Very cool, if true

I know, I know, I'm not very smart sometimes.

In my defence, it's not something I've seen discussed much so far.

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Indeed. if it had threaded comments and multiple user icons, it would be a reasonable replacement for LJ. if LJ needs replacing. Though I am "following" a fair number of well-known geeks on G+

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Facebook does have a weird walled garden thing going on so even though my status updates are set to "everyone" and most of my facebook to be as open as possible, I still cannot be found by a non logged in user (because too many other Richard Cleggs are before me in the results and you have to log in to hone down searches). It's one of the reasons I never really got why people think facebook is obsessed with making information "open" (I suspect it is more public statements by well known owner than technical issues). LJ allows you to be much more open and doesn't allow you to lock down your user info page much for example.

If you know the URL then a non facebook user can see my status page in full but not my wall and there's no way I can allow that either.

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Yup. Very much a walled garden. Whereas G+ can replace both FB and Twitter (well, for some stuff - it can't do events yet).

One of the things I'm hoping is that if we get solid competition in the social space then we might get the players to agree some standards, and open things up even more.

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The sharing thing and standards would be awesome but I'm more skeptical than I was. I hoped both dreamwidth and buzz would pursue this but neither got much traction in that direction.

There's a lot of issues because users are finely sensitive to really nuanced privacy details that you might not at first expect. For example, for a first approximation a lot of people might think "public is public -- if a feed is open for anyone to read then that's a clear 'level' of security" but other people draw extra distinctions with whether that feed is automatically indexed and posted to a public timeline (like twitter -- can't recall if they allow opt-out from that) and whether that feed can be indexed by search engines.

So, while for you or I, a public post on G+ and a public post on twitter may seem to have equivalent privacy levels, other people may see it differently (and very vociferously so).

I share your hope though in general.

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kashandara.livejournal.com

I'd like to hope that events are something that's coming soon, especially since a lot of the groundwork already exists on the google calendars...

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apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com

What, and let the users go wherever they want?
In your dreams!

It will take a disruptive technology/standard to leapfrog, I think. Personally, the walls of the gardens can't come down too soon for me. (Let's see, this lj post is cross-posted from dream thingy, which is the same but different; this is a bot generated accumulation of a day's tweets; is that a facebook event or meetup?) But I fear it will take another techno-paradigm/monetization model.

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The links come from Delicious, but yes :->

And apparently Google have said they'd love to interoperate, but we'll see how that goes...

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Open can mean different things.

LJ encourages users to make posts open to the public, under a pseudonym.

Facebook encourages personal data to be entered under real name, and made open to friends ... and to Facebook and its business partners.

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The association with real name is definitely another important issue. Despite preferences of organisations I know people with FB identity secret and LJ open and I know people who have it the other way around.

For those people merging identities would be a disaster.

Even for people like me who prefer open-ness and think security through obscurity ("I post everything to LJ public but not worried that it's a problem because nobody at work knows that wibblewobble is my LJ name.") there can be issues -- I'm currently trying to disentangle google's belief that I'm two people "richard@richardclegg.org" (my public email) and "richardclegg@gmail.com" (a dump where I collect emails for archive which people should never send emails to).

I must admit I don't know the differences between LJ and facebook as regards third party applications.

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Yep, it definitely needs threaded comments. I was involved in a discussion on G+ yesterday, checked my email, and had 20 or so comment notifications from other people posting in the same thread that had nothing to do with the discussion. Very irritating.

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Given that threaded comments have been around forever, it's worth thinking about why Google+ and Facebook don't have them. It's probably not that they don't have them yet but it's down on the backlog. It's more likely that they're seen as "too complicated" for the mass market. So much as I want them, the signs aren't good that they will appear as a later feature.

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Yeah. I'm not sure why, as they don't seem complex to me. But I know I'm unusual in many ways :->

And lack of threaded comments make multiple conversations impossible in discussions, which tends to curtail them, which always disappoints me.

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Yeah, i was having an interesting debate yesterday about a character in Torchwood, but it got swamped under OT postings by a half dozen other people who were talking about other things.

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andlosers.livejournal.com

There's some talk in the G+ community at large about threading, at least down to a second level, but my guess is that it's a little bit more computationally expensive, so they're wary of it. Blogs and Facebook have made single threads acceptable, so most people probably won't complain.

But do remember who's on the team, and all of their previous work, so I wouldn't be totally surprised to see it show up eventually.

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I hope so :->

I do think that Facebook has made single-threading more acceptable, and it annoys me, because I think it's the main reason you rarely get interesting conversations on Facebook.

At least Disqus has threads, and I'm seeing more blogs use that for their commenting engines.

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andlosers.livejournal.com

Interestingly, so does the embeddable Facebook comment system you see in some blogs.

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That's unfortunate, because that's really the major block that stops me from using FB or G+. When those multiple emails arrive in my inbox of people posting with 'lol' or 'me too!'....

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matgb

With G+, I've turned off email notfications, the built in notifier, which also displays at the top of my Gmail, is so much better and easier to use, only flaw is it doesn't seem to want me to have multiple tabs opened from it, but beyond that it's good.

And I obsess over notifications from everywhere else and turn everything on.

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Not being able to get to it except via my phone when I'm at work, I like email notifications :->

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matgb

I suspect if I knew I was going to be away from my home machine for a bit, or working soemwhere where certain sites were blocked, I'd turn them back on, but currently I'm mostly at home and mostly on the laptop.

At work I'm busy and turn off the phone completely, as you'd expect, but I do sometimes do stuff during party meetings and similar.

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Ah yes, that might work better. Thanks for the tip.

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It does seem that the world has moved away from this convention.

Last year for the first time ever, I got an email from a friend saying "I don't know what the heck is going on with your emails, it's all greater than signs" (I do inline replies but trim rigorously and rarely allow even two levels of indentation). It seems the threaded conversation model has just fallen out of public perception in favour of

Dave: I think so.
Bert: I don't think so.
Alf: @Dave I agree with you.

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.. which just reinvents threading, poorly. Sad, really.

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I would say it doesn't quite reinvent threading as it's much more vague. It's more like the naturalistic method of conversation (note that by naturalistic I do not in any sense mean better) where unless referenced otherwise all remarks are part of a general "conversation" but with a minor notation you can indicate a specific part of the conversation.

I've no strong preference for threaded/non threaded, each has their strengths.

Threaded definitely wins out in a situation where a dozen or more messages are attached to the same entry in distinct threads. (That is, not 100 messages all saying 'congratulations' or 'happy birthday'.) My observation though is that this is very rare on Facebook except on communities or with celebrities.

Non threaded definitely wins out for simplicity and in situations where the typical number of comments is low. (Novice users to LJ almost always used to reply to the wrong entry and inappropriately thread because it's not a model most non-geeks are used to. Fortunately the problem is nearly solved nowadays as LJ has almost no novice users.)

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yalovetz

Yeah, I got a comment a couple of years back from someone who noted how I was replying to their emails (inline replies) and got all nostalgic - said they hadn't seen that sort of email behaviour in years as it's all top posting nowadays and assumed that replying that way meant that I must be an old school computer geek.

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How does it feel to be old-school?

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matgb

I got told off at work by a new MD for doing it in a previous job-"I understand why you're doing it, but I think it's outdated and some of the other staff find it too confusing. Plus, I'm paying for massive server storage space, and it's easier to refer back to a single email".

Annoying, but he actually had sound arguments for work related stuff and still encouraged inline replying when it was necessary, but insisted we mark at the top of the email we were doing it.

People who first get email at a place of work, for standard office work purposes, have a completely different approach to those of us who came into it from geeky/social/techy backgrounds.

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skington.livejournal.com

Top-posting makes sense in corporate environments where you might want to copy someone in on a discussion part-way through, and it's easier to just reply to all, add in new person, say "Hey, this person needs to know" and let new person read one single email in reverse order, than forward every single email in the thread.

Of course, that breaks down as soon as you get multiple replies to the same email simultaneously, at which point there's more than one set of history.

And when people do need to reply inline, which happens rarely but occasionally, they find they need to reinvent the wheel - e.g. "my replies in bold", "my replies in red" or "my replies in all caps" - yuck.

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matgb

Yup--I've had all of them, and caps is the worst.

Hell, PZ Myers does that on his damn blog, and he really ought to know better.

Really frustrating, but what can you do?

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

A major reason I don't do much with Facebook is that I can't check most people's postings to see if they're saying anything interesting before I friend them.

Threaded comments have their virtues, but they're very annoying unless they have a most recent comments option.

I want trn!

However, LessWrong has an interesting hack. This is presumably only if you're logged in, but when you refresh a comment page, the comments which have come in since you viewed it are bordered in green.

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