Am I being unrealistically impatient, or is the only feature that actually matters the feature that lets your friends sign up? Google+ is a ghost town for me right now and there's nothing I can do to change that.
It's very frustrating. I love the ideas in Google+ and want to use it, but I've got no ability to share or add friends.
I had the opposite reaction: At first only a couple of close friends were in my circles, and it felt like a true social site. Even though many of us are miles and miles apart, we were sharing, talking, hanging out and posting. All this without hundreds of relatives, coworkers, ex girlfriends silently watching us like some stalkers from the bushes.
It got even better once i realized that because of the way circles work, this kind of feeling might actually be preserved without much effort on my behalf.
I'm actually very excited about this feature. I feel like George Costanza faced with "worlds colliding" when my family, friends, and coworkers were all meeting each other on my wall.
I had to give up the site because I have to keep those lives separate for my own sanity.
I was also excited about this feature (and the way it's properly exposed and integrated) until I started thinking about how sharing to a list can get complicated in deceptive ways very quickly. For example: when someone comments on something I shared, how does she know who will see that comment?
Yes, but that's still a significant amount of friction for something as important as understanding what your social context is. And how many people are really going to understand that that distinction even exists?
I think the real problem is that there's no easy mental model for the way information flows through the system. That's what metaphors are for. A "Circle" is not a metaphor. It's just a brand.
Sorry, I thought you were just asking is it possible to see the context. I wasn't looking to defend the product. That said, though...
I don't think Circles intends to aid in setting social context for other people. It's intended to help the sharer set context for who will see their content. Google is betting that people will share more information if they can limit it to the right groups of people.
As a commenter on this content, I don't get to reset the context or modify it. I can either trust the initial poster's choice or I can dig in further. The mental model is pretty simple: I trust the poster or I take a look around the room and see who else is there. I think when people do dig in further, they will either see a small group of people that they recognize or a large group of people which will set them in "public" context mode for commenting.
The people that don't notice are the same ones spamming their friends with FarmVille invites and there's limited controls for blocking them without disavowing them entirely within Facebook. They're the people that post drunk pics to Facebook in "Everyone" albums without any consideration.
So what if they use + the same way. Ignore them, move them to a quieter circle. And for their benefit, it defaults to a more protective privacy setting than Facebook, especially for pictures.
I definitely agree that Circles are better. I don't think they're as good as they could be. I don't think it's that clear for people, even those that are outside the group you cite, where exactly their comments are going. It's discoverable, but it's certainly not immediately obvious. I think privacy usability is really important, you want to make that stuff as easy and intuitive as possible.
Yeah, they really nailed it with Circles. That's exactly what I want out of a social network, and they've managed to implement it in a very intuitive way. I can't wait for my friends to get on it so I can finally delete my Facebook account.
Looks like they are adding people in rounds. This morning I added some friends to circles trying to find out how to get them in then later in the morning all of them were added. I did the same thing again and it had appeared to stop working. Late this afternoon all of the additional people were added.
Basically add everyone you want to circles and make a post. They'll likely get through the invite within a day or less based on my current experience.
Wave failed for this reason. It's a communication tool; if the people I want to communicate with can't use it right now, I'm moving on.
The invite-only, throttled approach worked for GMail because you could use it to talk to people who aren't on GMail. Facebook's gradual launch worked because entire social networks (universities) could join at once. Wave and Google+, however, were/are worthless in closed beta.
Interesting, I was definitely able to use a different account for my invite link. My original email was also tied to a Google Apps account with a custom domain. I can't seem to find the option to enable profiles in Google Apps, so I ended up registering with an old gmail account.
They aren't. I got an invite on my epochwolf gmail account but signed up with my personal gmail account. (Which I happened to be logged in to at the time)
It's very frustrating. I love the ideas in Google+ and want to use it, but I've got no ability to share or add friends.