How to Use Google Plus Circles

A common question I hear is "How can I get value from Circles in Google+" so I thought I'd list a few ways that I find them helpful.   Firstly here's an image that shows what my Circle strategy looks like:

As you can see, I don't have hundreds of Circles - although I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to having that many either.  Here are my top 5 reasons for using Circles:

Privacy

An obvious initial reason for segregating users into Circles is to limit the scope of information that you share.  Again, this is a key driver behind my [Colleagues] and [Family] Circles.  Having the ability to post information directly to those groups allows me to limit information from being seen by people that it might not be relevant for.  

Example: I'm at the beach and I use my mobile phone to take some photos.  When I get home, the photos are instantly sync'd with my G+ account as soon as my phone hits the Wifi.  From there it's just a couple of clicks to share those photos with my family members by posting them to the [Family] Circle.

Noise filtering

I know how frustrated I feel when I see other people clogging up my feed with their own personal interests (e.g. excessive posts about cats) and so, I believe that it is really important to be aware of and manage to the amount of "noise" that I emit to other individuals.  

Example: I'm confident my [Hockey] friends don't mind me posting several updates a day about hockey related stuff (e.g. pictures, embedded YouTube video's, etc.).  However add that up with my [Developer Community] related posts, and a few other general posts and suddenly I'm at risk of having people de-circle me because I'm too noisy.  

Having a [Hockey] circle allows me to post hockey-specific stuff to just those members and thus reduces the amount of "noise" that I'm sending to people with no interest in hockey whatsoever.

Tip: A neat feature is [Your Circles].  [Your Circles] is one step back from [Public] and allows you to easily share information with the widest scoped audience.  In Settings you can manage how wide that scope is by managing which Circles are included in the [Your Circles] scope:

Scanning

The Internet provides us with unlimited opportunities to access information, but managing the signal to noise level is a constant challenge.  [News and Information] and [Tech News] are Circles where I've add lots of providers and therefore receive a great deal of information.  To deal with the resultant "noise", I then tune the volume of information I receive from them in my main feed by using the following tools.  

Tune the amount of information displayed in the main feed

Click on filters to display all items for a given Circle

Drag Circles to change their order so that most common ones are displayed first

Search and Organize

In addition to the above mentioned benefits, posting to Circles acts as a way of grouping so that content can  easily be found later from among the masses of other posted content.  

Example: Although I may not remember the exact content of something posted, I may be able to find it by recalling that it was [Hockey] related.  Given that knowledge I could filter my main feed by the [Hockey] Circle and then scroll through the reduced amount of information to locate a post I'm after.

Integration across the Google landscape of products 

Given the integration of G+ across the Google sphere of products, it shouldn't come as a surprise that your investment Circles can be leveraged in other applications.  

Example: Circles flow through into Gmail, and therefore provide a useful way to find and organize communication from contacts by filtering based on the Circles they belong to.  This is a key driver behind having my [Hockey], [Family], and [Business] Circles.

Getting started with using Pub on Windows – The Dart Package Manager

The Dart language is a thriving community that is growing and with it come the tools that assist with doing modern development.  One of the key tools that define modern development is a package manager and with Dart, the job of package management falls upon the Pub tool.  You can read an overview of the Pub tool on the Dartlang.org website.

A common question that I see in new groups is “How do I use pub on Windows?”.  In this article I’ll walk through using pub to help get the Dartsweeper application downloaded from GitHub and running on your machine. The basic steps that we are about to walk through are:

• Install the Dart Editor on your machine
• Install Git (distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system)
• Update some Windows Environment variables
• Clone the Git source that we want
• Run Pub to install dependencies
• Run the application from within Dart Editor

OK, let’s get started

Get the Dart SDK

To get started, you need to have a few things in place on your machine.  The first thing is to ensure you have the Dart SDK.  The best way to get that is to download the Dart Editor which contains the Dart SDK files.  You can get this from the Dart Editor Download Page.

Once you have downloaded the .zip file, simply unzip the files to a location on your local machine.  The pub tool ships with the Dart SDK and you can find it at the following location: dart-sdk\util\pub

Configure Windows Environment Variables

You’ll need to configure a couple of Windows environment variables which make it easier to work with the SDK tools.  First, add an environment called DART_SDK and point it at the root SDK folder in your unzipped Dart download.  Next, update your Windows System Path variable and add a path which points to the bin folder of the SDK folder:

The reason for pointing the Path variable at the bin folder is because that’s where the main tools that you will need to use are located.  The DART_SDK variable however needs to point at the root SDK folder because it is used to access SDK resources other than just the SDK bin tools alone – e.g. Libraries, Packages, and other Utilities.

Test that you have configured your environment variables correctly by opening a Windows Command Prompt and type ‘pub help’ and you should see Help text for the Pub tool displayed:

Install Git

Many of the packages that you will want to include will require Git to pull them down.  Pub itself has support for working with Git via native protocol handlers which can be declared within the pubspec configuration files.  To get Git, download the latest stable build from the Git website.

Test that you have Git correctly by opening a Windows Command Prompt and type ‘git –version’ and you should see the version number for your Git installation displayed:

Grab Dartsweeper from Git

Now that we have all of our tools installed, it’s simply a matter of using Git commands to fetch the Dartsweeper files and then we’ll use Pub to update all of its dependencies.

Open a Windows Command Prompt and change to a directory where you want to work from and type the following commands:

> mkdir %USERPROFILE%\dart
> cd %USERPROFILE%\dart
> git clone https://github.com/kevmoo/sweeper.dart.git
> cd sweeper.dart
> pub install

This will make a folder under your user profile called Dart and then clone the contents of Dartsweeper repo on GitHub into it.  Finally we run the pub install command from within the newly downloaded Dartsweeper folder.

Here you can see the result of running those commands in real time:

Running Dartsweeper

Now that we have Dartsweeper installed, it’s time to open it up in the Dart Editor and run it.  Open Dart Editor and open the sweeper.dart folder that we just grabbed from GitHub.

When you first open the application in Dart Editor, you will notice some red crosses against folders which indicate compiler errors:

The reason for this is that, currently in the Dart Editor, we need set the location for the packages on a per application basis.  In this case, we simply need to open Tools|Preferences and change the location that we want the compiler to look in for packages for this application.

After doing that, you can right-click on the test folder and exclude it by choosing Don’t Analyze to remove it from the compilation analysis process.  That should remove the remaining compiler error warning.

Now press Ctrl+R (or hit the Run button) to run the application in the Dartium build of Chrome:

BingItOn

BingItOn.com is another wasteful exercise by the Microsoft Bing team which attempts to con users into believing that its results are superior to those of Google’s Search product. 

I remember travelling to Seattle 5 or 6 years ago and seeing this tool used internally at Redmond - now finally it appears that the mighty Redmond marketing machine has unleashed it upon the public at large.

The premise of this tool is that you run a search and two sets of results are returned - one from Bing and one from Google.  You are then asked to make a choice about which set of results is more useful.

There are two problems here.  First, Microsoft simply needs to turn its back on some of these old Ballmer fights and look instead to the future.  Get back to innovating and delighting customers and walk away from this sort of stuff.  They really don't need to fight meaningless fights just because Ballmer made some dumb promise all those years ago.

Second, how relevant is it to make a choice when you strip away the added value pieces that Google delivers to me in a normal search?  Things such as personalized search results and added context through their knowledge graph enhancements.   For example, when I run a search using the Microsoft BingItOn tool for AFL Football legend “Buddy Franklin”, I receive two walls of results:

Picking through them both to find a winner is tough and quite subjective.  But let’s see how the results actually appear when I do the search on the actual site’s:

First I use Google and we can see that the results which are presented are far more useful than what is simply presented in the BingItOn tool.  I’m given personalized results which are more engaging, presented better, and which have added context and knowledge about the topic.

Contrast that with a search on Bing.com and we can see Bing doesn’t actually make it much easier than the BingItOn tool:

Less engaging, less relevant, and potentially a lot more work to do on my behalf to get a result that I might be interested in.

Here I repeat the result by searching for the term “Adelaide Crows Players” and let’s look at the results:

Google presents me with a scrollable list of the current players with their playing positions at the head of the SERP.

With Bing on the other hand, it appears that the first half dozen results might even be advertisements:

Yet run it in the BingItOn tool and the results are far less clear:

So the message that I take away from the BingItOn tool is this... if we strip away all the stuff that makes Google search great and dumb it down to a certain level, which search engine do you prefer.  It's not even a valid question to ask!