Not that I’m aware of. You can just make everything Uncategorized, and then e.g. hide the Category view and just leave the Latest, Top, etc. views. Then use CSS to hide the category indicators I guess… Workable, albeit imperfect.
Interesting idea, yes. But to me this actually gets away from some of what seems more interesting about “social media”, the intermixing of content from multiple sources. You can already subscribe to someone’s activity feed from Discourse via RSS, so if you’re really interested in just what one or a few people say, that’d probably be the way to do it. There is also the Follow plugin:
It’s good to know you don’t want those boundaries eroded. But can you explain specifically why? Hopefully not just in terms of simple preference, “I like the way it is”, but specifically why, or at least how the existing setup makes you feel in interacting with it vs. the alternative.
I really want a plugin like that if it’s possible! What a great suggestion from @Decorbuz!
As an addition to that suggestion, what if you wanted users to be able to create their own categories (to essentially function as either “Circles” or “Collections” or “Communities” if that makes any sense)?
Some people don’t like Twitter recommending random posts or other garbage you might not care about in the slightest. The intermixing of a somewhat specific (large) interest from multiple sources seems more ideal to me (and that’s another thing that Google+ did well in my opinion).
You’re showing a different view than they are though. This is more of a “Category” view, and there is category thumbnails that would work to create something similar. They’re showing a person activity view, for which a solution to spruce it up doesn’t yet exist as far as I know. But I too would like to see one, even just for Discourse in its forum context…
Actually, that’s sort of similar to what I was looking for (not exactly though).
Also, here’s an up-to-date video of the Google+ profile page.
One thing I liked about the old version of Google+ was that it allowed you to display a lot of information about yourself on your profile (education, work, occupation, skills, etc). Is there a plugin out there that allows you to display that kind of information?
Upvote it if you want to see it happen! I provided an admittedly overdramatic explanation as to why I think the meaning of +1 is better than “like” or even “heart” for that matter (sorry, Jeff! ).
If a user were to interact with this icon, it could be used to convey a generally positive emotion instead of a single emotion that a thumbs up (like) button and a heart (love) button are ultimately limited to. “+1” can mean many different things, which is why I think it has an advantage over the traditional like/love buttons and should be implemented as an icon into Font Awesome. It is so simple, yet so powerful at the same time.
I believe you can use SVG icons too, right? I don’t believe its restricted to Font Awesome.
One thing that has seemingly gone unmentioned (no pun intended) is how Google+ used the + symbol instead of the @ symbol for mentions. I think it was more of a branding thing (at first, Google+ used the more traditional @ symbol instead of the + symbol for mentions), so I guess the > symbol would be more suitable for a technology-oriented crowd.
