Our stack is pretty standard fare for Google apps these days: we use Java servlets for our server code and JavaScript for the browser-side of the UI, largely built with the (open-source) Closure framework, including Closure's JavaScript compiler and template system. A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it's an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you're on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don't run into this in practice). Our backends are built mostly on top of BigTable and Colossus/GFS, and we use a lot of other common Google technologies such as MapReduce (again, like many other Google apps do).

tweet

We had these with old profiles (and buzz), though IMO most users find and share their profiles in the app itself (or by copying/pasting their long profile URL as is), so this isn't a big loss (though it's cool to have short/friendly/personalized URLs, I know). Interestingly, I remember it was a big deal when Facebook first offered the ability to get "vanity URLs" for users, but as far as I can tell, they're rarely used (do you ever use your own FB vanity URL or know/use the URLs of your friends on FB)? In any case, this is something we'll consider further...

tweet

Sadly, as usual I can't comment on specific timelines or unreleased features, but as I said on another answer, this is near the top of my personal wishlist for Google+ integrations with other Google properties, and I know I'm not alone... ;)

tweet

We don't necessarily want everything users +1 to be immediately shared to the stream, since that might be too noisy and make people +1 less stuff. Part of why +1s are so useful right now is they only show up in context, e.g. if you search for a new digital camera, you may see that I +1'd the Canon s95, but if you don't care about cameras, you don't have to be bothered with that info. We also let users list their +1s on their profile page, which allows for vicarious discovery without being right in the stream. That said, clearly people often want a way to explicitly share something they've +1'd, so we need a better story there, and it's something we're actively thinking about.

tweet

I think the ability to explicitly exclude a particular person/circle might be useful in some circumstances, provided it doesn't make the normal sharing UI more complex for normal everyday use. It's "on the list", but probably not at the top. :)

tweet

We haven't yet decided exactly what form our platform will take, but in general we strive to support open standards wherever it makes sense.

tweet

There are definitely good use cases for this, but we worry about the complexity it would introduce. This might be a great "power-user" feature to build using our APIs (once they're ready, heh).

tweet

No current way to do that, but it's feedback we've heard a lot, and helping users manage the signal-to-noise of their stream (both manually and automatically) is definitely high on our priority list.

tweet

Our first priority was to ensure users know their choices of circles is private to them, so they feel comfortable classifying people the way they really want, without fear of "social awkwardness". That said, there are definitely cases where it would be useful to share a circle you've made with others. I thunk Chunka Mui argues convincingly for this in his recent Forbes piece: http://blogs.forbes.com/chunkamui/2011/07/15/why-google-is-poised-to-fail/ (though I think it's a bit much to claim this means we're "poised to fail", heh).

tweet

As usual, nothing specific to announce, but clearly planning events and sharing stuff around events is an important part of socializing online, and as you might imagine, many of us on the team are itching to do something cool and useful in this area.

tweet

It's certainly something I've been lobbying for internally, though as you can imagine it'll be complex and tricky to do right everywhere.

tweet

I don't control our overall roadmap, but personally I'm eager for many of the features other Google+ users have asked for recently: smarter ranking/collapsing/filtering in the stream and notifications (though I consider it a "good problem to have" that there's already so much activity on G+!), integration with more Google products (e.g. an easy way to share articles from Google Reader to G+), and an API so I can start hacking on cool uses of circles, etc. in my "copious spare time". :)

tweet

I'm quite certain there will be "features added to the Hangouts" soon, and the examples you list are all useful/fun things to do in a real-time environment, but I don't know exactly which new features we'll add or when, and even if I did, they wouldn't let me tell you here, sorry! :)

tweet

To be honest, I'm surprised we don't have them (we did for buzz)...lemme look into that! :)

tweet

Trading off consistency vs. availability is always challenging, and even more so in social applications where your actions affect other users, often in other data centers. For instance, adding/removing someone from a circle impacts (among other things): which posts they can see, the counts of people on your (and their) profile, suggestions (for potentially many people), and so on. Clearly some of these changes need to happen immediately/ASAP, whereas others could be a bit stale and that's ok. Picking the right trade-offs so our systems are fast and robust but users rarely notice any problems was (and continues to be) challenging, and in some cases required some very clever tricks in the backends.

Also, pretty much everything about hangouts is technically challenging. I don't know much about the details; I just know those guys are wicked smart. :)

tweet

We're working on it, sorry for the delay! See also Dave G's recent post on this: https://plus.google.com/100940716892313727285/posts/RmQAR4v4VRr

tweet

We put extra emphasis on engineering speed/agility--we try to release code updates on a daily basis while still keeping quality/stability/latency as high as you'd expect from google. This helps us move fast and respond quickly to user feedback. Otherwise, there's not too much magic to the process--just lots of passionate, hard working people trying to make sharing better. :)

tweet

The circles UI is definitely an important part of "making it easy/fun enough to create circles" so people do it. But the circles model itself (where you can add anyone to a circle that you want, they don't have to add you back, and your choice of circle is private to you) is I think the main key, since it lets people build their graph like it is in the real world, without artificial constraints or "social awkwardness".

tweet

Yes, we really want it to be easy to create circles from your existing gmail contact groups, we just didn't get it finished in time for launch, sorry! Also, we want to make sure users fully realize that circles have a slightly different privacy model than contact groups (e.g. the people in your circles get notified that you've added them, and by default they show up on your profile), so people aren't surprised if/when they turn a group into a circle.

tweet

No comment (posted from my mobile phone with front-facing camera and high-speed internet connection).

tweet

We built and re-built many aspects of the UI many times based on user studies and dogfood feedback. And of course we're "standing on the shoulders of giants" in many ways, learning both from our previous social products and the industry at large. For instance, Andy Hertzfeld was working on a prototype "next-generation contact manager" before Google+ got started, and many of the ideas in that prototype formed the core of the "circle editor" UI we shipped, but we made numerous changes and revisions to the UI along the way, and we're clearly going to need to keep doing that going forward (for all aspects of the product).

tweet

I think our blog post covered it well: "We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests." We think we can make sharing better and make Google more social (and useful) in the process.

tweet

Isn't that the whole point of tabbed browsing? :) Note we do let you run gtalk inside Google+, but we're trying to get our initial download size *smaller*, so embedding all of Gmail would certainly take us in the wrong direction there! :p

tweet

Personally, I want this too (and I know Chris Messina agrees, heh), but we don't have anything official to say about this (or pretty much any other specific future features or timelines).

tweet

Not yet, sorry! We're eager to get it out though, trust me! :) You can sign up at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/plusdevelopers/ to learn more as soon as we're ready.

tweet

I presented some ideas for this in my talk at Google I/O last year: http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/building-fluid-social-experiences-across-websites.html -- and also talked about it more recently in a podcast I did for IEEE Spectrum: http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/innovation/the-unified-field-theory-of-google -- in general, our circles and sharing model was designed to be "federation-friendly", and many of the building blocks needed to federate connecting, sharing, commenting, etc. are already in place, so now it's time to put the pieces together!

tweet

We're happy to see that people seem to like the circles model, hangouts, the realtime UI, etc., and our servers seem to be doing pretty well so far, though we definitely got more demand faster than we anticipated. :) There's a ton still to do, so everyone is still hard at work, and we're trying to do our best to listen for feedback and iterate quickly.

tweet

The circle filters on the left side of the stream used to be "sticky", but in practice this was annoying more times than it was helpful for most people. I would just bookmark the URL of the circle you want to check most often and maybe add it to your browser toolbar so you can easily click to see what's new there.

tweet

Good question! Not everyone posts YouTube videos using their real name, so we wouldn't want to do this for everyone, but personally it does seem like a good idea for users that are uploading videos that they want to be associated with their Google+ profile.

tweet

Vic Gundotra (Eng SVP) and Bradley Horowitz (Product VP) are our "buck stops here" leaders, though they don't force themselves into every decision the team makes. And of course, our founders often have strong opinions of their own... ;)

tweet

Nothing specific to announce, but both are actively discussed topics internally with many Googlers asking for them too! :)

tweet

Personally, I think it's a crucial feature to empower targeted sharing, esp. in the early days of the product when many of the people you want to share with aren't yet using Google+ or checking it regularly. After all, a lot of "targeted sharing" happens over email today, and while social networking is a much better UI for sharing/commenting/etc., it's only competitive if you can reach the same desired audience. This feature lets you do that, and it also exposes non-members in a useful way (seeing your content).

tweet

The cool thing about Closure templates is they can be compiled into both Java and JavaScript. So we use Java server-side to turn the templates into HTML, but we can also do the same in JavaScript client-side for dynamic rendering. For instance, if you type in a profile page URL directly, we'll render it server-side, but if you go to the stream say and navigate to someone's profile page, we do it with AJAX and render it client-side using the same exact template. See http://code.google.com/closure/templates/ for more info.

tweet

Serious enough to let you all "Ask me anything". :) Hopefully people on Google+ have seen us already address several pieces of key user feedback and iterate on the product quickly. We're definitely going to keep doing that, so please keep your feedback coming!

tweet

It's too soon to tell, but I'm personally happy with the core circles/sharing/etc model, there's just a lot to do in terms of UI tweaks, making the stream and notifications smarter, improving new-user sign up, and so on. In social networks (or consumer software in general), lots of little tweaks in core areas like that can lead to a qualitative shift in overall usage and engagement, so I consider that as "core" as big new features.

tweet

We do currently support this in YouTube, and many users do find it useful for reaching their audiences on other sites about their YouTube activity. I'm not sure if/when we'll do this in an automated way on Google+, but in the meantime, every post you make has a permalink (click on the timestamp next to your post) that you can share on external sites (and many people do).

tweet

There's definitely a good use case for sharing circles with others. The trick is getting it simple and intuitive enough and not confusing people that circles are normally private to you (specifically, the names and who's in each circle). But it's something we've been noodling.

tweet

Nothing to announce, but I did spend a lot of time listening to Google Music in another tab while coding up the parts of Google+ I worked on, so they're already "well integrated" in my mind, or at least in my heart. :)

tweet

Yes! See https://plus.google.com/105923173045049725307/posts/E3mVj6nskaX for more info (and to sign up to be notified when we've got more ready here).

tweet

I'm not involved in this directly, but here's the official response currently: Google+ won’t have any major impact on Buzz right now. Buzz users will still see a Buzz tab on their Google profile, and Buzz will continue working as it always has. Google+ users can also be Buzz users or can decide to just share their content using one of the products. Over time, we’ll determine what makes the most sense in terms of integrating the products.

tweet

We're honestly still figuring out exactly what form our platform/APIs should take, but we're eager to hear input from would-be developers!

tweet

That's not really a question, but it does sound like a neat idea. :)

tweet

It's most likely not permanent, though things do slow down a lot when you have that many people in your circles, so we wouldn't want to raise the limit until we can handle that more gracefully. In fairness, very few people actually know and care about >5000 people, but on the other hand, we're Google, so we should always strive to remove any scalability bottlenecks in our products.

tweet

All of the above, plus a lot of talented, hard working humans to help sift through it and file bugs, report on trends, etc. :)

tweet

See the "Will users be able to create hierarchies of circles" answer.

tweet

Android app is already out (grab it in the market or look for the link on the right side of your stream). iOS apps coming (real) soon.

tweet

We're just trying to move fast, listen to feedback, iterate quickly, and participate actively in the product ourselves. Not sure we can do much more than that.

tweet

Personally, I sure hope so (I think it could be really useful, and I hear we have some good search people around here somewhere, heh), but we don't have anything official to say about it right now.

tweet

Looks like not enough people +1'd it. Kinda ironic...

tweet

We're working to make block even more comprehensive; this is definitely a priority for us.

tweet

Nothing against GWT, but the engineers who started building Google+ didn't use it, and in general projects end up all-GWT or no-GWT, and this was the latter.

tweet

I'm sure they would have still shipped something with a simpler / more familiar graph model. Personally, I don't think it would have worked as well, though I'm admittedly biased. :)

tweet

In the short term, there's not much we can do beyond making sure our data is available for export and building as many import/connect bridges as other sites' terms of service allow. But as I outline in a recent podcast I did for IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/innovation/the-unified-field-theory-of-google), I'm hopeful that Google+ can help us move the social web towards a more distributed, federated world where different users can use many/different tools and they still all stay richly connected.

tweet

I'm sure our authenticated calls will use OAuth 2 (like the rest of our APIs do these days), but there may be other stuff too depending on where/how we try to do integrations.

tweet

I think everyone feels the need to share different things with different people--and the desire to be able to hear from certain circles without losing them in the overall stream. Real-world social relationships are complex and nuanced for everyone--so this is not a "power user feature" IMO. The trick is making the UI simple/fun/rewarding enough for mainstream users, and that's what we're working on. It can definitely be better, but I think we're off to a good start.

tweet

I believe this has been shipped live since the question was asked. How's that for agile? :)

tweet

Not really, beyond bringing in non-Googlers to our usability lab to get early feedback on mock-ups/prototypes/etc. We mainly "dogfood" it internally with Googlers, but clearly with social products it's really important to use them in "the real world", so it's great to finally be in a public Field Trial, and we're learning and iterating in the open every day now.

tweet

Probably because I suck and have been too busy building Google+ to upgrade (or even use) my own blog. Gotta work on that whole "work/life balance" thing. Then again, I feel privileged to have a job I love!

tweet

Not really, but there are lots of chatty googlers using Google+, and people like me answering questions online, so hopefully we're not too opaque. :)

tweet

We try to do a full push (almost) every day, and we sometimes sneak in patch releases too if needed. But there are humans in the loop, it's not a "auto-push if all tests pass" situation or anything like that.

tweet

I don't think there's any integration currently. What would you like to see here?

tweet

Our fearless leaders Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz usually post (or reshare other Googlers' posts) whenever we roll out new stuff of note in Google+, so that's a good place to start.

tweet

If you're interested in the upcoming Google+ developer platform, please sign up at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/plusdevelopers/

tweet

Probably not (unless perhaps someone does it via APIs).

tweet

Too early to tell, but I hope they end up mirroring the distribution of people's real-world social circles: several smaller ones (close friends, family, surfing buddies, whatever) as well as a few larger ones (friends from college, coworkers, etc.) and also a fairly large list of people you follow because they're interesting but don't know personally.

tweet

Google's had social search for a few years now, and +1 buttons more recently. In both cases, I hope Google+ gets a lot more users connecting and sharing a lot more stuff, which should then make social search a lot more useful.

tweet

Personally, I'm currently focused on the sharing UI (the "share box", as we affectionally call it). But I try to keep my fingers in as many other pies as I can get away with, esp. the circle editor and related UI.

tweet

I can't share official stats on user growth so far, but our Executive Chairman did make some comments about it recently, which you could read e.g. at http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/eric-schmidt-on-gauging-googles-success/

tweet

Lots of Java, no JSP, no GWT, lots of Guice, no Go. :)

tweet

We're a surprisingly small team (esp. by Google's standards), but we try to make up for it with passion and speed.

tweet

Googlers are not mandated to use Google+, but most are very eagerly doing so without prompting. :)

tweet

I'm not quite sure which lever we'd be balancing on this fulcrum or what we'd be trying to lift, but I do use both Gmail and Google+ a lot, and I hope they'll work even better together over time. Of course, I also still use lots of other communication tools, and I'm sure that won't change anytime soon either.

tweet

Don't think so, but now I kinda wish we had.

tweet

I think we all wish we'd been able to ship this sooner, but we revisited and revamped many aspects of the product several times internally based on usability and dogfood feedback (esp. aspects of the circles and stream model/UI), and in the end, I think it was the right decision, however painful at the time.

tweet

Nothing much magic, just code reviews on every new check-in, lots of unit tests, lots of integration tests, some automated tests, and a lot of hardworking QA engineers.

tweet

We gave everyone a default "Following" circle for "People you don't know personally, but whose posts you find interesting." So that's a good way to use the circles model to connect to people/topics you're interested in. You can also use Sparks to get news/photos/videos/etc on topics you're interested in and them share those stories with your circles.

tweet

Not that I'm aware of, though it's possible some low-level stuff got reused. Wave was mostly written in GWT though, which we don't use at all on Google+.

tweet

Mean or median (they're probably different, though I haven't seen the full histogram). In any case, the maximum simultaneous participants is 10, and they all start out with 1, so I presume the average would be somewhere in between, weighted to the low end (hangouts rock for 1:1 video chat too). If you're Vic on the other hand, the average is always 10. ;)

tweet