Sharing from Google Reader to Google+

One of the tenets of social constructionism is that learning is most effective when a learner's experience includes constructing a meaningful object.  In the world of online social media, this can include a blog post or a comment on an article.

I tend to read all my journals as an RSS feed in Google Reader.  I have blogged about this model before.  I then use Google Reader's "Send to" feature to share certain articles on Facebook or Twitter with a few additional comments summarizing my take home points on the article.  This can generate some additional comments from followers and friends sometimes leading to rich discussions.

Googleplus is a terrific tool for such discussions.  

• I have a chance to share with a wider audience (since I don't limit my circles like I did on facebook) 


• There is no 140 character limits like on Twitter and the comments are organized like a conversation.

Big Problem:

Google Reader does not have a Send to Google+ feature!!  Google what were you thinking?  Sparks is no replacement for Google Reader.

Now there is a nice workaround

• On Chrome:  


• Set up Buzz to connect to your Google Reader shared items


• Share from Google Reader to Buzz


• In G+ profile page to to the Buzz tab


• Click on Share in the Google bar at the top right of the page


• Drag the hyperlinked title from item in Buzz to the share box, select your circle and share


• In FireFox (courtsey http://davidvielmetter.com/tricks/share-google-reader-items-on-google-plus/) 


• You can drop links from Google Reader items directly to the Share box on the top right.  


• In both cases, make sure you first click to open the share box.  Then drag and drop the link.

Have fun!

A 2 circle Google+ Migration Strategy for Newbies.

There has been a lot of agonizing over the Google+ circles.   People are trying to sort their "friends" and family and acquaintances into all kinds of groups and overlapping subgroups.  Opinions range about how many busy people will take the time to understand the nuances of the asymmetric circles.  Will this scare people away from trying Google+?

A very simple solution could be as follows



Create 2 circles

1. Former Facebook folks


• These are all the friends and family that you "friended" on FB.  This meant you saw everything they posted, and vice-versa.  - This maybe a good time to clean house ;-)


• This assumes that like the majority of FB users you did not care to select a subgroup of your friends when posting.


• You will immediately start seeing anything these friends post in your stream.


• When posting something you decide if you want it to go out to all your former FB friends.


• When reading your stream, with one click you can convert it to a FB equivalent


2. Former Twitter folks


• These are all the folks you followed on Twitter.


• This will allow you to read all their comments just like in Twitter


• You can post publicly what you would normally post to twitter.

You cannot control who will read your posts.  You can hope that folks you add to your circles will reciprocate.  Then they can read your posts depending on how they filter their stream. 

Now you are all set.

When posting in FB mode, post to just your FB circle

When posting in Twitter mode, post publicly

When reading in FB mode filter by FB circle

When reading in Twitter mode, filter by Twitter circle

As time passes and need arises, start creating subgroups of your major circles.  Periodically check who is adding you to their circles and reciprocate appropriately.  Once all your contacts are in G+, may be tempted to stop checking FB, Twitter, (and your mail?)!  Till then there is a Chrome extension to share on FB and Twitter from Google+.  You can find it here.

Fortunately for Twitter Google+ has no hashtags.

Now this is not what I did when I started but trying to explain Google+ to a couple of friends, I realized that we learn by comparing anything new to what we know.  Since we know FB and Twitter, we keep comparing Google+ to these.  That is fair enough, and this model will help folks get used to Google+ and they can figure out the exceptions and limitations.  There are many nuances but rather than become a case of paralysis by analysis, just start and be extra careful about what you post till you get the nuances.  

Google+ Circles Simplified

While Google Hangout is a unequivocal home run, Google+ Circles have a lot of people (including myself) scratching their heads.

Courtesy mbensen on YouTube

After 2 days of using Google+ in the limited testing phase, it seems that we need 2 sets of circles:

1. Circles to filter the feed (flood) of posts in Google Stream- this is mostly a convenience issue.  Depending on your mood and available time you can decide to see few, some, more or all the posts in your stream.  My guess is that I will create circles for this somewhat like this:


1. Priority (Not sure of this yet) 


2. Educational and Engaging, 2-way conversations - folks that I tend to learn from or interact online in a meaningful manner.


3. One way but informative - folks that generally provide useful information in posts but we don't usually have conversations.


4. Casual  


2. Circles to share information with. - This is mostly targeting and privacy issue.  You want to post information that is meaningful to the viewer and you want to decrease the chances of it ending up with inappropriate audiences.  The privacy is not water-tight and thus with very sensitive information, you want to avoid posting online - use some other medium.  Some examples of using circles for this purpose are, sharing the place and time of an event with local friends, or wedding photographs with family, making colleagues aware of a journal article published by one of the doctors, reminding members of a professional organization to vote on a political issue etc.
   
   Why should we bother to do this?  Why not just post publicly and leave the filtering to the reader?  If you think about how the clinical decision support system became almost completely impotent due to alert fatigue, we would not ask this question.  As the amount of data in people's information (Google) Stream becomes overwhelming, it will be critical to do our part in reducing the noise:signal ratio.  It is just part of being good digital citizens.  

A point to note.

All your circle names appear on the left side of the Stream.  Right now Google does not allow rearranging these.  You can be creative by adding a Digit in front of the names you want to show up at the top.  Thus  "1 Engaging&Entertaining will appear near the top after the 4 default Google circles (Family, Acquaintances, Following and Friends).  You can of course rename these or delete these default circles and then they go away or get arranged in alphabetical order. 

Google+ Early Impressions - Lots to Like - A Few Things to Tweak.

July 4th long weekend with a long list of to dos and fabulous sports on tap (Wimbledon, Womens' Soccer and India-WI test match) dissolved into a Google+ tire kicking session.  It all started when I woke up Saturday AM with an invitation from Pauline Sweetman via Anne Marie Cunningham.



The past 1 and 1/2 days I have been trying to understand the new Social side of Google keeping the education perspectives in mind.  A lot has been written about Google+ already.  So lets take a look at some of the key features of Google+ and what they are missing.

1. The Stream - this is a very Facebook like UI.  The best part of this the ability to filter this stream by specific users.  You do this by creating circles of users and this list is visible on the left side of the page.  The other nice feature is that posts can be quite long allowing for a true conversation like experience.  The comments are not threaded so you cannot reply to a specific persons comment.  The last comment appears at the bottom of the conversation.  The conversation is protected from external viewers - it shows up only on the stream of people in the circle selected by the original poster.  There are several nuances and exceptions to this but as long as the folks in the circle adhere to certain rules, this conversation will be "private".  You can disable re-sharing of the posts but at the time of this writing, Google+ allows you to grab a link to a post and pasting this in a browser allows one to view the post even without logging into Google+!. Will this level of privacy be sufficient to overcome educators' and parents' resistance to getting school kids on Google+?


2. Circles - Uniquely Google+ designed visual approach to organizing your contacts.  As long as the folks in the circle don't break the trust, the content of the conversations, photos etc will stay in the circle.  I think this set the bar very high for adopting Google+ to share any kind of sensitive information in a circle.  This is still much better than FB but users will probably leave all their sensitive information shareable only with immediate family or very close friends.  


3. Hangout - This is probably the biggest home run of Google+.  The ability to do up to 10 user video conference at the drop of a hat is awesome.  You can "hangout" with your circle and any circle member who is around can drop in for a chat.  The other evening I joined Anne Marie's hangout session and we had the most interesting and educational conversation for over 90 min.  I know because Hangout asks you at 90 minutes if you are still there!  You can imagine using this with students and other learners.  Since Hangouts are not stored, the privacy is even better protected.  You can see a webcam feed of every one in the session.  The only part missing is a white board sharing feature which will be coming soon I guess (hope).


4. Sparks - Users can select or create a feed of regularly updated data in their area of interest.  As they read this, they can share with their Google+ Stream.  Unfortunately it does not support Google Reader and it does not support RSS feeds.  I hope this gets fixed quickly.  Most users will want to decide what goes into their feeds rather than let Google+ decide this in the background.  I like to go through my stream of information from Journals, Blogs etc on Google Reader.  I like to tag, share with notes, and send to Facebook or Twitter.  Right now there is no way to do this with Google+.  The shared articles show up on Buzz but that is buried 3 clicks down from the Google Stream.  

Conclusions:  So there you are.  There are many good things about Google+.  Google has hundreds of millions of people who use its products on a daily basis.  It has had the opportunity to study other social networking apps and seen what the deficits are.  It has so many different apps like the Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Reader and Blogger that are hugely successful.  Google must have a strategy of pulling these together seamlessly into Google+.  If not it will be a case of unfulfilled potential.  

A lot of information here may become irrelevant very quickly as Google+ gets feedback and makes changes based on its limited roll out and beta testing.  I hope it does.