Ponies and other requests

Posted on Thu 21 July 2011 by alex in geek

So Google Plus is not even in beta, it's still a limited trail but they are soliciting feedback. Following on from Rich's suggestions here are some things I would like to see Google+ do.

  1. Allow nesting of Circles

Circles are great. They are a pretty intuitive way of arranging your friends into groups. It's certainly way easier than Facebook's rather clunky friend lists interface. However I have a lot of people in multiple circles but it's a little inconsistent and it's hard to check people are in the right place. To illustrate here is a subset of circles I've defined:

* Fellow Geeks
* Cambridge Geeks
* Googlers
* Transitive Alumni
* #blue

Really the last four circles are all sub-sets of fellow geeks but sometimes it makes sense only to post to a sub-set. For example the Cambridge Geeks are those that are more likely to make a Geek Beer shout out. The Transitive crew are a special set of geeks that would appreciate some really obscure posting that might be irrelevant to the wider Geek community.

What I really want to do is declare Fellow Geeks as a super-set of a the other circles. It's not going to be a one to many relationship either. Cambridge Geeks also should belong to the Local People group because I don't spend all my time socialising with people just like me ;-)

  1. Support Huddle in the browser

I like the concept of Huddle which is a group based messaging system in the mobile version of Google+. However currently it seems the only place to access is on a mobile device and that is currently Android only. To make it useful you should be able to access the Huddle from the browser as well.

  1. Allow rolling up of comments

This is especially a problem with some of the higher visibility users that I follow. They can often have hundreds of comments attached to a post and there doesn't seem to be any way of hiding the comments. All you can do it "Mute" the whole post. Sometime G+ does hide "older comments" but the only thing you can do with them is expand them.

So like a good trail user I'm also raising these issues via the feedback option. I'm still enjoying the Google Plus experience and once I can post from Gwibber I'll be a lot happier. So what niggles have you found so far? Have you reported them?