Googlecosm

Why haven't Google come up with accessable forum service yet?
Been using Google buisness set up and its powerfull with Drive and email groups, calendar. Its social networking is...meh .

Googlecosm would be ace for my organisation as we already are so linked up.

In their mind they have... Google Plus.

Google+ doesn't work.
In TABS search for a forum solution for our needs it didn't occur to us to use this. Yet we use most other google services for our business.

Well, that is their answer.

Google+ Communities.

Ah ha, I cam here to chat about Google+ communities.

I was playing around on it last night and a couple of things stood out for me that would be possible and great on microcosm, as I currently understand it.

The first is the ease of discoverability of forums. If, as it surely will, microcosm becomes the defacto home of forums, then it should be able to offer search and browse of microcosms, by name but also by metadata of which there would be an abundance that could be derived from the content of those forums.

The second is something that I presume will be a feature of microcosm, the ability to have private, join on request type forums, like chifg etc. Although I don't particularly like them, I think that they do have a useful niche for me, ahem, esoteric material. (web censorship pun intended).

In a related but side note, the G+ app on Android is becoming really really beautiful and nice to use. The commmunities bit of it would tempt me away from a full browser for some of the more simple threads that we find on LFGSS. The same can definitely not be said, for tapatalk or similar. This is really a call to developers, unless you feel that an in house moble dev is woth having at some point.

Writing the above paragraph reminds me of another advantage of the native mobile app: first class and rich notifcations on mobile devices, paticularly on Android's more sophisticated incarnation. Yes, a neutered version of this can be done with email, but it could be a lot more. Can web apps push notifications to a mobile device, possibly through a Microcosm listener app?

tldr

Yup, all of the above is intended. Unfortunately not all immediately, because others things take priority. But all on the plan.

Good stuff. Do you have a feature backlog that is visible to public / investors?

We don't.

Out roadmap of features is stored in a product called Pivotal Tracker. That product's charging structure means that we would have to pay to give people access, or just make it fully public. Neither of those is ideal. Though anyone who visits our Smithfields office will be shown it if they ask.

Fair enough. I do keep meaning to pop along.

Well, that is their answer.

Google+ Communities.

Google groups has been doing a reasonable job for as long as I can remember...

I wouldn't disagree.

Except that Google Groups had potential when they recognised that groups need file storage, calendaring, and then they later withdrew those features taking it down to "email lists".

With the gradual folding of groups into Google+ they've introduced real identity into the mix, which most people find to be not-compatible with sharing their hobbies/interests/pastimes.

Google Groups are good for email lists, but even then they're not quite as good as a listserv once you get to a certain size.

But for small email groups, it's hard to beat Google Groups.

Google+ is a strange thing though, a hybrid of many things, solving virtually no-one's problems. It seems like it was someone's theoretical experiment