PaiChart for G+ Circles

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Doriano

Here’s my infographic which I call a PaiChart.

It’s a work in progress so please excuse the crudeness and any mistakes. I’m trying to learn as much as I can about Google’s new G+ circles and the flow of information and posts. At first glance everything seems simple and easy but as you use the service you learn about its intricacies and some design flaws that will be fixed in time. After all, it is still early field trial beta (though it’s almost 2 months old now and Google has spent over a year working on this).

In a nutshell, here’s what I believe our options are for publishing posts on G+

Private Posts

Private messages are easy. You send a message just to an individual or group of individuals by adding their names and removing all circles. Easy cheesy.

Circles

Sending a post to a circle or several circles only goes to the people that you have added to those particular circles and no one else.

Your Circles

When you select the circle called Your Circles that means the message will go to ALL of your circles.

Public

Posts here go to all of your circles as well as the incoming circle for all of the people that have added you to their circles but that you have not added to any of your circles yet. Phew, that was a mouthful! But wait, there’s more! Your public posts also go to your Google profile for all the world to see, hence the term, Public.

Extended Circles

Ah, this is where the plot thickens even more. Some people confuse “Your Circles” with this one but that could be a fatal mistake. Here’s why:

Posts to Extended Circles are unlike Your Circles because it goes beyond the scope of the people you’ve curated into your circles of trust. Again, hence the term Extended. So who gets to see these posts? While they are not as public as Public posts, they do appear in many streams of strangers you don’t know because your post is shared with circles of people in your circles and so on. How many levels or circles does that mean? Who the heck knows at this point. I mentioned it could be a fatal mistake because some people will share messages with extended circles thinking only the people they have in their circles will see it, but that is not true. Because of the extra reach this means those posts could be seen by people you don’t want reading them such as your boss, spouse, fringe friend, A-lister, etc. So please be careful. When in doubt, don’t send it out.

Conclusion

Like I said earlier, I could be off here, especially with the public and extended circles parts. Please let me know if you have a handle of this stuff.

Going forward, I truly wish Google would give us public circles which would allow us to share our circles and allow people to join/leave at will as well as public circles that can be managed like public groups where an admin can curate the members (such as for a company with many employees). We also need ability to nest circles within other circles.

Google Like it or Not?

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Doriano

Eventually, Google will need to make some decisions regarding the way they let people like things if they want to have any consistency across all of their products and services. For example, on its new Google Plus network you can click the plus one button to “Like” something. See image of G+

However, on google’s popular video platform, YouTube, you still see the traditional like button. Notice it also has the dislike (thumbs down) button which is not available on the new G+ network. You can’t give a minus one or negative one to anything, merely +1 or take it back.

Now let’s take a look at Google Buzz, it’s earlier attempt at social networking. You will also see the “Like” button which becomes an Un-like button once you like something so on this platform (like on G+) you can only like something or take it back. You cannot give a negative vote as on youtube.

Eventually, Google should provide the same methodology in its UI across all of their products. They should also make sure that the information all flows back to its flagship social network which will obviously be Google Plus.

Share and Share Alike

The same decisions regarding consistency should also apply to other functions on each service such as sharing and commenting. If you want to share something on Google Plus you don’t have many choices right now. You can only share it inside of Google Plus. You just have to decide to share it on the public stream for all to see or to one of your curated circles.

Note: There is a third party Chrome extension that allows you to share something to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn but I’m addressing built-in features from Google itself.

On YouTube you have many more options to share something. You can email it to anyone you want or share it directly on Twitter or Facebook. You can also get the embed code (in some cases anyway) and embed the video on your website. I give Google a plus one for adding its Plus One button to YouTube. Nice job! Also noteworthy, if you +1 a video on YouTube it will show up in your Google Profile under the +1′s section! However, nothing you +1 inside G+ or in a google search shows up yet. Double boo there.

On Google Buzz you will notice a similarity to Google Plus where you can only share something on Buzz itself. However, they did include the email option which was good.

Adding Your Two Cents Worth

The way Google handles commenting will change for sure too. They must become a model of consistency if they want people to embrace their platform for commenting. Already there are many people who have stated they would be willing to make Google Plus comments their commenting system for their blog. This is a big deal as platforms such as Disqus have spent years integrating with thousands of websites. Facebook comments has slowly replaced Disqus and other commenting systems so it is possible for Google Plus to infiltrate this market if they provide a worthwhile platform.

Google Plus offers a simple and straight forward system for commenting on someone’s post. You enter your comment and post it. Nothing much to do.

An important thing to note here is the fact that Google Plus does not thread comments or conversations. It’s very twitter-like which is hard on the eyes and makes following the flow of conversations very difficult. You will see someone responding to a comment way down on the vertical list and have to do a lot of scrolling up and down if you care to make sense of it all. This must be fixed at some point. You can add the person’s name in your comment which helps a little but not really that much. Seeing the comment and then the reply/response just below it makes the most sense.

On YouTube, well, no one really reads the troll infested comments on there do they? In any event, let’s compare how it handles commenting. As you can see, simple entry form but they do offer the option to leave a video response which makes sense since it’s a video service. They also display the number of characters remaining for comments (500).

Also worth noting, there’s no threading either. Just a series of comments…no context.

Google Buzz offers a similar plain vanilla commenting system like Google Plus. Just post a comment, you can’t reply to a commentator directly either.

It also does not thread comments or conversations.

Note: Google should have a dedicated tab in Google+ that shows all of the comments we’ve made. Right now it only shows posts we’ve shared on G+, not any of the comments. They should follow the examples by Disqus and BackType which Twitter just acquired.

Summation

So there you have it. An examination of the three core functions that Google will need to address at some point across all of its products:

1. How do people like something? They must replace Like with the Plus One button everywhere.

2. How do people share things? They need to offer wider array of choices as they do on YouTube. Yes, even to Twitter and Facebook.

3. How do people comment? They should offer a rich text experience with easy bold/italics formatting and the ability to thread conversations by replying to comments.

Google’s Circle of Strife

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Doriano

I’m really liking Google+, the new social network from the search giant. Everyone who’s gotten into the field test release for G+ seems to be liking this effort much more than Google Wave and Google Buzz which is a good sign. However, everyone has complaints and suggestions too. What else is new?

Here’s my two cents worth. It centers around what I consider the best feature of G+ which is the Circles feature. In short, you can create groups for your contacts so you can isolate and control where your posts go, in theory anyway. There are some flaws in this design of course. The worst flaw has been fixed already though which involved the embarrassing situation that allowed people in your private circle to share your post publically. The Google dev team has been ultra busy patching holes like this so much praise must go their way. However, there are some other leaks that should be attended to sometime soon.

For example, let’s look at this situation. You create a private circle called XYZ for your small company and add about 10 people who work with you. Whenever you post something to this XYZ circle, only those 10 people you added to your circle will see it. That’s perfect and as designed. However, is this process as streamlined as possible? Not quite. Because this process is one-sided, it only truly works for the person who created the circle. Also, in order to make this form of communication a two-way street, all 10 people from XYZ must create and curate their own private circle for XYZ and must add all of the same people if they are all planning to stay in sync and on the same page. Obviously, for other types of circles (groups) this doesn’t matter as much. For example circles for good friends, relatives, etc.

Here’s another problem. So let’s say you create a new circle called Film Buffs and add some folks that love discussing films. So you try to share posts that involve movies to this film buffs circle instead of the public stream…which is what you do on twitter. Everything is shared in the public stream on there except if someone has a private account which is rare to see.
On G+, even though you added people who are into movies to your film buffs circle it does not mean everything you see will be about films. Every public post made by the members of your film buffs circle will appear in this circle, doesn’t matter what it’s about. The same holds true for you if they create a movie circle and add you to it. That movie circle will display all of your public posts regardless of the topic.
How do you handle this? Should there be an option to block public posts and only display posts shared directly to the circle? This won’t work because there is no centralized management of circles. Everyone creates/maintains their own circles.So unless the members of the circle agree to create synchronized circles with similar memberships it will not work.

What’s the answer?
I think a public circle where someone controls its visibility and membership would be the answer. For example, once employees of XYZ join Google+ they can do a search for public circles and find their official XYZ circle (Friendfeed did this well). The members are already curated for them and members are added/removed automatically. You can decide to join or leave any time as well.

Without centralized circles everyone will have to create and curate their own which is fine for most situations but there are many cases where we can save a lot of time and effort by having official circles available. It would avoid duplication as well. Right now, people are having trouble labeling people…does this person go to social media circle or marketing or both? Friend or acquaintance?

The other problem with relying on individuals to create all of the circles is that people will post something to a circle they created about something and the people they added to the circle will see it, but if someone replies to the post only those that happen to have created the same exact type of circle with similar people added to it will even see the reply. Unless the reply is marked public then many of the members of the circle won’t see it…which defeats the purpose of creating the circle in the first place. We are supposed to post to the public stream for all the world to see or to a particular circle for only those select people to view and respond to. As it is today, Google’s circle design is flawed and should be fixed someday. Judging by the amazing response from the google development team so far I will bet it’s only a matter of time before they improve the process of communicating with circles on G+.

Note: G+ needs to improve Sparks too by integrating Google Reader and/or Buzz but that’s another story for another day.

Exporting Everything Out of Google Docs

Posted on August 8, 2008 by Doriano

If you’re an avid Google docs user as I am, then you’ll get to the point where you will want to be able to export all of your docs to your local computer. If nothing else as a backup.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a built-in easy way to do this. However, there is a way to do it thanks to Firefox and some greasemonkey scripts! I just gave it a shot and it works like a charm!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install Firefox if you’re still stuck in the 1990s (www.firefox.com)

2. Install Greasemonkey

3. Install the GoogleDocs Download Script

4. Install

5. Go to Google Docs and select the documents you want to export (to select all documents in a folder/tag remember to click the Select: All option at the bottom of the screen.

6. Click on the new Download Your Documents menu and select the format you want to use for your documents.

7. Your selects will appear in a new page like this

8. Right-click and select DownloadThemAll. Select the local folder you want to download/export your google docs to in the Save Files in: field. Click Start to download.

9. That’s all folks! You’ve just exported all of your Google Docs!

Conclusion
While this method works and isn’t that hideous, Google could make this process a whole lot easier if they got off their rumps and implemented an internal option to do this for us from within Google Docs itself! We also need an auto-sync option that will keep copies synchronized online and offline via Google Gears. Until then, we at least have a way to do this ourselves. Thanks to Peter Shafer for the excellent GoogleDocs Download script!

Enjoy and to quote Nick Burns your company’s computer guy, “uh, you’re welcome!”

What You See Is What You Get

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Doriano

Google has finally added a much needed View Menu to Google docs. You can now view your documents with fixed width and margins much like desktop word processors! This is a step in the right direction for online web applications if they seriously want to challenge traditional desktop applications.

While this might not seem like a big deal at first glance, it really is more important that it appears. This gives Google docs a much improved look n’ feel that closely resembles Microsoft Word which means improved user acceptance. It will also attract more bloggers to use google docs for posting directly to their blogs. Here’s a screenshot of the publishing options:

Final Thoughts:
I applaud Google for adding this and other new features. I look forward to the battle between desktop apps and web apps!

Doriano Carta

Renaissance 2.0

Tag Archives: Google

PaiChart for G+ Circles

Exporting Everything Out of Google Docs

What You See Is What You Get