Friday, July 01, 2011

Simulating the Facebook Wall in Google+

Its been two days of Google+ and enough articles to fill a couple of
books, so I'm not going to say anything about what I think of it and
all that.

But a couple of friends have been wondering how to do something like
the Wall in Google+. The fine granularity of sharing means
that you can directly use your Stream as a wall in G+ which is very
convenient. If you are a programmer think of it in terms of Pub-Sub
with highly configurable channels.

To write on someone's wall, just create a new post, and share it only
with them. That way only that person sees it in the stream
which is effectively what a wall is. But a mutual friend can see the
wall post in Facebook. How do you do that in Google+? That is what
a circle is for. I think the real value of circles is as disposable
ribbons around friends. You can pull and push people into them as
required,
create temporary circles to share among really small niches or over a
set of overlapping circles and so on.

Tip: LIke Facebook uses @ to mention names, Google+ uses, quite obviously, +

What I would love to see is the ability to put one circle inside the
other and so on, so that information shared with outer circles leaks
to
inner ones, but not the other way around.

Posted via email from nikhil's posterous

1 comment:

  1. Likes the idea of circles within circles.

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