5 ms·

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

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 15y 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 15y 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.
- farnsworth 15y 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 15y ago
You can add yourself to the Hacker News Circle at http://hngp.axxim.net/ 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)
sp332 15y ago
Go to https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts 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/ 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 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 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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- felideon 15y 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.
  - betterth 15y ago
    Yes! Leave it to Google to screw up privacy, I don't use G+ much but this right here has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would say it's intentionally convoluted to get people to have poorly set settings (more "sharing"), but let's face it, Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design (they're engineers!). Anyway, I spent 20 minutes frantically trying to figure out how to handle gChat privacy settings while my carefully curated buddy list filled up with random names. - Go to plus.google.com - Find the chat box on the left side, there is a small down arrow at the top left of it - Click on privacy settings - MAKE SURE that only the circles you want in gChat are selected (IE uncheck the hacker news circle you made) DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN! I'm still trying to figure out how to get the names off my list, even though that has been set. No new names though. I'm just surprised that Google would add to my Google Chat buddy list, a totally separate product, without ever asking me if i wanted to combine G+ and gChat like that. Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??

hyperbovine 15y 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 15y 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.
farnsworth 15y 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 15y ago

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

sp332 15y ago

Go to https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts 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/ 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 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 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.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
felideon 15y 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.
- betterth 15y ago
  Yes! Leave it to Google to screw up privacy, I don't use G+ much but this right here has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would say it's intentionally convoluted to get people to have poorly set settings (more "sharing"), but let's face it, Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design (they're engineers!). Anyway, I spent 20 minutes frantically trying to figure out how to handle gChat privacy settings while my carefully curated buddy list filled up with random names. - Go to plus.google.com - Find the chat box on the left side, there is a small down arrow at the top left of it - Click on privacy settings - MAKE SURE that only the circles you want in gChat are selected (IE uncheck the hacker news circle you made) DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN! I'm still trying to figure out how to get the names off my list, even though that has been set. No new names though. I'm just surprised that Google would add to my Google Chat buddy list, a totally separate product, without ever asking me if i wanted to combine G+ and gChat like that. Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??