Scott Hanselman

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Google+ Ripples brings something interesting to the table

November 04, 2011 Comment on this post [14] Posted in Blogging | Musings
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I'm on Twitter. I'm on The Facebook. And, sigh, I'm on the snoozefest that has been Google+. I keep coming back to Twitter though for so many reasons

Twitter, today, is just easier to to use, the "What's happening" text box is always there, sharing is effortless. But the lack of real threading, of discussion, is starting to wear on me. Why do sites like even Storify exist? They are there to try to piece the shatter pieces of your Twitter discussion back together. Seriously, I challenge you to piece together anything two weeks after it happened on Twitter. How many retweets did your awesome Tweet get? 100+. Maybe more. You'll never know.

But, the Google+ mobile apps are a mess, so I've just not found a reason to spend much time on G+, except for the occasional Hangout. Until today.

Ripples. Wow.

Pick a post, like I did here, click the down-chevron and click "View Ripples."

Give the users their data. Give them analytics. Let them see how their data moves around the web and how it happened. Let them understand how the network lives and works with elegant visualizations. While you at it, animate the process. Brilliant.

Your move, Twitter. Now it's getting interesting.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Comment on this post [14]
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November 04, 2011 12:25
I can see facebook guys saying: "Oh noooo, not again, will have to stay late this weekend too, we have to ship this on monday :(" :D
Aleksnadar
November 04, 2011 15:57
This doesn't appear on any of my posts. I guess you have to have lots of shares and +1's to get this?
Jeff Yates
November 04, 2011 17:47
Very nice project, but "normal" users probably couldn't care less?
Jef Claes
November 04, 2011 17:49
Notice, though, how much they broke the performance of the ripples visualization performance in Chrome 15, hopefully they disable the hardware acceleration in Chrome again until its fully baked.
Graham Murray
November 04, 2011 17:53
if you are a chrome user run the same viz with --disable-accelerated-2d-canvas cmd line param if you want to see what the performance was like before chrome 15.
Graham Murray
November 04, 2011 18:12
As Jef said, this is probably cool for people like Robert Scoble who get Shared and +1'd all over the place but for normal users it's meh.

The primary issue with Google+ is the barrier to posting. I can simultaneously post to Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, FourSquare, etc. all from Tweetdeck or HootSuite. Google+'s lack of a read/write api means there is a "pain in the arse" factor to posting there.
Nick Foster
November 04, 2011 18:22
Yup, its also rather annoying that its often so hard to share a post WITHOUT +1-ing it. This is obviously some Google tactic. It really gets in the way of how I want to use the product though...
Graham Murray
November 04, 2011 18:47
I actually committed G+ suicide the other day. Just wasn't using it and I already don't "use" Facebook all that much. For me, Facebook is more of a way to keep track of older friends and for them to keep tabs on me. Google+ was not going in that direction, but I just didn't feel like keeping up with it. I'm on Twitter all the time and while I think that it's a bit messy with "conversations" I still like it better than FB or G+. A lot better.
Brian Hall
November 04, 2011 18:54
Seriously. How many networks do you need?
I just tell people: you can find me on this cell phone, or better yet, msn messenger.

No, I don't have FB. No Twitter. No G+. No blog.
No BS cross domainers who put your data at risk.

You'll find me on MSN messenger. That's it. I drew the online-social line there, long ago; and I'm very happy with it. And I'm not wasting too much time on it, get what I want, and no privacy issues whatsoever.
NNM
November 04, 2011 21:52
I disagree this is just for Scoble and the popular kids. Here's a guy who just G+'ed something interesting and it spread virally. Now we can see how it happened. Anyone can use it and anyone can have a post that "hits."

Understanding G+ diagram

Scott Hanselman
November 05, 2011 0:16
I don't see this on my posts.
Mike Borozdin
November 05, 2011 23:04
If it is my data, I want to get them, not just analytics. Meantime, I even cannot get a list of urls of my +1s.
Yuriy Solodkyy
November 07, 2011 19:24
It only shows in the Post's arrow drop-down if it the post is shared as a Public post. And from my anecdotal tests, seems to only show for users with lots of shares to their posts. My guess is they don't want to waste processing the long tail of posts with 0 or 1 shares, etc.
Jon Adams
November 16, 2011 12:47
If you like this kind of social network stats, then you should definitely take a look at ThinkUp. It looks very promising.
Enrico Campidoglio

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.