Hackers to follow on G+?
currently following Guido van Rossum: https://plus.google.com/115212051037621986145/posts
Who others are there on G+ ? I have a better question. How many of these people are actually posting? It feels a little pointless to follow a bunch of people who have no public posts. I've gone through all the links in this thread (at the time of writing) and included only those where I can see posts (i.e more than just uploading a profile photo). I've simply copy/pasted the links from the original submitters into this post. Hope it's useful. (edit: I also put them all in a spreadsheet which anyone can edit http://bit.ly/nBqc8e) Guido van Rossum: https://plus.google.com/115212051037621986145/posts Ian Bicking: https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts Michael Foord: https://plus.google.com/u/1/114852031032123777881/posts Simon Willison: https://plus.google.com/u/1/106366615678321494423/posts Brett Cannon: https://plus.google.com/u/1/115362263245161504841/posts Graham Dumpleton: https://plus.google.com/u/1/114657481176404420131/posts Waldemar Kornewald: https://plus.google.com/u/1/112495598999878465094/posts Eric Florenzano: https://plus.google.com/u/1/109591387819364984777/posts Randall Munroe: XKCD. https://plus.google.com/111588569124648292310/posts Matt Cutts: https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts Brad Fitzpatrick: https://plus.google.com/115863474911002159675/posts Scott Hanselman: https://plus.google.com/113698589973698283456/posts Ryan Dahl: https://plus.google.com/115094562986465477143/posts Andy Hertzfeld: https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts Adrian Holovaty: https://plus.google.com/113607435918549143249/posts Armin Ronacher: https://plus.google.com/116865269069705863179/posts Don Stewart: https://plus.google.com/115274377971493973150/posts Paul Buchheit: https://plus.google.com/111732375221065535359/posts So, how are these hackers sharing their technical insights on G+ without bothering their real-life friends and family? That's right, they aren't. Unless you manually add all your followers to a 'followers' circle and share to that (and subsequently pollute your default stream with your followers' posts) there's currently no way on G+ to keep your technical public persona apart from your more personal, private one. Is that really a concern? For now, their friends and family can ignore any posts they don't care about, just like Facebook. Hopefully, G+ will eventually implement tagging and people can filter out tags they don't like. I, too, believe this is a problem. My idea of circles is to segregate them into different, private sectors. I currently face this problem on Facebook and Twitter. I tend to use Facebook for only personal friends and family whereas I use Twitter for networking and technology. Ideally I would use both of these networks for both purposes, but there is no easy way to promote separation and ensure that my messages/tweets go to the right parties. I have no drive to create separate accounts for each social network. My personal preference would be to have different façades publicly viewable to different groups. I would treat Facebook very differently if I was given the opportunity to separate these groups and target them individually. I have a belief that Facebook tried to accomplish this with groups but fell short on exactly what I've been waning for. As an aside, there is a Hacker News group for those of you who may not be aware. Of course it's a concern, it's a problem circles were supposed to resolve. I for one am still barely sharing anything, because I don't want to bother people with posts that I know will not be interesting to them. And yes, tagging would be nice as well, but I don't think one should have to explain to his/her mother to filter out their #tech and #business posts. That just won't work. So in other words, Circles are backwards from Twitter, and this is a problem. I guess G+ needs a mechanism to allow people to ask to subscribe to a Circle, and the owner can approve or deny it. (Or set an option to auto-allow.) That keeps the privacy aspect, but also makes it easy for people to follow or be followed. If that happened, then the circles themselves would become the tags. Another post here on HN talks about Circles not being Groups. (The Zuckerberg one.) Reposting my comments from there: I would definitely like to see Google add groups as pseudo-people... And then you can put that group in a Circle and share to it. People in the group can see who else is in the group. Groups could be curated (need approval to join) or just open to anyone, and moderated (need approval to post) or not depending on the choices made by the group owner. I have a very early stage startup called Subjot, with a goal to create a network that matches people with the posts they care about. We are in private beta but you can use this invite code to check it out - http://sjot.it/m0bqQy Subjot is a microblogging site where you assign subjects to your status updates. Then instead of following people and EVERYTHING they post, you subscribe to people's subjects and only see their status updates in the subjects you have subscribed to. I'd love everyone's feedback on the product. I think G+ is only solving the problem of selectively publishing and not of selectively subscribing to updates that might be interesting to you. The easiest way to correct this would be to allow posting to intersections, disjunctions of circles. It's gonna come for sure. In all honesty, if these people really care about this, they'll have an account for their "online personality" and a personal account. See the difference between Facebook fan pages and actual Facebook profiles. Of course, now the problem is that there is no elegant way (currently) to manage 2 G+ accounts... I've always though that personae-based would be better than circle-based. You could even have people like the former _why who have an entirely separate online presence. It seems to me that the most active use for G+ at the moment is as a broadcasting system, very much like Twitter. Maybe Google has envisioned this, maybe not. I admit I didn't. I thought Google would have done whatever it takes to promote more intimate and private communication among close friend circles. But while G+ is arguably a better broadcasting system than Twitter, it is still broken. A tech celeb would love to consistently post tech stuffs, but while this activity satisfies his geeky followers, it would annoy his friends and families. And there is no way a tech celeb can manually add his followers into different circles. I imagine if G+ fixes this problem, it will completely replace Twitter in no time at all. One solution is to introduce a concept called Channels. Suppose I follow DHH. The problem is DHH has a lot of interests, ranging from Ruby, entrepreneurship, to Forbes bashing (DHH fans bear it with me here). Now DHH doesn't know who among his followers cares about which of his interests, but he creates some Channels, namely "Ruby", "Entrepreneurship", "Forbes Bashing", etc anyway, so followers can filter themselves. Now a Rails guy found DHH's G+ page. He would like to follow DHH, but he doesn't care so much about DHH's financial insight. Now that when he adds DHH to his "Follow" Circle, he can choose to pick some among many DHH's Channels and everyone is happy. Finally, DHH's "public" posts are only visible to those who specifically added him to the "Follow" circle. I've been working on an early stage startup which does something very similar to this, although less celebrity focused and more on common circles. It's funny actually, when Google+ happened, I figured they did exactly what we've been working on, but they didn't. Seeing as everyone on HN seems to want something like this now though, it seems to be putting a lot of pressure on. Sounds like it would work like the feed-anywhere system on WordPress. I could grab the robotics feed from an interesting person at example.com/robotics/feed/ and easily forget that it's actually a competitive crochet blog. I guess the reason is that for most people, almost none of their personal friends have signed up - only their techie circles are there. Python and django related ones: Michael Foord (aka voidspace, fuzzyman): https://plus.google.com/u/1/114852031032123777881/posts Simon Willison: https://plus.google.com/u/1/106366615678321494423/posts Jannis Leidel: https://plus.google.com/u/1/116135559313623469613/posts Jesse Noller: https://plus.google.com/u/1/115662513673837016240/posts Brett Cannon: https://plus.google.com/u/1/115362263245161504841/posts Graham Dumpleton: https://plus.google.com/u/1/114657481176404420131/posts Waldemar Kornewald: https://plus.google.com/u/1/112495598999878465094/posts Brian Rosner: https://plus.google.com/u/1/102458913105606955755/posts Eric Florenzano: https://plus.google.com/u/1/109591387819364984777/posts Randall Munroe: XKCD.
https://plus.google.com/111588569124648292310/posts Matt Cutts: head of the webspam team at Google. https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts Brad Fitzpatrick: Googler, creator of Livejournal; author of Memcached, and bunch of other stuff. https://plus.google.com/115863474911002159675/posts Scott Hanselman's profile, Principal Program Manager @ Microsoft. Prolific online presence:
https://plus.google.com/113698589973698283456/posts Adrian Holovaty - one of the creators of Django, founder of Everyblock https://plus.google.com/113607435918549143249/posts Armin Ronacher - creator of Flask (Python web framework) https://plus.google.com/116865269069705863179/posts Don Stewart- Author of Real World Haskell and quant https://plus.google.com/115274377971493973150/posts these urls are terrible You can use profiles.google.com/yourname (if you haven't excluded your profile from search) This. I don't get it. Google already has usernames - why not use them? Antispam measure. They're trying to make it harder to figure out a user's email address. You can use http://gplus.to to make a shortname though. I guess Google doesn't need to care about SEO gplus.to ..although it's not run by Google. Maybe they'll end up getting gpl.us You can use http://gotoplus.me , it's make vanity URL for your Google+ Profile like http://gotoplus.me/yourusername And http://plus.ly Steve Huffman - reddit co-founder https://plus.google.com/108698511898906110438/posts Resig - creator of jquery https://plus.google.com/115675748062237570841/posts Limor Fried (Adafruit): https://plus.google.com/108772200278976934119/posts Gina Trapani (Lifehacker): https://plus.google.com/113612142759476883204/posts Merlin Mann (43folders): https://plus.google.com/100537991844787325512/posts Marco Arment (Instapaper): https://plus.google.com/110386126391315414323/posts Tim Bray: https://plus.google.com/107606703558161507946/posts Very few infosec and IT security peeps yet that I have found. A few so far: Bob Rudis: https://plus.google.com/106858596733931987499/posts Graham Cluley: https://plus.google.com/102593062779602837630/posts Naked security (Sophos): https://plus.google.com/109804632067529299377/posts Seth Godin: https://plus.google.com/106497949182730964838/posts Ian Bicking: https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts Mark Chu-Carroll: https://plus.google.com/102359124322399475449/posts Joe Hewitt https://plus.google.com/113111163133053240092/ Also, just came across this post https://plus.google.com/111379026657101157995/posts/Sirk5KSb... though those recommendations are mostly tech industry and blogger types not really hackers. Also, here is a list of hacker news folks on G+. You can add the emails into Google Contacts and we'll all appear in find and invite or you can dd people one by one.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lQACCsE19tzBjRrfgmAcU25m... Martin Odersky Creator of Scala https://plus.google.com/117708211719030258230/posts David Pollak Creator of Lift
https://plus.google.com/105156943245180312120/posts Ryan Dahl (maker of Node.js): https://plus.google.com/115094562986465477143/posts Andy Hertzfeld: https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts Paul Buchheit: https://plus.google.com/111732375221065535359/posts Jason Fried: https://plus.google.com/107991344352087348543/posts Is PG in G+ ? Andy Hertzfeld member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s, now doing lead designer of Google+ (the circles UI? that's his and his team's code)