might try and call you, meaning you don't have to deal with unwanted calls when you're in your pants.

Other than on very rare occasions, I don't ever want to video chat with anyone.

I have no qualms about clicking the button that puts the phone and silent and lets it ring out when I'm already with someone.

The person on the other end just assumes I'm unavailable (or an ass).

Plus it makes the person you're with feel more important.

I just don't get this. Am I completely weird in sometimes just phoning people up to see what they're up to, if they fancy a pint or whatever? I had no idea I was being so massively rude, next time I'll be sure to email them days before to arrange a convenient slot in their calendar.

Not if it's the done thing in your friends circle.

Some people are just scared of social interaction.

And yet you don't do the "reject call to voicemail immediately" button? Would that feel rude somehow?

Oh sure, but I don't envision a time where I am ever sitting at my computer and think "what I want right now is to video chat with a random person I half know" when would someone ever click the "I'd like to chat" button, other than the first time it comes out just to see if it works?

Even here, we are a pretty friendly bunch, certainly more friendly than 99% of the internet and know each other more than just a bunch of randoms. If there was a Beex "Hangout" how many of us would actually go in on a regular basis and click the "I'd like to chat" button? If we won't do it, who would?

Specific video chats with specific people, sure. Video chats with psuedo-randoms?

i can't even see a market for it in the porn industry...

I think most of us here are just broken. I mean, we spend half our lives on an internet forum... we're probably not indicative of the country at large.