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Bringing Google+ to work
- silverbax88 14y agoIt's good that Google is trying to think about how companies (and people) might not want to share everything they do publicly. However, Google should spend considerable amount of time working on their core products. Many of them are feature-poor (as an example, Google Calendar doesn't seem have a setting to prevent your phone from getting automatic notifications, no matter if you turn EVERY notification off).
- josteink 14y agoCore product for whom? Google+ brings Google valuable information about who you are and what you do to their ad-words (revenue)engine. Improving a Calendar app which already provides them with that information, brings them little extra. It's sometimes important to remember who Google's real customers are. It's not you.
- abrahamsen 14y agoThe blog post is from the Google Apps team. Their customers are people who pay them money for using, among other stuff, Google Calendar.
- hahainternet 14y agoAh yes the Google's real customers meme again. It hasn't ever had any validity. You are Google's customer as they need you to click on relevant advertisements. The advertising companies are also their customer. The intention is to hook two customers up together. Google are matchmakers. How you can twist that into what you posted I don't know.
- rogerbinns 14y agoIf you have anyone else's calendar showing up in your Google Calendar, then Google Now treats all their events as though they are your events, so you get their driving directions and similar notifications. Yet another example of doing things half-assed.
- Evbn 14y agoI bet someone could write an Apps Script to tweak all incoming calendar events.
- cyanbane 14y agoI really enjoy Google+. It honestly has become my defacto "social network" when I just want to peruse whats happening in the world. There is a video game that I have been following for the past few years that went live this weekend and the community on Google+ is head and sholders above what I have found in other places. The content (as a whole) has been more thought out and and as a percentage I have wanted to read more of it than other sources. That being said I think "circles" caters to niche groups of people wanting to discuss a certain topic, will be interesting to see how another "post fencing" appartatus plays with circles.
- freehunter 14y agoI've been following GW2 on Facebook and the community is terrible. Never thought to check it on Google+. (I'm assuming GW2 is what you're referring to).
- cyanbane 14y agoYes, GW2. - I added my G+ profile link to my Y! profile, add me and shoot me a msg and I can send you my GW2 circle.
- rsync 14y agoI have never used facebook, twitter, etc., but I have increasingly found relevant content and discussion on g+ pages. So much so that last week I attempted, unsuccessfully, to create a g+ account for rsync.net. You'd think that wouldn't be rocket science. Then all of that "real name" bullshit that I tried to ignore last year came back to me. Google refuses to recognize the account, blah blah blah. No, I am not giving them my personal information for these discussions, and furthermore, multiple different people will be using this account (it's a business account) so it's not appropriate to tie an identity to it anyway. Does the "g+ for business" solve this problem ?
- endtime 14y agoI think the use case you describe is that you create a Google account as yourself, along with each of your colleagues. Then you create a G+ Page and make them all administrators of it. You can act/post/etc. as the G+ page and not as yourself, e.g. https://plus.google.com/+TheCorcoranGroup https://plus.google.com/+TheCorcoranGroup Not saying this is ideal or that you should like it, just that I think that's how you can do what you want to do.
- seiji 14y agoCan we make a Joel Anti-Test? Ideally, you want zero points. Cases: Uses Google+ Internally. Uses JIRA. Uses a VCS you have never heard of. Entire product is licensed from an outsourced shop and resold under your own branding. Extensive use of Windows desktops or servers. Uses one or more of {MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB} at scale. ...
- maayank 14y agoWhy the first, why the last?
- chollida1 14y agoWhat's wrong with JIRA? I've worked at a few places that use it. I don't see the problem with bug tracking software.
- T-hawk 14y agoNot so much JIRA itself, but the ecosystem and culture that surround it. It tends to be corporate enterprise ware and a symptom of a top-down management driven structure. I'm not aware of any teams that chose JIRA on their own. It's also rather oriented to time tracking and micromanagement (or at least that's how my group is told to use it), leading to Bad Agile focusing on process not results. It's not terrible to use, just mildly slow and clunky compared to other options like FogBugz or TFS.
- fps 14y agoMy team picked JIRA after examining other options; we felt it was the best and most usable solution that wasn't a) Hosted or b) running on expensive alien software like Windows (we're a unix shop.)
- darklajid 14y agoIn my world that makes about as much sense as 'your corporate intranet facebook'. Heck, just as much as Contoso YouPorn. Zero. Social networks, ignoring the problems with the current implementations, are for your social life. I enjoy social interactions at work, but most of my social life is _not_ connected to work. So social networks and work don't mix for me. And in what kind of business would you share stuff on a kind-of-but-not-quite blogging platform? That seems to be a SharePoint (no fan either) contender from a very weird angle..
- timothya 14y agoI think it depends on the company, but I disagree with your point in general. There are plenty of companies that would benefit from an easy model for sharing content internally, whether it be links to articles relevant to the company, wide discussions about internal (confidential) topics, or pictures from a recent company BBQ. With the features Google launched today, companies can safely use a social network and assume that internal information will stay that way.
- darklajid 14y agoThanks for the reply. That is done today already. Ignoring SharePoint: Many companies I know of deploy wikis internally (for content) or just have shared network drives (for pictures, movies). Why should that leave the corporate net? And what feature is G+ offering? That thing is about social interactions ('share content', 'chat', 'follow news'). So I have some issues here: 1) Mixing a type of site that is mostly for procrastination (FB, G+, this site) into the company culture doesn't seem a smart move 2) All the useful features of G+ are probably already deployed internally (which company doesn't have a way to share documents/news?). 3) What kind of (business) and size of (numbers of employees) would ever go for this thing? For lots of businesses storing stuff in the cloud is a no-go. For small-to-mid sized companies this seems .. laughable. Posting on G+ to your circle of co-workers sitting behind you/on the same floor, connected to the same network? I'm sure I'm extra harsh because I don't even see the benefits of (some/most of) these products in general, but at work? There's just no way that I can see any added value.
- chrisacky 14y agoSteve Yegge is most likely responsible for this feature being pushed through. https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...
- jmillikin 14y agoSteve Yegge accidentally posted his rant to the wrong account. Google+ for apps wouldn't stop anyone from doing that, unless there's a way for administrators to ban employees from using their personal accounts during work hours.
- gbog 14y agoIn a subsequent post about his current project and conservative vs liberal coding he seem to have mentioned it was not accidental.
- gbog 14y agoI'm downvoted here, maybe because I'm wrong and misunderstood the last sentence of Yegges post (1): (Special Note to my fellow Googlers: Yes, I meant to post this externally. BOTH times. No, I am not the Mouth of Sauron.) What can "BOTH times" mean, but that the first time, the "platform" rant, is included? (1) https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSK...
- cjhopman 14y agoMy guess is that he accidentally posted it internally first and then posted it externally. And so, both times he posted it, he meant to post it externally.
- Evbn 14y agoAs a sinister plot to trick other people into making the same mistake he did?
- timothya 14y agoThis is a really smart move by Google. This starts to eliminate the need for corporate social networks (like Yammer), and lets businesses take advantage of all the integrations that are happening with the other Google apps. As someone who has used internal social networks like Yammer at previous companies, I can honestly say that they are surprisingly useful - it gives other employees the forum to share interesting and work-related content, and provides a place for basic discussion on internal topics with a wide audience.
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoWe use both of these features very heavily at Google, so I'm really happy to see them launch externally. The ability to restrict posts to within a company lets you create a corporate social network very easily (think Yammer, Chatter, etc.). One of the main complaints I hear about Google+ is that specific friends aren't on it, but that's much less of an issue if your company uses Google Apps. I spend a lot of time and get a lot of value out of within-our-company Google+ posts. And since Google has widely distributed offices, I can't tell you how many video meetings I've attended, but it's a lot. Having the ability to join a video conference/hangout from a link in Calendar makes such meetings really easy to set up.
- lt 14y agoWhat about Hangouts on Air private to your company? That would be really useful.
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoFor the most part, we use video hangouts for smaller meetings, but that's an interesting suggestion: I could see private Hangouts on Air being useful for company-wide meetings. I don't know exactly what the team has planned though.
- VikingCoder 14y agoIf Wave had gotten this feature, I would have used it for all of my corporate documents.
- jeffjose 14y agoGoogle Docs (now called Drive documents) work just fine and I think is actually a product of rectifying the mistakes they made with Wave.
- danmaz74 14y agoHow easy is it to reshare a "company" post to the wrong people?
- jiggy2011 14y agoGreat, so now people who don't want to sign away their privacy to a social network don't get a choice when their employer decides to mandate use of this company-wide. This also pretty much forces you to merge your personal and work personas.
- jeffjose 14y agoNope. Where I work, I have an enterprise account which has a gmail, drive, groups and calendar which is signed in using a login@company.com account. My personal stuff is different and is a different account, signed in using personal_login@gmail.com The key point is, my company knows only about @company.com (and Google doesnt have any idea) and the other way around for @gmail.com account.
- lallysingh 14y agoWhat? How? You'll have one account via your corporate email address (e.g. you@employer.com) and another via your personal email address (e.g. you@gmail.com)
- pilif 14y agoThe google apps accounts are completely separate from the non-apps accounts. There's no need to merge personal and work personas.
- Zenst 14y agoThis is a great move for G+, only concerns having not tried it yet are the following: 1) Free until end of the year, so in effect open roll-out beta testing and once we have it how you like it and enough hooked, then we charge you a unknown amount. Not sure in what depths of society that marketing model is drawn upon but it is something that stood out. 2) Garantee's - when you share data in a closed circle (company or select group of friends) withing a enviroment that allows open/public sharing and the identifiers being user changable parameters then I would ask and suggest one big addition. Make all interface changes approval acceptance only and by that I mean allow a company to have a technical social person for the whatever changes are needed but have the ability for all impacting changes (level of changes definable even) needing approval of at least another person, maybe even a few down to some needing CEO approval. You may have situations were you have a internal post and later on wish that to be made fully public in just the case that you dont want some internal posts ever publicly leaked and whilst the permisions to say who can see things is there. Perhaps the ability to add NEVERFORPUBLIC tags indicating that nomater what is changed down the line with facebook style permision bias in whatever fasion, they will never ever change unless the user who created them changes them. Also need to have orga chart ability for higher ups to change incase a person leaves. 3) Think Murdoch - What legal aspects do social media posts have in comparision to emails and do you have the ability to blind copy people into posts as you would say BCC your lawyer on emails. Some companies like that approach and how does G+ cater for them if it is going in the direction many think it is.
- numbchuckskills 14y agoI am surprised how many comments are focused on the traditional social networking aspects (posts/following etc.) and NOT the video conferencing. That to me is the killer feature.