G+

[cellio]

Someone sent me an invitation to Google+ last Friday, which didn't work after repeated tries. Yesterday two other people sent me invitations, which arrived tonight (so a one-day delay). This time it worked.

First I had to get a newer version of Firefox. I'd been meaning to move from 3.0 to 3.6 but an extension I like wasn't going to be supported, it said. Turns out they built it into the baseline, so all is fine there. (Rendering in 3.6 looks...different. Can't pinpoint it.) Google and Mozilla are both strongly pushing me to move to Firefox 4, but I remember hearing rumblings of problems there, including problems using LJ. If you're using FF4, please comment about any diminished usability you've encountered. For critical functionality -- operating systems, cars, browsers, etc -- I am not an early adopter.

So ok, I have a G+ account. If you're there and care to let me know you exist, please do. If you've figured out useful patterns, please share that. One I figured out right away (so tell me if there's a reason this is wrong): since you can share a post with any number of circles, stay away from any notions of nested circles or hierarchical circles: given the existence of acquaintances, friends, and best-buddies, put somebody in exactly one of those. Of course, there may be orthogonal circles too; that's different. (E.g. I don't currently see the need to have an SCA circle, but if I did it would include some friends, some best-buddies, and some people who aren't in any other circle.)

Yes, I acknowledge the irony of posting on LJ to discuss G+ best practices. :-)

Edited to add: FF 3.6 annoyingly changed how new tabs are placed. New tabs should go to the far right, not immediately after the current tab, thank you very much. This page has some rather colorful language, but it did tell me how to fix it. (I assume I will have to do that with FF4 and 5, too.)

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I was unable to use LiveJournal in FF4 and ended up junking it for Safari.
IIRC the problem was something like the text boxes not showing anything you typed in them.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Using Firefox 5.0 (yes, that's a five). No problems.

[cellio]

Thanks for the information.

Hey, since you're a Mac person you might know this... on Windows if you installed a new version of Firefox (or several other applications) there was no going back if you didn't like it -- it had too many hooks into who-knows-what in the OS or something; I never really figured it out. On the Mac, though, the notion is that everything's bundled up in the one file (bundle?) that you drag into your Applications folder -- meaning, in principle, you could archive the previous one and return to it, or maybe even have two versions installed side by side if you named them differently. (But probably not that last; I don't know where Firefox stores local files like bookmarks and cookies.) So anyway... on the Mac can you revert to a prior version, or are you hosed? Could you have rolled back from FF4 to FF3 if you'd wanted to?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Yup. I didn't revert because the version of FF3 I had _also_ had some issue with... I forget where, but it was situation where neither 3.3 (what I had) nor 4.0 could do what I wanted, and I could not figure out how to get a later version of FF3 off their site--they only let me download FF4.

I'm not sure if you could have both versions active at once without interference. It depends on how they treat the system preferences files. (Preference and other nonstatic info tends to be kept outside the application itself.)

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

An application is just a directory with some special metadata.

You can certainly have multiple copies of an application installed in different places or under different names, but yeah, if they store anything in ~/Library/ (which is where most apps put user data), you probably will not have completely independent experiences.

[wingblaze.livejournal.com]

What are your thoughts on it so far? I think I mostly like the part where it's not facebook, personally, but haven't tried it. (I'm a google apps customer, and they don't have it ready for us yet.)

[alienor.livejournal.com]

When you are eventually (through functionality and support) forced to move to Firefox 5, it looks and behaves so much like Chrome (but less polished) that when reinstalling my desktop software I just went to Chrome (I use Chrome on my netbook because the menus and such take up less room and so it's better for the limited space of a netbook, so I knew what to expect).

I don't know if you've considered Chrome, but since Firefox seems to be headed in that direction, I thought I'd give you a heads up.

[littleweeds]

I'm on G+ under my actual name (merging usernames) and I just posted a comment.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

If you get spare invites, remember me? :-) (Sad eyes)

If I recall, you are using a Mac, yes? Windows FF4 works fine, and it is begging me to upgrade to 5.

[gingicat]

I'm there on my gmail address; ping me if you don't have that.

[gardenfey.livejournal.com]

I'm there as amethystazzz@gmail.com.

[cellio]

I'll be happy to send you an invitation. I need a gmail address (feel free to transmit via email or LJ message).

[cellio]

Thanks for saying there who you are here; I don't think I knew your other name before. (I wish I could find a way to annotate G+ users the way you can annotate LJ ones!)

[cellio]

I presume that comment I got was from you, so I think we're good. If you didn't see me add you, let me know.

[cellio]

Thanks for the help! This is good to know.

[cellio]

Thanks. Mac or Windows?

[cellio]

I'll do a real review in several days after I've used it more, but some quick impressions from the first day, and noting that I have no Facebook context to compare to:

+ Posts with comments inline all on the same page, with ability to collapse or ignore.
- Posts all on the same page means you can't throw something into a browser tab for later.
? Need to check: can I "pin" a post to keep it in a well-known place so I can more easily return to it?
+ Notifications implementation seems reasonable so far.
+ It's really easy to know what circles somebody is in.
- Big minus: no way to annotate people with notes about who they are (e.g. Bob Smith = Fred the Barbarian in the SCA = xyzzy on LJ). I don't know how I'm going to keep track of who all these people are.
+ The "read stuff from people you haven't added but who added you" view seems convenient.
- The editing interface is not so great for longer entries and mangled the formatting when I pasted text in from an external editor.
- I would like more control over font sizes.
? Use of screen real-estate could be better.
? Interface for circle management is kind of cutesy.
- There are some weird synchronization problems, possibly having to do with caching; things are showing up out of order and maybe some things not at all.
+ Email notifications.
? Haven't investigated how finely you can manage email notifications (e.g. always tell me when so-and-so comments, but don't tell me every time that-guy does).

[cellio]

Chrome! What a good idea! I'll bet G+ works well in that. :-) And a little time with Google today told me that it apparently supports one of my very most important Firefox extensions, without which the web would be much more hostile to my vision problems (Stylish). So yeah, I'll be checking that out -- thanks for the clue!

[cellio]

Gotcha! (I think. It took two tries to find you, for some odd reason.)

[eub.livejournal.com]

Ironically enough, could you send me an invite to firstinitial.lastname@gmail.com? Thanks. :)

I am using Firefox 4 on Mac because I hadn't heard warning of any problems with LJ... and I haven't seen any yet.

[cellio]

Done! I don't know how long they're taking to arrive at the moment; mine took close to 24 hours.

Thanks for the Firefox info.

[geekosaur]

There's also the issue that multiple applications with the same bundle ID (in this case, org.mozilla.firefox) can result in confusion.

[gardenfey.livejournal.com]

I must be sooper-seekrit. :)

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

I only just got there (as Noah Singman), but I'm not sure what to do with it yet. I'm obviously behind enough on LJ as it is.
:-)

[cellio]

I'm still figuring this out too, having no Facebook background to draw on. I think the idea of circles (filters, groups) right up front is an excellent usability improvement over what I understand to be the setup on Facebook. We'll see how it works out.