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"Another reason why Google+ competes with distributed social networks: for people worried about the social networking service provider (or the Government) readi

"Another reason why Google+ competes with distributed social networks: for people worried about the social networking service provider (or the Government) reading their posts, client-side encryption on top of Google+ could work. The Circles feature is exactly what is needed to make encrypted posts viable, because you can make a circle of those who are using a compatible encryption/decryption plugin. At least a half-dozen such plugins have been created over the years (examples: 1, 2), but it doesn’t make much sense to use these over Facebook or Twitter. Once the Google+ developer API rolls out, I’m sure we’ll see yet another avatar of the encrypted status message idea, and perhaps the the n-th time will be the charm." I really like this idea. I hope they even implement it themselves so you can encrypt the data yourself on certain circles. I also agree that Google+ so far seems that it could threaten not just Facebook, but also Twitter and Linkedin and maybe even personal blogging (Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, and Wordpress to a lesser degree) It could become a publisher platform too if they create a good way to monetize the content without being spammy. Chris Brogan suggested affiliate links. I was also thinking they could allow you yo use your own Adsense id on the page of the post. But they should think all these things through before they implement them. Oh, and I'm STILL waiting for content search within Google+, the way Twitter search works.

randomwalker 15y ago
Glad you liked it. I'm not sure if I'll have time to implement it myself (I'm an academic.. more time for writing than hacking :-)) but I've worked on a very related project called SocialKeys: http://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2011/03/arvind_narayanan.pdf http://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2011/03/arvind_nar... It's been on hiatus for a while.. maybe this would be a good time to restart it.
city41 15y ago
I think G+ will threaten Twitter quite a bit. I love being able to add people I don't know to my "following" circle and then watch people post interesting, deeper updates than 140 characters would ever allow. All the "hacks" like twitpic, tweetlonger, etc are no longer needed. So far my experience with G+ is basically "it's Twitter except it's useful"
mike-cardwell 15y ago
Regarding encryption. Google+ with such a plugin wouldn't fix the fundamental problem. We don't need "encryption for geeks", we need "encryption for everyone". Until we have a social network where every message posted is only viewable by the sender and the intended recipients, there will always be room for improvement.
- baq 15y ago
  google is in an excellent position for this: they "only" have to assign a keypair to every profile. there's a small problem in that the private key would have to be stored in their cloud for good usability, but it's otherwise possible.
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    They're not going to do that though because of their commercial interests. And a key stored by the service provider is equivalent to a service provider storing the data unencrypted and promising to not look at it. Just like Dropbox.

randomwalker 15y ago

Glad you liked it. I'm not sure if I'll have time to implement it myself (I'm an academic.. more time for writing than hacking :-)) but I've worked on a very related project called SocialKeys: http://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2011/03/arvind_narayanan.pdf http://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2011/03/arvind_nar... It's been on hiatus for a while.. maybe this would be a good time to restart it.

city41 15y ago

I think G+ will threaten Twitter quite a bit. I love being able to add people I don't know to my "following" circle and then watch people post interesting, deeper updates than 140 characters would ever allow. All the "hacks" like twitpic, tweetlonger, etc are no longer needed. So far my experience with G+ is basically "it's Twitter except it's useful"

mike-cardwell 15y ago

Regarding encryption. Google+ with such a plugin wouldn't fix the fundamental problem. We don't need "encryption for geeks", we need "encryption for everyone". Until we have a social network where every message posted is only viewable by the sender and the intended recipients, there will always be room for improvement.

baq 15y ago
google is in an excellent position for this: they "only" have to assign a keypair to every profile. there's a small problem in that the private key would have to be stored in their cloud for good usability, but it's otherwise possible.
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  They're not going to do that though because of their commercial interests. And a key stored by the service provider is equivalent to a service provider storing the data unencrypted and promising to not look at it. Just like Dropbox.