That's Not Allowed! Social Media Thought Police  
In July of 2011, in the very first weeks on Google+, I came across posts by +Dain Binder and +Ahmed Zeeshan attempting to define an etiquette for our interactions here. I was a bit taken aback by the sudden desire for rules in a landscape yet explored. How could we know good, better, or best ways of interacting much less declare the one, right way? 

People asked me netiquette advice and I wasn't shy about giving it. But I always prefaced my advice with these cautions: Think first, what are you are trying to accomplish. What works for me might not work for you. There's more than one right way to do this.

Most importantly, just because I apply a standard to myself does not mean I wish to impose it on you.

What is this impulse to begin imposing rules before anyone has a chance to "misbehave"? Are we so afraid of the case where everything is allowed unless it is explicitly forbidden that we feel we must immediately begin forbidding?

In the linked article, The Social Media Thought Police  +Peter Strempel similarly notices "... that in any group of three or more people, there is an immediate drive to establish rules and punishments for infractions against rules that don’t yet exist, and transgressions that have not yet occurred."

Anyone who must abide by the rules of an American HOA (Homeowner's Association) soon realizes that rules are there to have an infraction to hang you for, just in case you ever cross paths with the little petty tyrants in charge. You learn to keep your grass mowed and your mouth shut. Welcome to Stepford. On the surface, a pleasant community. And for that surface pleasantry, what do we sacrifice? Our willingness to dissent lest we cause a ripple in the harmony?

That's what we tell ourselves. That we want to maintain the harmony and make the world a safe and pleasant place for all. But what we really mean is that we're afraid. Afraid to speak up, to be singled out, to be labelled as a troublemaker, to be expelled.

Online communities are no less tyrannical. Thus I remain suspicious of netiquette and even community standards. Our communities are too rich and diverse for one standard to satisfy them all. It's neither possible nor desirable to be forever in a group hug, or sit around the campfire singing Kum ba ya.

I came across these comments I wrote to +Lori Friedrich  on October 29, 2011. "There is no one right way to use Google+. Everything depends on context and intent, thinking and being thoughtful.Thoughtfulness is not the same as blindly following netiquette conventions."

I still believe that. As Peter concludes, let us not be silent bystanders just to keep the peace. Let's not lobotomize our consciences because we fear it will be considered bad manners to cause a fuss.
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The Social Media Thought Police: Peter Strempel Jan 19, 2013
http://peterstrempel.com/2013/01/19/the-social-media-thought-police/

Google+ User Etiquette and Protocol: Dain Binder, July 13, 2011
http://www.dainbinder.com/2011/07/google-user-etiquette-and-protocol.html

Google+ | The Etiquettes: Ahmed Zeeshan, Sept 2, 2011 (revised)
https://plus.google.com/+AhmedZeeshan/posts/XHVtBJgQ6JG
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#netiquette  

UXG+: Information Scarcity 
Or "How Google+ fails to be even a pale imitation of Twitter"
Or "Emptiness does not equal simplicity in design"

A lot of people make fun of the 140 character limit to Twitter and wonder what quality of communication can exist under such constraints. Why bother? But Twitter has a purpose and it does what it does very well. It's is like the 21st century version of the telegraph. Short bursts of breaking news. It's responsive and agile and, on the downside, often this agility emphasizes an emotional response, an unthinking mob mentality as rumors spread through the hive mind in pulse.

The strength in Twitter's visual design is in its information density: that important balance between communicating a lot of information in a small space without it seeming cluttered or overwhelming. In Twitter the message is still the focus. It takes up the majority of the screen space. In the same amount of space that I can get six tweets, I can see only two of the new Google+ posts. Twitter's design is clean and simple. Google+ is vacant.

In the most recent Google+ redesign, we get huge cards that are mostly blank or cluttered with design elements that take up space but convey little information.

Not only does Google+ display less information in the same space, it is so bulky and slow, and grinds up so much CPU on my laptop and  so much app space on my phone that it's tedious to use it as a Twitter replacement.

So why does Google+ want to be a pale imitation of something else. Why does it insist on positioning itself as the better Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, or Twitter. I don't need Google+ to be any of those things because those things already exist.

When Google+ first came along it was different. That's why I liked it. It provide a slew of features I couldn't get elsewhere. So, dear Google+ Team. I will tell you what I told you a year ago and two years ago. Stop trying to beat the others at their own game. Make your own game. Fill in the void. Give us what's missing in those other platforms. 

I gave up Twitter for you. But looking at these screenshots side-by-side, I now think I was wrong.
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#waronwords   #newgoogleplus   #uxdesign  

Google+ UX: Fostering a Sense of Community
In a comment to my post on the Empathy Graph, +Yonatan Zunger , the chief architect for Google+, agreed that what set Google+ apart for him was the sense of community.

Yonatan wrote, "...my own experience has been like that too. I thought I was unusual in this regard. If there's something about the dynamic of this place which is encouraging greater empathy and community, then it's something I want to encourage as much as humanly possible...And do you have thoughts on what would encourage it further?"

How do the dynamics of the Google+ user experience foster a sense of community? This is such an important question that I’m going to turn it over to my community here on Google+ as well as write my own (very long) answer below.

Rules for This Thread
I want to focus on what is working and how to leverage that to make it work better. What I don’t want are the same grumbles and complaints that we’ve hashed out on our other threads. We are here. We are using Google+. We’ve had some great experiences. The conversations, despite the perceived hurdles, go on. What works? Be specific and concrete. Offer solutions.

In order to do that, be personaI. I want you to think about some of the best conversations that you’ve had while you were here and what lead up to them.
• How did you meet the people in that discussion?
• Did you already have existing ties?
• What specific elements of the user experience provide the special dynamic that entices you into these wonderful conversations we have with each other? What makes you engage with strangers? Stop and leave a comment? Circle someone you don't know?
• What design elements could be incorporated to encourage greater empathy and community?
• Is there anything that's holding you back?
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Terminology
I know these terms are cringe-worthy but until someone coins some new ones, this is how I'm defining them.
• social graph: the map of your existing connections.
• interest graph: a network of people sharing information centered around common interests, topics, or causes (such as political activism). A connection may exist but is not required.
• empathy graph: a sense of community, a support group. The connection usually evolves from shared interests as conversations move from public topics to more personal ones.

A sense of community stems from a sense of ease. You can't share your innermost thoughts and feelings until you feel comfortable. The level of inhibition in a discussion varies wildly both by topic and by the personalities types of the people involved. (I've written elsewhere how Google+ has created an environment that has made those of us more introverted comfortable.)

Case Study: Me
Dynamic: A Fresh Start, Egalitarianism and Meritocracy
From the very first day I've been on Google+ I've encountered helpful people. I think the initial sense of community stemmed from the fact that we were all starting from scratch and, in that sense, as equals. Members of the Google+ team actively engaged with us. Tech gurus conversed with tech newbies.

Because we were all starting fresh, Google+ provided a place to establish a reputation . In my case, I didn't need to be a big tech journo for people to listen to my advice; I just had to give good advice.

[Aside. Google+ all but destroyed this sense of community with the Suggested User List. The feeling that the best would rise to the top, the motivation to be one's best self, was replaced by a sense of unfair favoritism. When even a big name like +Robert Scoble says, "I'm not going to play that game. Take me off the list." you know that feelings have soured. Does anyone starting on Google+ today have that same sense of the possibilities, of working together, as we did eleven months ago?]

Dynamic: Real World Interactions: Friendships Develop
In the real world, not everyone you interact with is a friend. You aren't born with friends. Friendships develop over time based on proximity and interactions. Thanks to the Internet, our friendships are no longer constrained by proximity. The focus here is entirely on the interaction.

Google+ does a much better job of modeling this than Facebook. In a social network, you define your perimeter (your existing connections) and then you act within it. On a sharing network, you share what interests you and that attracts people who share that interest.

+Yonatan Zunger said, “All of my such experiences started out as discussions about interests, but veered off as we got to know each other more.”

I think that's exactly how it works. In my own case, I once mentioned in a post that I was currently out of work. +Youssef Hachhouch left a commiserating comment and said that he was in the same boat. That little pat on the back raised my awareness of him. So a couple of days later, when he wrote a post about some frustration, I stopped by and left a word of encouragement.

His post was a turning point for me. It turned into a conversation with half a dozen people that went on for over three days. Have you ever been at a conference where you strike up a conversation with a small group of strangers. As things close down, the conversation is so intense that you all move to a bar to keep talking. And you talk late into the night, animatedly, full of discovery and the recognition of "Wow! You do that, too. I thought I was the only one!" That was the dynamic.

What elements of the Google+ interface made that conversation possible?
1. Notifications.
The participants frequently addressed each other by @ name, which sent a notification and drew people back into the conversation. This was especially important because not all the conversation happened in real time. The participants were scattered across Europe and America over many time zones. I'd write something, go to bed, and wake up to find that half a dozen people had left me more questions or comments. Then I'd have to scroll up the long thread, read what had been written overnight, and respond with questions for them.

These days, I notice that people other than the author of the post, now use notifications in order to call someone into a discussion. This is just as it should work! Unfortunately, notifications get bad press. I think because of the potential for abuse by spammers, that notifications are mistrusted and poorly understood by a lot of new users. A lot of people overly limit them -- cutting off the potential relationships. Certainly there have been times where I've had to tell someone not to spam me but I allow notifications from "Anyone" and have had few problems with spam. People need better education on the power of the Notification system. The wording in the interface could be improved, too.

How to Improve Notifications.
Notifications are the equivalent of an Inbox. Reading notifications is the first thing I do when I get on Google+.
1. Make it easier to get read them. The redesign, I'm sad to say, has made this more difficult because there is no longer a special button for the Notification stream -- you have to click through the Notification window to get to "View all notifications". When you are having an involved discussion, you have to move to the post view. It's just too hard to read in the little notification window.
2. I wish I could use the j-key shortcut to click through my Notifications stream (when in the main window).
3. The Notification window seems unstable -- I've lost too many comments there while typing them.
4. I still get the sense that I'm missing notifications. I see things via email Notifications which float away in the stream of the Notification window.

Bookmark to Read Later.
People have started leaving a comment in post to "bookmark it" so that they can come back to the discussion later -- pinged by Notifications that the conversation is ongoing. Google+ needs a star system like Gmail. A star, which bookmarks a post for the reader, is different than a +1, which is feedback to the author.

2. Comments.
Conversations are the soul of a community. The one-line cheer or boo, the LOL, the "Awesome" are not conversation. They are surface chit-chat. The +1 button handles that transaction. A +1 or an online comment may produce a kind of community spirit akin to rooting for the same sports team. A pat on the back is also always appreciated. But these are just the baby steps toward developing empathy. True empathy is when you move to the next level and have that heart-to-heart (or mind-to-mind, for us T-types) conversation.

In a conversation, comments are essential. This should be obvious but even calling them comments gives off the connotation that they are less important, merely annotations to the main text.

In the original Google+, a post could be anything. It could be a blog post, where someone is broadcasting and the audience merely cheers or boos in response. Or it could be a discussion where both halves of the interaction are equally important.

The Google+ redesign changed the feeling that a post could be anything. Comments are muted (originally almost grayed out). The focus is on the author and on the post. Communication is one way. Now Google+ feels more like blogging than talking. This subtle but important change retards the sense community because it hinders discussion. And from the initial reaction to the redesign, you must have seen how people noticed it.

On the plus side, Google+ comments work now because:
a. They're easy to leave. You don't have to sign into a blog or be friends with the author. (See note below.)
b. They feel conversational, like messaging, but one isn't limited by length. This encourages people to tell longer, more involved stories, just like they would in real life. It enables people to move from the superficial cocktail chatter, to some really deep discussions.
c. We can edit our comments. (This is probably the biggest reason I've abandoned blogging, Twitter, and even Gmail for Google+.)

[*Note: I've seen a suggestion recently for Google+ to implement some sort of karma score to alleviate the problem with trolls. I don't have problems with trolls, nor do I see it much in my circles -- so I may be insensitive to this problem. I know that some people have said that they can't have a public discussion on a controversial issue because of troll attacks. However, I'm wary of any system which would make it harder to leave comments. Again, I think it is the egalitarian and open nature of Google+ that has made it possible to form communities.]

How To Improve Comments.
Many people involved in intense and meaningful discussion leave long comments which I want to refer to. Comments need to be objects in Google+, just like posts. We can already +1 and edit or delete them, as we do posts. But we need to be able to reshare and link to them, too. This would enable us to spin conversations off, for example, from a public post to a private aside or a smaller discussion.

3. Dynamics: Trust and Safety (Sometimes Strangers Are Better Than Friends)
The people who are the most supportive aren’t necessarily the people who are in your existing social network. In fact, just the opposite. Strangers can be encouraging because they don't know anything about your backstory. They don't know your baggage. Moreover, it doesn't cost them anything to offer encouragement. Strangers aren't going to suffer from the consequences of your decisions. So it's easier for them to say, "Go ahead and go for it! Live your dreams." than it is for your friends and family.

How to Improve Trust and Safety
Google+ blew it on the nym wars and drove off a lot of people who would have been here building support communities. I hope that when the Blogger integration comes, that you are more sensitive to the kind of anonymity people require when asking questions of sensitive personal nature -- the kinds of questions that are too sensitive to ask even their closest friends. The needs of that kind of personal support community are like the needs of people at an AA meeting. (Maybe there's no place for them on Google+.)

[Tangent: Is it possible that after we establish an account with our real names, that there could be community support pages which we could access via a pseudonym? Google+ could track our pseudonym but that connection would be invisible externally. This would be a non-voting pseudonym which would be allowed to comment only on these specially created discussion forums/pages. For example, let's say there were community support pages on autism, drug problems, spousal abuse, or job hunting.]

4. Dynamics: Discovery
First of all let me say that there is not a single person from my social network with whom I engage on Google+. Not one. Some of my existing connections have accounts here and I sometimes share things with them (or cross-post links to Twitter or Facebook to entice them over). I occasionally receive comments from a friend of a friend. Nor did any of my online friends from blogging or Twitter follow me to Google+.

That means my entire sense of community grew entirely from the interactions I've had on Google+. Currently 12,000 people follow me on Google+. I follow about 1200. I distinguish between my sources (the people I follow) and my audience (the people who follow me).

So how did I find anybody? My community began with the openness and the helpfulness of the Google+ team in the first weeks of the beta -- your willingness to talk to us users provided the sense that we were collaborating on this new system. You, +Yonatan Zunger were one of the first people I followed. From there, I just started adding people who seemed (from their comments) to be particularly helpful, curious, or insightful.

In addition to comments, I also look at who the person I thought was interesting was following. Unfortunately, the habit of most people circling anyone who followed them and adding people they don't know via Shared Circles has pretty much ruined this strategy. It is impossible to know who are "real" connections and who are strangers under evaluation. When we had the Incoming stream, we could evaluate people without following them. But no more.

How to Improve Discovery
To recap, the natural evolution of our relationships starts with discussions over shared interests which then veer off onto more personal tangents. Thus the most important way to improve the empathy graph, our sense of community, is to provide tools for the interest graph.

1. The discussions on how to do this are out there: tagging posts (categories are not the same as keywords), community pages and event pages, better search tools, suggested topics lists...help us find each other.

2. Don't give us a better social network. Understand that there are a lot of people on Google+ because we don't want the Facebook experience. We don't want a different model of car. We want an airplane. Google+ has it within its grasp right now to give users something Facebook can't provide: the interest graph and a sense of real community.

3. Don't destroy synchronicity. Don't box me in. Don't limit my options.
The best thing about the original Google+ was the sense of equality. A post could be anything. Anyone could talk to anyone. We were all exploring this new territory together, discovering new ideas, and making friends in the process.

The worst thing about the Google+ redesign is that in an attempt to simplify Google+, there is a sense of favoritism, of sacrificing one group for another, a feeling of limiting our options, of dumbing down, the loss of egalitarianism. Post content is favored over comments which in turn means blog type posts are favored over forum-like or discussion posts. Graphics are favored over words. Celebrities are favored over non-celebrities. The feeling of meritocracy is disappearing. Existing relationships are favored over the potential of discovering new people. (This last thing isn't a tool dynamic -- it's a problem with education and marketing.)

Summary: Simpler is not always better.
The richness of human life comes from the complexity of our human relationships. Embrace complexity.
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Now I'm calling on my various communities to answer the question: How do the dynamics of the Google+ user experience foster your sense of community?

• The people always willing to lend a hand, who reach out to the newbies and provide that sense of a helpful friendly Google+ community: +Mark Traphagen +Ryan Crowe +Johnathan Chung +Ardith Goodwin +Denis Labelle +Marc Jansen +Rahul Roy +Jaana Nyström +Christina Trapolino +Tetsuya Kitahata +Ronnie Bincer
• My fellow bridge-builders: +Brian Titus +Eileen O'Duffy +Debbie Ohi
• The group at the bar who got me talking excitedly about things other than Google+: +Daniela Huguet Taylor +Youssef Hachhouch +Armida Evony +Amy Knepper +Alex Schleber +Anita Law +nomad dimitri +Paulissa Kipp (and all the introverts who are uncomfortable being mentioned by name...you know who you are). Also the people who stop by frequently to chat: +Greg Cunningham +Cara Evangelista Reynolds +Meirav Berale
• The people who have been changed by their experiences here: +Ted Ewen +Eli Fennell or who love the convention/conference feel of it +Cliff Roth
• +Max Huijgen who sees in Google+ the potential for the MOAF (Mother of All Forums). All the tl;dr writers, warriors in the war on words, people fighting for the interest graph, and Google communities : +Alexander Becker +Dieter Mueller +Colin Lucas-Mudd +Peter Strempel +Tormod Renberg Lerøy +Bob O`Bob
• And +Kimberly Chapman who brought the suggestion of karma ratings for comments to my attention.

Social Networking: The Empathy Graph
I've written a lot about how Google should ditch the social graph for the interest graph. This week something new emerged. While some of my circles were discussing the #waronwords and how the most recent Google+ redesign favored graphics over text, a whole other communtity was writing about "How Google+ Changed My Life". As it turns out, sometimes strangers are more supportive than friends. Why? Because we don't carry any preconceived notions about you.

I discovered that while I've been mapping an interest graph, I've been developing an empathy graph.

Google+: A Sharing Network
I prefer to call Google+ a sharing network rather than a social network. A social network presupposes that an existing relationship must exist before one can share. "Sharing with friends" is very narrow worldview. In contrast, on a sharing network, relationships evolve as the result of your engagement; relationships are not the prerequisite for sharing.

On an old social network you check in with your friends to see if they are doing anything interesting. On a sharing network, you notice interesting things being said and begin interacting with the people who said them.

Escape from the Tyranny of Small Town Life
Facebook is like the small town that you couldn't wait to grow up and get out of. Everyone knows you and watches your every move. Sure there's friends and family. But there's also gossip, backbiting, and bullying. Those close to you expect you to act a certain way; when you try to break out of your rut, they accuse you of not being yourself. You are defined by your past history and every slight is remembered.

Google+ is the bustling city you escape to. Everyone is a stranger. But, oh, the excitement! The information overload is overwhelming but invigorating. You lurk. You go to a few hot spots. You hang around. You take classes. Pretty soon you notice certain people who catch your attention. You give them a friendly nod. You strike up a conversation.

In the big city, we are free to be ourselves precisely because we do not know each other. We aren't carrying the baggage of our past nor are we weighed down by obligations for the future. We are socializing without our usual social strictures. We are not constrained by old expectations. We are not defined by our past history. We can encourage someone without worrying how their decisions affect personally. In short, we can accept each other in this moment, in this conversation.

So, Google+. Stop telling me how I can share with my friends. Sure. You already provide the tools for people who want to do the Facebook thing. But you can do so much more. Be so much more. We came to you because we reject the Facebook model. Let's create something entirely new.

Related: The Empathy Graph Curated
Note: +Chris Pirillo Our Google+ experience doesn't "suck". Here's why.

* G+ Has Changed My Life (For the Better)
"I'm tired of opposing idiots and bigots, I want to build with people who want to build a better world."
+Ted Ewen https://plus.google.com/u/0/110455526548551633166/posts/gB5WTk4BZ5h

* G+ Is My Tool to Change Life
+Youssef Hachhouch responds to Ted's post.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109907447383307087458/posts/9MEu2SxJYor

Google+ makes it possible to dump toxic relationships without the drama of publicly "unfriending" someone.

* Getting Personal
"My ultimate decision to move to G+ also coincided with the OWS movement, and I know the precise moment I made the decision to leave FB after observing a similar bullying taking place amongst friends of mine who were polarized by the real world brutality OWS was making apparent...leaving FB to get away from the endless sniping that was happening amongst an extended group of people I thought would have behaved differently...I moved to G+ at what was possibly the lowest moment in my personal life and in a way being here kept me alive."
+P E Sharpe https://plus.google.com/u/0/107066609145001672622/posts/A5mVFT5kkw5

I was tormented by Facebook for years. The job I had required me to be on it professionally. Privately I got stalked by all those past 'friends' that just had to share everything but the ideas I'm interested in." +Youssef Hachhouch (comment on P E Sharpe's post)

* Lessons Learned in Life on FB
‎"In life you’ll meet a lot of mean and disrespectful people. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they've got issues and you're on a different level than they are. That will help keep you from reacting to their insensitivity. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance. Walk away, keep your dignity and always be true to yourself."
+Paulissa Kipp https://plus.google.com/u/0/116071275946594200077/posts/2mcyiKAxrGy

"On Facebook I was lonely among friends, so lost in their Lists of people they shared a more superficial connection to, often never having met in real life, that they lost contact with the quality people. So far, at least, G+ is a more tightly knit and supportive community where "strangers" find each other through passions and interests, and a desire to see this place succeed." +Eli Fennell (comment on +Mike Elgan's post) https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/AfZMXrtZxUQ

Our social graph relationships are mostly accidents of proximity. Do we want to be stuck with people just because our paths crossed once upon a time?

* Facebook is anchored in the past
"'I need more interesting friends.' ...said unthinkingly it gives a very false idea of the differences between these two social networks, as if Google were anti-social. The problem really lies in that Facebook, due to how it works, is anchored in the past, and Google+ -- and I'm not sure if it was intentional or a product of its users -- works in the social network of the present... aah! did you think I'd say future? but no, I think this is present day reality, even if only at its beginnings."

"On Facebook, we're scandalized by those 150 friends that people have (on average), "who has 150 friends in real life? this is stupid!" and they're right, we have a lot of connections, but very few "real" friends, and Facebook doesn't encourage us to change any of that. In Google, it's the other way around, "where you going with 50 persons in your circles, you ass! That's why you're saying it's dead!", because here the network that is formed around you is made of smaller links, but more numerous: our armour is lighter, a better fit and protects us better."
+Daniela Huguet Taylor
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101642015660380479673/posts/24rrgrRAFd4

* Google+ should ditch the social graph
"Google+ is not going to beat Facebook at its own game. It's going to beat Facebook by changing the game. It's going to beat Facebook by understanding that people aren't using the Internet as a tool to map their existing lives. The Internet is an entirely different landscape in which we live and form new relationships."
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/JCkxasKMQVY

So onward, pioneers!

* Facebook Connections Don't Always Make People Happy
"I never feel, here, like I'm lost in the noise, rather I feel like I'm a valued fellow traveler in a new frontier. I wonder if this is how the folks who migrated along the Oregon Trail to new homelands felt about their own "pioneer community"?"
+Eli Fennell
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110619855408549015935/posts/RsaHYSBnm2s

Protest Japanese Style
To call attention to Japan's new tougher laws on illegal downloads, protesters (wait for it) picked up litter.

Apparently after the Diet enacted laws which could mean jail time for illegal downloads, websites for various government agencies were hacked ... but by Anonymous groups outside Japan.

This may be the first Japanese-led Anonymous group operation. “We prefer constructive and productive solutions,” the group said in a statement. “We want to make our fellow citizens aware of the problem with a productive message.”

The Visual Web: Killing the Discussion
The introduction to the new Google+ reminds you to "Liven up your post" with a photo or a video, cuz, you know, words are soooo dead.

With the recent successes of Instagram and Pinterest, analysts are hailing a revival of an old trend in communication (with its roots in stone age cave paintings). Pictures! "Andrew Lipsman, the vice president for industry analysis at the research firm comScore, called [Pinterest's] popularity among brands one more example of “the rise of the visual Web,” along with Instagram (which was recently acquired by Facebook) and Facebook’s timeline feature, which is heavily driven by images instead of text ."

Mobile versus the Desktop: Tool Limitations on Text
As we consume more and more of our content over mobile devices, we are losing our tools both for consuming and creating text. On a mobile device, even responsive, voluble readers can hardly be expected to do much more than tap out an acknowledging +1 with our thumbs or, if we are really motivated, a "LOL". The marketers worry about the lack of audience engagement. Would they also expect us to clap without hands? Give us a keyboard where we can touch type.

Opposable thumbs gave us an evolutionary advantage but thanks to our mobiles we're now all thumbs. I saw one poor man at SXSWi pawing at his iPad screen like a puppy, as if his fingers had fused.

I know some of you are wonderfully adapted to typing with your thumbs. And limitations often result in new art forms as the creative among us test the boundaries. In Japan, the mobile phone beget the thumb novel, keitai shosetsu fiction serialized for text messaging.

In 2009, Barry Yourgrau wrote, "...the keitai shosetsu phenomenon hasn’t so far headed west...mobiles play a different role in Japan. They, not computers, are the principal portal to the internet. "The majority of my students (19-22-year-olds) don't have a PC," notes Yuki Watanabe, a PhD candidate in Tokyo. "They're of the keypad, not keyboard, generation. The lingo of texting is normal language to them."

In 2012, we seem to have caught up. In the introduction of the Google+ redesign, Vic Gundotra touts "Conversations you'll really care about". Unfortunately, the limitations of reading and typing over our mobiles hamper in-depth discussion and influences the design of our tools. It's hard to "cherish the conversations that unfold" when we have to open every long comment separately -- even when viewing on the desktop. (Maybe that's what unfold refers to.) This is time-consuming, and annoying. Being constantly required to fiddle with the tool distracts our attention from the content of the discussion.

Opening a comment also causes the left text margin to jump. Our eyes strain trying to find the beginning of the next line. (I can no longer find an example of this so maybe it's been fixed.) As with using any kind of tool, the user should be focused on job, not the tool.

So what tools does Google+ provide for conversation? Per Vic:
• Full bleed photos and videos that'll make you really proud to post
• A stream of conversation "cards" that make it easier to scan and join discussions
• An activity drawer that highlights the community around your content

Look at a screenful of conversation cards. How many lines of actual content text do you see per screen?

Driven by Images
Kelly Mooney. "[People] love scrolling for minutes or even hours looking through photos by friends, celebs and brands or on topics they’re passionate about. With Instagram, there’s no need to share any sentiment or craft the perfect post. Words aren’t the magic here; pictures are." (Emphasis mine.)

Vic Gundotra. "Simply put, we're hoping to make sharing more awesome by making it more evocative. You know that feeling you get when a piece of art takes your breath away, or when a friend stops by with unexpected gifts? We want sharing to feel like that, every single time." (Emphasis mine.)

So the visual web is like TV channel-surfing on steroids. We j-key through the conversations cards, passively staring at images which reduce us to our primal, emotional state. Awesome! Do we stop there with what Wordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and call it a success? Or do we press forward and meditate, mull, analyze, synthesize, and create something of our own? Do we have a real conversation?

I can't settle for appeals to emotion; I want thought-provoking ideas.

A Picture's Worth
I enjoy seeing beautiful, startling, evocative photographs and paintings on Google+. But I get tired of that old saw, "A picture's worth a thousand words."

Show me the picture that expresses, for example, all that +Peter Strempel does with his words.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110695872689494369839/posts/6ufQzefD6se

Despite the setbacks, we lovers of words don't give up. No. We keep trying to make it better. You can find some of us in +Dieter Mueller 's Homo digitalis circle.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110168665701189567035/posts/YBFJinfnREb

-------------
Sources
The Visual Web
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/business/media/marketers-find-a-friend-in-pinterest.html

Kelly Mooney: The Rise of the Visual Web
http://www.resource.com/wethink/the-rise-of-the-visual-web

Vic Gundotra: Toward a Simpler, More Beautiful Google
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/toward-simpler-more-beautiful-google.html

Barry Yourgrau: Thumb Novels -- Keitai Shousetsu 携帯小説http://www.keitai-shosetsu.com/
---------------
#newgoogleplus

Google+ Should Ditch the Social Graph
In the real world our relationships rely on proximity. We learn to make friends (or at least how to politely tolerate) the people near us: our family, our schoolmates, our neighbors, our coworkers and colleagues. Of course, many great friendships grow from this soil. We discover common interests and grow closer. We date the cute guy at work; we marry the girl-next-door.

Relationships evolve in the other direction, too. We join a club or a group. We discover the excitement of talking with people who share our passions, who never get bored or roll their eyes at the trivial details which bore our spouses, family, and coworkers. The Internet has made it easier than ever to interact with people who share our interest irrespective of proximity.

So who are our real friends? It depends on you. But don't expect a lot of overlap.

Facebook owns the social graph.
By default, Facebook entries are private and friendships reciprocal. You can share publicly but it feels like your at a party with all the people in your life, past and present. For the most part, the conversation remains at the level of cocktail party patter.

Google+ has the potential to own the interest graph.
Despite all the marketing of circles, many people tend to share publicly on Google+ and interact with strangers based on shared interests. When our friends and family are cajoled into joining, they are bored by our tech talk (or whatever passion). This is our social graph asking to be excluded from our interest graph. This is our mom rolling her eyes when we get excited about the latest API release.

We should let them go.

FB is social for the real world. But look around you in the real world and look at all the people staring into their phones. We live in the Internet age. And social on the Internet is the interest graph. Our relationships are no longer constrained by proximity.

Google+ is not going to beat Facebook at its own game. It's going to beat Facebook by changing the game. It's going to beat Facebook by understanding that people aren't using the Internet as a tool to map their existing lives. The Internet is an entirely different landscape in which we live and form new relationships.

Explore the Potential
Advice to the Google+ team. Stop selling Google+ short. Stop selling it as a social network. Give us tools to find people who share our interests. Stop focusing our attention on the people we already know and help us find people we want to know.

#interestgraph #socialgraph

Concentration and the Myth of Multitasking  
Of late my attention has been fractured. I find that I cannot do one thing without thinking of half a dozen others. I begin and am distracted. My mind meanders. My thoughts wander. I cannot settle. Unsettled I become more restless and so accomplish nothing.

The tools I use to work have become less of the solution and more of the problem because they constantly interrupt my work with their demanding notifications. Particularly and specifically the integration of Google+ into the rest of the Googleverse means that I can't check my mail or do a search or have a chat window open with my remote office without the constant distraction of the red notification box. Only Google Docs provides a haven.

In order to work, I'm forced to reclaim my desktop, to drop out of the cloud and put my feet on the firmer ground of my desktop machine. But the desire to see the red notification box light up is now ingrained and the temptation to check it remains, even when I shut off my connection to the Internet or shut the laptop completely and go to my other desk to write by hand.

Last December, in "The Power of Concentration," Maria Konnikova defined mindfulness as "less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way... the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention." 

Here she describes my dilemma. "Multitasking is a persistent myth. What we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things happen as a result. We don’t devote as much attention to any one thing, and we sacrifice the quality of our attention."

She goes on to describe some studies which provide evidence that we can train our brains to concentrate, and that doing so not only provides a sensation of control, but physically changes the brain, increasing connectivity between the portions of the brain which control attentiveness and our ability to resist distraction.

How do I reclaim my focus?  The promising news is that we can train our minds to concentrate and attend, that the structure of our brain can continue to develop and change even into middle age and beyond.

If I have a goal for the new year, then, it is to unitask: to focus on one thing at a time and to complete it before beginning another, to be mentally present and to pay attention.

Related  
The Power of Concentration
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3

6 Mindfulness Exercises
http://www.pocketmindfulness.com/6-mindfulness-exercises-you-can-try-today/

Google+ Uglifies Profile Page Cover Photos
Another "improvement" that makes the words illegible against the background and once again destroys whatever unique layouts we designed for ourselves.

You know...it really does make a difference to a design when you resize elements and change their locations.

Updated: So basically, they've bled the photograph into the text and BLURRED both. Great design choice. Thanks, guys.

Updated: Goddamit! All that EXTRA space devoted to the new rollover hovercard and they can't even manage to get one line of text on it without cutting it off!

Now I "Works at Making a Simpler, More Beautiful Goo..." Great!

Updated: Ugh! What's with that ugly blue line under to highlight the tab I'm on.

Updated: As soon as you scroll to look at someone's posts, the giant profile pic turns into a thin bar. This is cleverly done, but now the banner picture disappears. It was so much nicer when I could see the banner from anywhere on the page...when it was a BANNER not a magazine cover.

#googleplusupdate  

Google+ Tips: Blocking Gone Wild  
From the early days of Google+, I've told people don't be afraid to block. It doesn't have to be negative. It's your way of taking control of what's in your stream. I sometimes even preemptively block people based on their comments elsewhere so that they will never troll (or is the better metaphor trawl) my stream.

But lately, it seems that people are blocking for every little reason. They are blocking longtime followers over a difference of opinion. And this behavior makes it difficult reading threads where little communities have built up around a core group commenters because the blocked parties can't see each other's comments but everyone else can. This makes for some very odd conversations like trying to explain what's everyone's talking about during Christmas dinner to your deaf aunt.

+J.C. Kendall has written a blog post about blocking etiquette. I tend to shy away from etiquette posts because I'm definitely not a "one-size-fits-all" kind of person. However, especially for newbies, it's interesting to see what other people's standards are, consider the kind of behavior that might get you in trouble, and think about coming up with some standards of your owns.

Mine are not nearly as harsh as J. C. Kendall's. For example, I can't see this as a reason for blocking someone at all.

11. You have circled me, but won’t let me see your profile, or you have not provided a profile. Google+ is for the purpose of discovering like-minds of interest. When a person circles others, while not sharing their own information, is considered bad-form. Someone (not me, of course) lacking patience might block you for it.         

A lot of people are just readers. They've circled you because they want to read your stuff. You are under no obligation to circle them back or even go look at their profiles. If they are not providing content, there is no reason to circle them back. But to take it a step further and block? How many writers block their readers?

I'd like to chime in on the conversation with J.C., but apparently he's blocked me. Go figure.

Build it and the Trolls will Come
If you've been involved in any passionate discussions on G+ lately, you might have noticed that the trolls have arrived. Currently their mode of operation is to circle people with whom they disagree, cut and paste their garbage message on every public post those people make, and scrape those people's contacts and then follow their friends -- which enables them to insinuate themselves into any conversation that the person they're trolling is reading.

Edit Your Profile
The safest thing to do is hide the list of people who you follow from "Anyone on the web". You can also select which of your circles are visible. (See screenshot.)

I suggested this a couple of weeks ago when the extended circle spam began. I know we all like to share and to see who someone is following because 1. we can see if we have anyone in common, and 2. we can discover new people to follow. But once a troll starts harassing you and your friends, your options for dealing with him are very limited.

Blocking
Sharing a post publicly gives read permissions to the world. Thus blocking does not (and should not) prevent anyone from reading a public post. If the post is yours and you've blocked someone, this should prevent the person you've blocked from doing two things:
1. Commenting on the post.
2. Seeing the post in his stream even if he has added you to his circle. He can still go to your Profile page and see the post -- just like anyone on the Internet (even if they don't have a Google+ account) can do.

Blocking indicates that you do not want to interact with this person on your posts or see them in your stream. It is not the same as reporting someone for a violation. All the Republicans in America could block all the Democrats in America and all it would mean is that they didn't want to listen to them.

Shutting Down Comments
However, once a person has commented on a post (before you discover that they are a troll and block him), you cannot revoke his read/write permissions on that post. You choices at this point are pretty onerous.
1. Block him.
2. Shut down comments on the post.
3. Delete his comments.
4. Reshare the post.
Yes, I know the discussion will be cut in half and that people in the original discussion won't know about the redirect (unless you edit the original post to tell them). But once a troll has trashed your post, it's trashed.

Limited Sharing
Sharing only to our circles is a pretty unpalatable suggestion to most of us in these early days of Google+. We are still using the discovery tools to find and build an audience. If we wanted to remain in the confines of a closed system, we'd stick with Facebook or LiveJournal. If this is our only option, then the trollers and spammers will rule the Public posts and the rest of us will live in enclaves. It's impossible to "get the message out" if we can't post publicly.

Community Blacklist
When you block someone, you prevent them from commenting only on your posts, not posts of the people you interact with. Ultimately, it is up to the person who shared the post to block the troll, not you. So talk with them.

You might want to create a blacklist which you share with a select circle -- so your friends have a heads up on who to block before the troll attacks. Remember, once a troll is in a conversation, you cannot revoke read/write permissions for that post.

Abuse of Power
Being obnoxious or irritating or having a dissenting opinion is not against the terms of service. I keep reading comments that we should be able to block, shut out, and report people who invade our social networking "space". As long as that space is a public forum, you can't really want that to happen -- or else those same strategies will be applied to shut down your opinion.

Related
Let the Right One In
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/ijexSUrwi9Q

Extended Circles Spam and How to Stop It
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/8nQ2ZCZmT1s

Rise of the Visual Web: The Visual Version
First, I want to clarify that my issue with how text is treated in Google+ has nothing to do with content producers. It is not a manifesto against photography or graphics. Google+ gives each of us the ability to choose what we want to see in our streams. I like to read. I like to look at pictures. And I especially like it when artists explain their pictures (as +C.J. Shane and +Cliff Roth do).

My concern is entirely with how the redesign of Google+ has made it more difficult both to read and write. Would I be pointing these issues out on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or Pinterest? No. Because none of those platforms has the potential for the discussion of ideas that Google+ has. People in my circles are exulting -- saying, these discussions are changing our lives.

Google+ can do the status update thing and the photo-sharing thing like the other platforms. But Google+ could do more and provide something that none of the rest do. Why should Google+ settle for being one of the pack when it can set itself apart?

The Experiment: Is the Layout Designed for Reading?
+Vic Gundotra said that a goal of the redesign was for us to "cherish the conversations that unfold". Do you think it meets that goal? Did the redesign make it easier to have conversations, easier to read and write? Or did it impose new barriers?

I explored the What's Hot stream and took screencaps of the first 15 posts in order. What I was looking for specifically was how much text is displayed in a single screen on my MacBook Pro. That is, is the layout designed for reading?

With the advent of conversation cards, the boxes drawn around every element of a post, the excessive amount horizontal whitespace between elements in the stream, and the huge amount of screen real estate dedicated to navigation, there's almost no room for text. Write more than a few lines and your post is collapsed.

We readers are left to lap up the stream in drops. Take a look for yourself. We might as well be reading Twitter and writing keitai shosetsu (thumb novels).
-------------------------------------
#newgoogleplus

Stanford University Courses, Online and Free: Spring 2012

Computer science courses:
* Computer Science 101 http://www.cs101-class.org/
* Machine Learning (one of the offerings this past fall) http://jan2012.ml-class.org/
* Software as a Service http://www.saas-class.org/
* Human-Computer Interaction http://www.hci-class.org/
* Natural Language Processing http://www.nlp-class.org/
* Game Theory http://www.game-theory-class.org/
* Probabilistic Graphical Models http://www.pgm-class.org/
* Cryptography http://www.crypto-class.org/

Entrepreneurship courses:
* The Lean Launchpad http://www.launchpad-class.org/
* Technology Entrepreneurship http://www.venture-class.org/

Journals  
I've been using Moleskine hardbound grid-lined journals for the last few years. I have scores of mismatched journals dating back to when I was ten and the Moleskines were as close as I've ever been to settling into a system.

Last month when I needed a new one, I couldn't find exactly what I wanted. Since the shop didn't have my usual grid-lined style, I settled for unlined. My handwriting is illegible enough within the constraints of lined pages. Without, it was darn right unruly.

So I went back and tried the Leuchtturm1917. It is almost the same size, just 1/4 inch taller...the added space gives a line for the date. Other bonuses: page numbers and a blank table of contents to fill in. The paper is nice. I like it better than the Moleskine.

Imagine my joy, then, when I wandered in Half Price Books 20% off everything year-end sale and saw four journals priced at $5.99 (before the discount). I grabbed the four remaining on the shelf. That should keep me in journals for a couple of years.

I use the little bamboo journals to keep more static notes...like notes on plants for the garden, or wine lists, or lists of books to read, or passwords. They are small enough to fit in a pocket, so I can carry one everywhere, even places where I might not have my journal. The bamboo-derived paper is very nice but the binding is poor. So they are good only for temporary notes.

The little cheap flip pad notebooks are for even more temporary notes than that...grocery lists and calculations.

It's not all  Post-it notes around here.
--------------------------
Related  
+Amy Knepper inspired me to make this post by writing about her journals.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/108131446424328262298/posts/R1SaR94ULTe

+Peter Strempel discusses his weapons of choice because good paper demands good pens.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110695872689494369839/posts/ADsu75nYYP3 

Review of the Leuchtturm 1917
This person also thinks they beat the Moleskine.
http://www.infobarrel.com/Moleskine_Notebook_Killer_-_A_review_of_the_Leuchtturm1917_dotted_journal

UX G+: Reply to Comments
I noticed a few subtle changes to the interface yesterday. Potentially the most interesting is the Reply button on comments (which apparently not everyone can see yet). Is this a first pass change headed for threaded comments in Google+?

In a way I hope not. Although I initially wished for threaded comments, I now think they would fracture the conversations on threads. I like Google+'s sequential conversations and the fact that if we want to direct our remarks to someone, or several someone's we explicitly address them. Somehow this seems more personal and conversational to me. More natural.

In my example conversation in the screencap, I replied to +Alexander Becker and Google+ popped his name at the beginning of the comment. But what if I also wanted to add a few more people to my tangent? I can still do that by hand, but if Google+ adopts threaded comments, then other people are left hanging outside the thread.

Also with sequential comments.  Also the next person who answers sequentially has the option to take the focus back to the original post, or follow us out on this tangent.

Aside. What's the deal with new features that you can see only when you mouseover them? Are we supposed to be constantly mousing over the entire screen real estate looking for new features?

Threaded comments or no? Which do you prefer?
---------------------------
#googleplusupdate  

A Fresh Start in a New World
+Peter Strempel's post The Amerikaner Hypothesis got me thinking about my own cultural identity. Initially I meant to test Peter's hypothesis by putting on the mantle of the Amerikaner to see how it fit, to move from the abstract and general to the concrete and personal. I agree with most of what Peter said. And so instead of arguing his points, I've decided to explore further. I want to know: If this is my character, why am I like this?

Perhaps like anyone in a dominant (domineering?) group, it's hard for me to understand that my experience is a consequence of this group identity. For people inside the group, our experience is so much the norm that we're unaware that there is anything outside the group. Just as it is difficult for women to convince men, non-whites to convince whites, or the poor to convince the wealthy that the world operates on a two-tiered system, it's hard for me as an American to understand the pervasiveness of American pop culture elsewhere.

Also, to me, many of the things that Peter identifies as Amerikaner seem to be more differences between generations than nations: "the Seattle-to-LA backbone of pop culture, virulent anti-intellectualism, accessory 'gadgetisation', nano-second attention spans, and a bottomless appetite for only ephemera...Throw-away, fleeting things are highly prized for those fleeting moments, and then forgotten and devalued as if they were always worthless."

Yes. I'm restless, easily bored, spend more time watching TV than reading serious books, follow memes, write in acronyms, quote from The Simpsons and I love my gadgets and toys (not just my various Apple products and other electronics, but tools of all kinds -- woodworking, gardening, and cooking).

But my inconstancy and fascination with novelty are just the negative extremes of the same impulses that give rise to my best qualities: my unbounded curiosity, my desire to explore, and my inability to accept things as they are. I can't help tinkering because I want to make things better. Novelty and innovation both spring from the desire for the new.

Pioneer Spirit
Thinking about what Peter said made me realize that I draw my cultural identity more from my family history than any sense of national character. Maybe it's because I lived abroad both as a child and as an adult, or because I'm married to a Brit, or because I've never lived in the suburbs. But maybe it's because I'm descended from people for whom abandoning the past and starting over was a way of life.

On my father's side, my first ancestor in the new world, Daniel Brainerd, arrived alone in 1649, when he was eight years old. To pay for his passage over he was indentured to a farm family. When he reached adulthood, he became one of the founders of Haddam, Connecticut and lived a long, prosperous life. None of his wealth came my way. I'm descended from the line of youngest sons of youngest sons. As the country settled up, there was nothing for us. So we were always moving west, always looking for the next new thing, the next best chance for prosperity. My grandmother's grandfather did well enough in the California gold rush that he returned to the midwest and bought 500 acres of farmland along the Mississippi -- all which was lost to my family in the Great Depression.

New Frontiers in Cyberspace
I arrived on Google+ the first week. An unexplored territory. I left my family on Facebook. I abandoned the social network I spent ten years developing on my blogs and Twitter. And it felt great to leave all that behind. To be unencumbered. Is this what my ancestors felt when they said goodbye to the old country? The irresistible promise of a fresh start.

I realized in writing this that my antipathy toward Facebook has nothing to do with the toolset. That is, there is no improvement Facebook could make, no technical change that it could implement that would make me want to be there. Why? Because I view it as already settled territory. It's already built out, the result of someone else's vision. I have nothing to contribute. Why be there?

On Google+ there is a sense (even if it's only imagined) that we are building this place together. Explorers and pioneers and settlers. Isn't that why we talk about it endlessly?

Concerning the work that we've all put in to building communities on Google+, Peter worries about "the ominous threat of impermanence, of being edged out altogether, and of losing any benefit that might have accrued to the significant unrewarded effort that went into building a small corner of the Google imperium."

In the family where my character was formed, that's pretty much life. I've descended from a long line of people who made something out of nothing, who struggled with the insufficient tools, who succeeded for awhile, lost it all, and were forced to start again.

So I focus on the process of building and accept the idea of impermanence. Will I be sad when it's over? Of course. Will I think my time here was wasted? Absolutely not.
-------------------------------------------------------
Peter Strempel: The Amerikaner Hypothesis
https://plus.google.com/110695872689494369839/posts/cvTRmBoJJ8a

RESHARE:
Communities: Culture versus Policy  
Some of us just resist being herded in a certain direction even when it's a direction we'd like to go. If it were up to us. If we were allowed to explore and wander about on our own. Yep. We'd head that way. But not when we're being pushed and prodded. Then we dig in and refuse to budge. Or charge off in a different direction. Just to show we can.

I feel the same way about building communities. In theory, I believe that communities should set their own standards and be self-policing. But this is because I believe people should decide for themselves what is acceptable. I shouldn't decide for you and you shouldn't decide for me. We should just trust that we can all be sensible here. And expect it.

In practice, what always seems to happen is that a few people take the idea of "policing" very seriously and start waving their batons at you accusingly to tell you that you're doing it wrong. They start writing rules, creating policies.

When culture turns into policy, it's the end of culture. And community. And creativity.
--------------------
via +Gideon Rosenblatt 

Reshared text:
Culture vs. Policy, reminded me of my blog post from a few years ago: http://blog.softwareontheside.com/2010/10/culture-beats-process.html

Google+ Tips: Notifications  
This seems to be the message you get when a third person mentions you on a thread where the owner of the thread has blocked you.


     [Some third person] interacted on a post with you.
     This post no longer exists.

-----------
HT +Max Huijgen 

Google+: Designed for Introverts?
Recently I discovered my niche -- my group of INTx-types here on Google+. Boy, have we given lie to the myth that introverts are shy. The stories we've shared! These last couple of weeks have been exhilarating but exhausting. No matter how much introverts enjoy people, we need time alone to recharge.

Emotional Investment
We agreed that Google+ is a great platform for introverts. Why? As +Alex Schleber explained it, for introverts to participate they have to believe "that the other people constitute an actual cause/energy worthy of investing more energy into." So how does Google+ encourage introverts to make that emotional investment?

If someone is a stranger to me (emotional currency bank balance at zero), then the effort to interact, the mechanism for expression has to be simple and yet flexible. On this point, I think Google+ scores big.
* Commenting is quick and easy. I don't have to sign in to each different person's thread like on blogs.
* Once I'm in a discussion the back-and-forth can be as quick as chat -- but allows for long remarks. Introverts like in-depth discussion.
* Because I'm writing, I have time to think before I speak.
* I can edit my remarks; so I'm less self-conscious about making mistakes.
* I can @ mention someone and spin off a private conversation.

Yes there are many improvements that can be made (especially in making it easier to find each other in the first place) but in this post, I'm focusing on the positives -- especially on the mechanism that make it possible for us to write quickly and encourages us to follow through and leave a comment. I can't even remember the last time I left a comment on a blog.

Slow Intimacy
Introverts are not big fans of "instant intimacy". We want to get to know you slowly, over time. And if things don't work out, we'd like to be able to slip out gracefully.

I think that Google+ provides a very nurturing environment for introverts. We can stop to answer someone's question or comment on a post and we are not required to reveal too much about ourself initially(1). We can just pat them on the back with a +1 and disappear into the crowd.

As we become more brazen, we leave comments. Eventually we're in passionate discussions.

If someone turns out to be a dick, we can disappear without fanfare. (No public "unfriending". No drama.) Because we have an easy escape hatch, we feel freer to explore intimacy over a long time -- and step back when we feel uncomfortable without hurting anyone's feelings.

I guess the next question is how can we make the extroverts on Google+ equally happy?
===========
Footnote: (1) Except our names. Google+ lost a lot of introverts in the nym wars.

----
HT +Alex Schleber , +Marianne Tamminen and +Youssef Hachhouch for encouraging me to take this post public.
-----
link via +M Monica

Judging You by What You Do, Not Who You Are
I don't want to know your name. I don't want to know your race, your gender, your age, height, or weight. I don't want to know the color of your eyes. I don't want to know your marital status, where you live, or what diseases you have. I don't want to dismiss you as part of that group, some ~ism, or that alien other.

I want a chance to know you before I make that judgment.

So don't come to me with a seal of approval from your little group, from your private club. Don't hold up your litmus test. I don't want to know whether you're an atheist or a Dominionist. I don't want to know who you voted for. I don't want to know your political views on global warming, gay rights, or abortion.

Not yet. Not first thing.

I want your words. I want your ideas. I want your observations. I want you to tell me the reason why. Why you liked that movie. Why you eat bacon on ice cream. Why you can't support my line of reasoning.

And the other stuff, it will come out naturally. Our relationship will evolve. Trust will grow (or be broken). We will confide more and more with each other. Or we'll go our separate ways. We will encourage. We will disappoint. We'll get into fights. We'll comfort.

Sharing demographic traits provides an immediate but false sense of intimacy. Your badge, your name means nothing to me. I want to peel away the layers and discover.

Google+: Unpaid Laborer  
Every time the Google+ team makes a change, an impassioned response swells from a small group of us users followed by an equally predictable roll-of-the-eyes from another group calling us people who care a bunch of whiners who can't deal with change. To add insult to injury, we are then reminded that this service is free, we don't have to be here, and our masters Google owes us nothing. Translation: So SHUT UP. 

Yesterday +Steve Faktor took this line of reasoning one step further (just a joke, I know, Steve. I saw the emoticon) by calling me a "fellow freeloader". The implication is that it is I who owe Google. They provide a service to me which I use for "nothing"—if we define the only worthy transactions those where money is exchanged. (My mind wanders to wives and whores.) What is my worth in this new economy where we expect everything for free and no one is paid?

I'm not a freeloader at all. I invest my time and my mental energy on this product. I do three jobs on Google+ for which I usually get paid good money:  
  1. I provide testing and feedback to the Google+ team.
  2. I document features and train people on this platform.
  3. I produce the original content that draws an audience.

If Google paid me the rate they paid me when I worked for them as an independent contractor for the number of hours I've put in on this little project, I could afford a really, really nice vacation abroad right now. And maybe even health care.

However, I've never expected a monetary reward for my efforts on Google+. I've been thankful for the exchange of ideas. Beyond that, I've had some interesting social interactions, some good, some bad. But to call me a freeloader, as if I have proffered nothing and thus should expect nothing, rankles. 

We whiners and complainers are the unpaid labor force that keeps Google+ going.

In the olden days of desktop apps, software companies employed test teams and technical writers/trainers. In the Cloud app era, every user is a guinea pig...just release the feature and let the users sort it out. I'm not a big fan of "throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" development.

In April after the first big redesign, I said much the same thing but with a more positive spin, in an attempt to reassure the Google+ team that criticism was a good thing, that it was an indication that people were using the product and cared.

"Users who care enough to speak up are your most engaged users. We are using Google+ to do things. We have visions for what we could accomplish with it. We expend a tremendous amount of effort stretching its boundaries, using it for purposes never imagined by the developers, instructing others, forming communities, and encouraging others to try it. We are your active community. We are your fellow innovators. We take the time to examine what bothers us, to articulate our problems, and to brainstorm solutions."  

Time is money. It just doesn't pay my bills. 

Related  
Engaged Users Are Collaborators (April 14, 2012)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/NAWCgUEv7pW 
If the Google+ team paid attention to me, they should be discouraged to notice how little I wrote about the change to notifications. I made a few comments to people who pinged me into conversations but otherwise made little effort to educate others about the changes or even explore them much myself.

+Steve Faktor The Goal is Jobs
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101420285783101939251/posts/8864vPpEWzy
In response to +Michael O'Reilly 

+Peter Strempel Explaining the Sartrean "other's" influence on the individual via the mechanism of labor
https://plus.google.com/u/0/103158907747936316985/posts/cBxbFKEAMQH 

+Alexander Becker reshare of +Fraser Cain's post Are You Notification Worthy?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100500197140377336562/posts/1UbcYbyxVQw
The thread in which Steve Faktor chummily called me a fellow freeloader.

Willful Ignorance: Raising the Next Generation  
via Ken Ham, director of the Creation Museum in Ohio Kentucky, USA: "I just love teaching the children the truth about dinosaurs—that they were made on the sixth day of creation alongside Adam and Eve. I love to teach them how to think correctly about origins based on Job 38:4. I.e., when someone says “millions of years,” these children will now know to ask politely, “Were you there?” Oh, the secularists hate me teaching children the correct way of thinking. They go ballistic, knowing kids are being taught think in the right way concerning the truth about origins."

"I made sure all these young people understand that God created the universe in six literal days about six thousand years ago and that most of the fossils came from the Flood about 4,300 years ago. Yes, thousands upon thousands of children are learning the truth, and we are making sure that we can reach as many children and young people as we can, including at our Creation Museum. Bill Nye, who is really the “Humanist guy,” is out to get kids and brainwash them into secularism and atheism. We need to do all we can to capture these kids for the Lord Jesus Christ."
--------------------------
#creationism  

G+ Dumps Geek Girl, Asks Popular Girl to Prom
If +Mike Elgan is correct, "Right now, Google+ is populated by technically savvy younger males, as well as wealthy suburbanites." In the first two months on Google+, tech professionals have dominated the public discussion. I have no statistics on how young, male, or white they are but (in my circles anyway) they are good at what they do. Whether they are scientists, writers, software developers, cranky old political analysts, or photographers -- I select people based on merit. The cream of the crop. The elite.

On August 24th, shortly before Google's Recommended Users list went live, +Tom Anderson made this point in an article for The Next Web. (Emphasis mine.)
"Now take Twitter. When the 140 character wunderkind launched in 2006, it was only used by tech nerds. Just one community, that knew each other by name, if not in person. Then John Mayer signed up. Now there was two communities. The tech nerds, and the John Mayer fan club. Then there was Diddy. Suddenly Twitter was of interest to people who liked hiphop & rap. One celebrity at a time started to build sub-communities on Twitter. And make no mistake, Twitter went out and recruited them."

And I thought, that makes sense. Celebrities are like the anchor stores at the mall. They attract the masses who stick around and shop in the little stores, too. But the reaction to Google+'s Recommended Users list has been more like the reaction of Mom and Pop stores in a small town when the big box stores move in.

So which is it: cooperation or competition? Are celebrities like the anchor stores? good because they bring more people to Google+ and more people here is good for everyone. With trickle down economics we might get only the crumbs but there will be a lot more crumbs. Or are they like the big box stores? bad because they compete for the same audience with the little guys and run us out of business?

Then it hit me. Wrong analogy. People are passionately opposed to the Recommended Users List because this feels personal. For two months geeks ruled in this little beta world. They've experimented with the system, sent feedback, written countless booster articles for Google+, participated in discussions with Googlers, played and networked. They've been good, supportive friends. And then Google+ turns around and asks the popular girl to the prom.

Google+ Shared Circles: Help or Hindrance?
Of course, the answer depends on what you're after. If you just want big numbers that give others the impression that you're a hot shot, shared circles might be your thing. If you are looking for people who want to share on topics of mutual interest, shared circles might get in the way of finding them.

From the article, "Followers that do not engage are effectively worthless beyond creating an impression of social importance. While they may contribute to a herd mentality causing others to connect to seemingly popular individuals, as seen above, they might have an equally negative impact when judging our influence."

So how do you want to define yourself? By the content or by the numbers? 
---------------------------
via  +Eileen O'Duffy and +Colin Walker 

Feature Request: New Pre-Defined Google+ Circle: Followers Readers
#featurerequest #circles

Intended Audience: Granting Read Permissions
When sharing with people in a circle, all an author is doing is indicating who is allowed to read the post (setting the read permissions). If you've ever followed a link and gotten a 404 message, it's probably because someone who had read permissions shared it with someone outside the author's intended audience.

When I share with my circles, the people in those circles who have also added me to their circle can see my post in their Home stream. If they haven't added me to any circle, they can see my post in their Incoming stream. It's important to remember that I'm not sending the post to those circles or notifying anyone in them that I've written a post. (There are ways to do that with user-defined circles or individuals, but it is not -- and shouldn't be -- the default behavior.)

Google+ has three pre-defined circles:
- Your circles: everyone you follow (even if they don't follow you)
- Extended circles: everyone you follow plus everyone they follow
- Public: everyone on the Internet

What's lacking, currently, is a way to make a post visible to the people who have indicated most strongly that they want to see it -- the people who have decided to follow me subscribe to my posts, my Incoming stream.

Asymmetrical Relationships
One of the core strengths of Google+ is it allows us to have asymmetrical relationships. Not being forced into a symmetrical relationship (I follow you read your posts so you are required to follow me read mine), lets relationships both develop naturally and degrade gracefully (no one has to slam the door in someone's face with an "Unfriend" notification).

Reading: To enable asymmetrical relationship, Google+ includes the Incoming stream. This allows me to read the posts of people who follow me have decided to read mine. (In blog terms, the Incoming stream contains the people who have subscribed to your RSS feed.)

Sharing: However, Google+ currently lacks the other half of this equation. I can't share posts with the people who follow me have subscribed to my posts (my Incoming stream) unless
1. I follow them back, or
2. I publish a post Publicly.

Why not just publish everything Publicly?
I was attracted to Google+ because it allows us to publish selectively. This is the big plus -- its advantage over other platforms.

Here's some examples of why you might want to make posts visible to your Incoming stream (the people who have elected to follow you) -- but not Publicly.

1a. Me: Brainstorming and research before publishing an article.
When writing an article I often want to get feedback from my readers. I may ask them questions about their own experiences in order to get different perspectives on a topic I'm puzzling over. I may ask them to contribute quotes.

At this point in the writing process, I'm not ready to "publish" my work (share with the Public circle -- with everyone on the Internet). Even if I decided to do so, the Internet outside of Google+ would not be able to provide any feedback to me (leave comments). So what's the point?

Updated: Another Example
1b. Me: Getting to know you
When I see a lot of people I don't know in my Incoming stream, I'd like to encourage them to introduce themselves -- to leave a comment telling me how they found me, or why they followed me subscribed to my posts -- something to help me decided whether I want to add them to my circles. This is not a message I want to publish on the entire Internet (Public). Nor do I want to add someone to my circles in order to have this conversation with them.
2. +William Shatner : To reward his fan base.
William Shatner shared this message with his fans. "Apparently one can only have 5000 plusers in total in all their circles. I do apologize for those not yet in one of my circles. I would hope that Google lifts this limit or comes up with an alternative so I may add you."

Of course, William Shatner does not need to follow his fans for them to see his Public posts. However, he may want to reward his fan base by sending them special messages not visible to everyone else on the Internet. Being able to receive selectively visible messages (to be part of a select group) would be further incentive for people to follow William Shatner. This, in turn, would increase his own "popularity" numbers on Google+.

Currently, the only strategy available to William Shatner is to follow everyone back and then share with just his Fan circle. Not only has he already exceeded his limit (which in the future might be increased) but this becomes a time-consuming chore for people who have more than 5000 (or even 500) followers.

Related Articles
Navigating the Raucous Stream: Tips for keeping down the noise by managing your information stream.
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/hNkCJGE8omA

Let the Right One In: Why it's not a good idea to let everyone into your house and why you don't have to.
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/ijexSUrwi9Q

Google+ UX: Communities vs Circles When Publishing Public Content  
Thanks to all of my readers who pinged me excitedly last week when Google+ Communities came out. I decided to sit out the first week of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies every major change to the Google+ user interface and watch the fray from the sidelines. But now I stick my toe in.

So far I like Communities. Since they've been implemented, I'm seeing much more interesting posts. A lot of the noise in my streams is being filtered out. And I've even rediscovered some of the people who I met in the early days of Google+ whose voices had been drowned out or filtered out subsequently. So for me thus far, a thumbs up for Google+ Communities.

In the discussion of +Gideon Rosenblatt's post I've linked to, opinion seems divided on the idea that public Community posts are shown on our Profile pages but not the Home streams of people who follow us. Thus, people who have subscribed to us as individuals no longer see all our public posts.

People who don't like public Community posts showing on the author Profile page think Google+ is showing too much information and becoming cluttered. People who don't like that Community posts aren't dumped in the streams of the people who have subscribed to us as individual writers feel that our readers are being cheated: that Google+ is now showing too little information to the people who want to follow us.  

Our Choice as Readers
I understand that there is an adjustment we need to make in terms of how we subscribe to public content. Initially we had no choice but to subscribe to content by author; that is, we followed someone. This has never been the same as "friending" them. Following is an asymmetrical relationship. It is us as readers identifying the authors we want to read.

However, even though we followed someone and all their public posts were dumped into our stream, it was no guarantee that we ever saw those posts, especially as some frequent posters often drowned out the words of less frequent posters.

For those of us who have been here awhile, this might be a good time to prune some of the "dead wood" in our circles...people who we've follow but who aren't consistently providing good content. Or not. You can keep everyone so that your Home stream is still populated with chances for serendipitous discovery. 

There is no one right answer. So enjoy the options.

Our Choice as Writers  
As writers we are also faced with new choices. We can publish under our own name and thus to the audience of people who have subscribed to us (the people who circled us). Or we can publish under a Community...which is like publishing for a magazine...where everyone who reads that magazine will see our public posts.

I think it depends entirely on the content, thinking through who is the appropriate audience, and publishing it for that audience. The idea behind both Circles and Communities is to "share with those who care". So think a moment who that might be. Ultimately that means realizing that not everybody wants to read every word we write.  

People have been complaining about the noise and lack of filters on Google+ since day one. But it seems that no one wants to filter himself.
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#communities   #circles  
HT +Brian Titus +Eileen O'Duffy +Cara Evangelista +Andrew Eva +Colman Carpenter +Mark Traphagen 

RESHARE:
Lifehacks: Use the Buddy System
"If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public."

Reshared text:
Why are rape-prevention campaigns so often directed at women? This one, from Scotland, makes more sense.

Google+: Reputation Engine or Social Network
Professional or personal? What kind of networking do you do on Google+? One of the coolest things about Google+ is that it gives us the ability to do both. You can write public posts which are searchable by anyone Internet and build your reputation in whatever field your passion leads you. And you can write limited-share posts to share status updates with your friends and grand-kid photos with your parents.

Public Comments Are Public
But what happens when someone in your "People with Embarrassing Green Spots Support Group" circle posts publicly and you respond with encouragement? Well, your comments on a public post are also viewable by anyone on the Internet. While some of us have no problem with bringing the issue of embarrassing green spots out in the open, others of us cringe at the idea that our colleagues will assume that we, too, have embarrassing green spots. Once you're stuck with a label, it's hard for people to look past the spots and see you as a whole person anymore.

Most of us have gotten into a personal discussion on a public post, the same way we do in a restaurant. We focus on the two or three people at the table and shut out the public around us. As long as discussions with your vegan friends flowed in separate streams from your BBQ-enthusiasts friends, Google+ did a pretty good job of modeling real life.

Topsy's Chilling Effect
Now Topsy brings comment search to Google+. While most of us will find this a useful tool for revisiting conversations we've lost track of, it has some serious repercussions.

1. Anyone can track your public comments.
Any careless remark, even to encourage a friend, can be taken out of context or blown out of proportion. And the Internet's memory is forever. Your social life has just leaked into your professional reputation.

And, yes, I know the old adage about my mom and my boss. But the sands shift. A topic that wasn't controversial yesterday is controversial today. And suddenly employers who couldn't discriminate against you for your religious (or irreligious) beliefs are given an opt out licence to do so in the name of their faith.

Or your formerly loving spouse hires a divorce lawyer. The thoughts you shared are now twisted and used against you.

Or the person thinking to hire you has a personal horror of little green spots. You might not have little green spots yourself but you're sympathetic to those dirty creeps that do.

2. A tool for stalkers.
We've already had a problem on Google+ of people following people to whatever discussion they engage in and leaving abusive comments. We've hidden our "following" lists and gotten our friends to block them. Now Topsy makes it easy for them to find you wherever you enter the public space for open discourse.

Related
+Max Huijgen Search Tool for Comments
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112352920206354603958/posts/LUPMSAn71Wk
+Mark Traphagen Search for Your Own Comments on Google+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107022061436866576067/posts/cSNq6RCNo1x
+Matt Holmes Stalkers Will Love This
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109667864053549756579/posts/jNAoiRCLQFN

#Topsy #commenthistory #privacy

Google+ Hashtag Implementation Broken?
Interesting discussion going on in the comments of Google+ Chief Architect, +Yonatan Zunger's post (link below). Yonatan says, "The über-specific use of hashtags as exact markers was, to a great extent, a bug rather than a feature; e.g., it forces people to always type the hashtag perfectly for it to work at all. In web search you would never expect "dog" and "dogs" to give you radically different answers; likewise in social products, you shouldn't expect #foo and foo to give you radically different answers. (Although like "dog" and "dogs," that doesn't mean they shouldn't differ at all)."

But apparently users do expect and want hashtags to be a specific marker of a topic or event. We want it to be specific. We want to narrow our search results to #OccupyWallStreet and not get back every result which includes "occupy + wall + street".

Our use of hashtags is not just a shortcut to search. Sometimes it's a sign of solidarity. Hashtags are even used to inject humorous counterfactuals. Irony. Is the Google+ team so steeped in search that they are blind to the social subtleties of hashtags?

I'm a big fan of Yonatan and of Google+...but I find it a bit disconcerting to have the way users do something described as a "bug". If users come up with a way of using a tool that catches on (as hashtags did on Twitter), developers should support it, not say we're doing it wrong.

What do you think? Has Google+ improved on the concept of hashtags or has it broken it?

See the comments by +archer rehcra, +David D. Levine, and +Andy Owen in the original post.

Google+ Changes the Social Dynamic
I'm gratified to discover I'm not the only one who had exactly this reaction.
------------------
+Tom Nardi writes "By removing the Incoming Stream, Google+ has now become a lot more like Facebook. If a person adds you, the only realistic way of seeing their content is to Circle them yourself. This completely changes the dynamic of Google+ and forces the user to either Circle a person immediately or lose track of them and never see their content."

"I simply didn’t want to maintain a Circle full of strangers. But I always had the option of using the Incoming stream to drop in on these users and see what was on their mind. Presumably, these people added me to their Circles because they wanted me to engage with them, and the Incoming stream was how I did that. With Incoming gone, these people will likely never hear from me again."

"Now, call me crazy, but I thought the whole point of Google+ was to give us more options on how we want to manage our social networks and drive up engagement. With this single change, Google has not only forced my hand in terms of who I want to have in my Circles, but deprived my Followers from my engagement with them. This seems completely counter the point of Google+, and changes how I use the service completely."
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#incomingstream #socialnetworking

Google+ Sharing: Changing the Focus from Me to You
As someone fascinated with the concepts of identity and personality, I looked forward to reading +Tim Rayner's article on Foucault. Overall it struck me as nonsense. Not the parts about self-constructed identity, or the way we edit ourselves for our audience, or that we adjust what we project based on the feedback we receive, or that certain situations bring certain facets of our identity forth. Only that the cultivation of our identity and reputation is somehow new and unique to being online.

For me the article fails because of two assumptions:
   1. That our lives online are less real than our lives offline.
   2. That people before the Internet led simple, uncomplicated lives where there was no conflict between duty and desire or need to balance how one feels privately with how one behaves publicly.

Everything is Real Life
Everything you do is real life. If you have made the judgment that your interactions online are somehow less rewarding or fulfilling than your interactions offline, then close your computer and go outside and play. 

Shocker: People Led Multi-Dimensional Lives Before the Internet
What really rubbed me the wrong way in this article was the assertion that  "The real challenge presented by social media is not privacy, it is psychological integrity." Really?  Only our life online reflects a prismatic self? Being multi-faceted leads to the  breakdown of our psychological integrity? And most ridiculously, that "engaging with multiple crowds...[is] more or less impossible in the offline world." Do you think I act the same way at work as I do with my friends? in a bar as at a PTA meeting? Or that my parents know me the way my lovers know me?

Only the immature and the self-absorbed who have absolutely no sense of how to act at all, who think everything they do or say is equally interesting to every person who crosses their paths, and who simply seem to be broadcasting from their id would say something so out of touch with how people behave offline.

People have always cultivated their reputations. People have always experimented with different sides of themselves, especially as children and teens on the road to establishing their identities. People have always displayed different sides of themselves depending on context.

From the time we are about two years old, most of us have begun to test the boundaries of acceptable behavior in various situations by trying out different facets of our personalities. This is our first painful step in establishing our identity and learning self-control.

However, if you were the unfortunate product of parents who were so afraid of crushing your delicate spirit that they set no bounds, who let you run as loudly and wildly in restaurants as you did in your backyard, who praised your every word and deed until you began to believe that not only were you the center of your own universe but everyone else's—well boo-hoo. Stop blaming your parents for how you turned out and start taking responsibility for your own actions. Learn how to set your own bounds. Learn to edit yourself according to situation, setting, and audience.

When Sharing, Change Your Focus
Some people resist the idea of editing themselves because they worry about coming across as a fake or being accused of hiding something. You can wear clothes and still be the real you. Most of us would prefer it if you shared less, if you saved some special moments for those special people in your life. When offline, editing yourself is natural. When online, it's essential. 

Indiscriminately broadcasting events in your life does not make us closer. Letting a machine do it for you (via apps for frictionless sharing), removes both of us from the equation of our relationship. Frictionless sharing is simply the artless dissemination of data. 

Sharing means giving a portion of yourself to others. Giving is not about the benefit to you but about the benefit to your recipient. The trick is to change the focus from yourself to your audience. What do they want to know? What would interest them, entertain them, inform them, encourage them, alter their way of seeing the world, or motivate them to take action?
-------------------------
via +Peter Strempel 

Enemy of Memory
Closure, not writing, seems to be the enemy of memory. Whether, you write something down or talk it over with someone, once you've dealt with it, it's gone.

One of the reasons I write so much more on Google+ is that it's easy to get my ideas down quickly and to work them out as I'm writing them. If I were to jot a few notes for writing a blog post at some later time, that time will never come. Making a note dismisses it from my mind. And I can never recapture that initial excitement. So on Google+, I pounce on the inspiration and force myself not to put off writing -- whether it is a post or a comment.
----------------------
From the article:
"In this view, talking something through—completing it, so to speak, off the page—impedes the ability to actually create it to its fullest potential."

Writing [the stories] I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me.-- Ernest Hemingway

-----------
via +Walter H Groth

RESHARE:
Google+ War on Words
Has Google responded to criticisms that they can't "get" social by playing the dumb blonde?

+Peter Strempel provides the best analysis I've read yet of the underlying meanings of the Google+ redesign.

Related
+Colin Lucas-Mudd G Minus -- The Lowest Common Denominator
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100324134371388101482/posts/6JpyB5PQSCE
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HT +Alexander Becker #WarOnWords

Reshared text:
G+ displays early signs of anti-intellectual culture

Google Plus is not an altruistic venture, nor does it owe me a damned thing, but as a ‘member’ I nevertheless not only use the platform for my own purposes, but also form opinions about it. What I saw last night was a dismaying deference to anti-intellectual pop culture that does not value fresh ideas, articulate exchanges, or genuine debates. In other words, a tilt towards an anti-intellectual, slavishly populist pap culture.

Demotion of literate exchanges
The diminution of the text-based features of G+ must be seen as deliberate, and therefore as a trend that may well continue rather than be addressed at a certain but unknown point.

The problem I foresee is that this emphasis removes from G+the possibility of promoting a vehicle for empowering, re-enforcing and strengthening the one feature of Western civilization that has made it arguably pre-eminent in the world: the free speech and widely disseminated written discourse about all aspects of life from which have sprung democracy, liberty, social advances, challenges to tyranny, and the most educated people in the history of the known universe.

There is a trend in civil society for education and erudition to be under-valued, and mass market products to be lionised unduly just because of profitability and numbers. This trend has already led to massive social and economic dislocation in the US, the UK,and continental Europe. Should we not attempt to halt that disturbing phenomenon? And if so, how can we do that without discourse that is unashamedly intellectual and informed? Do we really need to be shoved aside for a quick buck, or because some people feel threatened by what they see as elitist snobbery?

I think at Google the answer is YES! And that’s a disturbing, personally disappointing observation to make, but I can’t really reach an alternate conclusion. Here’s why.

The interface re-design: what it says
My first few months on G+ were a roller-coaster ride of making discoveries about features and connections with people all over the world. It was a refreshing departure from the focus on juvenile trivia that appears to characterise other networks, social and professional.

Yesterday’s unannounced and unexplained interface re-design speaks for itself, screaming at me that G+ is changing direction to become a picture-sharing and YouTube distribution platform.

I say unannounced because I’m not in any Google in-crowd,and unexplained because the +Vic Gundotra blog is marketing puffery, not an explanation of purpose or intent. In the absence of knowledge in these two opaque areas, I must use the only evidence available to me, which is predominantly a massive re-sizing of picture and video content, and a displacement of text by those placeholders, as well as an inexplicable greying-out of posts, making them harder to read, and therefore less appealing to follow.

My assumption is that the interface designers at Google are among the best in the world because the company is an employer of choice. Therefore they didn’t make amateur mistakes, and their choices reflect deliberate strategies to encourage certain ways of using G+, while discouraging others.

So, beyond the grotesquely brash promotion of visual posts,and the deliberate demotion of text-based interaction, what else does there-design tell me?

The disappearing navigation bar for moving between circles,and the need to use multiple menu levels to get to my own circles, suggests G+ wants me to focus mainly on an indiscriminate stream. That stream also compulsorily promotes the rather asinine trending feature, which is invariably linked to lowest common denominator content with appeal primarily to a mass audience that does not discern. No problem with the feature, just the fact that I can’t disable it or swap it out with something more useful.

It is understandable that hangouts should be given increasing focus on G+, and I understand the technology is rather good, to a point. But hangouts are synchronous and limited in number of participants. The asynchronous feature of text posts is a key ingredient to attracting an international audience or communities of interest.

I’ve already vented about the poor text formatting features elsewhere (cf https://plus.google.com/u/0/110168665701189567035/posts/K1btJ2Ex3eW), but I must conclude from the relative neglect of the text-based features that they are not seen as important to Google. That, in itself, says to me that the asynchronous interactions on G+ are regarded as relatively unimportant, a corollary of which is that international interactions are not seen as important to Google.

Is Google business model ghettoised?
Does this mean that Google’s business model is ghettoised by region? By lack of concern about markets other than the US and Europe? I wouldn’t know, and I suspect that there is a disconnect at senior executive levels in Google itself between the technical aspects of G+ and an overall business strategy (not the short-term tactics). But as I said, I’m not an insider, and my guess is only as good or bad as yours.

My own response to all of this is to actively look at alternative platforms to continue to connect with people who want to do more than share pictures and watch videos. It’s the first time I’ve been tempted to do that since I started using G+.

My outlook is a bit glum. If the trend apparent in the interface re-design continues, people with literary and intellectual tastes will increasingly abandon G+ as a platform for connecting with likeminded people all over the world. So, if and when Google starts to find an intellectual demographic appealing, I suspect it will have destroyed that consumer base in G+.

Google+ Now Even More Unreadable Screencap
What happened to making Google "more beautiful"?
New on the left. Original on the right. Bring back the original!

Related
If I could have edited the original post to add the screencap, I could have kept all the comments in one thread.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/4zUBQaCTUF9
-----------
#waronwords  

UX: Google+
Now it's time to get back to earth and offer some practical suggestions. On a couple of streams that I've linked to below, we've been discussing Google+, why we love it, why we're frustrated that more people don't share our passion, and what could be improved so that people don't dismiss Google+ simply as a competitor to Facebook but as new and entirely better way of interacting. Google+ can't beat Facebook at its game; it's got to create a new and more compelling game.

+nomad dimitri has the knack for bringing out the lyrical idealist in me but it is not enough to dream. Today my T-type side wants some solutions.

Ten People, Ten Colors (十人十色)
The Japanese have a proverb that translates roughly to "Ask ten people a question and you'll get ten different answers." So it is when you ask people what they want out of Google+.

Are you here to follow celebrities or are you here to find community? Are you here to keep up with people you know or to discover new people? Do you want to constrain your world view or expand it? Do you want to broadcast your ideas or have intimate conversations? Are you looking for content to read or are you looking for readers for your content? Do you take pleasure in tweaking and customizing your experience or do you just want it to work out of the box?

All answers are valid. But how do you build a tool that supports so many different uses--different types of personality types all with different purposes? And, if users are not actually the customer but the product, is that even your goal? I will assume that regardless of who the actual customer is that Google's goal is to get as many people using Google+ as possible.

So what kind of tools do people need to socialize? I've broken them down into three sets: discovery tools, engagement tools, and management tools. If you think of more, please chime in.

Discovery Tools
How do I find the people who interest me?

* Discovery: Existing Contacts
If you have a large Facebook network, you don't want to have start from scratch and add them by hand. I love that we can take our data out of Google+ but how can we bring our data in?

Suggestion for Improvement:
Google+ needs better migration tools or people aren't going to migrate.

* Discovery: Shared Interests/Communities
The implementation of Pages (they're not just for brands), Google+ search and shared circles are all an improvement. But it's hard to build or maintain a community page either by topic (Triumph Spitfire Enthusiasts), by semi-permanent group (Becker Elementary School PTA), or by ad hoc group or event (Our Wedding).

Changes to the defaults of the Notification feature make it almost impossible to get a group together for a project or an event unless you get everyone on board beforehand via some other tool (like email or talking to them).

The idea of being able to find interesting people by seeing who someone you found interesting is following has been pretty much nullified with the advent of shared circles. Most of us follow hundreds of people we really don't know on a trial basis -- so that we've followed them isn't really a recommendation. We're feeling blindly too.

Suggestions for Improvement:
1. We need community pages for interests, groups, and events.
2. We need some sort of directory, index, hierarchy. Some place to browse not search. You know, Usenet. Search is great when I know what I'm looing for (a business location and operating hours). But I also need to be able to find something when I have only a vague notion of what I want. I'm suddenly nostalgic for old record stores, library stacks, card catalogs, even the Yellow Pages.
3. Trending topics. Hot topics are not the same as trending topics. A hot topic is a post that's gone viral. A trending topic means a lot of people are talking about the same topic across multiple posts. Even when I tried to follow something that I knew a lot of people would be writing about (SXSW), Google+ was not as effective as Twitter for following the conversation.

* Discovery: Celebrities and Brands
I think Google+ has this covered with their Suggested User List. And if you already know who you want to follow, search has got you covered.

Engagement/Interaction Tools
How well does the interface help me engage with the people I've discovered?

Google+ scores some big points in this category. A post can be anything. Commenting is easy. Resharing is easy (and we can finally get to the original post from a reshare. Yay!) Both posts and comments can be edited. We can see who +1 or Reshared. Feedback is easy via the +1 button. Viewing Ripples gives us a window into our most engaged readers. We can make our posts viewable to the public sphere or to a limited audience. We can notify people of important posts (this doesn't work as well as it used to because most people don't know how to customize the defaults).

Suggestions for Improvement:
1. Option to read by person, not just timestamp (RSS feed).
Sometimes I want to catch up on a specific person's posts...not just hope I see one of them flow by in the timeline of a circle. Also there are some people (tech gurus) who I don't want to see in my stream but I want to check in on from time to time. I go to their Posts tab on their profile to read them all in one go. I'd like to be able to have a list (like a blog's linklist), or a bookmark, or an RSS feed so that I can remember who these people are.

2. Ability to control noise by viewing stream by content type or language.
You can add a link, photo, or video to a post. Why can't you constrain your view of the Home stream by those same content types? The Notification stream has something like this...you can view all your notifications or just notifications by type.

3. Ability to see what my readers are saying in order to evaluate whether I want to follow them back.
We had this. It was called the Incoming stream.

4. Ability to share with my readers. (Separate your sources from your audience.)
My circles are the people I read. Someone like +Robert Scoble or +Guy Kawasaki is not interested in what I write. Why should they be? The people who have expressed and interest in what I have to say are the ones who are following me--not the people I follow. But I have no way to share posts with just my readers except to share publicly. This cuts down my reshares to about one-tenth of what they would be. I prefer my public content to be mostly my original content. I want to be able to connect to my readers. Currently I can only connect to my sources.

Management Tools
How easy is it to keep up with people? How easy is it to turn down the noise? Does the interface work both for people who don't want to tinker and people who love to tinker? for the novice and the expert?

Suggestions for Improvement:
1. Make it easier to find old discussions you've been in or comments you've made.
2. Save posts in draft mode.
3. Queue to publish.
4. Ability to star or bookmark a post.
A +1 gives feedback to the author. A star or bookmark identifies something that I want to keep track of -- to read later, to do more research on.
5. Ability to make notes about people I'm following.
I saw this as an add-on -- sticky notes on profiles. I really need something like this to remind me where I met someone or why I decided to follow them. I follow people primarily because of the content of their comments. It's not always obvious to me later why I followed them or what circle I want them in.

-------------
I'm sure the moment I post this I'll think of things to add. So let me sum up. My purpose in writing this post was to try to think of concrete things that would improve the social aspects of Google+ by providing tools for discovery, interaction, and management of relationships. I tried to stay away from focusing on the specific implementation. Let's not be tied to old solutions. Let's think of better ways to do some of these things by focusing on what we want to accomplish.
Related
+nomad dimitri : Networks and Frontiers
https://plus.google.com/u/0/113953592758896789108/posts/jn2k9shUa1M
+Matt Holmes : How to Be Really Popular
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109667864053549756579/posts/N3oGYcCyXA6

----------
Note: If I've notified you personally about this post, it's because we've been in discussion about building communities or helping newbies out on Google+ in the past.

#googleplusfeedback #googleplusfeaturerequest #ux

UXG+: Read More  
#waronwords   #ildl  

Circle Management: In Process
Developers: a new design should not break existing customizations.
If I suddenly drop or add you, it's because the Google+ redesign and whatever changes have been made to the "relevance" algorithms has completely disrupted the flow of information in my stream.

I've stopped using circles at all. (I'm reading by person or saved search.) Maybe that's the goal of the redesign and why the design team made it so difficult to access our circles or know what circle we're currently in. The underlying message of a "simpler" Google+ seems to be that they want us to stop over-thinking our circles. Apparently we only need three circles: All (public), Friends (private), and Following.

I'm so frustrated that I'm tempted to just dump all my circles and start again from scratch.

Save Circle Data: Data Liberation
At least the Data Liberation feature makes it possible for me to keep a record of people that were in my circles before I deleted them. So I will find you again.

Reading by Topic: Saved Searches
Circles aren't for reading by topic. They are for sharing by topic. All a circle does is limit the read permissions of a post to the people in the circle or, if we post publicly, enable us to send notifications to people in that circle about a topic they might find interesting.

People are wonderful multi-faceted. Just because we share an interest doesn't mean that that's all they talk about. Even with us. So if you want to read by topic, do a search and save it.

Our saved searches are now hidden under the Explore icon and at the very bottom of the drop down list of circles (under the More) tab.

Shared Circles
My problems really started when shared circles replaced the Incoming stream as the means for discovery and evaluation. Adding shared circles muddied the waters in my Home stream and told Google+ that certain people were more relevant to me than they actually are.

Worse, Google+ told other people that I followed that person, that we had them "in common" -- thus providing a tacit stamp of approval on people with whom I have no relationship other than that they were introduced to me in a shared circle.
---------------------------------------
I've noticed I'm not the only one having this problem. Given that it's not just my imagination, time to do something about it. If you've been doing some circle rearranging, I'd like to know how you went about it.

Google+ Tips: Following is not Friending
What is your expectation when someone follows you? Do you think that they read your every post? hang on your every word? want to get into a discussion over everything you say? Is that what you do when you follow someone?

Google+ is not a social network in the sense that Facebook is. Facebook traditionally has been a network of symmetrical relationships, about keeping up with people you used to know. Google+ is about discovering people you would like to know; it celebrates asymmetrical relationships.

Google+ is a sharing network: "Real-life sharing rethought for the web". Google+ differs from blogs because it also enables directed sharing -- the ability to funnel information to specific people who are most interested in having it.

Sure sharing is social. But it does not require starting with a personal relationship. On Google+ you have the opportunity to start with ideas and then develop a relationship based on common interests. Following someone is closer to subscribing to their blog with RSS or taking a trial subscription to a magazine.

Measuring Engagement
I know some interesting people (+Max Huijgen, +Brian Titus, +Alex Schleber, +Marc Jansen, +Jeff Jockisch, +Mark Traphagen ) who spend a lot of time analyzing engagement on Google+. They are especially interested in the SUL (Suggested User List) and how the number of followers is not an indication of real engagement.

I'm no fan of the SUL; I think it is a slap in the face of meritocracy. I understand that brands need metrics on engagement. But we're not all brands. And I can't help feel that we're measuring the wrong behaviors; that chasing follower counts is like chasing our tail. We're running in circles. Sometimes when you follow someone you just want to be passively entertained. Google+ makes a great discussion forum but not all posts are worth a discussion.

Nor do I engage with all the people I follow the same way. The reasons for following someone are varied and vary even by the type of person we follow. Following a celebrity is different than following my brother. Both are different than following the people in my company or a newsfeed or someone who is a stranger to me that said something interesting on someone else's post. And now that there is no Incoming Stream, I am forced to follow people on "trial subscription" -- just to evaluate their content.

Also, I engage with people I don't follow quite a bit. How are we measuring that? I don't follow certain power users because they put too much noise in my stream and I prefer to read all their posts together. So technically, I'm not counted as their follower, but I am an engager on their posts.

Google+ is not just a social network of existing friends (Facebook); nor is it just a publishing platform where what you say can be seen by everyone (blogs); nor is it just a discussion forum on steroids. It's all these things and more.

Google+ is a sharing network where you decide what you want to share and who has permission to see it. Not everyone we meet in "real-life sharing" is a friend. Nor do we need to be. We can be strangers at a concert, colleagues at work, students in the same course, people thrown together by a cause or admiration for a celebrity. We can be ardent fans or simply curious bystanders. Following is not friending.

Passivity is the norm. Readers outnumber writers. How many students in that class actually raise their hands and get into a discussion? Bueller?... Bueller?... Bueller?

Technological Fundamentalism: The Danger of Thoughtlessness 
“This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.” --  from the closing monologue in the film Hannah Arendt 

via +Anne Mette Agerholm 
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107769210599269225458/posts/GuvChiuetHt
(This post is worth your time to click through and read it.)

In a discussion elsewhere on the May 2013 Google+ redesign +dawn ahukanna asked, "How is it, with all this advanced super-duper tech, all the focus seems to be on what attracts our residual "thousands of years old" lizard brain remnant?"

I, too, wonder why we are embroiled in this constant emphasis on appealing to the visceral and emotional. We humans are that. But we are so much more than that. I don't mind starting with basics but I want to build on that foundation. This toadying to our instinctive natures seems to be a kind of technological fundamentalism. 

#waronwords   #fundamentalism   #literacy  

Brainstorming: How is Good Conversation Like Dance?
* awareness and focus on one's partner
* joy in precision
* balance
* fluidity
* harmonious tension
* passionate attention
* respect for each other's personal space

And...?

Our "Inauthentic" Forebears
How interesting it would be to have Ben Franklin on Google+. Or would it? How could we put our trust in the ideas of a man who is such a fake, right? I'm sure the self-righteous mob would quickly report Silence Dogood and Busy Body, while Benevolus wouldn't get past Google's own algorithm. How dare Franklin speak for democracy when he isn't even willing to stand behind his own words.

RESHARE:
Google+ Tips: Quit Your Quid Pro Quo Mindset
+Matt Holmes sums up the best strategies for getting the most out of Google+ in a pithy, no-nonsense style. Pay attention. He's right on target.

I'm going to reiterate the one that is the most important to me: remember that your readers are not your sources. If you're following the same people who are following you, you're living in a bubble.
--------
HT +Meirav Berale

#newbieshelp

Reshared text:
How to be really popular on G+ and get loads of followers NOW!…
...here’s a cynical Brit take on this.

There have been many posts recently attempting to give methods to get a big following, fast. Some are helpful, but some astonishingly cynical. How to reach engagers, how to gain traction, how to do it faster, more more.

Despite the Google+ graphic below, it is most definitely NOT about You! So, enough selling of snake oil, let's look at some reality!

Why are you here?...
Are you here to promote yourself, your business, or merely have an enjoyable time?
Regardless of what may have been said about numbers, the way to get the best is effectively the same, regardless of purpose. Sorry to disappoint, but there's no magic bullet, or easy fast track to G+ stardom (I'm never going to be an Internet Marketer am I?). Getting G+ to be a vibrant, fascinating and useful place is actually quite easy. Getting visibility is easy. You just have to go about it the right way.

Despite what you may be seeing it's nothing to do with getting big numbers fast, and mostly not about you. If you think it is, do us all a favour, and get off the internet and go back to selling timeshare.

Two Important Things to Know...

Connections are asymmetric. First this is not Facebook. No really, it isn't! I choose who I want to read daily, and a different group of people choose to read what I post. (The question of why is an entirely different matter!) There's no offence if someone doesn't circle you back. Get used to this - it's the way it's meant to work! Asking someone to circle back will usually get you nowhere - unless you're posting something they'd like to see daily.

For anyone with more than 5000 followers it is impossible to circle everyone anyway. If someone removes you after a week or two, that just means they don't want to see your posts daily, not that they have fallen out with you. They're almost certainly still going to welcome and respond to comments you make on their posts, which of course you are still seeing! It's not Facebook, it pays to remember that! :)

You have to give a little first. Interaction is basically all that matters. Now if you're here posting your blog like entry daily, or worse, a daily link to your blog post, you're going to get nowhere. Then quit because G+ is dead.

Add some people - ideally people who actually interest you. 200-300, at most, is a good number to start with. Don't go mad! Add more if your stream is slow. Follow their posts in the stream, and join in - make comments and +1s when you can. Have conversations, and people will start adding you. Add people you find interesting after looking at their posts.

Yeah yeah, I know this is all very slow and tedious, and why bother when you can play some cynical game of circling, forwarding and uncircling to get numbers fast. And once you have, not one of them will give a toss. In fact they probably have you in a "silenced" circle of unknowns they might look more carefully at when they get chance. Which of course they never do.

Ever wonder why advertising and radio trailers are repeated so often? Simply because it takes a number of hearings of the message for you to remember it. There's tons of research on this. Same applies to social connections. It takes a number of interactions and conversations for you to be recognised, and remembered. Once I "know" you, I might, just might care about your message. 'til then I don't give a monkey's. How to do that on a social network? Talk to people, about their posts and interests. It's not bloody difficult.

What's this +1 about?...

Well first it's not a "like" button. It's feedback! It's far more an acknowledgement - it can be like, sympathy, I've no time to make a comment, sometimes even I'm too shy to write etc. Now that I get regular comments on many posts, I take it as validation or otherwise for the post. If my jokes regularly get no +1s and my pictures often get many, then I can assume the folks following me are liking the pictures far more and my sense of humour needs work, or possibly to be abandoned! Do you adjust the message? Well that's down to you, and why you're here. Learn to notice what's getting a reaction and what isn't - is it the subject, the way you're presenting it, too busy broadcasting, too promotional? Take that feedback and use it as you will, but it's easy to discover what is working for you, and make it work better.

But, very simply, you can use it to gauge what your followers are finding interesting. How you choose to use that is up to you.

Uncircle Uncirclers Addon

Oh really? Talk about missing the point! This is for cynical numbers chasers only.
Don't expect any who are going to interact, comment, or buy your product. Maybe a couple of +1s per thousand added. But someone you found interesting enough to read this morning suddenly stopped being worth a look because they uncircled you? Really? Wow, aren't you a ball of shallow!

Want to know how to stop folks uncircling you? It's easy. Interact, and post interesting stuff! Are you seeing a pattern here yet?

If you're still not seeing it, do us all a favour, and just get off the bloody internet.


Or as +Rod Dunne put it last night...

RECIPROCITY
Give & Take

RESHARE:
Text: Dear John  
Without advertising for friends who maintain strict phone etiquette, I seem to have wandered into a circle of people who are all of the same mind. 

Reshared text:
She is definitely not happy he is on the phone...

... as she very well should not be!

I don't know your etiquette regarding mobile use in social settings but i am pretty strict:
- i expect friends to either turn them off or to put them in flight mode when we go out together (vibrate does not cut it)
- (& to not check messages when they go to the toilet)
- if someone forgets & it rings i insist they turn it off & do not answer
- i have known to walk out on friends that do not respect these rules, getting them stuck with the check
- after years of doing this, most friends are actually grateful for these strict standards which, after all, they would apply during a meeting with the company CEO, their most important client or a visit to the intensive care in a hospital

Technology gives us choices.
Our choices define us as humans.
Friendship is a gift & personal time together nourishes communication between friends.
Interrupting that to answer calls is not just rude, it is practically sacrilegious.

---
#nomadimitritrends
#nomadimitritech
#nomadimitrivideo
#nomadimitripersonal

Circle Management: Who's Relevant?
Last Friday I cut more than one-third of the people I was following from my circles. Most of those people I'd picked up via shared circles. I didn't cut anyone from my own hand-crafted circles.

As a result, the content in my Home stream has improved. It still has a decidedly different feel than it did before the Google+ redesign. If I +1 a post by someone, it starts showing me more posts by the same person -- making it hard for new people to get my attention.

Now that I've cut so many people who I was just "checking out" I am seing more things that I'm interested in seeing. Unfortunately I'm still not seeing a lot of posts I want to see from people that I want to keep in touch with. In fact, for my "quieter" friends, I have to go to each of their home pages to make sure I'm not missing anything.

I need Google+ RSS. Grouping people by interest ensures that the more frequent posters drown out the voices of the less frequent ones. I follow a lot of introspective people for whom quality, not quantity, is the prime virtue.

Circle management would be a lot easier for users if we had a clue what Google+ thought was relevant to us. Google+, tell me so I can correct you. I'm happy to give you the data on my connections. But I'm tired of the wild assumptions you make with that data. I tell you what I'm interested in and you insist on showing me something different. Stop second guessing me. What do I have to do to get you to listen to me?

Sort By Relevance
There's a fad going around Google+ lately where people share the top 10, 20, 100 people that Google has determined are relevant to them. I don't understand the point because why would I assume what is relevant to me is relevant to you? In fact, two of the people in my top ten would make a crummy recommendation as they don't even use Google+. We do, however, interact in chat and email and have shared Google Docs. The latter must make a lot of difference because my two other chat buddies are much lower on the list.

Or maybe it's not Google Docs. Maybe it's location. See the problem? I'm just guessing. But what else can I do? I tell Google+ the truth about myself and it puts me in a box. For example, what if I don't want a parochial world view? How can I tell Google+ to ignore location? If I'm interested in seeing more posts about Europe, should I tell Google+ I live in Germany?

So looking at my list (before and after dropping people), I still can't make much sense of why Google+ thinks some people with whom I've interacted are less relevant than others with whom I've had very little interaction. Someone I've interacted with since week one has been knocked lower on the list by a couple of people with whom I've gotten to know only recently but have had private conversations with. And why are some big names who have no reciprocal relationship with me so much higher ranked than less well known people who do?

All I want to know is how do I tell Google+ who is important to me?

Factors (order of importance uncertain)
* email contact list
* recent email interaction
* recent chat interaction
* Google+ interactions (reshares, +1s , comments)
* celebrity (several celebrities seem oddly high up my list given that I interact with other people more)
* follow back
* number of shared contacts, people in common (shared circles really mucks with this)
* current location
* current employer
* what else?
---------------------------
#newgoogleplus

RESHARE:
Google+ Tips: Circle Management
"Not yet using Google+". The yet is a optimistic. As if they'd come to play if only you'd invite them. The truth is the reverse. If they were strangers that you circled, then at one time they were using Google+ and have since closed their accounts (or had them shut down).

So another 20 people in my circles have bit the dust. This group was quite diverse: tech, gardening, Japan, photography, science... Unlike people who were "disappeared" six months ago, they do not seem to be victims of the nym wars.

This 20 is in addition to the 20 people who still have accounts but I dropped because they haven't posted since July 31, 2011. And then there are about 40 people from my personal Gmail contacts who signed up but never used Google+. They are in my "Friends Inactive" circle.

On the bright side (for me not Google), my experience the last couple of weeks has been better than ever. I've found new niche groups to hang out with and I'm enjoying some intense discussions.

Reshared text:
Under Circles go to Your circles and change the sorting from Relevance to Not yet using Google+. These are actually people you've circled who have left G+. If you need to free up space because you are close to your 5,000-person limit, select them and remove them.

My First Post Optimized for the iPhone
Beautiful. And simple.

Product Development: Changing the Game
What do I keep saying? Google+ won't beat Facebook at its own game; it will beat Facebook by changing the game.

What a difference five years makes. Here's a laugh from 2007 -- a analysis of why the iPhone would fail. Bottom line: adding a music player to a phone is cute but frivolous. What next a toaster?

What the analyst didn't foresee was that users were not tied to the idea of carrying a phone in their pockets. Not if they were provided with something demonstrably better. My iPhone is a camera which happens to let me make phone calls. It's my connection to the Internet. It's a map. It's my electronic Japanese dictionary. It's my email. It's whatever I need it to be -- now there's an app for that. The only limitation on an iPhone is the image conveyed by its name.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the article (emphasis mine)
"Lastly, the iPhone is a defensive product. It is mainly designed to protect the iPod, which is coming under attack from mobile manufacturers adding music players to their handsets. Yet defensive products don't usually work -- consumers are interested in new things, not reheated versions of old things."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From day one I've been fighting the image of Google+ as "just another social network." It's an uphill battle. Even within Google there seems to be disagreement over what path to follow. The development team has given us some good tools (with the potential for great tools to come) for exploring outside the walls of the social graph. Google is the company who brought the world to us via Search and Google Translate. Google+ should be another tool to broaden our horizons.

But the Marketing and Education departments keep pulling us back from our explorations. "Share with your friends." they chant. How tired is that? Clue. Most of those people on Facebook? they are not our friends. They're our contacts. And it turns out, we've run out of things to share with them. Who goes to a high school reunion every week? We'd like some new ideas.

So, dear Google. Don't be content to start with what others have done and improve on it. Do that and you will be playing a game of comparisons forever. Instead, focus on what people want to do and can't. Then help them do it.

Otherwise you will end up like the typewriter manufacturer whose company goal was to build the world's best typewriter. Which they did.

Related
+Cliff Roth Google+ is NOT a Social Network
https://plus.google.com/109602109099036550366/posts/XVReYhJK8oM

The Empathy Graph
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/DkNdMGTWTen

#interestgraph
-----------------
HT +Paul Minda

RESHARE:
Discovery Tools: Incoming Stream
Google. Don't kill something if you don't have something better to replace it. Between moves like this and social search, I'm beginning to think that 2012 is the year Google decided to constrain our worldview on the Internet rather than help us expand it. Thanks largely to Google, the Internet used to be about what you couldn't find elsewhere.

Reshared text:
I Want My Incoming Stream Back!!!

+Google+, in my opinion, just made their first major screw up. The Incoming Stream, for those that aren't aware of it, was a stream that included posts from people that have added you to a circle, but you haven't added them. It was an extremely useful tool to quickly browse through posts from the people who've added you, see what they're interested in, and oftentimes, end up adding them to a circle.

At the beginning of this month I even issued a challenge entirely based on it (https://plus.google.com/100035762233109552669/posts/5CWJ13dGseJ) It was a fun way of getting people to get to know one another, to interact with someone that perhaps on the surface they didn't share much in common with, and maybe find something surprising.

Well, that's no longer possible. Earlier today, Google removed this stream. Posted here (https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153/posts/Rjt66GLtnA2) is the explanation for that choice, and I think it's foolish. The Suggested User list is not an adequate replacement for this feed. All it does is showcase high level G+ users, not those lesser known people who are constantly posting great content. In fact, the Suggested User list is largely useless. +Carter Gibson summed up the reasons why perfectly here: https://plus.google.com/115121555137256496805/posts/TWbvJ6qPMLU

The "What's Hot" list? Please. 90% of what I see there are cat gifs, posts from +Mike Elgan (which, since I follow him, I'm already seeing), and various posts from celebrities that I don't care about. Not useful.

They say that you can still see the people who circled you under the Circles button above. While true, it's useless for doing what the Incoming Stream did. A huge list of names does nothing for me. Do you really expect me to find the time to check the profiles of, at the time of this writing, 829 different people? There simply aren't that many hours in a day. Even if I were to delegate only 5 minutes per person, this task would take me just under 70 hours to complete. I'm not doing that. Would any of you?

In the comments for both +Dave Besbris's original post and +Natalie Villalobos's repost, I've seen people saying that they never used it anyway. Chances are, they didn't do that because they didn't know what it was. I'll admit, this was something that was never really explained very well, and it's only though trial and error did I figure it out. Once I did, I made almost daily use of it.

The solution to this was to perhaps rename the feature, or simply provide a better explanation of what it did...not to remove the feature for those of us who were using it.

I truly feel that Google made the wrong choice here, and I really hope they reverse it. The Incoming Stream was a valuable tool I used to decide who among the people that circled me should be circled back based on the content they posted here, and not having it changes a large part of my Google+ experience.

I want my Incoming Stream back.

More Readers. Less Engagement?
Since the Google+ team released the ability to share circles my readership (number of people who have circled me) has doubled. But the level of engagement has plummeted.

The fact that so many people added me blindly based on someone else's recommendation without first seeing if we had something in common might have something to do with it. I don't have anything against lurkers. It's fine if you enjoy reading my stuff and never feel motivated to add to the discussion. I like readers. But if I'm just adding noise to your stream, you should unfollow me.

The danger of shared circles is that when we add someone else's circle of 500 people, we've added 500 voices that drown out the voices of the people we've hand-picked. (Unless you read by circle. I always have but remain amazed at the number of people who refuse to do so and then complain about a noisy home stream.)

It's hard to have an engaging, intense discussion when our dinner party moves from private dining room to the convention hall.

Tool Sharers vs Social Sharers
I've been amused before by the people who want the machine to solve their social problems for them. Sometimes you just have to socialize -- actually interact with each other.

Contrast these two shares.
1. The Tool Solution
+Louis Gray shared his circle of 211 women active "on Google+, particularly those who live tech and media". https://plus.google.com/100535338638690515335/posts/AQjL31jgUX8

In one fell swoop, you can add his entire circle knowing nothing more than these writers are somehow related to tech and they are not men. This will "make your stream more diverse, engaging and smart". (Does he assume all his readers are men who follow only men?)

Shared circles are great for people new to Google+ looking for a place to get started. But you only have to add the circles of a few gurus before your stream flooded with voices and you become one of the people whining about the noise.

2. The Social Solution
+Ayoub Khote recommended 13 people in his Circle Sunday post. https://plus.google.com/111058843129764709244/posts/dQJ7ZXMKkUv

The difference. Ayoub Khote recommends a manageable number of possible additions and more importantly, he tells us why each person is interesting to him. This helps us evaluate their value to us.

This method demonstrates the whole point of social networking. At least to me. I prefer the "critic's choice" to the "people's choice" -- specifically, I prefer the people who articulate the reasons they've shared something with me. It's not enough that you're in my contact lists or that you are famous for me to follow your recommendations blindly. I need to know why.

It's Not the Feature, It's the Users
If Louis Gray had broken his "Women in Tech" circle into smaller circles -- different circle for each topic ("social media", "journos", "Google+", "mobile technologies", "science", whatever...) and then included the cream of the people who write on these topics, then shared circles would be really useful.

Of course, we readers have to take responsibility, too. Shared circles are a great source of recommendations. But you don't have to add everyone in the circle. Pick and choose. Or if you find it easier to add the whole thing, read by circle and then unfollow the people who aren't interesting to you. Circles are dynamic.

Quick Tips: How To Stop the Noise
You've added a bunch of other people's circles and now your Home stream is impossible to wade through. Do this.
1. Read by circle.
2. Skim your stream and use the j-key to jump over posts.
3. Unfollow people who don't interest you.

Related
Let The Right One In
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/ijexSUrwi9Q
Navigating the Churning Stream
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/hNkCJGE8omA
What If Men Can't Get Social
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/R688XkkDFSs

One Person One Vote
After reading +Paul Clarke 's post on the forced consolidation of his Google accounts, it occurs to me that the Google+ team has let the identity argument get away from them -- into a battle over pseudonymity.

Most of us think our account as the thing we sign into to use a service (email, banking, utilities). But Google has built our Google Profile as a separate entity. Go into Google+ settings and check the Data liberation options. Your Profile is distinct from your Stream data, Buzz data, and Picasa albums.

We users might think of our Profile as just the settings for our Google+ account, but it is not. It is one of many "reputation management tools" that Google is developing.
http://www.ciopronews.com/ciopronews-75-20110617GoogleLaunchesNewReputationManagementTool.html

So the underlying issue isn't about allowing pseudonymity. It's about preventing multiple identities. It's about quashing sock-puppetry. With Google products, we get +1 not +1000000. Our Google Profile is our voter registration card.

Allowing people one vote (a single identity) is a good thing. It keeps people from gaming the +1 system. It builds reader's trust in a specific author's reputation.

But what's the best way to verify accounts? I don't know the answer to that. But based on takedowns of William Shatner and Alyssa Milano, it's not someone legal name. If you are a rapper, an actor, or a writer your legal name might not be connected with your reputation.

So the question is how should Google+ ensure that one person doesn't create multiple identities while at the same time allowing people to use the pen/stage name on which they've already built their reputation?

Signal or Noise: Which are You Creating?
I had the this interesting discussion with +Meirav Berale which made me think, maybe we should look at the signal to noise issue not just as content consumers but as content producers.

Public By Default
mss: "I don't want to limit people to one topic but I do expect that if they share something publicly that it is something of true public interest."
mb: "Oh, I so don't want to go that route - if we start weighing up each of our posts and thinking whether or not it is of true public interest, we'd post so very little publicly. I look at it quite the opposite: the only time I post something not publicly is if there's a reason why I don't want to share what I'm saying with the whole world."

Targeting Content by Audience
As a writer, I've been trained to be highly conscious of my intended audience. Whether I'm writing a personal letter, software documentation, or a blog post, I have you in my mind's eye.

Circles make this easy. When I write publicly, though, who do I think you are? Not the people I follow (those are the authors I read and they don't necessarily follow me). Not just the people who follow me, all of whom are strangers to me. Here on Google+, my target audience are the people who interact with me. I know a bit about you from your posts and the discussions we have on what I write. And the people I manage to strike a chord with, the people who respond to what I write, I typically end up following and learning more about them through their writing.

So, my audience (you), influence what I post publicly by what you respond to and what you ignore. I never post indiscriminately. I find something interesting and then I search for the appropriate audience to share it with. Sometimes it's worth only a tweet. Sometimes it's an email to a specific friend. Sometimes it's a blog post. Sometimes it's publicly on Google+ with you.

Forget the Gurus -- Do it Your Way
What do you do? Write everything publicly by default or target your posts by audience? (There is no correct answer. It's all individual preference. Google+ lets us share what we like with whom we like and lets us decide what type of sharers to follow.)

RESHARE:
Not What I Signed Up For
As the big player keep integrating each other's features, are they losing what makes them distinctive? We are headed toward a bland sameness everywhere we go.

Sure social media gurus love to auto post the same content to all platforms.But I prefer to write to (and read from) each medium. My Gowalla content is distinct from my Twitter content is distinct from my Google+ content is distinct from my blog content. Different content. Different audience. Different voice.

Somedays I prefer a book to a movie, too.

At what point to you, the user, embrace change as progress or reject it as not being the service you signed up for? Does Facebook bet on keeping current users out of habit and thus puts its energy into attracting new markets? I guess that's the old sales pitch. But isn't there less customer loyalty these days? Don't companies have to work harder to keep existing users happy than they used to?

Reshared text:
In the middle of redesigning my blog so wasn't planning on posting any content but with today's big news, I couldn't help myself. Enjoy, and sound off in comments here or on page.

Social Networking: The Need for Cross-Cultural Communication
Why do we say a giraffe has a long neck? What is our criteria? To another giraffe, a giraffe's neck is just the right length. It is only in contrast to the proportions of the human body that a giraffe's neck is long.

This is a kind of anthropocentrism: using ourselves as the measure of all things. Like ethnocentrism and egocentrism, its another way we put ourselves at the center of every circle.

Marks of Distinction
I've been in several discussion lately about the MBTI. One problem in identifying personality traits and grouping people with like characteristics together is that people tend to form tribes. Such is their relief and joy to find others like them, that they want to set themselves apart and above other groups. Suddenly what was merely a difference becomes a mark of distinction.

Our first impulse is to use ourselves as the yardstick for "normal". For some reason it is not enough for us to view someone different as simply "other". If they are different and we are normal, we conclude that they must be abnormal. We break the world down into groups of us and them.

Just as the human neck is a poor measure for judging a giraffe's neck, so are we each a poor measure for judging others.

Underlying Meanings
One of these MBTI discussions reminded me of a book I read recently on the differences in communication styles between the Americans and the Japanese. I lived in Japan for two years and experienced many of the misunderstandings that resulted from people (on both sides) not realizing that there is more than one way to interact with others. It's all a matter of understanding each other's style -- and seeing through to their intentions. I saw people with the best of intentions become frustrated, hurt, and angry.

Here's a quote from that book that applies to all the different tribes I've worked with If you notice a difference, realize that the difference in itself may not be so important…look for the underlying meanings.

Gaining Perspective
Last night I realized that I had been trying to bring opposing tribes together my entire life. I'm a translator. A bridge. A mediator. An interdisciplinarian. I believe in cross-pollination of ideas. I'm a busy bee. I never thought I had a calling but maybe I've discovered it.

I try to get people to focus on the bigger picture, on the property (eye color) not the value (blue, gray, green, brown). I try to get people to notice our similarities and to celebrate and learn from our differences.

Whenever a question is framed as an either/or choice I want to pull the conversation back and show people that they're arguing about the same coin. Both sides are necessary. They complement each other.

Perspective requires two points of view.
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Book Review: With Respect to the Japanese
http://www.zanthan.com/wordsintobytes/reviews/book-reviews/with-respect-japanese

Politics: Raising Wages 
I'll invite my friends who know more about economics and politics to weigh in on the pros and cons of this argument given that those are not my areas of expertise. But on the surface it seems like a reasonable way to move forward out of this stagnation, not just economic stagnation but partisan deadlock.
----------------------
From the article, "...an astonishing 93% of the total increase in income during the recovery period has been captured by the top one percent of earners, who now hold almost as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent of our society."
... 
"Although our bipartisan elites regularly suggest higher education as the best elixir for what ails our economy and its workers, few of these job categories seem logical careers for individuals who have devoted four years of their life to the study of History, Psychology, or Business Education, often at considerable expense. Nor would we expect the increased production of such degrees, presumably at lower-tier or for-profit colleges, to have much positive impact on the wages or working conditions of janitors or security guards...Education may be valuable for other reasons, but it does not seem to hold the answer to our jobs and incomes problem."
... 
"Leaving aside the obvious gains in financial and personal well-being for the lower strata of America’s working class, there would also be a large economic multiplier effect, boosting general business activity in our weak economy. America’s working poor tend to spend almost every dollar they earn, often even sinking into temporary debt on a monthly basis.[x] Raising the annual income of each such wage-earner couple by eight or ten thousand dollars would immediately send those same dollars flowing into the regular consumer economy, boosting sales and general economic activity. In effect, the proposal represents an enormous government stimulus package, but one targeting the working-poor and funded entirely by the private sector."
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via +Sheila Nagig 

RESHARE:
Google+ Tips: Giving of Yourself
I just read a slew of really awful Google+ posts -- the hot topic is how to get, get, get. How to get circled. How to get followers. How to circle loads of people to guilt them into following you back. And if they don't, drop them and move on.

Well, here's something you can get. Over. Yourself. The operative word on Google+ is share. The goal is to find people who fascinate, amuse, and inform us and then connect them with the people we think will also like them. You are the bridge between the people you follow and the people who follow you. You are the conduit of information.

If you're only giving to get, then that's just gaming. Don't be a player.
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Now for a refreshing fable from +Johan Horak : Lessons from Casanova.
HT to +Rahul Roy for tipping me to this post.

Reshared text:
Why is +1 Like Casanova Gifting? What I learned when I wanted to kiss a girl a 13 or 15.

Let me tell you the story. It's a little embarrassing but I got through it. It was my first lesson in social engagement.

And it's very applicable to my social engagement philosophy here on Google+.

As a 13 year old schoolboy my family sent me to an all boys school, 8 hours away from home by train. Sunday nights we got on at six and got off at 3 am.

It was boring. But there were older boys and they shared how they kissed girls and what-not. I was intrigued and never slept. But I was so excited by the idea. I could just imagine the closeness and the soft lips. Goodness! I could not wait.

But it took me a few more years to be invited to a disco. Yes. That's what we called a dance at that time.

I saw this good looking girl and asked the unsuspecting soft-lips for a dance. At least I got this bit sorted. But I could not move. My legs were stuck to my hips. I, never before danced and had other plans as well. I was frightened.

I asked her to walk outside and she obliged. What now? I tried the kiss. I got a smack. And I never saw soft lips again.

I was sad. My friends made fun out of me. But I am a learner. One day I met the local casanova. And he said to me:

1) It takes time.
2) You have to ask her about herself. She will talk. Some more than others.
3) Hold her hand.
4) Speak to her regularly.
5) Be honest. Always. (This was a real casanova).
6) Buy her flowers.
7) Take her to the movies.
8) Tell her how beautiful she looks in the purple dress.
9) Buy her a small ring.
10) And then give her a kiss.

Well. This helped a lot and I got a lot more kisses than smacks.

This is the same here at Google+.

Circling someone thinking you'll get the kiss is like me at 14; you won't get anything.


I believe you have do the following (and I am not saying this has not been said. I just packed it in a kissing story):

1) +1's are the gifts. Give them out. Like +Jaana Nyström (http://goo.gl/HXKyJ) sharing +40 000 +1's (She has nearly 40000 followers. I am not saying there's a relationship between +1's and followers. And I am not saying she's chasing no-of-followers. The above post by Jaana shares how you can tally your number of +1's.

2) Comment on a post is like taking her for dinner.

3) Sharing a post is like buying her a nice ring.

4) Doing all of these regularly are like sharing kisses. You'll get it back. You'll be added to public Circles. (My less than 500 followers jumped to more than a 1000 in one week when I changed my engage strategy. I wrote it here http://goo.gl/oh7VS (Warning: Selfless promotion because my engagers like it and shared it)).

5) You'll have to find Casanovas to teach you how to get the kiss and when you do they will return it. Here are some of my Casanovas; +rahul roy, +Jaana Nyström, +Denis Labelle, +Mark Traphagen, +Prabat parmal, +Eli Fennell, +John Hardy, +Al Remetch, +Rehan Ahmad, +Valentin Dobroia, +stephanie wanamaker

6) +Bud Hoffman shared a very simple circle management idea. http://goo.gl/6I4S8 I find it very effective.

May you get all the kisses you deserve. Start with +1's and share them in all honesty.
Have fun.

Google+ Tips: Scrapbooks and Hovercards
Many people took the advice to spice up their profile pages and create a scrapbook of photos as a banner. While some people used favorite (but unrelated) snapshots, others seized the opportunity to create a clever, integrated design. Does Google+'s redesign affect your layout? It might.

Now that the scrapbook photo is used as a background for your profile photo on your hovercard, your banner design may need to be rethought. Most of us didn't get the memo that the new thing in banners is a panoramic photo.

You can still use the old style multiple-photo banner. Just remember that on your hovercard the fifth photo will be covered up. So leave it blank or don't put important images or information there. +Marc Jansen provides a great example.
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#newgoogleplus

Film: Skyfall  
James Bond gazes into +Peter Strempel's  infuriating mirror of youth.

Google+ Circle Management: Stop Going Around in Circles
Do you feel like you're missing out on what people in your stream are saying because Google+ pushes certain people's posts to the top? You see those posts and so you interact. Then because you've interacted, Google+ serves you up more of the same.

Letting the cream rise to the top seems like a good thing. The problem is, if you never see posts from the other 80% of people you've circled, you are never going to interact with them. You never get the chance to say, "Hey! I like this stuff, too." The less you interact, the less you see it. If you never see it, you can't interact. It's a vicious circle. 

Google+ isn't observing who is relevant to you. It's choosing who is relevant for you. Let's stop the madness.

Several people have shared circles of the top 100 people that Google+ has determined are relevant to them, even when the people themselves question Google+'s choices. I feel that doing so only reinforces Google+'s bad behavior. So let's mess this up.

How to Pop the Filter Bubble
1. Go to Circles and sort by Relevance.
2. Find the last ten people in the list (the people Google+ thinks are least relevant to you.)
3. Interact with them.
Go read their posts. Throw out a few +1s or reshares. Leave a comment.
4. If Google+ is right and after looking at their posts you decide you have nothing in common, uncircle them. 

Related
Circle Management: Who's Relevant?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/QLeBcHYWxrb

+Alexander Becker Pattern-analyzing Experiment
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100500197140377336562/posts/VMCqpuPbVBg

#filterbubble   #echochamber   #bottom99  

Measure of Man: Good and Bad Employees  
Susan Adams writes In blithe understatement. "Often what makes people good at those jobs can’t be defined by simple metrics."

Gee, you think? And you are still so wishy-washy that you soften that statement with "often" and "simple"?

The gist of the article is this. The best employees are unchallenged. The worst employees happily oblivious to the lack of efficacy of their contributions.

From the article. "...high performers tend to thrive on feeling involved and challenged. They also act as company ambassadors with clients, customers and potential hires. If they are bored or they feel under-appreciated, they will stop talking up their employer, mentally unplug from their work, start looking for opportunities elsewhere and eventually jump ship.

As for low performers, companies want them either to become more productive or to disengage and find work elsewhere. Companies don’t want deluded low performers, who think they are contributing when they are really doing poorly, to stick around because they have fallen in love with their cushy jobs."
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via +dawn ahukanna 

Rise of the Visual Web: Confirmed
When I said that I wanted Google+ to stop competing with Facebook as a social network and create something completely different, I meant an interest-based sharing platform -- not Flickr Redux.
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From the article, "Vice president of product for Google+ +Bradley Horowitz ...who led Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr in 2005, kicked off the event Tuesday by talking about the future of photography, how Flickr changed his outlook, and whether ads will ever make an appearance in Google+. '

“I feel photos are the lifeblood of our service,” said Horowitz. “They are the way we can most immediately and viscerally connect as human beings.”

Related
Rise of the Visual Web: Words Are Dead
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/D6jxk5s2Nvi
Rise of the Visual Web: The Visual Version
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/beVGwzYSRNv
Gismodo: How Yahoo Killed Flickr
http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet
Gigaom: Google's Secret Weapon for Social: Your Photos
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/22/google-plus-social-photos/


-----------------------------
via +jack hollingsworth #waronwords #newgoogleplus

RESHARE:
Google+ Tips: Followers or Following?
What are you looking for? Most of the people I follow concern themselves with finding interesting people to follow: people who share their interests, concerns, politics, hobbies, or even personality type.

The difficulty of building, maintaining, and finding communities on Google+ is not trivial.

In the other camp are the people trying to help you get more followers, more attention on Google+. Is that what most people here are looking for? If so, why? Well, if you are a professional artist, you want to find your audience.

I'm sharing +Max Huijgen post because it is a departure from the usual "best ways to attract a following" posts. I think the gist of what he is saying is that success cannot be measured simply by raw numbers.
---------------
I serve up light fare compared with +Max Huijgen. His posts are always something you can sink your teeth into. If you prefer spun sugar fluff, look elsewhere.
(Re: +Eileen O'Duffy The G+ Menu: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113873289443253295484/posts/h1btUv5m88y)

Reshared text:
My take on G+ photography and the importance of follower counts
originally written as two comments in a thread from +Alexander Safonov who wants to leave G+ as he is disappointed with the photo community.

Alexander, so far I have left the photography circles too its own, as I never believed that the kind of photography I like will be mainstream or fashionable. I remember sharing one of your underwater photos and I have posted some B&W from others, but I mostly ignore the discussions. You are extremely dissatisfied with the abundance of HDR on G+ and I understand that feeling.

HDR is a trick I use myself on a regular basis but only a real photog will ever notice it, as I just use it to bridge the contrasts the human eye can perceive by quickly adjusting, which in a still is impossible.

There is however a limit to the amount of saturation I can handle and there is very low tolerance for failing compositions where HDR is added to make stuff you wouldn´t even print in your studio for contact proofs look ´interesting´

So, it´s not my taste and I don´t subscribe to posters who publish them in abundance. I have seen +Tom Anderson who I highly value as a poster and thinker about social media, getting his first camera and going on the socialite tour while shooting everything in extremely dramatic color tones. Nothing wrong with Tom doing that, but that he ended up on the suggested user list as a photographer is clearly wrong.

Having said that I don´t feel any need to go on a crusade against it. It´s a fact of life that the taste of the masses is not mine. Look at picture post cards. It´s a century old medium and it used to be hugely popular before we got flickr and picasa. Every photographer knows that the only way to sell them is to crank up your color saturation to the max and use the most basic of composition rules. We will all have had that devastating moment when we showed our photos of that popular holiday resort just to hear that they bought an even better one.

HDR unfortunately became a tool to get pretty pictures but there is no denying people love them just like they love picture post cards. The reality is that all photo techniques can be used for art purposes (remember the experimental solipsism?), but will often get popular in the general audience through what we would call an abuse of the technique.

Is that bad? Not at all, welcome to the real world. When I visit friends I immediately grab their tv remote and get it off the factory setting ´oversaturate, 9000 degree kelvin color temperature´ to a normal 6500 or lower one with all sharpening filters turned off. They usually complain loudly and I need to use my authority in digital imaging to convince them to let it stay on for 24 hours just to humor them. Next visit I revert it to the factory ´shop mode´ and they complain loudly and tell me it´s horrible. I have a hard time convincing them that this is what they had for a year on their expensive large screen.

So why would we bother about picture post cards being popular on G+? It´s not related to photography as an art form, but where does it say G+ is an art platform? It´s a picture sharing medium and people like ´pretty pictures´.

Try to share great B&W: it´s hardly possible as the community at large doesn´t have the color calibrated monitors so the subtle play with contrast will be lost on the everyday consumer monitors. I know Apple shows designers at work on glossy 32" monitors in which you can design your new hair-cut, but serious photographers use real monitors. However the general audience will go for glossy, oversaturated and ´real´ HDR clouds.

This all is not new. This is called the popular vote. If you don´t want to show off your work on a photo sharing site used by the masses there is nothing stopping you. But, if you followed me so far read on …

There is a reason I don´t post my own photos. I photograph for about 40 years, grew up in a dark room before that got a new meaning, and didn´t buy expensive Agfacontour Professional Film to experiment with solipsism as I knew how to do it myself. I know how to ´dodge´ and ´burn´ by blocking the light and heating local spots by brushing them.

My hands have been in chemicals for so long that I´m pretty sure I´ll either die early or they were not as hazardous as the signs on the bottles suggested. I have caught up with digital photography albeit late and I still do some experimental stuff, do stereo photography since the nineties, play around with HDR to give me the interior photography I want and capture real high dynamic range environments with a dome as I am active in the professional CG world as well.

However I don´t share the results as I don´t need nor want the feedback of people who wouldn´t appreciate what I am doing. I like constructive criticism but I don´t want to waste my time defending my bleak, boring skies and the flat colors, or, horror, my B&W stuff.

What however is preventing you from showcasing your work? It´s not a hobby like mine became, but a profession and a business for you. Why don´t you work on building your audience here? No, you are right, you won´t get a million followers like +Trey Ratcliff who you seem to despise.

Strange as I like him a lot as a person and I know him as someone who is willing to listen and talk with others although you suggest he is not. He really is a nice guy who just happens to be big in a style which we both don´t appreciate. Art is and will always be a difficult subject and my opposition against over-saturation has nothing to do with good photography in itself.

Do you really need a million followers to use G+? I have my own pecularities: I write tl;dr posts as you can see :) but I fail in doing in so as they do get read. A staggering 19.000 people are willing to read them! I don´t force them, I didn´t lure them by posting stupid email jokes from the nineties or stealing other peoples stuff to get ´famous´ on G+.
I just post. I post about my views, my interests, I show what drives me, the things I oppose, the things I love, the viewpoints others don´t want to hear. But even that isn´t true as apparently a rather large number of people do want to hear them.

Only 19K people. Do you realize how many people that are? Imagine a conference hall with 19.000 people in it, showing up for hear what you have to say. It´s a staggering amount of people and it shows there is an audience for everything on G+

No, I didn´t get to that number in a month. It took me nine months and the first four months brought me to a total of ´just´ 2000, but I persisted. I got unsolicited advice to make short, tweet like posts. To tone down and be humble instead of the typical arrogant bastard style which is mine ;)

I ignored it. I am by nature an arrogant bastard :) and kept posting in the same style, with the same length and with the same critical view. I have been warned that I will never make it to the SUL as I can be very criticical about G+, but I counter it by the very simple argument that it's better to be hated for who you are, than loved for who you are not.

Why would you want to be on the SUL +Alexander Safonov? Is it not much more satisfying to have the appreciation of people you value than to have the votes of the masses? When I had about 6000 followers I already noticed that more than ten people on the SUL were following me.

That number went up later, but is it not much more satisfying to realize that you have a real audience? That you´re are being noticed and listened to by the people who matter to you? For you it will be different people than for me, but the principle doesn’t change.

Turn your negative attitude in a positive one. Don´t start cheering G+ as there is no reason to do so and sucking up will bring you nowhere (correct +Louis Gray ;) Take a good look at the people who got the tens of thousands or even millions when they reach the SUL.

Only a proportion of them are genuine people who use G+ to share really interesting stuff, but they exist. I can assure you that when I mention them in a relevant context they are happy to come over and comment. I am a content guy, I use words, but you can have a similar experience on G+ if you do your thing.

Forget the millions, but appreciate the thousands. You will have a hard time getting these elsewhere and reactions like in this thread are the one thing G+ is excellent for. Stand your grounds, keep posting your work and dwell on the idea that the people who matter like it.


cc: +P E Sharpe who wrote an excellent comment on the original thread which I hope she will repeat here.

edit: as this became a discussion about who should be on the suggested user list:
This is the complete current Suggested User List of Photography&Art by the way.
"+Tom Anderson","+Dave Powell","+Victor Bezrukov","+Elena Kalis","+Olaf Bathke","+Colby Brown","+Trey Ratcliff","+Daniel Ibanez","+Mike Shaw","+Thomas Hawk","+Jim Goldstein","+Klaus Herrmann","+Lotus Carroll","+Patrick Di Fruscia","+Chaz Bojorquez","+Jennifer Bailey","+Leodor Selenier","+Alfie Goodrich","+Jay Patel","+Leanne Staples","+Dave Cox","+Mihailo Radičević","+Vivienne Gucwa","+Ryan Estrada","+Patrick Smith","+Star Rush","+Shepard Fairey","+Kyle Marquardt","+Dave Beckerman","+JR Artist","+Scott Kelby","+Karen Hutton","+Alex Koloskov","+Alan Shapiro","+Christopher Michel","+Michael Cuddyer","+Jeremy Cowart","+Gary Baseman","+Lisa Bettany","+MOCA"

Notice there are many amateurs on that list, but that´s not a bad thing at all. For one, many professional, pricewinning photographers don´t want to share their work on G+ as you effectively sign away your rights (read the T&C of Google people). The other reason it´s not only bad news is that showing amateurs getting out such extremely good work encourages others.

I´m a big fan of a number of these people on this list and I can only hope that through G+ exposure they will be able to do this full time

RESHARE:
The +1 Paywall
Here's an idea. Force people to +1 your content in order to see it. Initial user reaction predictably is to be repulsed: As +Ayoub Khote commented, "If any blog I read uses this and wants me to spread the word (read: endorse) their content without reading it, I will stop reading that blog."

True, but...What does that +1 really cost you? It's worth money to the page owners trying to up rankings but unless Google starts rationing +1s, your supply to give out is limitless. We've been talking about reputation -- the idea that everyone is now a critic and our +1s represent our stamp of approval. Are we really trading away our good name when we endorse a page unworthy of our endorsement?

Besides the workaround seems simple. Read the page and then unplus it.

Personally I think the concept is ugly. But, if people are going to game the system (and they will try), shouldn't we ordinary users figure out the rules and play their game to our benefit?

Reshared text:
Well!
What do you think of this, folks?

Excerpt from the site:

"Tap into Google’s 500 million plus users with Google +1 Content Locker and gain immediate search and social traffic boosts. More +1’s = more traffic = more money!

The first plugin of its kind, Google +1 Content Locker allows you to wrap your WordPress post and page content in a “content locker” that will require the user to share your content with Google +1 before they can see it.
Build a social media super prescense over night by locking all, or just parts of your posts and pages!"

It's starting...

Deleting Comments and Branching Discussions
#netiquette
Recently +Steven Streight and I discussed whether it was okay to delete comments or was it a type of censorship. It's absolutely okay (and if you don't believe me, listen to author +John Scalzi -- see link below).

My House, My Rules
First of all, I'm under no obligation to provide anyone with a bully pulpit. I'm the host of my post and if I don't like the way that someone is acting in my house, I'll bounce them. If they want to spout off, they have their own account where they can set their own standards among their circles. I'm not going to give anyone netiquette advice on how to behave at their place. But I do expect them to respect the rules at mine. We do not need one standard for everyone; we need to respect the standards people set for themselves.

My post is my space where I'm free to do what I want and they have to play by my rules. Conversely, my comments exist in someone else's space where they are free to do what they want and I have to play by their rules. If they delete one of my comments, I'm not going to cry about it.

Branch the Discussion
If you're worried someone will delete a comment, then the best tactic is to reshare the post and put your comment in the reshare as an introduction. That way you are in control. In fact, that's one of the best ways to reshare something -- to provide added value when introducing it, to explain why you agree with the original author or why you don't. This turns you from a reader into a content producer.

That's my policy on deleting comments...in theory. In action, I've only deleted two comments in seven weeks. One person got really off topic. The other forgot we were speaking publicly and revealed personal information. What I did in both cases was copy their comments and start a new discussions with just them.

My Standards
I've been lucky so far to have interesting and engaging readers. I'm always more interested in a good discussion than mindless agreement. As long as people stay on topic and focus on the issues, then you're welcome here.

Updated: Please Expand to see Update
Privacy Invasion Leak: Google+ Displays Profile Photo from Gmail
Great! Not only did Google+ make me use my personal email account (rather than the public one associated with my blogs) to sign up -- this morning it started displaying my picture from that Gmail account.

This is a photo I specifically chose not to make public. It is the photo I use to interact primarily on chat with my spouse and a very few close friends. I have just gone to my Gmail account and deleted it. I have submitted feedback. I hope this was only a glitch.

I feel exposed and violated.

Update: Just logged back in again and was directed to a new Account page. Maybe Google is merging Google+ and Gmail account profiles and that's what caused unexpected behavior. Does anyone have status updates from the Google team that would confirm.

Politics: The War on Women, Part WTF?!!?  
The poor, frightened dears. Why do you think they can't get laid? Is it their itty bitty dicks or just their charming manners? Apparently the only way they can imagine a woman opening her legs is if that woman is economically dependent on them. Submit, harlots! Women, are they right or what?

As for their fantasies of submissive women on which they can impose their wills...well, if I thought that way, I'd be ashamed to admit it publicly. I suppose they also dream of lording it over black men but are bit more concerned that if they give voice to those fancies that they might get beaten to a pulp in a dark alley.

What a disgrace these two are to real men. You know, the kind of men who women like just because they're men. No coercion (economic, physical, or otherwise) necessary.

Transcript  
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/conservative-radio-hosts-parse-feminists-some-are-cute-some-are-ugly-all-are-family-destroyi
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#waronwomen  

User Experience: Less Interactivity  
I'm tempted to turn sharing and commenting off on this post so that you, dear reader, do not feel obligated to respond.

This is one of the most sensible things I've read lately. If only it weren't from the Onion, maybe social media and website designers would take it more seriously.

From the article. "Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on social media, bestow ratings, leave comments, and generally 'join in on the discussion,' the nation’s Internet users demanded substantially less interactivity this week."

"Speaking with reporters, web users expressed a near unanimous desire to visit a website and simply look at it, for once, without having every aspect of the user interface tailored to a set of demographic information culled from their previous browsing history. In addition, citizens overwhelmingly voiced their wish for a straightforward one-way conduit of information, and specifically one that did not require any kind of participation on their part."

via +Alex Moffat 

Politics: If Only White Men Could Vote 
I thought the editorial from Maureen Dowd dovetailed nicely with the maps showing how the 2012 US election would have gone if only white men could vote.
----------------------
From Maureen Dowd, "Mitt Romney is the president of white male America."
...
 "Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.

The election about the economy also sounded the death knell for the Republican culture wars.

Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told wives how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time to cook dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands not to vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party was helping to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception.

Just like the Bushes before him, Romney tried to portray himself as more American than his Democratic opponent. But America’s gallimaufry wasn’t knuckling under to the gentry this time."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/opinion/sunday/dowd-romney-is-president.html
----------------------
#waronwomen

PSA: How to Survive an Active Shooter Event
Don't you love the euphemism for "crazed gunman". Brought to you by our government because life in America is sometimes more like "an action movie than reality". (Yes, they say that.)

Despite the weirdness, overall it seems to be fairly sensible advice from Houston's Regional Disaster Preparedness site: http://www.Readyhoustontx.gov/
(The site is nicely multi-lingual, I notice. Not just the usual English and Spanish but Chinese, Vietnamese, and American Sign Language).

RESHARE:
Ten Myths About Introverts
1. Introverts don't like to talk.
"Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days."

Yep!
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INTJ Circle: Not a lot of new information here but it sums it together nicely. I have heard of the Laney's book The Introvert Advantage but I haven't read it. The part about the physical differences between extroverts and introverts sounds interesting. I know that I'm extremely sensitive to physical stimuli and too much for too long forces me to put my shields up.

Reshared text:
http://www.carlkingdom.com/10-myths-about-introverts

Indeed.

RESHARE:
UXG+: Text, Please
Dear Google. I want my text back. I don't want to communicate solely via pictures like the cavemen did. I'd hoped we'd progressed a bit since then. However, if this is the game you want to play, I will play it. Just how searchable is text in an image versus text written as text on a page? 
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#waronwords  

Reshared text:
I'm also submitting this (with notes from my past posts) to Google+ feedback.

Clean Slate  
If I worshipped a god, I might choose Janus, the god of thresholds, looking forward and looking back, marking beginnings and endings. I have learned to love marking the New Year because I use it is an opportunity to stop a moment in the swiftly flowing stream of time, catch my breath, and check my bearings.

To prepare for the New Year I do o-souji  which is the Japanese year-end tradition of "spring cleaning". I'm attracted to the idea of getting everything in order before a New Year starts, of getting rid of accumulated clutter, paying debts, and tying up loose ends. This satisfies my need for closure.

My version of New Year's cleaning is not restricted to just cleansing and scrubbing. (In fact, there has not been nearly enough of that.) This is when I organize. I dump the contents of my drawers, get rid of old clothes, dried up pens, alphabetize the spice drawer, file unfiled papers, clean out the pantry, and all other closets by pulling everything out of them and selectively putting things back. Out goes the worn, the broken, and the out-dated. Most of these things are not replaced. 

I also get rid of all of my unfinished projects and wipe my To Do list. If I haven't done by now, I reason, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to start the new year with a lot of obligation and guilt pressing on me. New and more important things will start populating my list on January 1st.

Here, too, on Google+ I'm cleaning out my circles. If I don't recognize you by name, then we probably haven't interacted much. So, goodbye. Until we meet again. Also, I used to use circles to organize select people whom I wanted to notify when I posted on specific topics. Now that we can subscribe and publish to Communities, I don't need to do this. So I have axed about half my circles and lumped everyone I know into one of two. I'm determined to beat the Google+ relevance algorithm at its own game and get it to display what I want to see in my Home stream.

The one problem I have doing o-souji is that I'm easily distracted by the things I'm putting away. I'll start to put a book back on the shelf and then start leafing through it. Half an hour goes by. I'll file away some letters and think, I should really write again, and do. I'll put away old study notes and wonder why I haven't studied lately and make plans to do so. 

When it comes to cleaning, I meander when I should march.
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きれいにしましょう

Google+ Chat Invasion
According to a Google spokesperson, “We’re making it easier to chat with the people you care about.”

No. You are not. Google+ has just made it more difficult for me to chat with the people I care about because their voices are now drowned out by the 1000 people I have circled because I find their written content engaging.

I circled these people to read their posts, not to chat with them. I indicated which people I want to chat with. Now I have to turn chat off completely because the only choices I am now given for the people in my chat list are "Anyone, Extended circles, and Circles." What about Custom? What about None?

G+ Tips: Stop Using Hashtags
As currently implemented Google+ hashtags are merely a shortcut to inserting a link in your post to keyword search...and an ugly one at that. Not only does Google ignore the hashtag when performing the search, it adds the hashtag character to the link text (without graying it out like the + in @mentions). This has the double problem of being typographically ugly while conveying the incorrect impression that it is searching for the hashtag character. It isn't. And you can't force Google+ to search for it either.

Even if you try to search for a single exact word following Google's instructions (see doc below) to put in in quotes, Google ignores the hashtag character.

Conclusion
If Google+ is not going to perform an exact word search and is going to ignore the hashtag character, there is no reason to use hashtags. They just annoy your readers.

For readers, hashtags are a typographical nightmare. We put up with them because they provide social value. We use them as an exact word search. And yes, that means sometimes we have similar competing phrases. For example, on the rare occasion that we get a rain to ease the drought, I might tag my tweet #ATXrain and a friend might write #centexrain . That's part of the social game -- proving you're with it enough to know the password.
#fail
Note: This is a social use of a hashtag to express commentary. It is not actually the keyword of this post.

Hashtags Co-opted
Now that the hashtag character has been co-opted by Google+ to insert a link to keyword search, there is already a movement to use another character as an identifier. See +Andy Owen 's post on &ampertags: https://plus.google.com/102221067073073008496/posts/CfjypMGYiri or +Gokul NK 's post on the exclamation point. https://plus.google.com/u/0/112936134628107902655/posts/CUrf1Juiejk?hl=en

Kudos
Thanks to many readers who left comments on my two previous posts where I explored people's reactions to hashtags: the netiquette of using them and the problems with search results. You helped me clarify the pros and cons and come to my conclusion.

HT to +Halfdan Reschat for the link to the doc, to +John Moyle for his eloquent response on Yonatan Zunger's original post, and to +Yonatan Zunger for taking the time to respond to our concerns. Yonatan, I know we sound pretty rough on you and your team. We do appreciate the great amount of effort the Google+ team is putting in. I think the level of our disappointment is often an indicator of how high our expectations are. I am, and remain, a big fan of Google+.

From the Google doc...
Search single word exactly as is ("")
Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By putting double quotes around a single word, you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it."

Extended Circles Spam and How to Stop It
#circles
One of the brilliant things about Google+ is that, for the most part, it is the reader who gets to decide what to see. No one can push content onto you that you didn't sign up for, unless...one of your contacts lets them in the door via extended circles.

Ideally extended circles let you expand your circle by making your posts visible to friends of friends. Of course, we don't live in an ideal of world and the brands, the marketers, the social media gurus, and the spammers are already exploring ways to exploit this hole in the pull model so that they can push content into your stream.

They will add you to their circles so you get a notification. If you've been ignoring my advice, you will follow them back. Even if you don't follow them back, they will push content into your Incoming stream and the Incoming streams of all the people you follow. The latest twist: if you follow them back, they will use new tools which block your content in their stream.

These people aren't interested in what you have to say. They are only interested in access to your stream and your circles.

Protect Your Friends and Encourage them to Protect You
1. Edit you profile.
Extended circles only works if your contacts are visible to the person posting to Extended circles. So the safest thing to do is hide the list of people who you follow from "Anyone on the web". You can also select which of your circles are visible.

I trust the people I follow not to abuse extended circles. Currently, I have a lot of friends who know each other only by their blog names. Thanks to Google's policy on pseudonyms, we're having a hard time finding each other. So, if I add one of them to my circle, I want them to see the other people I've found -- so that we can rebuild our community here on Google+. That's why I let anyone I've added to a circle see who else is in my circles. In the future I may have to limit this further.

2. Don't add gurus to your circles.
Well, if they've already reached their 5000 limit, it's okay. Then they can't add you back and so spammers can't reach you through them. (But if Google+ caves to their demands to increase the follower limit, you are opening yourself up to abuse.)

Also, if it's someone like +Chris Brogan who has followed step 1 and hidden the people he follows, it's okay. He's protecting the people he follows from Extended circle spam. Way to go, Chris! If we could get all our friends to do this, we could foil the spammers.

3. Turn about is fair play.
Since the marketers are developing tools to follow us without reading our content (https://plus.google.com/113117251731252114390/posts/UyMGYfQGtRN), I think it's fair to turn the tables and read them without following them.

Remember. You don't have to add someone to your circles to read or comment on their posts. In fact, with highly popular authors, you have little incentive to do so. First of all, they're going to flood your stream with posts ("The Scoble Effect"). Secondly, everything they're going to share with you, they share publicly. So just go to their Profile page and read it.

If you can't remember them by name, you can subscribe to their Profile pages with RSS. (http://plusfeed.appspot.com/)

Or you can just build your own bookmark page with links to their Profile pages.

Related Posts

Let the Right One In
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/ijexSUrwi9Q

Content Scrapers Are Here, Too
Shortly after +Robert Scoble reshared my post on trolls yesterday and it came to the attention of a wider audience, reader +Chris Clark gave me the heads up that he'd seen it reposted on Inside Google Plus .

I followed his link and sure enough, two of my posts had been combined to create one post -- used without my knowledge, permission, or attribution. I left a comment saying as much. This morning my comment had been deleted but, they had edited my article and linked back to my Google+ profile. As far as I looked, it is the only attribution given to any "author" on the site.

This doesn't satisfy me. Someone else is still monetizing my content without my permission and without compensating me. I write for a living so this hurts. (Even if I didn't, I'd still consider it stealing.)

Their site map contains rules for becoming an author.

"We do not accept guest blogging account request on this website anymore. If you want to submit your articles, please contact info[at]googleplustip.com."

"We received many re-written articles and discarded all of them, many previous guest blogging author published such articles and all were deleted."

If you go to the site map, they have an "Authors" category but no authors listed. No authors but plenty of articles. A complete list is on the site map. Check and see if any of yours are there. (I'm not providing a direct link because I do not want to drive traffic to their site -- get the URL from the screenshot below.)

UX: Pinterest 
Prescribing bland conformity. Why all photos on Pinterest will soon look exactly alike.

#ux   #pinterest   #photography  

In describing the "perfect" Pinterest  photograph, Apu Gupta CEO of Curalate has articulated a prescription for everyone playing the number games for attracting followers. "Curalate, which helps companies optimize and monitor the images they post to Pinterest and Instagram, has a vested interesting in figuring out what Pinterest users like."

They do that by analyzing how Pinterest users respond to certain elements of an image: color, saturation, background, faces and then sell their analysis to companies who want to repeat the success of Pinterest's most popular images.

For anyone who once believed that the Internet offered a glimmer of hope in the darkness, an alternative to the old media corporate model of "We just print what sells." it's clearly time to put your idealism back on the shelf. The analytics for determining what sells is more pervasive than ever. Rather than provide a platform that caters to every niche taste no matter how offbeat, a feast of billions of distinct images and voices, the Internet grinds them into an inoffensive pap digestible by the greatest number.

In describing what sells, we have prescribed behavior for everyone who wants to make a sale. Who dares to be different or innovative? The data is in. "Science" tells us what works...for the majority...to be popular. Hey. Don't blame us. We're just selling what people want to buy.

This is the Perfect Pinterest Picture 
“Consumers are increasingly communicating using images rather than words,” says Gupta. “We’re trying to decode that language and give you a better vocabulary with which to speak.”
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/this-is-the-perfect-pinterest-picture/

Interesting Aside
From the article. No human faces: Images without faces get repinned more often than images with faces...This surprised even Gupta, a veritable scholar of Pinterest behavior. “I would have thought that faces make an image more relatable — it’s a human seeing a human,” he says. But it turns out Pinterest has its own distinctive character as a social network. “We think of Facebook as a network of people, and Foursquare as a network of places. Pinterest is a network of things … and it seems like on a network of things, faces are actually a distraction.”

I wonder what Google+ is the network of? and what images work here best. I used to think it was the network of ideas.

RESHARE:
Stand Up. Man Up   
Time to take back our space. Perhaps not coincidentally, just this week I've come across related articles on how it's time for American conservatives to take back the GOP from the lunatic fringe and for mainstream Christianity to take back their religion from fundamentalist theocrats.

So this trend to take back these concepts—man, conservative, Christian—for those who would pervert them in order to abuse others, seems like the bright spot of the week.
----------------------
From the article.
"Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We're seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They're as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They're causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this."

"Why us? Because it's our job to see to it that a boy becomes a man, and we are failing."
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Related  
+George Takei The Gorilla in Their Midst
http://www.allegiancemusical.com/blog-entry/gorilla-their-midst

Reshared text:
The sheer awesomeness of this article made me almost weepy.  This this this and this again.

Standard warning applies.  I'm entirely on side with this article's declaration that this stuff is not open to debate.  This is the way it is.  If you don't like women or you think men don't have a role to play in curbing the upward trend in online harassment, feel free to decircle me.  That's from any side: I will block those who say men have no voice in feminism as surely as I will block those who play any of the standard Bingo responses (see http://tumblinfeminist.tumblr.com/post/12171070300/notaskingforpermission-derailment-bingo-by ).  The only acceptable further discussion is mutual support within the clued-in community.

Fox
During our attempt to relocate the raccoons which have taken up residence in our attic, so far we've also caught four possums and this fox. I do manage my garden as a wildlife habitat but I've never seen a fox in it before.

It snarled and snapped when I got near the cage but the second I managed to get the door open it was halfway across the yard.
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#ATX  #78704

JPop: Pizzicato Five, La Depression  
+John Asano posted on what currently makes a hot guy (ikemen) in Japan.   https://plus.google.com/105181601937151625687/posts/K3yuoFw932t

The list has changed a bit from the attributes listed by Pizzicato Five ...
   Yasashikute (nice)
   Kawaikute (cute)
   Okanemochi no (rich)
   Otoko no ko (guy)

...who lamented in "La Depression":

I haven't seen
A single interesting
Man around
For ages

A gentle
Cute
Rich
Bloke

We've been going through
Quite a recession these days
The world is going through
Some crisis I tell you
These days have been
Somewhat tedious

Interesting
Guys
Are not available
This season    

Austin Police Department: It Gets Better  
Proud Texans. "The Lesbian & Gay Peace Officers Association produced a video comprising of LGBT officers and civilian members of the Austin Police Department to send a message to LGBTQ youth that it does get better."

"This is part of the It Gets Better Project (www.itgetsbetter.org) and The Trevor Project (www.thetrevorproject.org) to reach out to LGBTQ youth who may be struggling due to bullying, harassment, and non-acceptance, and who may be thinking of committing suicide. Our message is to let those youth know that even though it is difficult today, tomorrow will bring hope, love, and life. We are here to help you make it there!"
------------------------
#ATX    #trevorproject  

Google+: It's About the Community
This article goes through a lot of whining before it gets to the meat.
--------------------
"I've been drawing out a city building metaphor here, so let's keep it going. If Google Plus is California City (or Brasilia), Google needs to find areas where people are already congregating excitedly. They shouldn't build a new city, but revitalize the neighborhoods they already have.

"Note that this community building task is different from providing better search service with social knowledge! This is about generating more social connections, not drawing on them to power a separate product. The former is nice, but it's not how you build an engaged community.

"So, where are the neighborhoods where humans are already hanging out? Google has a variety of products that while not explicitly "social networks" could easily be thought of as places that help people "share," a la Facebook's mantra. Just think about them all: Reader. Picasa. Scholar. Earth. Books. Blogger. Hell, even Zagat.

"It's these already bustling communities that should form the core of Google's next-level social offering. Take Scholar, which allows users to access research papers. A smallish group numbering in the millions visit the site to find research papers because it works better than academic search engines. It's pretty clear that Google's corporate honchos think the site is kind of a drag and they have no revenue model for it. Little has been done to update the service, even simple things like allowing people to sort by the number of citations."
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Related
Fostering a Sense of Community
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118011560178264222649/posts/4DHBEbHi3os
via +Cara Evangelista Reynolds

John Scalzi: Straight White Male and Followups
Scalzi's offhand manner has always been a source of inspiration to me especially when dealing with idiot comments. Luckily, this is not much of a problem for me. Maybe I'm not popular enough to attract the attention of idiots. Maybe it's the social dynamic on Google+. Whatever the reason, I have great commenters.
------------------------
From the followup post. "9. In your comment thread with the article, you censored people who disagreed with you.
"I indeed malleted quite a few people in that comment thread. Most of them disagreed with me philosophically on the issue under discussion. They were also being assholes. They were malleted for the latter, not the former. Who gets to judge when someone’s being an asshole here? Why, I do. Because it’s my site...Now, people may be upset that in addition to deleting people’s comments, I also mocked them when I deleted their comments. But, you know, when you show up on my site and decide to shit all over the carpet, I’m not going to be nice to you."

Followup: +John Scalzi Responds to Comments
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-setting-follow-up/
----------
via +Alex Moffat

Social Marketing: Search Plus Google+
Just a reminder that all of us who use Google+ to talk about things other than our relationships with brands are just freeloading on a system designed to feed social into search. This is why I don't believe we'll see ads popping up in Google+ itself. Rather everything we write on Google+, every careless comment we make, has the potential to be an ad on Google search.

Last September I wrote a piece on "Authors and Authority" pointing out that another reason not to circle people indiscriminately (follow back guilt or large shared circles) is that you are telling Google+ that this is a person whose opinion you trust.

"By circling someone, I tell Google search that I have chosen him as one of my authorities. How does this affect my search results? Is skewing results in the favor of my chosen authorities always a good thing, or will dissenting opinions be adversely damped down?"
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/cd4Lviw5M4Q
--------------------------
Now for my own test. My search for principles did not bring up +Peter Strempel even when I searched specifically on the 90 "personal results" that Google search found. I recognized all the people on the first page of results but I interact with them less and they would not have been my personal choice as an authority on the subject. It wasn't until I searched on "integrity" that I found the conversation I was looking for -- probably because the word integrity was in the title of Peter's post; principles was not.

A comment by +Daniela Huguet Taylor (who I also follow) and which included the word integrity was also displayed. I understand that comments on a public post are public but seeing a line out of context gives me pause. What a damper on conversation to see them used as ad copy. So much for our talks of fellatio and vengeance.

Authors and Authority
In an article on Dickens in the Aug 29, 2011 "The New Yorker", Jill Lepore explains that book reviewing sprang up in the 18th century with the introduction of magazines. In the 19th century, as literacy rates rose and the price of magazines fell, " A democracy of readers rose up against an aristocracy of critics. " Thus emerged the rift between popular success and critical acclaim.

In the 21st century, everybody's a critic. Hell. Everybody's a writer. The Internet and blog software have made self-publishing possible beyond the wildest dreams of people like Ben Franklin in the days of small, free presses.

We now live in a moment when anyone can voice an opinion and be heard. Is it coming to a close? Companies which fight against Net Neutrality want a tiered system which favors their content over competitors'. Facebook has shown that most of us are social animals, influenced by our peers in our decisions to try and buy. Facebook is the realm of the "democracy of readers".

Google+, I think, is not. Google+ seems designed to spotlight the "aristocracy of critics". Google+ encourages us to build our reputations, to become an authority. Then when we give something our stamp of approval, it will mean something.

According to my dictionary, "imprimatur" comes from Latin verb imprimere "let it be printed". It was the stamp of approval that the Roman Catholic church put on religious tracts, the official license guaranteeing the contents were free from heresy.

The return to an "aristocracy of critic" seems like a natural response to information overload -- just as magazines began to review books when books became too plentiful for anyone to read them all himself. On the Internet, we complain about the noise. We demand relevant search results.

As someone who relies more on the analysis of authorities and critics than I do on the tastes of my friends, Google+ sounds like should be the ideal solution. By circling someone, I tell Google search that I have chosen him as one of my authorities. How does this affect my search results? Is skewing results in the favor of my chosen authorities always a good thing, or will dissenting opinions be adversely damped down?

In theory, it sounds good. In practice, it makes me feel rebellious and heretical.

Film: Jiro Dreams of Sushi  
How much do you love your job? Is your work your life work? Do you get antsy over holidays? If you're at the top of you profession, do you still obsess each day trying to figure out how to best yourself?

85 year-old Jiro Ono is considered one of the top sushi chefs in the world. His tiny (10 seat) restaurant in a Tokyo subway station earned a coveted 3-star Michelin rating. And he loves his job.

In fact, the whole quiet little movie is a celebration of people who enjoy mastery in their work. I'm inspired to take my work more seriously. And I now also have a craving for sushi, although, after watching this film, no ordinary sushi will ever really satisfy me again.

A delicious little film for people who love food and work.
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"Two chief elements make work interesting; first, the exercise of skill, and second, construction."  Bertrand Russell

RESHARE:
Halloween Horror  
The real horror of Halloween, in fact all holidays in America, is that they just go on forever as the corporations try to milk every last cent from our rituals and celebrations. 

As a child I disliked New Year's Eve but since living in Japan, the New Year has become the only holiday I observe. Among the most cringe-worthy for me are Halloween, Valentine's Day, and Christmas. 

I hate Halloween the most because the way it's now celebrated in America is a six-week reminder of a generation that cannot let go of its childhood. 

Don't bother commenting to tell me I'm a crotchety old grump. Just get the fuck off my lawn.

Reshared text:
I wanted to return an item to a store. I brought it and my receipt to the return desk. The woman looked at my receipt and said, "I'm sorry, but we have a 30-day return policy. You needed to return this by September 19th." I said I was. We both looked around the room, which was floor-to-ceiling bedecked with ghosts, bats, pumpkins, cobwebs, and giant spiders. She sighed and said, "So ... it's still not October yet?"

INTJ: Reality, the Crucible for Refining Ideas
We've been having a really fun discussion over +Youssef Hachhouch's place on the MBTI (link below). If you're an INTx, you'll find it interesting. Youssef is experiencing the same sense of revelation I did when I first started reading about my type: INTJ.

This is the quote that really spoke to me back then. "[INTJs] are the supreme pragmatists, who see reality as something which is quite arbitrary and made up. Thus it can be used as a tool -- or ignored. Reality is quite malleable and can be changed, conquered, or brought to heel. Reality is a crucible for the refining of ideas, and in this sense, INTJs are the most theoretical of all the types. Where an ESTP sees ideas as the pawn of reality, an INTJ sees reality as the pawn of ideas: No idea is too far-fetched to be entertained." -- INTJ Profile by David Keirsey
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I think this quote goes a long way in explaining my excitement about Google+, too. I meet so many people here who love to play with ideas, experiment, toy, and have fun thinking. There is a camaraderie that comes from a shared sense of adventure as we explore uncharted territories in the theoretical landscape.

Rant: Damn, tabs!
Just lost my first serious post in awhile because I went to double-check a link and forgot that Chrome opens up things in tabs not new windows by default and Google+ doesn't auto-save drafts.

Anyway...my post was about the reader experience and how advice for social networks focuses too much on how to get an audience and not enough on how to read effectively. That's a pretty one-sided, anti-social relationship.

Now I've lost my train of thought and I'm not spending the next half hour trying to reconstruct my carefully constructed revelations. I'll just sign off with my original question: where's the advice for readers? where are the features that make Google+ experience better for readers? Is social media shorthand for a social interaction where everyone is talking and no one is listening?

G+ Tips: Letterbox Circle #circles
I use Google+ rather than Gmail these days to have conversations with individual friends. Google+ has the quick interaction of messaging plus the ability to write longer missives. Google+ posts feel more informal and conversational to me than email -- even when they are just as long.

However, when I write to one or more people by name (rather than by circle), the only place I can see that post is on my Profile page where it quickly gets lost among my Public posts.

So I created a new empty circle (like the ones I have for Bookmarks, Drafts, and Feedback). I call it Letterbox.

Using the Letterbox Circle
1. Open the Letterbox circle to compose your letter.
This keeps the main stream from distracting you as you write. It also automatically adds the Letterbox circle to the distribution box.
2. Enter the addressee's name with an @ mention on the first line of the post.
This adds the addressee to the distribution box.
It also acts as a salutation -- a social convention which highlights the fact that this post is shared with just the person you are addressing.
Note: If you want to keep the conversation private (that is, turn off resharing and not allow the recipient to add anyone else to the conversation) then after sharing the post, lock it.

Using my new Letterbox circle, all my letters are now in one place where it's easy to monitor the conversation or pick it up again.

#parody #socialnetworking
What If Men Can't "Get" Social?
There's a lot of talk about gender inequality here on Google+. I have to admit, after reading some of the analysis and reviews, I'm worried. What if guys can't get it? What if it's not in their genetic makeup to be social?

Tool-makers vs. Tool-users
The first instinct of many male early-adopters seems to be to take Google+ apart and try to redesign it. Fiddling with the tool and discussing endlessly how they could have built it better delights them. But they seem stumped on simply how to use Google+.

Relationships. Not a guy thing?
In "Can we ever digitally organize our friends?", Kevin Cheng points to some of his difficulties. "...maintaining digital groups has two problems. First, you don’t know when to move someone from one group to another because transitions happen gradually. Second, it’s simply a lot of effort to maintain...When compounded with the high overhead of maintenance and likely outdated groups over time, it’s even less likely that I’ll know who I’m actually sharing a post with."

Fred Wilson, in his article "Explicit Groups Vs Implicit Groups," responds to Kevin. "...[F]riends and interests are not so finite and fixed. They come and go. They are highly fluid and dynamic.

I'm just about to shout "Yay! Fred gets it!" when he concludes, "I don't want to put my friends into circles. I want a machine to do it for me." [ emphasis mine ]

Despite these initial pockets of resistance, I have hope. In my three weeks on Google+, I've met plenty of men who break gender stereotypes. Maybe we could encourage more guys to open up if they had their own circle on the Recommended Users site. That site (see screenshot below) spotlights "Women in Tech". But where are the men? We need to make them feel more comfortable.

M's List: Guys Who Get Google+
So to correct the oversight, here are some of my daily reads. This list is by no means exhaustive. And I didn't include any superstar gurus (like Scoble). These are just guys who are using Google+ to share their passions. They engage and amuse me and I'm always learning new, cool stuff from them.
+Mark Traphagen
+David Prieto
+Ricardo Francisco Prochnow
+Jeremy Welch
+Ron Pemberton
+Kol Tregaskes
+Geeky Sprocket
+Daniel Jomphe
+Takahiro Yamamoto

Sources for this article
+Kevin Cheng Can we ever digitally organize our friends?
http://kevnull.com/2011/07/can-we-ever-digitally-organize-our-friends.html

+Fred Wilson Explicit Groups Vs Implicit Groups
http://www.businessinsider.com/explicit-groups-vs-implicit-groups-2011-7

Google+ Suggested Users
http://www.recommendedusers.com/

RESHARE:
Graphic Advantage
Are our words just collateral damage in a larger war between Google+ and Facebook?

Reshared text:
How Google+ Devalues Facebook

Competitive brands stay ahead of their competition in the consumer market by finding ways to both build the brand, and undermine the competition at the same time. For Google, undermining the competition often takes the form of undercutting their margins.

Google has shown a willingness to run projects at a loss, often for many years, in order to grow their market share and the lay the groundwork for future profitability.

YouTube, for example, only recently began to generate profit, but now looks set to become a multi-billion dollar, media-reinventing powerhouse. Gmail forced competing email services to offer larger storage for free. Google Drive has already altered the pricing structure for cloud storage. Android is conquering the world while generating little revenue.

They seem set to repeat this pattern with Google+. Google+ is two things, a social network, and a social layer for the Google ecosystem. The latter may or may not generate profit, but the former clearly does not. How could it? There are no advertisements, no ways to spend money directly, nada. It's not just that there aren't any advertisements... it's that there seems to be almost no space for them to be added in the future.

With bigger pictures and videos, longer character limits and the text formatting abilities to encourage its use, and everything else that Google crams onto the page, the screen real estate for advertisements is basically absent. Google+'s new User Interface seemed to correct this by introducing a massive area of "white space" visible on widescreen monitors.

Yet, Google has indicated that it will not use this space for advertising, and in every other respect the new User Interface removes basically any screen real estate for future advertising. Nor does it offer any sponsored posts (yet).

The new Google+ iPhone app repeats many elements of the new User Interface, including bigger bolder pictures and videos, taking up valuable screen real estate on devices with less to begin with. The Android app will also be updated to something closer to the new iPhone version before long (with some "extras", apparently).

Google is an advertising company, and a social network is valuable real estate for advertising. What's going on here? Are they smoking some bad granola out there in Mountain View? I don't think so. I think this is a deliberate strategy to utterly devalue Facebook by forcing them to compete on features or go too far plastering ads everywhere.

In the most direct way, this devalues Facebook by forcing it to spend more to stay ahead. Less directly, they are trying to force Facebook to choose between two unattractive alternatives: continuously increasing the amount of real estate it devotes to advertising while Google+ remains ad-free, or continuously decreasing that real estate to compete on features.

When Google introduced Hangouts, Facebook had to integrate Skype. This helps Microsoft, but (when used) tends to take user eyeballs away from Facebook's advertisements. The cost of running Hangouts, and Hangouts On Air, must be quite large, and yet Google offers them free, without any advertising. And because Google+ offered bigger bolder pictures, Facebook had to offer them as well, eating away even more screen real estate.

What did Google do in response? They made pictures and videos even bigger and bolder in their new User Interface, too big and bold for the liking of some people. Will Facebook follow suit? How much would this further reduce the real estate they have available on the screen? What about mobile apps? If they are forced to compete on cramming features into their mobile app with Google+, their mobile advertising revenue may be permanently starved.

Google is making social networking, while still valuable for marketing purposes, essentially valueless for paid advertising. Their hope, I believe, is that eventually Facebook will either try to cram so many advertisements onto the page and into the News Feed that users opt to switch to their ad-free alternative, or will be forced to remain largely ad-free in perpetuity, effectively choking the revenue stream.

I, for one, don't think a social network should be used as a captive audience to sell advertisements. Facebook has to do this. They have no other revenue source. Luckily, Google doesn't need to make money from Plus any time soon, may never need to. Social networking without all of the advertisements? Now that really is "more like real life", and less like the world's largest Tupperware Party.

◄ #facebook #googleplus #whitespace ►

RESHARE:
Shakespeare addresses identity on Google+.

Reshared text:
Some Shakespeare for the deciders at Google:

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

#googleplustips #share #reshare #contentcreators
Why Resharing is Not Broken -- But How it Could Be Better
Coming to Google+ with my blogging blinders on, I was initially dismayed by the behavior of the Share link at the bottom of each post. As a blogger, I want readers to read my content on my site, not an aggregator's. Page views are a bloggers bread and butter. The idea that people could expand my entire post inside someone else's post just felt wrong.

I talked to Googler +Trey Harris and this is how he explained Share to me. "...it interests me that you feel that using the share button as currently implemented feels like stealing. The format of the " Person originally shared this post:" with the profile picture and link is not possible to fake; you can't alter a post or make something up or point the profile picture and link to some other person. The original poster gets notified of the reshare and can look at comments made to it. It requires attribution to the original author. It seems like taking this mechanism away would result in people using copy and paste, which doesn't require attribution or notification to the original author, and that seems much more like stealing to me."

Finally. I got it! And the more I use it, the more I get it.

Reshare = Link Love
Google+ is actually providing the same behavior as when we share a link on a blog. The reader can either comment on the linker's post or click through and comment on the author's post. My shared post, arguably, gets more eyeballs because the reader can read it inline and not lose his place in the stream.

Reshare Enforces Attribution
Google+ improves on the blog experience this way. When a reader clicks Share on the linker's post, it actually shares the author's post -- giving the original author all the credit. The original author gets notified of the shares. And, on the original post, you can see how many people shared it and who they were by name.

Reshare Helps Your Post Go Viral
Rehare enables the original post to build up an audience over days -- as people share with their friends who in turn share with their friends. Rather than the post slipping off the timeline into oblivion, it has more opportunity to go viral.

Share counts go to the author of the original post, not to the linker.
http://socialstatistics.com/?include=popular

How Google Could Make Reshare Better
1. If the original post can be viewed publicly, let the reader click through to the post.
Then we could read the comments in the original discussion and leave comments for the original author. (This is one of the major complaints of the current implementation that I've seen.)

I would expand this. I would always allow the click through to the original post and then let the original author's read permissions determine whether or not I can see it.

2. Convey more explicitly which post (author's or linker's) that these actions apply to: #1, Comment, Share.
Maybe, Google+ could detect if the post is from a Share and change the text to "Share original". Maybe there could be two comment options: "Comment (works the same)" and "Comment on original" which would have a link to the original post. Whether or not you have permissions to view the original post, you'd discover when you got there.

How Users Could Make Reshare Better
1. Introduce the Material
If you're going to share something with me, tell me why. If you can't tell me why you are sharing someone else's post with me, don't share it with me. If you can't form complete sentences, stick with hashtags (#humor #fail #NSFW) -- but give me a clue.

2. Share With a Specific Audience.
Rev up the power of Google+, people. Share with the people who care. Your Fishing Buddies don't care about your Yoga videos. Your Vegan friends don't want to see BBQ links. And I don't want to see anymore animated gifs. (#humor)

If you must share with everyone, at the most share with Extended Circles. This will get it out to more people than those you follow explicitly.

There is almost zero reason you should ever reshare publicly (share to the whole Internet). If the original author shared publicly, (or is referencing content external to Google+) then the permalink is already out there on the Internet. I don't know the ins and outs of Google's search algorithm, but I doubt if they are giving you extra credit for sharing publicly.

With many new features, not limited to Google+, Google now seems to be focusing the spotlight on content creators. Bravo, Google!

RESHARE:
UXG+: The only way to write...
...is to make a picture of it. Really, +Vic Gundotra ?
#fail   #waronwords  

Reshared text:
The inevitable image test

Politics: Texas Petitions to Secede  
If Texas succeeds in seceding, can Austin secede from Texas?
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Details  
Gawker: Petitions to Secede Filed in 19 States
http://gawker.com/5959719/we-the-people-petitions-filed-in-nineteen-states-seeking-permission-to-secede-from-the-union

The Examiner
Apparently the movement is catching on...up to 30 States.
http://www.examiner.com/article/citizens-over-30-states-petition-for-secession-from-united-states
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#atx   #soreloser  

Film: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs  
Friday night at the movies brings us at last to this cheerful little film about life in the good old days (1960). The days when being a young widow forced you into the life of a bar hostess and prostitution to keep from starving and to support your family. Everyone is in debt, no one can pay, and even killing yourself doesn't discourage your creditors from hitting up your family at your funeral.

Seriously, though. This is the first film by Naruse I've seen and I'm going to watch it again tomorrow. He apparently made 80 films but this is the only one I've ever heard of so I must seek some more out. Were it in French instead of Japanese, I'm convinced it would be enjoyed by the whole family. 

21st Century Health Care in America   
Please reshare with your mothers, wives, and daughters.

Google+: Home Stream Algorithm
Lately, has anyone noticed tweaks to what's being displayed in your home stream?

1. Although I follow +Paul Simbeck-Hampson, I don't remember seeing his stuff in my stream before (that is, he is not someone I interact with frequently enough to remember his name.) However, this post (https://plus.google.com/u/0/106342049490120140849/posts/TvSD58C9mp2)  bubbled up to the top of my stream and when I clicked over to view the link it turns out that the article mentions someone in my Gmail contacts to whom I'm closely related (in real life, although we have little interaction on Google+).

Strange coincidence or expert data mining?

2. I +1d and commented on some photos with funny captions from +Dieter Mueller  and suddenly all I'm seeing in my Home stream is photos with funny captions from a half dozen people. While this is diverting, it's not all I want to see in my Home stream. Given how I set up my circles and the sliders showing what content I want to see from each, I'm frustrated with the  narrow focus of the content being displayed. I see posts from the same score of people over and over even though I follow close to 2000 people (active, engaging people).

I told Google+ what I want to see but I don't get the feeling that that's what I'm being shown. I feel that if I don't interact with you every day, then I'll miss the next thing you post. I feel cut off from the people I've chosen to follow. I assume they are also cut off from me. 

I don't feel like I'm in control of what I see and I don't feel that I have the power to adjust it. The cause and effect relationships between my settings and the behavior of Google+ is difficult to discern. If my conscious actions as the user are ignored, then (to me) the results feel random. This doesn't make me, the user, happy. It makes me feel suspicious and mistrustful.

Related
Circle Management: Who's Relevant?
https://plus.google.com/118011560178264222649/posts/QLeBcHYWxrb

Generalist or Specialist
Note: I wrote this piece for my blog ten years ago, but it is still a question that interests me today. And the discussion on Google+ is so much better.
I’ve always considered myself a generalist, a person with a wide range of interests who stops in at the entrance to a subject, peeks inside, notes the inhabitants, and moves on. At our last lunch together, MDM recommended I Could Do Anything: If I Only Knew What It Was. Reading Chapter 6, in which Barbara Sher discusses scanners (generalists) and divers (specialists, made me wonder if I’m really a specialist after all. She describes the case of the odd diver who behaves like a scanner–a specialist who is afraid of committing to a specialization.

I do enjoy learning everything I can about a subject. When I worked at the IRS, I knew the IRC like no one else in my unit. I knew what page in Pub 17 you could find the list of the 8 community property states. I knew the obscure code for entering a foreign address. And I loved summarizing my knowledge and sharing it with others. Those are the traits that got me into documentation and training.

When I study Japanese, I look up words in four or five books. I look up the English to Japanese and then I look up the Japanese to English. I look up the Japanese meaning in a Japanese dictionary. I look up the kanji and the etymology. I compare the word to similar words and I contrast it in books on usage. No wonder it takes me so long to learn one word!

When I began gardening, I read everything I could. I loved to open three books at once and compare their descriptions of the same plant.

Beginners and Experts
On reflection, I think I always thought of myself as a generalist, because I always feel like a beginner. Although I like being an expert in whatever I’m doing, I don’t like being the expert. I prefer to surround myself with people who know more than I. Also once I feel I’ve mastered something, I get bored with it. I’ve had jobs that made other people wonder how I could stick with them for so long. But as long as there was something new to learn, I could sustain my interest.

I’ve answered my own question: I’m a specialist. I’ve not committed to a specialty, not because I’m afraid of commitment, but because I tend to choose subjects that aren’t easily mastered (like Japanese) or my attention wanders.

Another reason I have always believed I was a generalist is that I’m a proponent of interdisciplinary studies. And I have chosen many jobs where I’m the bridge between two specialists, or the bridge between a specialist and a non-specialist. Because I understood only enough of these specialties to bridge them–because I was never as expert as the expert, I concluded I was a generalist.

What are you?