Yesterday I logged into Google+ and immediately became lost. I spent about five minutes playing around and then left.
Today I came back and dropped an hour and a half playing with it.
Here is what I found, and why I love it:
Built-in Profile
Ok, I’m a blogger and I want Google to send us hits. This means I created a Google Profile with links, pictures, and a biography. With that instantly linked to Google+, I am saved the trouble of having to re-create a new personal profile.
Creating a new account on every freaking website is the slavery of the web. The same info, the same profile pic, hopefully the same password, multiplied across 1,000 sites.
Friends via Email
It is very likely that I have emailed anyone I will want to friend in a social network. With my profile auto-linked, my email contacts are auto-linked too. They are not yet my Google+ friends, but they are a quick drag-n-drop away.
It’s been super easy to get going.
But, on a side note, the whole circles thing in Google+ is still weird. I have over 1,800 friends in Facebook (part business, part personal) and sorting them into groups is a daunting task. Moving them into the Google+ circles means sorting out many 100s of affiliate friends. The circles feature is as easy as it gets but still involves 100s of actions by the user.
This is definitely something I expect/pray a data engineering company like Google to fix.
Privacy
I think Google learned their lesson with Buzz. As Gina Trapani puts it:
Don’t mess with the Gmail inbox. When Buzz invaded my Gmail inbox with a flood of social-networky conversations, my first instinct was “Turn it off!”
First step complete (don’t mess with successful products). Second step, make privacy easy. I think they have done that with circles, and despite my complaining above, it works really well. Every friend you add has to be sorted into a circle, then when you share information you have to specify which circles it goes out to (with “all” being an option).
It’s kinda amazing in its simplicity, but maybe that’s all it takes when privacy is truly “built-in”.
I guess we should also say that circles is an obvious steal from Diaspora, although they kinda deserve that since they called it the annoying “aspects”.
Mobile
You really can’t launch a social network without having mobile on day one. Google seems to have done that with all the positive buzz around their mobile site. It’s not an app but Google does have the best web apps of anyone on the market.
I haven’t tried this feature yet but will soon. Early thoughts on it are welcome.
Sparks
Lastly, Google+ has this feature called sparks. It’s an obvious rip-off of Facebook’s likes and interests features, but with an interesting twist.
When you perform a search on one of your “sparks” (mine being “surfing”) up pops the latest news from Google News. If one were in Facebook the results would be populated with random people named surfing, groups about surfing, and web content they have stolen/imported into Facebook. All part of Facebook’s plan to re-create the web inside their network so we never leave the site.
I see this difference as potentially providing Google with a big advantage over Facebook.
Think about how often you use the suite of Google tools (news, docs, finance, mail, calendar) and how incredibly useful they are for productivity, work, and research. If Google can continue to incorporate these tools into Google+ then they can overcome Facebook’s biggest problem: the social network is a huge waste of time.
That would so +1 Facebook.
So do you see your “friends” who are not yet on Google+ ? Its like they are there, but phantom, because the network is still closed? How does this work?
I think so. I added you to a circle and it accepted it. Were you on Google+ a few hours ago?
Maybe it grabs all the emails from your contact list and lets you add them to a circle. Then when they log-on for the first time they automatically have 15 friends or something?
Nice! Looking forward to trying it. Waiting for my invite from google…
ok, if I get any invites you will be one of the first to get them 🙂
Gee whiz, and I thoguht this would be hard to find out.
“…then they can overcome Facebook’s biggest problem: the social network is a huge waste of time.”
That’s the point!! Who the f*** visits Facebook and thinks “gee I sure wish Facebook would shove a word document in my face.”
It only goes to show that people like you don’t get it. Google is not the next Facebook. Facebook is not going anywhere.
Nah, ur missing the point. Facebook has no content so it makes up stuff or steals it from the rest of the internet. That is why they are always having such silly things like farmville and pokes, to get people to actually the site.
Google is in the opposite boat. People come to them all the time. For search, mail, calendar, docs, music, pictures, and on and on. That is why they were killni themselves to get out a social network. They even tied all executive bonuses to going social.
To ur point about social networks being created to waste time or that is why people like them. I totally disagree. People want to be social for fun and productive reasons. Reading a blog is a lot like reading a document and here we are commenting and being social…
“…then they can overcome Facebook’s biggest problem: the social network is a huge waste of time.”
That’s the point!! Who the f*** visits Facebook and thinks “gee I sure wish Facebook would shove a word document in my face.”
It only goes to show that people like you don’t get it. Google is not the next Facebook. Facebook is not going anywhere.
I like G+, but there are some things that annoy me. For instance, I want to toggle back and forth between G+ and Gmail in the same tab, but can’t. I also dislike how when someone gchats me it pops up both in gmail and G+. Then when I close the chat window in gmail it disappears in G+…until that person chats me again. And it’s not even a person that has a G+ invite! #G+isconfused?