zlacker

That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.

>>UncleO+(OP)
Yeah that was sad.

The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google.

These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.

>>samatm+Qh
I'm kind of surprised that FB didn't copy that targeted circles feature. It was such a great idea. You could even do some logical operations on the circles. You could have a circle for professional stuff which you kept politics out of and you could have a separate political circle for politics only, but if you wanted to target both you could do an AND.

>>samatm+Qh
The Google+ push definitely provided some activation energy, but unifying accounts---and more importantly, building out a framework for account unification given that Google knows it will continue to build new applications and purchase companies that must be integrated against its existing applications---had been a goal for a while.

It was becoming a game of technological whack-a-mole on Google's back end to manage account information across apps. For example, was a user logged into Gmail also logged into YouTube? Were they logged in as the same person? How do resources get unified across different apps, since that's behavior users assume should work? What applications had authority to act on a user's behalf, in what contexts, And can we provide a better way to support that functionality than requiring a user to give their whole password to a third-party system? And when an account had to be banned for being abusive, what precisely got banned? previous to account unification, it was a shotgun depending on who did the banning and in what context.

True names was, in my opinion, a misstep. The account unification goal was a great idea.