Congratulations to +Louis Gray Hopefully he'll now have the attention of people who can get things done in Google relating to G+. The question is whether we can get his attention and if he'll pass anything on.
Louis, you've been a long time active user of Buzz so you know what's good and bad about it. What's been a real puzzle with G+ is all the Buzz function that hasn't made it into G+ yet. I'm a bit concerned that this is quietly being forgotten. It feels like the key stake holders in G+ need to spend a day or two round a white board looking at what was good in Buzz and needs to be brought over. A quick list:-
- Atom/RSS/JSON out with pubsubhubbub
- A "Share this on G+" button
- A sub tab on profiles for G+ Comments by this person
- A sub tab on profiles for things given a +1 inside G+ as well as outside
- Search with a native G+ output
- Better moderation of both posts and comments
Note that if you're going to go on using your favourite My6Sense, you need that Atom out as much as the rest of us.
There is a need for a personal aggregator somewhere on a profile to collect all the content posted by a person anywhere on the web and allow further comment on it. This is one of the things that Friendfeed used to do. Buzz already does some of this and perhaps that becomes Buzz's role in the future. Not as an end destination in itself but as a tab on a rich profile. This neatly sidesteps the issue of bringing external content into G+ automatically via some kind of POST API. Because that is fraught with problems. Many of us really don't want G+ swamped with automatic posts that say nothing more than "I've just posted a blog" and here's 3 more copies of the same link to it from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. if that is allowed to happen, then you'll have to implement all the Buzz filters that say "hide posts from Twitter from XXX". They didn't work all that well on Buzz and they won't work all that well on G+. By putting all that stuff into a profile tab you keep the aggregation function but avoid the clutter. If that is the route that Google goes, then the Buzz team need to go and aggressively build the import plugins to grab content from all the existing likely platforms and try and keep on top of the constant stream of new ones. When they reach a list of a 100 they'll know they're on top of it.
Oh, and stop all this nonsense about real names and name verification. Seriously. Just stop it.
There's plenty more where that came from so go on, gissajob! Except that I don't live in California, never want to travel to the USA again, have little management experience and can't hack Linux kernels or be a star at python. So I guess I'll never make it past Google HR. ;) I'm not that good anyway!46 Trinity Rd, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7