D'oh!

[andrewducker]

I've just realised what Google+ does that Facebook doesn't:

Facebook doesn't allow your status updates to be public.

steer was asking how the circles system in G+ was different to Facebook's friends list system. And the difference is that it's more like LJ's friends lists than Facebook's. Which is to say that, like Twitter, you can 'follow' anyone, even if they don't want to be followed. And like LJ you can post to a particular circle, a mixture of different circles, all of your circles (the equivalent of friends-only) or make a post public.

And that means that a G+ identity can be used as a public identity as well as for chatting to your friends. And this is something I've not seen on any other social network since LJ came along.

Now, if it only had threaded comments, I'd be happy!

Comments

[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I got told off at work by a new MD for doing it in a previous job-"I understand why you're doing it, but I think it's outdated and some of the other staff find it too confusing.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.

[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.

[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?