Improving Google+ Comments

You probably know that +Google announced Google+ Comments yesterday. Basically you can now read a blog post, write a comment using your Google+ profile and optionally share that comment to Google+, for your followers to read and reply.

The benefits for readers are important: they can now easily let not only their followers read their opinion, but also anyone interested in the topic who might be reading the blog post. It also makes it easier for them to keep track of potential replies, since these will trigger a Google+ notification. It's good for authors too, because they can see everything everyone is saying about their post (or at least everyone on G+, that is).

The problems

Google+ Comments do have a few hiccups. if you uncheck "Share on Google+" you won't push the conversation to your followers, but you won't get any notifications in case someone replies. You can see and reply to public comments (or private comments that you're allowed to see), but comments directed to a community work differently: you can see them but you can't reply to them, and there's no explanation why. And most importantly: they are broken because of the way sharing (and resharing) works on Google+.

See Alexander's comment? Neither do I. What happened here is that Alexander opened Google+ and pasted the link for his followers without saying a word about it. This is useful as a Google+ post (after all, his followers might be interested in seeing Google's announcement) but not as a comment in the blog post. It's empty, it doesn't add anything to the conversation and there's no reason why people not following Alexander would want to see it or reply to it. It just has no place as a comment.

See Nuno's Comment? No, of course you don't. That's because Nuno opened Google+, read +John Blossom's post about it and reshared it. Again, this is useful for Nuno's followers because John's comment is interesting and they probably want to read it. But it has no place as a comment in the blog post, and do you know why?

That's right: because John's comment is already there for every one to see and reply to. Nuno's reshare adds nothing, and simply makes John's comment show up twice instead of just once. And why would you want to see again a comment you just read?

Now imagine what happens with comments from popular plussers such as +Yonatan Zunger or +Vic Gundotra. Yonatan's comment, for example, has been reshared as much as 216 times. That means that his own Google post shows up repeated more than two hundred times as a comment on his own blog post. Why on Earth would you want to see the same comment repeated that many times?

Even worse: many of those reshares are empty and offer absolutely no value: they are noise and only make it difficult to find and reply to the original comment. Many people will just see one of those empty reshares and reply to them, branching the conversation and possibly missing everything everyone had said about it.

The obvious solution: don't show empty reshares as comments. Simply use them to post the original comment to the top.

Whole posts on our streams

Now isn't this funny? I follow +Yonatan Zunger, +Google and +Blogger on Google+. Yonatan wrote that blog post for both Google and Blogger, but in order for his followers to get it on their streams he had to manually write a Google+ post with the link.

In the blog, that Google+ post looks as if Yonatan had replied to his own blog post, which makes no sense and is much worse when that reply appears, as we have seen, repeated hundreds of times. I think there's a good solution for that problem, but I deal with those in another post.

Do you agree with this? Do you see things differently? Don't forget to comment and share your opinion.