Like any other organization out there, we’re always trying to find new ways to reach our audience. Admittedly, we’re not the fastest when it comes to adopting a new social communication site. We’re working on it though, trying to be a bit more interactive … or just plain active.
So, if you’re looking for other ways to get your hacking fix, or see some interesting commentary, find us on facebook, twitter, our own forums, and now G+. We just signed up to G+ and our name is “Hackie Smith”. If you need an invite, email us at theofficialhackaday@gmail.com see below. Sometimes there’s good discussion in those places that doesn’t end up here on the site.
You can also find several of us spattered across the web in sites like Reddit and Slashdot.
[Update: Our g+ page got shut down. Feel free to find any of the writers on g+. I’ll give out invites, look for “Caleb Kraft” or 60mango@gmail]
Aaaaand that’s exactly what’s wrong with having so many social media platforms. Pick one, and stick to it. Personally, I prefer the website, because I don’t want to have to check 9 different places to find out what I missed at the other 8.
@JC,
Oooh, good point. I updated the initial article to be more clear. We post all of our content to the site. Don’t worry, we’re not going to make you have to follow us elsewhere to get everything.
@jc my sentiments exactly!
@hackaday the KISS method usually works fine.
PS hackaday makes me smile everyday. :)
I can’t find you on G+ – I need the name, not the email. It only searches by profile name
@tz,
Sorry, still figuring that whole G+ jumble out. Our profile is called “Hack a Day”. Who knows how long before they delete us!
I love Hackaday but I have to say that I seriously hate all those social networks.
Facebook is killing the Internet. True story.
I agree with jc here. If I wanted to be more updated on what you guys are doing, I would just subscribe to your RSS feed. “Like”ing you on facebook doesn’t do anything for me except tell other people that I like you. A little bit to circuitous if you ask me.
@those who don’t enjoy the social tangle,
Believe me, I know what you mean. That’s cool though, it just means you don’t utilize those sites. We’ve been getting submissions through facebook/twitter and now g+, so we’re just trying to be more responsive. There’s also some decent chatter back and forth on twitter sometimes, but it can be overwhelming with all the pointless tweeting. Much of our communication with Jeri Ellsworth and Phillip Torrone are through twitter.
As with all the other posts, this will appeal to a certain group of users, and hopefully improve their experience. Hopefully they will also contribute cool projects, thus improving your experience!
I mostly read via google reader, it makes it easy to share articles that I like. Screw Facebook.
OK, seriously here. Twitter is *not* an appropriate forum for a conversation. If people want to have discussions, you use a forum. Jeri and Phillip may use Twitter, but as a record of a conversation and for the purpose of a discussion, using Twitter is about as useless as you can get.
A discussion implies (generally) an organized exchange of information between two or more people. Twitter is shouting into the darkness and hoping someone out there cares what you have to say.
It’s fine for “I’m at the bar, join me for a beer, mate!” but if you’re trying to decide the future of a project, or teach someone about how transistors work, Twitter is NOT an appropriate media.
Don’t try and tell me I’m out-dated and antiquated. I’ve seen a lot of internet/web-based technologies come and go, and the best two that will die a miserable death will be Myspace and Twitter.
The profile name actually won’t give you good results — the G+ search appears to be a regular google search with profile results ranked higher. Why don’t you just give us the UID? (There’s a url shortener floating around specifically for g+ profiles to get around the UID thing, gplus.to, which tells you how to isolate the UID)
Well, don’t make too much effort, that account won’t be there long. Remember, only accounts with real names are allowed, no companies or groups or communities yet.
One or more of you could register with your names and use that account, but an account for hackaday will certainly be deleted.
@telepath,
yeah, there’s tons of companies doing it and getting randomly deleted. We’ll see how it goes.
still no +1 button tho?
hopefully we can get that integrated.
I also wish google would add +1 to google reader
@Enohand,
We’re working on it. It is a very long and complicated story, but making changes to our template is a huge pain. The only area I can freely modify is that top right corner where the featured banners are.
The RSS feed works for me. using services such as facebook openid, and perhaps g+ for authentication to comment, is kinda nice from site to site, but until they build g+ to be more configurable, (ways to collapse articles and threads) i would nto want to read my blogs in it.
Looks to be gone :(
You actually need to search for “Hack a Day” with the quotes and it will be the first result.
And here I thought you were planning on having other websites feature Hack-A-Day buttons. But if you did, should it say “Hack this article” or “This article is a hack”?
@MDude,
heh, that would actually be pretty cool.
HA! The G+ fad is nearly over before it started. In six months I may be eating my words…if they do something unique with it.
It’s like a Google-branded Facebook clone. I don’t need that, I have regular Facebook. I don’t want to bother with the setup and transfer of all contacts to a new service either – especially since Facebook and G+ aren’t playing nicely with each other.
Can’t Google stick to what they’re good at(advertising, search engines, and smartphone OSs) instead of following Suck-it-berg into the pit of greed that is social networking?
Perhaps nobody cares, but to the editors/running members of HAD, anything you post on G+ and not on this site will be seen by far fewer readers, one of whom will not be me.
@M4CGYV3R,
Again, all of our stories will be posted here on HaD. Don’t worry.
“one of whom will not be me.” — AND NOTHING OF VALUE WAS LOST??
Don’t forget to get a google- account too.
As it stands, google is requesting that brands/websites/etc do NOT set up g+ profiles.
@M4CGYV3R
Well, I have setup a Google+ account, I NEVER use Facebook, because it is too hard to separate, Work friends, from Family, from geeks, from other IT….
At least with Google+ it’s easy to choose to post just to Family (like the rest of the world cares about our swim party). Or just to work (like my Family wants to know or would even understand what was posted there. Basically I have a Family Wall, a Work Wall, a Geek Wall. That should help get rid of a lot of the cruft that you get with Facebook.
I think Google+ is going to make it much easier to keep walls up between the various facets of your life. Of course if Facebook revamps with a host of features similar to google+ people will stay. I know a lot of techno geeks that have already jumped off the Facebook ship. I took a tour of Facebook at the dock and went meh. Google+ I am like well I might take it for a cruise and see. So, for me at least, Google+ is a step in the right direction.
RSS Feeds are great but posts to something like Google+ might be even more useful if done tastefully.
Also Google wants to own social media because it increases the value of the advertising. They will have even more info about not only you, but your friends, family…, so they can more accurately target you. That’s why google is wanting in the social media bizz so bad. Same reason they are doing gmail, google docs, google maps, picasa…. It’s all about getting a complete dossier on you so they can charge more to advertisers, because they can better target the ads.
For some strange reason my browser seems to be broken and doesn’t display 99% of ads, go figure. If I had to look at all the ads, I wouldn’t use the net nearly as much. If I wanted to look at ads I’d watch TV.
This is the exact opposite of what G+ is designed for. The whole idea of a G+ is to share between individuals in a more personal and meaningful way than you can with a list of 200+ people who you may or may not even know.
G+ is not the service to be using for something like this. HaD staff can certainly have individual G+ accounts (seems like some do already, from a quick search) but the site itself absolutely shouldn’t. There is a reason Google is actively removing accounts that are made on behalf of sites or companies.
On the other hand, being able to +1 articles and share them via G+ (whenever the G+ API is released to make this possible) is something that should be looked into.
@M4CGYV3R
I can only assume you have never actually used G+, and maybe just read something about it online or looked at one of the video tours. But it is certainly much more than a FB clone. It is already doing unique and different things that, even if G+ completely fails (which seems unlikely, with 10M+ users already), will certainly be adopted by other social networking sites/services going forward. The general response to Circles is overwhelmingly positive by anyone who has used the service. It looks like Joker put it into perspective nicely.
A url to the google+ profile: http://gplus.to/hackaday
With the camp above that the widget is pointless.
I never use the others and often even refrain from commenting on certain pages that want access to my FB or gmail contacts. End up clicking the “No Thanks”. But it ALWAYS seems to be all or nothing. They can’t just have access to verify I have fb/gm, they have to have my birthday and contacts??? That is garbage. If I want to point out neat things to my friends, I just email them or tell them-each have an equal opportunity of never being checked out lol. If I was really serious about sending links around the internet I would start a blog in an already existing blogosphere of interest and then have “backpatting” links to each others blogs so that you have to see 4 blogs before ever getting to the source page lol. That is how all the powerhouses do it. BoingBoing is infamous for the ol reacharound link. HaD not so much, but there are definite darlings in their pocket too.
Do what ya want tho, ck and pt. I’m sure more hits= more clout=more awesome HaD codes on dev board specials, which is a good thing. A lot of times I end up just adblobking the twitter and rss and stumbleupon and reddit clickies as it makes the page load faster lol.
Oh my, HaD just got all blurry and smeared-out all over the place. I can’t seem to put my finger on it any more. Where did it go? Oh there it is… no over there… no there… nope… GAH! Jut forget about it!
@Drone
I don’t think HaD got blurry at all. To put it 50 years in the past they are playing around with shortwave. There are reflections of HaD all over the world, but they all come from the HaD site.
@Carbuncle
I am very much like you. “Use your Facebook account to log into our site.” No thanks, I’ll pass. I would much rather manage multiple accounts and passwords than give away all the data about my life, not that it is that interesting. Not that sites don’t already have scraps of the photo that is my life, but I would prefer not to give them the paper and glue to make it into a complete picture.
—
Really people, come on. You don’t want to do the google+, Twitter, Facebook thing. Fine, don’t. I haven’t until just last week I started poking around Google+ a little (still haven’t posted anything). But don’t cry about people/sites that do.
The whole I don’t want to do X, so no one else should do X either thing is like 7th grade.
HaD has made it abundantly clear that they aren’t going anywhere! They are staying right here, so don’t get your panties in a bunch. Sit back and enjoy the ride, or don’t, that’s up to you, just don’t try to spoil the ride for everyone because you choose not to take the ride.
@all,
played around with g+ a little yesterday and did a quick “hangout”, which is like group video chat. [Ivan] showed us a neat looking SNES controller adapter he built for his PC and we requested he send us more details so we can publish it on the site. This is a great outcome for everyone! See, even though you may not participate in our various forms of communication, you benefit from us participating in it.
@techjoker This is a discussion to decide whether we want to use the HaD widget. People are supposed to come in here and spoil each other’s ride and provide opinions on what they use and don’t use.
If a majority of users don’t want to use X then it stands to reason to not use x. If the y readers want x, they can write a script to parse things out the way they want and then host a php or reblog it (like the rest of the world) in the format they like. Similar to 7th grade, this is the way the rest of the US runs. Not trying to crawl your arse, just seemed like you came in and did the same thing you complained about putting me in that “not sure if you’re serious…” camp. Otherwise if things do go ahead, I’ll just block it and move on with my faster loading webpage without 18 widgets updating things in the background lol.
I suppose everyone will need to refer to HAD as “Hackie Smith” in the near future to avoid the realname police :>
“Check out this cool project that Hackie Smith posted!”
From PC World, July 8: “Google confirmed that it’s planning to roll out business profiles to its new Google+ social network.” The article describes its use within the entity as a means of communication within the entity as in employee to employee communication and some kind of tie in to Google Apps as well as a number of other Google services.
The article also talks about google+ providing “a full fledged Web Presence integrated with its social networking platform.” So there you have google+ providing some of the services that Facebook provides businesses plus a lot more.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/235272/why_google_business_profiles_will_trump_facebook_pages.html