Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

http://thesash.me/how-google-got-its-groove-back

by thesash • 15 years ago

310 107 15 years ago

thesash.me

unreal37• 15 years ago

How do you add yourself to the Hacker News Circle? I added the circle to my stream. Anything more I need to do?

johngunderman2• 15 years ago

You can do so here: http://hngp.axxim.net/insert

badhairday• 15 years ago

Yeah, I found this incredibly confusing as well.

zalew• 15 years ago

https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts it's just a page. if I understand correctly what's going on on the page, we need to add people to our own circle every time they publish the updated circle.

//edit:

it looks fine except people who write public posts in their native language which I do not understand. I hope the author thought about spam prevention or we'll get lots of 'funny videos and pictures' profiles in there soon.

mey• 15 years ago

I wish posts had a native language the are posted in, since I have friends in Mexico that post things both in English and Spanish, I have no desire to grok their Spanish posts, so the ability to filter circles or the main stream based on certain things is something Google+ as a whole needs.

UK-Al052• 15 years ago

Google should automate this, so you follow a circle it automatically gets updated when other people join it.

FreeKill• 15 years ago

The only other thing you need to do, other than add the circle to your profile, is occasionally go back to the circle and add it again (to the same circle in your profile) to get the newest list of people. Unfortunately, adding a shared circle only adds a copy of it at that moment, but not a dynamic one that updates itself.

It's not so bad though, because adding a circle to an existing circle simply adds in people not already in there.

rizzy• 15 years ago

I just found out about G+ adding limit. I tried to add the new circle that was just published and it said I have added too many today. Try again tomorrow.

badclient3• 15 years ago

Google's Social Strategy: (1) Destroy Google Search (2) ????? (3) Profit!!!

krigath• 15 years ago

I would argue that they aren't destroying Google Search. They are merely adding another option for search.

VikingCoder• 15 years ago

You apparently missed this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAAL...

badclient3• 15 years ago

You apparently missed the overlarging bloat that google search has become in the past few years.

notatoad2• 15 years ago

i agree, change is terrifying.

wmeredith• 15 years ago

Ah, and now I have a compelling reason to try Google+. Well played, Google, you creepy SOB.

Johnyma22• 15 years ago

Meh.

mladenkovacevic2• 15 years ago

Thanks! This is bound to liven up my stream. I will refrain from adding myself to the HN circle though as I'm currently only a wanna-be hacker. But I do have have a fear of other wannabe hackers adding themselves to the circle and maybe polluting my stream with content that isn't as high quality as I'm used to on HN. (no upvote/downvote mechanism)

notatoad2• 15 years ago

when you add the circle, you're adding a copy of the circle and can remove people from your copy any time you want. at least, that's my understanding of how G+ works. so if some goof that you don't like starts posting, you should be able to just remove them.

jaredsohn3• 15 years ago

except if you update the Hacker News circle, you'll need to remove them again.

UK-Al052• 15 years ago

Hackers are not that elite, it's probably the least elite club. If you want to make or tinker with things you're probably welcome regardless of education or background. However being just plain offensive is another matter.

caw2• 15 years ago

Can I get an additional explanation of what to do?

> "I added myself and followed the circle"

I followed the group and added myself through hngp.axxim.net/insert, but do I have to add the ~650 people to my circle, or is just following the page enough?

barlo• 15 years ago

You need to add everyone in the shared circle to one of your circles for things they share to show up in your stream.

caw2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the information. So I'd have to periodically go and update that group in order to get everyone's feeds?

thesash2• 15 years ago

When you're on the page-- click "add circle" in the middle of the circle at the top of the page, that will allow you to follow all 689 people at once

electic• 15 years ago

All I can say is: WOW!

drinkzima• 15 years ago

Isn't the whole point that if these Hacker News G+ results are good they should be shown to everyone and if they aren't then they should not.

This isn't a 'social' problem it's a ranking problem, right?

abrahamsen• 15 years ago

Yes and no.

Yes, in that part of what you do is to tell Google "I trust these people" and give them higher ranking than random "search engine optimized" pages.

No, in that someone who follow the hacker news circle and search for "android" will likely prefer results about programming and marketing android applications, which are not the optimal results for the general public.

So the social graph does to things: it states trust (improves general quality of results), and it states interests (improves specific targeting of results).

The later obviously is more likely to work for interest based circles like "hacker news" than for your Family or even Friends circles.

jrockway3• 15 years ago

The example Google gives is that you can now type "photos" and see pictures of your family and friends. Instead of going to some other site and navigating, you just type your desires into Chrome's URL bar and the Right Thing automatically shows up. (There are some internal goals for this, but I'm not sure which ones are public... but this will only get cooler as time goes on.)

lhnz• 15 years ago

This is a smart move. There are many interesting directions and questions.

(1) Can we choose to give a particular search weight to different Google+ groups that are against our profile? I'd like to see what Hacker News thinks the search results should be and I'd like to see what my friends think the search results should be.

(2) Following from the previous point, I believe Google could effectively turn this into a sort of auto-generated "sub-reddit" system that does not require link submission, instead being powered by "+1". Or how about the top +1's from the group this day, week, year? The only things missing would be (a) comments by group users, and (b) some generic Google way of searching for public groups or tying these to internet communities.

Aside:

(4) What happens when spammers start adding themselves to the hngp.axxim.net Hacker News circle and then when we add this circle to our Google+ we start getting sponsored search results? Can we stop this? An active profile with a high average karma seems to me like an acceptable solution for a higher quality group but I guess we can't get that information easily... I wonder if the guy who created the Hacker News circle will allow us to update our profile in the circle to include our Hacker News username?

jaredsohn3• 15 years ago

>allow us to update our profile in the circle to include our Hacker News username

FYI, the Hacker News username is already an optional field that was added after some people had already added themselves; not sure if you can update your profile or not if you didn't include it earlier.

Kesty• 15 years ago

I think the idea is great, but I'm not sure Google has fully figured out what to do with it's social search.

I may like to know in search what all the Hacker News users like and dislike, but I'm not sure I'm really intereseted in everything they write on their google wall (even if mostly are probably great posts :) ).

mkr-hn4• 15 years ago

Being able to weigh results by G+ posts has made discovering new and interesting things inevitable, not just easy. Sometimes I find new and interesting things that aren't even related to what I was searching for. It's like StumbleUpon in the early days.

For example, I needed a Top Posts plugin for WordPress. I drowned in a sea of plugins, spam, and blog posts with the default search. Social weighting put the perfect plugin right on top. And it's been the same for every query I've tried so far.

jcurbo• 15 years ago

Yesterday the HN circle was in the 600's, today it's in the 800's, I guess it's catching on because of this story.

johnkchow• 15 years ago

I now see the true potential with personalized search. Just gives me the goosebumps (in a good excited way). Thanks for sharing!

agscala• 15 years ago

Beware if you add yourself to this list, your phone will go crazy with google+ notifications while it processes all the people following you

thesash2• 15 years ago

You can turn off notifications when people add you to circles here: https://www.google.com/settings/plus

mkr-hn4• 15 years ago

And don't forget that if you want to keep the circle to sort later, but don't want it in your main stream, you can dial down the weight of posts from it (or remove them completely) on the circle's stream.

lubujackson• 15 years ago

I'm not seeing what's so amazing about this, sorry... Google is basically hijacking the conversation off of HN and then making that searchable by its members, so what's exciting about that?

mkr-hn4• 15 years ago

It's not pulling anything from HN. This is an index of HN members who have G+ accounts.

sunchild2• 15 years ago

I can't find this feature. I guess it's because I'm logged into a G+ account via Google Apps for Enterprise?

I find Google's rollouts for Google Apps customers a huge source of confusion. You'd think they'd get that under control by now.

Anyway, looks like a killer feature that will slowly become indispensable.

estel• 15 years ago

It's not yet rolled out to all users, regardless of whether they're Apps customers.

sunchild2• 15 years ago

I see. I was able to find it on my non-Apps for Enterprise account.

villagefool• 15 years ago

I would rather hold on to what's left of my privacy and simply search Hacker News directly.

richbradshaw• 15 years ago

I added myself to this circle when it was first announced. Today I've gained over 1000 followers! Wondered why and found this post. Interesting to see that 89 votes and 34 comments leads to around 1000 people taking action. Makes you realise how big this community is!

slaven• 15 years ago

Me too - I'm afraid it's just a bunch of marketers or spammers who found it as a way to broadcast directly to HN crowd. I guess we'll know soon..

pacomerh• 15 years ago

Yeah, same here, I'm not sure if putting a circle public like that is the best choice, it'd be nice to be able to have access using your HN account somehow. We'll see how it goes. I wonder if others will start adopting this 'sharing a circle' method to promote their stuff.

jasonkester• 15 years ago

So what do you actually need to do to accomplish this? I followed the link to the Google+ page and it's just a giant wall of confusion.

I see a circle with a link in the middle saying "Add Circle". Is that what I want to do? I would have expected to see something along the lines of "Add me to this Circle" so that I'd be part of it.

Anyway, I clicked the "Add Circle" link, and got a string of progressively less parseable pages full of people's pictures that I can presumably drag and drop places. I just makes no sense whatsoever.

So first point: Google+ seems to have a terrible interface.

Second point: Assuming that somebody here (the author at least) must have interacted with that page in a way that created some form of value to his life. What are the steps to do so?

hyperbovine• 15 years ago

Same exact experience here. Should I add the Hacker News circle to my friends circle? Acquaintances circle? Family circle?

At this point I can hear some Googler with a 160 IQ chiming in that, algorithmically, it doesn't matter whether Hacker News is a person or a group of people; the effect on personal search is the same. This misses the point. People think in metaphors, and if the metaphor is broken they assume the product is too.

With so many brilliant people at Google, and Facebook nipping at their heels, I am shocked at how bad G+ remains months after it launched.

stonemetal• 15 years ago

I made an HN specific circle so that it could easily be limited or turned off. Getting a flood of messages from several hundred people can be a bit annoying.

farnsworth2• 15 years ago

The Hacker News Circle is a Google+ page that publishes the shared "Hacker Circle."

The Hacker Circle is a circle that has been shared publicly. This means you can look at the list of people in the circle, add any that look interesting, or, as I did, add the entire circle as one of my own personal circles.

But like the posts say, your own circle can't be updated by someone else. The page will periodically release an updated version of the circle, and if you want all the latest people, you need to go back to the page and re-add the circle.

To add yourself, visit the link as instructed in the posts.

As far as I can tell, when I do a search, social results should automatically show up. I must not have this feature turned on yet, or maybe I need to turn it on and can't figure out how.

I might be wrong on something, I don't even use G+ much, it's just how it seems to me on a few minutes of looking at it.

pgambling• 15 years ago

You can add yourself to the Hacker News Circle at http://hngp.axxim.net/.

The "Hacker News Circle" Google+ re-shares an updated circle every 5 minutes. Clicking "Add Circle" allows you to copy that circle into one of your own.

I just made a straight copy called "Hacker News" in my circles where I dump the shared circle.

All this is implementing a feature that Google+ desperately needs: a public circle that users can subscribe to rather than copy into their private circles, like Twitter's lists.

(Note: I am not the creator of the Hacker News Circle, just a user)

sp3322• 15 years ago

Go to https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts and, in one of the "Hacker News has shared a circle with you" posts, click the blue "View shared circle" button. Name the circle and voila, you now have a circle in your Google+ account with all the HN people who signed up on http://hngp.axxim.net/

Edit: I forgot to warn you that several hundred people will add you to their circles, and you will get notifications when that happens. You should probably go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and preemptively disable those notifications before you are drowning in them.

That's all you need to do to get the results mentioned in the article, but you might get a lot of unwanted noise in your Google+ stream from this circle. If that's a problem for you, go to your Google+ "home" page https://plus.google.com/stream and find your new HN circle in the left-hand column. When you click it, you get a stream made from that circle, and you can change the "volume" of the circle using the slider that appears in the upper-right. Now when you browse your normal stream you won't get noise from the HN circle.

felideon• 15 years ago

Doh. And now I have a whole bunch of people showing up in my chat client. Is there a way to disable that? I see the options for 'Who can start a Messenger conversation with you?' but they are somewhat limited and that's not the option I'm quite looking for.

bad_user2• 15 years ago

"You've reached the daily limit for adding to your circles. You can add more tomorrow."

For some reason it doesn't let me add anything by using that button. I can manually select each one and add them using the popup :)

antimatter15• 15 years ago

I'm the maintainer of the Google+ Hacker News Circle (Well, the script/cron job that makes a circle from hngp.axxim.net). I increased the frequency to every five minutes to keep up with the new growth.

It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to update.

farnsworth2• 15 years ago

Agreed. They need to introduce a different "class" of circle that people can add/remove themselves from at will, or just subscribe to. Maybe you could call it... a group.

pessimist2• 15 years ago

I'm worried seo spammers will start adding them to this circle. Does HN support some OAuth you can use to verify that those who add themselves are actual HN users? If you could require minimum karma points that would be awesome.

joshuahedlund2• 15 years ago

Agreed. And I speak for everyone when I say that the arbitrary minimum karma should be "less than mine".

chaosmachine• 15 years ago

It looks like there may be a problem:

"You've reached the daily limit for adding to your circles. You can add more tomorrow."

This happened when I tried to add any of the circles with 1000+ people. The one with 990 or so worked.

bad_user2• 15 years ago

It also happens to me.

mladenkovacevic2• 15 years ago

Just wanted to say great job. Browsed through your github. It's hard to believe you're only 16. Keep up the good work.

Frostbeard• 15 years ago

So, apparently there is a limit to the number of add-to-circle actions you can perform in a day. I added the circle and then removed it, and when I went to re-add I got an error: "You've reached the daily limit for adding to your circles. You can add more tomorrow."

brown9-2• 15 years ago

Am I the only person that thinks that the results shown in the Google search for "jQuery" are horrible search results?

The results are:

1) a Google Plus post on "CodeAcademy teaches jQuery"

2) a Google Plus post on "15 Resources to Get You Started With jQuery from Scratch"

3) a Google Plus post on "Is there already a jQuery Plugin that provides a Google+ Circles...?"

If you were to search for just the word "jQuery", what are the chances that any of these are what you were looking for?

This really doesn't seem like an instance of knocking it out of the park.

esrauch• 15 years ago

He explicitly clicked on the "see personal results" link at the top of the search results, the screenshot is not what it looks like if you just type jquery into the box and click search. You can see the "Personal" title at the top of the results that has an X on it, and on the left hand side of the page "Personal" is selected.

pessimist2• 15 years ago

So what happens when spammers start adding themselves to the Hacker News circle?

stephank• 15 years ago

I wonder why the HN account name field is optional, for getting in the shared circle.

Currently, it looks like anyone can add themselves just by having an email and G+ account. Someone already mentioned OAuth, and it'd be great if proper auth against both G+ and HN was required to be added to the circle.

On the other hand, it's also not that hard to selectively toss someone out of your copy of the circle, even right from the stream page.

Feanim2• 15 years ago

HN doesn't provide oauth api (or any api for that matter)

instakill• 15 years ago

I wish I knew how you felt, but sadly it seems there are quite a few people that don't have search personalization as an option available to them [yet?].

bluena2• 15 years ago

Great, but it's polluting my gtalk contacts

prez• 15 years ago

Go to G+ chat -> privacy settings and uncheck the HN circle.

Had the same problem, took me a while to figure how to fix it.

bluena2• 15 years ago

thanks

vosper• 15 years ago

It says a lot about the UI and concepts of Google+ that the tech-savvy HN crowd have spawned such a long thread trying to understand how to use it.

joshuahedlund2• 15 years ago

In general people seem to be finding a lot of value with these new "random" connections of people who share their interests in tech things or just "interesting" things. It strikes me that all of these people existed before, but none of us knew we "wanted" to be connected to them, we just happened to be at the right place and the right time. I can't wait for the first social network to help us connect to interesting people we don't know without us having to take arbitrary external steps. Google circles, Twitter suggestions for who to follow... these are baby steps to a future with great potential.

aestetix_• 15 years ago

The feature I'm really waiting for is pseudonym support. Vic Gondotra promised it several months ago at Web 2.0. I don't feel comfortable using Google+ at all right now, given that my account, among others, was suspended.

niels_olson• 15 years ago

Hmmm... I don't know. My Flickr account is associated with my Google account, and I have pictures of eczema on my flickr account that someone requested permission to publish, yesterday, but when I search personal results, those pictures are nowhere to be found.

joelmaat2• 15 years ago

I love this!

clone1018• 15 years ago

Hey guys, I'm the owner of hngp.axxim.net, I kinda forgot about this project, but tomorrow I'll be adding in google authentication (to manage your visibility and stop spammers) and fix the site load speed (did someone say ajax?!) and some other neat, but needed features.

Osiris• 15 years ago

I've been trying to add the shared circle but it keeps telling me that people could not be loaded and fails. Has anyone else had that issue and been able to resolve it?

twodayslate• 15 years ago

It would be great if you could subscribe to a circle and have it auto-update (keep adding/removing people).

asto• 15 years ago

The barrier to entry to get oneself added to this list doesn't seem to be much. I added part 1 of 2 of the circle and already my stream is being flooded with stuff like this -> http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/442/gplushn.png/

Information overload in a language I don't even understand!

andrewem• 15 years ago

Looking at the linked Hacker News Circle on Google+, the first person listed in the circle is "Paul Graham", who's pretty clearly not pg. The linked Paul Graham says "wow. so many people have me in their circles", and another user suggests it's because of pg [0]. I'm curious what percentage of the people are linked to the right profile.

[0] https://plus.google.com/114939270563299965266/posts/7UHfjBcD...

Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing

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