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0 pointsdekhn7y ago0 comments

There was an entire presentation made by a product manager at Google on circles: https://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-netwo...

The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).

it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.

Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.

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smelendez7y ago

I think the real solution to this turned out to be using different apps.

Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.

derefr7y ago

That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it.

So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. I feel like something that took that model and made it into a social network would be popular. (No, not like Reddit. Picture, say, Tumblr, but you can't reblog something if it's not from your community, instead only being able to create your own original link-post to it that doesn't propagate its interactions back to the community of the post it links to. So you have one shared piece of Original Content, but each community has its own sandboxed graph of likes and shares and comments and other interactions built around that Original Content.)

airstrike7y ago

> So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord.

You mean IRC?

2 more replies

crunchiebones7y ago

how do you prevent people from reblogging?

varrock7y ago

One thing the younger kids are doing is making separate accounts altogether. I know for certain I follow my younger brother on his "family approved" account and not his "you're my close friend" account.

leoc7y ago

That's a very logical approach to identity. Try the veal!

cxseven7y ago

I always wondered why Facebook didn't just syndicate its site, i.e. allow people to congregate on differently-themed sites as they wish, while using the same infrastructure underneath.

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