I don't get this... Google makes Friend connect, then abandons it?
Forboding Angel
abandoned this project. There are error reports all over the internet,
features missing, features not working, etc.
One of them being comment notifications, or rather, the lack thereof.
Did google just abandon the project? If so, let me know so I can
revert my site back to something that might get improved once in a
while.
M WASA
Bob Aman
Could you elaborate?
Forboding Angel
you. Atm you don't, meaning that you could have full blown discussions
going on and have no idea about it. Not cool.
Bob Aman
> Atm you don't, meaning that you could have full blown discussions going on
> and have no idea about it. Not cool.
Right now we send optional notifications for people joining your site,
but we don't send a notification for comments because in most cases it
results in a great deal of noise. For example, some sites have well
over 10,000 members. If every single comment resulted in an email,
that would result in a massive amount of email. Even for small sites,
these notifications could get noisy very quickly.
Forboding Angel
Besides, if someone is using google friend connect, they probably have a
general idea of how to automatically filter their email. Moreover, what
about moderated comments?
Your statement does not qualify the reason for not allowing for the
option. As it is, I have to sit here and check it all the time. I have
better things to do.
On topic: It's really really frustrating (and in most cases angering)
that every avenue to discuss this stuff with google seems to be either
closed, or ignore (save this one).
Bob Aman
> Besides, if someone is using google friend connect, they probably have a
> general idea of how to automatically filter their email. Moreover, what
> about moderated comments?
>
> Your statement does not qualify the reason for not allowing for the option.
> As it is, I have to sit here and check it all the time. I have better things
> to do.
We will take the feature request into consideration (and I've made a
point of filing the feature request internally), but as a matter of
policy, we can't promise a resolution or a timeframe. There are very
good services out there that give similar functionality to the GFC
comments widget: Discuz, IntenseDebate, JS Kit Echo (and in fact, some
of those other tools use Google as an identity provider under the
hood). You should consider all the tools available to you and make a
decision that best fits your needs. Certainly I hope you'll continue
to use Google APIs and I appreciate the fact that you've continued to
use our service thus far.
> On topic: It's really really frustrating (and in most cases angering) that
> every avenue to discuss this stuff with google seems to be either closed, or
> ignore (save this one).
That's totally fair. But this avenue is open and will remain so for
the foreseeable future. I value your input, and I'll make sure it
gets relayed back to the GFC team.
Forboding Angel
have used the API to do this or that or extend the functionallity. Ok,
makes sense. Here is the issue tho. When it comes to wordpress, the
comments system isn't something that rarely ever gets touched. The
google friend connect wordpress plugin was last updated in 2009. As a
result, I want to stay away from something that may work initially, then
get broken and there's no one around to fix it.
A key component of my frustration with this is the fact that imo this
behavior is very uncharacteristic of google... That is, to create a
great product then place it on a shaky backburner. I forgive google for
wave. That was a perfect example of genius executed badly (which happens
to be a pretty bitter pill to swallow for a google fanboi such as
myself) :-( I'm still pretty irritated about google talk stagnating (web
apps aren't the way to go for EVERYTHING (Especially if you can't
reliably use them with something like prism), but that's going further
off topic.
As long as google decides to maintain at least some support for GFC I
doubt I'll be going anywhere, but I am quite appalled at the lack of
customize-ability of many of the google created gadgets. The comments
gadget for example... It doesn't have an option to not show excepts
(yeah I know, you click the weird circly thing and it brings them up...
but that's the view I want to be displayed all the time, not just when
people click on the circly thingies). It also has scrollbars (?!?). I
dunno. Imo this sort of thing is pretty weird for google. Maybe the GFC
devs just never really got any decent feedback.
I'm a bit calmed by the fact that apparently you work for google (or at
least with google). That gives me some solace in my fear that google has
simply created and abandoned GFC. I appreciate your candor and your
patience. Thank you!
Bob Aman
> least with google). That gives me some solace in my fear that google has
> simply created and abandoned GFC. I appreciate your candor and your
> patience. Thank you!
Yes, I work for Google. And it's certainly true that the Wordpress
plugin for GFC does not get updated particularly often, but it also
doesn't break particularly often. And because of the nature of
gadgets being iframes, functionality updates don't need to happen in
the plugin — it's the contents of the gadget iframe which get updated.
