The n-Category Café

Another way is, when inviting someone, you can instead “share this link with a group of people” to invite any number of people.

In theory, click on that link, and you can get a free Google+ account…

And when the invite did come through, it was to the alternative gmail address I gave John. Just one data point, though.

Since people at Google know a thing or two about software, I figure they’ll keep tweaking and optimizing Google+ until most people are happy. I’m happy already because all of a sudden I get to listen and talk to lots of interesting people, in a way that’s a lot easier than firing off emails or roaming from blog to blog.

I never tried Myspace and Facebook, so perhaps this is old hat to most people… but Google+ is developing a different sort of ethos, and I suspect one that suits me better.

I’m hoping Google+ will make it easier to develop the Azimuth Project into the highly interdisciplinary thing it needs to become.

You can put people in multiple circles. So, for example, you could choose to have a set of outgoing circles and a set of incoming circles, and put people in the appropriate ones. Then use the outgoing circles for your posts and the incoming circles for reading others’ posts. (So far I haven’t bothered much with circles, but I thought I’d point out that what you want is possible.)

My annoyance is that I can’t filter someone’s stream based on my interests. For example, people have to ask John to be put into his circles if they want to see various topics. It would make more sense for John to just send out public posts with various tags, and let people filter them based on the tags they are interested in. The current method just doesn’t scale.

Dan, I think that what I want and what you want are really the same; I just expressed myself poorly. The problem with “incoming circles” is that whatever John posts will appear in all circles that he happens to be in, with no distinction based on what sort of post it is.

I figure they’ll keep tweaking and optimizing Google+ until most people are happy

That would be nice. Unfortunately, some of their recent tweaking of their applications like Gmail and Calendar has made me less happy. But perhaps I am not in “most people”.

And now I will stop complaining about Google and let us get back to doing productive things. (-:

For what it’s worth, I talk to people a lot both here and on my blog Azimuth. These blogs allow anonymous and pseudonymous comments.

in re:

Interesting piece on our local NPR yesterday about how Google ? and others are tracking all our data and
then searching and sending us stuff based on their algorithms assumptions about what we want to see!

As someone who thinks carefully about online postings, and who used to use a “consistent pseudonym”, I can say that I’m not worried about government surveillance. This is for a combination of two reasons: firstly if a government wants to do that they have the resources to do this using non-online sources. But there’s a second non-obvious consideration: sometimes governmental (including police, council, government contracts, etc) background checks are required for various things, and again these can find out various things you wish they didn’t know, whether using online or non-online sources. However, the people who do this are trained and will know how likely it is you’ll find, eg, a drunken escapade in a random individuals past, and in particular they are able to put what they discover in a reasonable context. My worry about putting unguarded stuff online because everyone has access, the people who are doing searches on you may put weights on the various things about you they find out which aren’t “contextually reasonable”. Combine this with the fact that they may not tell you what they’ve found that they believe is problematic (particularly since “officially” people like job interviewers aren’t allowed to do this in places like the UK) and there’s a potential for ill effects which you can never rectify.