Kickstarter has a full screen homepage takeover for users based in the US. If you're not seeing anything, it could be down to issues determining location.
I'm interested to hear how much penetration G+ has had amongst everyone's social groups.
Personally I just have one circle right now made up of work friends. They're all pretty technical; about 60% of them were on both my Facebook and Twitter, and the other 40% were just on Facebook. I was looking forward to using a social tool where I could share and hear more from that other 40%, but they haven't been posting much at all. My reasoning is that if they were big sharers they'd probably already be on Twitter.
My friends who aren't in web or game development have shown no interest in G+ though. I feel like the tool's purpose is to connect with people that I know in real life, so I'm less likely to connect with random but interesting people like on Twitter.
As a result of all this I don't get a lot of updates on G+, and those people who are posting seem to be doing it out of hope that it'll encourage use of the service - they're getting more engagement on Twitter.
Early days and all that jazz, I'm just curious to see if it's taken off for anyone yet.
I feel Google's strategy is indecisive, thus leads to you and I's confusion about the tool's purpose. I feel G+ produces the features of a more private Facebook (by directly implementing Paul Adam's model that matches more closely to the real life social graph), but advocates the use of an advanced Twitter (by inviting famous folks in for people to follow) and effectively builds the social graph top-down rather than bottom-up as in Facebook's case.
Pundits have already speculated that social networks aren't supposed to grow top-down, and G+ will ultimately fail (http://www.techjournalsouth.com/2011/07/why-google-will-fail...). Then again Google has always detested doing something too manually, especially when it involves human beings.
Mine is beginning to grow now. My friends circle is up to about 33, while geeks (which has SOME overlap but not all) is up to about 30. Family has one or two. I believe total I have about 56 folks there now.
I would say most of mine are either folks I know in real life (or network/contacts that I've made over the years in the tech world) and some other random friends from Facebook.
Less than 0.1 percent of the people in my hometown (35 of 42,000 – it’s a small town in Germany) have signed up, so few that I could actually count them and look at all of them.
No one I know has signed up or expressed desire to sign up. (I was, however, not asking anyone to sign up. That’s not something I would ever do.)
It will be interesting to see when the first person I know signs up.
For me, it's started to. The first days were like you've described, but yesterday, several non-technical people signed on and seemed to attach pretty well.
In fact, my friend's mom added me to a circle yesterday, and she's a choir director.
Good start! Don't be afraid to increase the font size - my eye sight is okay, but it's not easy for me to read the text surrounding the headlines unless I focus on it.
Not just you. I think you are right, it probably has something to do with information density. Which does raise an interesting question: Could font size play a role in the audience that you attract and maintain? No doubt 14pt Comic Sans would have a deleterious effect upon HN.
IMO, it could make a difference. 7pt Tahoma might be a bit too small, but I do think there is an 'intelligent aesthetic' that font size plays into.
Have you tried http://www.metafilter.com/? It has lots of interesting new links posted every day on just about any topic, and the quality of the comments is quite high. New users have to pay for an account ($5) in order to comment, and that tends to keep people well-behaved.
I've tinkered with Rails projects on and off since 2005, but it's never been my main gig. I'm sure if I was using it full-time I'd be okay keeping up to date with the latest trends and conventions, but as it stands I wind up Googling before almost every decision to ask "Okay, so how are we doing this now?"
I figure that infrequent users like us aren't who the Rails core is catering for, and that's fine. It does feel like a slow reboot coming back to Rails every 6-12 months for small projects, but I still recognise that it's a great framework that solves a lot of problems.
When making a decision on what technology to use, I often consider Sinatra for its simplicity. Rails feels like a black box to me at times - again, likely not a problem if it's your bread and butter.
It seems like the host thought you were stringing them along and has overreacted. I'd try to imagine how they were feeling before we call them crazy though, whether you book or not might affect them in all sorts of ways. Do they need to change their plans for the weekend to accommodate you being there? Did they decline a booking from someone else while waiting for you to commit? Are they hard up for cash and really need the extra dollars your booking could bring? They might be pressured by all sorts of things and just waiting for that confirmation email. For a weekend booking, still no commitment by Thursday would have made me a bit nervous as a host too.
Of course they could just be imbalanced, and that's a risk you take. Part of Airbnb's appeal is that it creates experiences for you that you wouldn't get staying at a hotel. If you are travelling with children, this might be less of a draw for you as safety becomes a bigger concern; you can minimise the risk by only booking somewhere that has a lot of positive reviews and a good feel to it.
I received an eFreedom result on the second page of results, and no corresponding Stack Overflow article. The title of the eFreedom page is "DEBIAN - pbuilder storing dependencies - efreedom"
I then searched for: ppa in pbuilder site:stackoverflow.com
This gives one response - not the same article that was scraped by eFreedom. So that seems a little off - as a user I'd expect the Stack Overflow article that was scraped to meet the query if eFreedom does.
Finally, based on the title of the Stack Overflow article that was scraped in my first query, I searched for: pbuilder storing dependencies
Here the original Stack Overflow article is listed first, eFreedom second, so that's good. Unfortunately when you scan a little further down the page, the article "UBUNTU - pbuilder create fail - efreedom" is above "pbuilder create fail - Stack Overflow".
As a side point, my search is not made more valuable by the scraped versions appearing in the results. Making Stack Overflow appear before eFreedom is one thing, but why should I see eFreedom at all? I'd rather the other results be different content, that way I don't have to mentally parse everything to work out if it's the same content with a different skin.
I'll switch when it can convert image attachments to ascii inline, I don't want to open a separate program to look at all those adorable pictures of kittens in my inbox.
https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/885140707866017798