{"id":541,"date":"2011-07-09T18:19:25","date_gmt":"2011-07-09T23:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=541"},"modified":"2011-07-09T18:19:25","modified_gmt":"2011-07-09T23:19:25","slug":"how-google-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=541","title":{"rendered":"How Google+ Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m working hard to convert my social media life away from Twitter and Facebook and over to <a href=\"http:\/\/plus.google.com\">Google+<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n<p>Why?  Well, I work for Google and want to see Google+ succeed &#8212; the best way to do that is to actually become a daily user.  Also, I want simplicity.  I can&#8217;t deal with three separate social networks;  I want just one, and Google+ is a superset of the other two.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of friends have been asking me how Google+ works.  &#8220;What&#8217;s the sharing model?&#8221;   Here&#8217;s my explanation, to the best of my understanding:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The basic unit of reading and writing is a <b>circle<\/b>.  You need to spend some upfront time defining these circles, but the UI makes it easy to do and the payback is well worth the effort.  (And due to Google&#8217;s Data Liberation Front, you can <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/settings\/exportdata\">take your circles with you<\/a> if you decide to leave!)<\/li>\n<li><b>Reading:<\/b>  You <em>only<\/em> see posts from people in your circles &#8212; nobody else.  You can either look at all the circles at once (&#8220;your stream&#8221;), or you can look at posts coming from just a single circle.<\/li>\n<li><b>Writing:<\/b>  Any post you create can be published to 1 or more circles.  This provides nuanced sharing &#8212; something that&#8217;s really hard to do in Facebook.   For example, in real life, you wouldn&#8217;t necessarily share the same stories with your parents, your co-workers, or your drinking buddies.  \ud83d\ude42    Remember, however, that the people you post to won&#8217;t actually see your post unless you happen to exist in at least one of <em>their<\/em> circles!<\/li>\n<li><b>Being public<\/b>:  Circles can be totally circumvented by publishing to the &#8220;public&#8221;;  in which case, everyone in the world could conceivably see your post when they read &#8220;incoming&#8221; messages rather than their stream.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This model is nice, since it captures <b>both<\/b> the Facebook model and the Twitter model.<\/p>\n<p>It captures the Facebook model of sharing via reciprocal friendship, but <em>without<\/em> explicit friendship requests in either direction.  If two people happen to have either other in each other&#8217;s circles, then they see each other&#8217;s posts.  Very simple.   No more hurt feelings from unanswered friend requests;  no more posts from people you don&#8217;t care about.<\/p>\n<p>It also captures the Twitter model.  You can do a public post to the world.  You can also &#8220;follow&#8221; the posts any famous person you want (without bothering them) by simply adding them to a &#8220;people I wanna follow&#8221; circle.<\/p>\n<p>If you haven&#8217;t signed up at http:\/\/plus.google.com yet, you really should.  The Android app is awesome.  Any photos I take with my phone are instantly available for posting;  no need to explicitly upload them.  It&#8217;s amazing how big a barrier to entry this used to be!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m working hard to convert my social media life away from Twitter and Facebook and over to Google+ instead. Why? Well, I work for Google and want to see Google+ succeed &#8212; the best way to do that is to actually become a daily user. Also, I want simplicity. I can&#8217;t deal with three separate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":551,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}