All that said... I'm still rooting for an open-source social networking alternative: right now Disporia seems like the only one on the horizon, but hopefully if it doesn't take off, others will follow.Don't forget GNU Social!!
Google+ is not a typical release. Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, it is a result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company's products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:10 PM on December 11, 2011 [4 favorites]
The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google's plans. In an approach the company refers to as "rolling thunder," Google has been quietly pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy—there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren't ruffled at all—lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.
That will begin now, with the announcement of the two centerpieces of Google+. But even this moment—revealed in a blog post that marks the first limited "field tests" outside the company—will be muted, because it marks just one more milestone in a long tough slog to remake Google into something more "people centric."
"We're transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we've never attempted—orders of magnitude more investment in terms of people than any previous project," says Vic Gundotra, who leads Google's social efforts.
It makes sense in terms of the patterns and substance of human language. The idea of a unified Google product is analogous to a grammar that all humans share. Perhaps Google is just a "language golem" powered by the aggregate of trivial dynamics in human relations. ... In the Google-era, political expression is an Energy Landscape.... What?
In mathematical terms, an energy landscape can be defined as a pair (X, f) consisting of a topological space X representing the physical states or parameters of a system together with a continuous function f: X → Rn representing the energies associated to these states or parameters such that the image of f represents a hypersurface in Rn..... What?
The term is useful when examining protein folding; while a protein can theoretically exist in a nearly infinite number of conformations along its energy landscape, in reality proteins fold (or "relax") into secondary and tertiary structures that possess the lowest possible free energy. The key concept in the energy landscape approach to protein folding is the folding funnel hypothesis.
Functionally it's turned out to be Facebook minus the games (which I also don't care about), most of the people and the ability to post on walls.G+ has games now. They have Cityvile, which is Zynga's more popular game now, as opposed to farmvile.
delmoi, a practical example of an energy landscape is A/B testing in online marketing. The "funnel" in this case is a conversion. In a political sense you can think of a "conversion" as a vote or, abstractly, the conformal systems of power that drive decision-making.So you just mean "path of least resistance" but decided use some really obscure mathematical terminology? An energy landscape, according to wikipedia involves a multivariate function associated with a topological space, whereas you're talking about something as simple as Hill Climbing, or linear optimization or whatever. Just one output function. The energy landscape thing seems to deal with energy in multiple parameters, not just one. It sounds like, from what I'm reading that when you're working with protein folding you have a situation where in order to properly fold portions need to fall down a 'funnel' from higher energy to lower energy. If a protein didn't have a funnel it wouldn't have a stable shape, and wouldn't have evolved.
They really, really need an easy way to distinguish "people I follow" from "people I want to share stuff with."Uh, you mean like circles? Which are the entire basis of the system?
And, as I mentioned in another thread the other day, they even managed to break their plain old Google search -- which was as close to perfect as could be hoped -- by taking your search terms and deciding that your choice of verb conjugation isn't important, and that all uncommon searches must surely contain misspellings that need auto-correcting before the results are shown, and then, just for the hell of it, throwing in a bunch of stuff that's sort of like your search terms. Now the results are often inaccurate and/or just plain wrong.Why don't you use verbatam search. The substitutions they're doing are probably helpful for most people. And if you want an exact match, you can put it in quotes.
If you have people in any circle, then they are in your default 'reading list'. Which lead me to uncircle a lot of people that post way too often or post too many self promotional posts.That is annoying. There should be a way to take people, or circles out of your newsfeed. But that doesn't sound like what desjardins was talking about:
I didn't worry about checking my privacy settings with every status update I made. I tend to be much more reticent to post personal or controversial things on G+ because I can't remember who I've added to my circles.People can be in multiple circles so you can add everyone who you want to be able to see your posts to it and leave them in other circles. That's different from the "I want to share stuff with people but I don't want to hear all their crap." problem.
Good, can you tell them to fix the obvious shit? It is nearly 2012...Uh, what is the obvious shit, if it's so obvious?
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In all seriousness: Here's hoping it doesn't.
posted by fake at 7:43 PM on December 11, 2011 [9 favorites]