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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 co

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??
- jrockway 15y ago
  Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult. Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me?? Why is this scary, other than the fact that it's different from what's happened in the past? Was the Chat / Mail integration scary too?
  - mkl 15y ago
    Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX. They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.
    - jrockway 15y ago
      I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for. I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to. Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.) (Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)
      - johngunderman 15y ago
        > I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for. Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns. EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being: People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.
- jaredsohn 15y ago
  >DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN! From my experience, you can do this even after you join.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    Yep, it took me all of three seconds to reverse this setting (admittedly, when I had been told where to look).
  - betterth 15y ago
    I connect to gchat using a third party program, and my contact list in this program is still full of unwanted contacts that I have to manually delete. I said do it before you join to save people in a similar situation.
- rfurmani 15y ago
  This is kind of a dealbreaker here. Especially since the chat in Google+ is indeed set to not show the Hacker News circle, but my chat in gmail is still showing everybody! And there's no visible setting to change that outside of Google+
nek4life 15y ago
The setting is unfortunately hidden. You need to click on the little arrow that's next to the chat login next to stream to find it. If you're not signed into chat first do so then click the little arrow again. From there you can add and remove circles from your chat.
- sp332 15y ago
  Thank you for finding that! If you go to the chat settings on the Gmail page (where I usually use chat), this option doesn't exist.
  - rfurmani 15y ago
    Thank you!! I've been searching for this inside Gmail and was very confused. I never thought of looking for it inside Plus Edit: I spoke to soon. This controls who appears in the Chat inside Plus, but the chat inside GMail still shows everybody!
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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??

jrockway 15y ago
Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult. Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me?? Why is this scary, other than the fact that it's different from what's happened in the past? Was the Chat / Mail integration scary too?
- mkl 15y ago
  Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX. They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for. I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to. Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.) (Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)
    - johngunderman 15y ago
      > I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for. Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns. EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being: People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.
jaredsohn 15y ago
>DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN! From my experience, you can do this even after you join.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Yep, it took me all of three seconds to reverse this setting (admittedly, when I had been told where to look).
- betterth 15y ago
  I connect to gchat using a third party program, and my contact list in this program is still full of unwanted contacts that I have to manually delete. I said do it before you join to save people in a similar situation.
rfurmani 15y ago
This is kind of a dealbreaker here. Especially since the chat in Google+ is indeed set to not show the Hacker News circle, but my chat in gmail is still showing everybody! And there's no visible setting to change that outside of Google+

nek4life 15y ago

The setting is unfortunately hidden. You need to click on the little arrow that's next to the chat login next to stream to find it. If you're not signed into chat first do so then click the little arrow again. From there you can add and remove circles from your chat.

sp332 15y ago
Thank you for finding that! If you go to the chat settings on the Gmail page (where I usually use chat), this option doesn't exist.
- rfurmani 15y ago
  Thank you!! I've been searching for this inside Gmail and was very confused. I never thought of looking for it inside Plus Edit: I spoke to soon. This controls who appears in the Chat inside Plus, but the chat inside GMail still shows everybody!
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