Google+ Invites

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

Not yet. There is still no full API for google plus, it won't become popular until people can start using it from their phones.

[Clin]

Google+ Invites

[Tiwaking!]

Send invitations - 150 left

Would anyone like one?

[Tiwaking!]

Google Plus has one of the largest number of Sex Workers and Code Monkeys. I was wondering: Does anyone know of there is a code tag for Google plus posts?

[Tiwaking!]

A really interesting read about Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Spoiler :

Rip Rowan  -  3:18 AM (edited)  -  Public
The best article I've ever read about architecture and the management of IT.

***UPDATE***

This post was intended to be shared privately and was accidentally made public. Thanks to +Steve Yegge for allowing us to keep it out there. It's the sort of writing people do when they think nobody is watching: honest, clear, and frank.

The world would be a better place if more people wrote this sort of internal memoranda, and even better if they were allowed to write it for the outside world.

Hopefully Steve will not experience any negative repercussions from Google about this. On the contrary, he deserves a promotion.

***UPDATE #2***

This post has received a lot of attention. For anyone here who arrived from The Greater Internet - I stand ready to remove this post if asked. As I mentioned before, I was given permission to keep it up.

Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform. In the end, a company's greatest asset is its culture, and here, Google is one of the strongest companies on the planet.
Steve Yegge originally shared this post:
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

 7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:

 - pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.

It is way too long to post up its entirety.

[Tiwaking!]

Facebook now uses Bing to translate posts from one language to another.
Facebook is officially Satan.

[Emrico1]

I had to Bing that to see what the fuss was about

[Tiwaking!]

I had to Bing that to see what the fuss was about

My myFace is in Dansk and posts now can be translated by Bing. BING.

I frickin hate Bing.

[Xenolightning]

I had to Bing that to see what the fuss was about

Did that fuss return "I'm sorry no results were found"?

[Emrico1]

Did that fuss return "I'm sorry no results were found"?

I just wanted to say I bing'd something. trololololo

[Tiwaking!]

I both love and hate Google Plus.

Love
Integrated everything
Privacy Controls
Auto-link verification
Circles

Hate
Integrated everything
Ruining YouTube layout
News Feed Spam


There is an interesting article about how Google+ cannot be avoided. It is interesting to note that it isnt really Google pluses fault for this. Facebook has forced many a website to 'conform or die' in that you can login and comment using your Facebook profile and by 'can' I mean 'must'. Digg, reddit, orkut, blogger, and loads of other sites allow you to use their credentials to identify yourself as well, so the problem isnt just facebook/google plus specific.

An example of this plague of Social Media appears in the most unlikely of places:
http://gambitious.com/

Gambitious is the 'Kickstarter' of video games, but with more emphasis on Video Games and project documentation (which is a HUGE plus)


Unfortunately: To actually READ any of the project documentation, such as Mission Statements and Business Plans, you NEED to login.
And I find this practice to be questionable.

Anyway: Google Plus article is below

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324731304578193781852024980.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories

There's No Avoiding Google+

Google Inc. GOOG +1.98% is challenging Facebook Inc.
FB +3.56% by using a
controversial tactic: requiring people to use the Google+ social network.

[Catalyst]

Can't be avoided ? I've never had a Google+ or facebook account, they can both get fucked

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

I've never needed to use my g+ account for anything. And I doubt I ever will.

I use facebooks though.

[Tiwaking!]

I've never needed to use my g+ account for anything. And I doubt I ever will.

Hmmm. Might be time to start. Especially if you are from space

https://plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/posts

Chris Hadfield
1:03 PM  -  
Public
Hi - I'm testing Google+ from Earth orbit, onboard the International Space Station. If I can make it work from here, I hope to post more in the future.

[Tiwaking!]

This account appears to be a robot whore.
https://plus.google.com/117153300502472638513/posts

This is not what I expected a robotic whore to be like

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

No Google Plus API = No mobile apps = Fail

[Kayne]

This account appears to be a robot whore.
https://plus.google.com/117153300502472638513/posts

This is not what I expected a robotic whore to be like

The conversations on that page are cringe worthy embarrassing.

[Bell]

I'm torn, I think google+ is a better product than facebook and I don't particually like the facebook company and I would like it to die.
But if google also had a platform as powerful as facebook that could add more personal information to their already massive dataset. I'm not sure I would be comfortable.
They would become a pretty scary Mega-monopoly when it comes to the internet.

[Tiwaking!]

Use your Google Drive to temporarily host pages. Interesting.

https://googledrive.com/host/0B716ywBKT84AMXBENXlnYmJISlE/GoogleDriveHosting.html

How it works:
Create a new folder in Drive and share it as "Public on the web."
Upload your HTML, JS & CSS files to this folder.
Open the HTML file & you will see "Preview" button in the toolbar.

 
Share the URL that looks like http://www.googledrive.com/host/... from the preview window and anyone can view your web page.

[Tiwaking!]

Well it looks like Google's master plan of rolling out Google+ to everywhere at once has been a great success. I was quite disappointed when Google Buzz (which no one used) disappeared and wondered why it did.

If you never used Google Buzz, it basically let you comment on a Webpage even if there was no commenting system on that website, kind of like a Forum dedicated solely for a single website or page, which is a kind of cool idea. Tribute pages of Nickleback got hit with nothing but hate.

And now Google+ lets you do something similar by linking/sharing a page on your page which lets people add comments. Whether you think this is a good idea or not depends on your point of view. Having seen some shared links be commented on by some quite famous people (Steve Wozniak comes to mind) makes you wonder just how powerful Google+'s sharing system really is.

However, Google+ ate the YouTube commenting system back in November and thats caused a whole heap of hatred, notably YouTube co-founder Jawed's comment on his profile:
http://www.youtube.com/user/jawed
jawed's channel posted

why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?


They really should have just instantly forced everyone on YouTube to join Google+ instead of passively aggressively suggesting it for 10 months before forcing everyone to join Google+ anyway. I may be sounding like an advocate for Google+, but the system is pretty damn powerful. Anyone familiar with Googles BigTable system knows this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable

I'm torn, I think google+ is a better product than facebook and I don't particually like the facebook company and I would like it to die.
But if google also had a platform as powerful as facebook that could add more personal information to their already massive dataset. I'm not sure I would be comfortable.
They would become a pretty scary Mega-monopoly when it comes to the internet.

I wouldnt be too worried. My Google browsing preferences profile still says I am a 56 year old chinese woman from Singapore

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

The youtube comments system is whack.

I blame google and their army robots.

[han16]

Deleted my google plus and told youtube to not merge my account with Gmail at least 1000 times now, can't comment on youtube or post reviews on Play store mobile apps because of it. Good thing that doesn't matter to me. I also get daily notifications to change my youtube account name to my real name?

Googles software is quickly becoming rather annoying.

[mycoolcar]

Deleted my google plus and told youtube to not merge my account with Gmail at least 1000 times now, can't comment on youtube or post reviews on Play store mobile apps because of it. Good thing that doesn't matter to me. I also get daily notifications to change my youtube account name to my real name?

Same here. I don't comment now, not that I really did ever before.

[Craigor]

[Arnifix]