Thoughts on Google+
It's been a few weeks now since Google+ has hit the scene and and I've had a good amount of time to play with it. The following are some unorganized thoughts about Google+:
- The joke about "Google finally hired a designer" is old but true -- the new design looks simplistic but elegant.
- When I mentioned I had invites to give away, I assumed I'd get anywhere from 80 to 120 requests. I've gotten well over 1,200 now. That speaks to how much buzz there's been about this new service within the web development world. Quite impressive.
- From the start, the service just felt like it would be more useful than Wave. I anticipate G+ will stick.
- I see this app as a direct competitor to Facebook but not so much to Twitter. The appeal of Twitter's 140 character limit will never get old.
- Facebook's saving grace is that its user base is already massive, and non-techies wont care to adopt G+. Where Google has an advantage over other community builders is the number of GMail and Google Apps users that will stumble upon G+.
- "Circles" instead of "lists" is just a fancy term, but they seem more pronounced on G+. The nice "Add to circles" mouseover effect reinforces that. As someone who likes his information organized, this feature pleases me quite a bit.
- LOL at "Sparks." Those will last a month.
- Profile pages are a billion times cleaner than Facebook's profile pages; with Facebook, there's way too much going on.
- The photo upload feature and display system are pretty sweet from start to finish. From photo drag/drop upload, to live progress bars, to all of the great mouseover effects, G+ is able to utilize a lot of HTML5/CSS3 features without becoming a major turn-off. Well done to them.
- I realize that services like Facebook Places and Foursquare are popular, but check-in features are a surefire way to annoy the hell out of me and clog up my feed with crap.
- The long-polling (and probably future WebSocket) technology Google uses makes their app seem lightning fast. Probably difficult to construct the system but well worth it for all G+ users.
- I love the stream's auto-fit-width and height. Loved it on Google Image search, love it here. Comment bubbles are a nice touch too.
- I don't see a way to change a photo album's name. Lame.
- I'm hoping that Google implements friendly links by username instead of the horrendously long profile URLs. I'd much prefer "/davidwalsh83" to "/114538814489633467974". Maybe that would too easily expose email address handles though?
- I don't use Facebook's "Like" very much, so I don't anticipate using "+1" much either.
- Johnathan Snook made some really good points about G+'s focus styles. Google's done a great job with them but could probably do better.
- The small "Send an Email" feature is quite nice. No need to jump into Gmail, no need for access to direct email address.
- Profile editing somehow manages to stay elegant and organized despite being a one-page, inline process.
- The real test is when Google creates an API for G+; can G+ stay clean and organized then too? Or will G+ turn into a Facebook Farmville mess?
Those are my thoughts on Google+. What do you think about G+?
Nice post about G+.
I didn’t test it in depth but I was very curious in testing the video chat feature. I’m quite impressed about that. I liked the possibility of watch a youtube video and “share” the video with all the participants. I also liked to see how Facebook, desperately, launched a video chat too…
Change album name in Picasaweb. Go to https://picasaweb.google.com/yourname and edit the album properties there. Unintuitive, I agree, but there it is.
Oh, and PS: I love Sparks. Kind of Feedly right in your regular stream. Different strokes, I guess.
Any more G+ invites? Anybody, please?
buri(dot)buster(at)gmail(dot)com
Also needing an invite: lance(dot)perry(at)gmail(dot)com
You can use http://gplus.to if you want a shortened URL to your profile
Have anybody heard about a Facebook Apps alternative for G+? Those really accelerated the FB growth at the beginning.
thanks for invite, BTW.
Good post and I’m in agreement with pretty much everything. I wrote up some thoughts on Google+, Facebook, geeks, and normals yesterday:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/117451652124879754397/posts/ZZo2Nwt9heR
Good post and I’m in agreement with pretty much everything. I wrote up some thoughts on Google+, Facebook, geeks, and normals yesterday:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/117451652124879754397/posts/ZZo2Nwt9heR
Very nice overall, but some important stuff still seems missing.
I would like to see
– As there is a notification of G+ events in Gmail, there should be a notification of new mails anywhere on google apps websites, including G+
– Business / community pages
– Ability to invite people easily, instead of having to type all their names !
– Integrating somehow RSS feeds into Sparks feature would be more handy than displaying some crap..
– Nicer terms of use for Picasa (for now, uploading a photo there gives them worlwide indefinite license to use your photo on any medium in any context in any way, for free)
– Ability to reorganize the album view, the automatic choice of which pictures are shown bigger than the others is not always what I would prefer …
I’ve been writing a lot about Google+ on my blog: Circles, and organizing ones social graph is what I find most compelling. Fits nicely with thoughts about Dunbar’s Number, tribes, and other issues of having more than 150 people in a group. Sparks, I haven’t tried them or found them compelling.
I also like to remind people that it is still very early. From traditional technology adoption lifecycle thinking. Even if there are already 10 million people on Google+, that’s only 1.3% of what Facebook has, and by technology adoption lifecycle standards, it should still only be innovators on Google+
Just in reference to your last point, I’ll be very surprised if Google allow developers to build on top of G+. I think the API will focus purely on allowing certain data to be pulled in (posts, photos etc) and out of it. For example allowing people to send twitter updates to G+ as posts, or pulling posts out of G+ and sending them to twitter.
I can see the likes of Farmville pushing and pulling from G+, but not running from within G+ or even permitting the same amount of, let’s face it, spam getting in to the G+ feeds.
The only reason I’d use G+ is because of their lack of advertisements, at least from what I can see (which isn’t much because I’m not a G+ user). I barely do anything on Facebook and really the only reasons I’m still on that is 1) event invites 2) sending messages to people that I don’t have email addresses for.
I think Google+ is fantastic :-) Just to point out I believe there are friendly links. Check this out.
https://profiles.google.com/matt.gru
This sends me to my Google+ profile.
Okay I apologize my link doesn’t work. I just realized that https://profiles.google.com/ goes to my profile as well. :-/ I’m sorry.
My thoughts:
a) Google+ is missing events. Events are one of Facebook’s best features and a hard one to live without.
b) Huddle shouldn’t be just for mobile. I’d like to participate in a huddle from my computer, and I’d like to include people that might not have the mobile app.
c) Instant Upload is awesome!
actually Matt your link DOES work.
You can set your google profile like this gplus.to/daholicofneki :D heheheh
try to set it in http://glus.to
Been a while now since the launch, and I feel like I’m the only person on the planet who saw the inevitable demise of Google Plus before it even got going.
Why? You have to look at Facebook users themselves, and what they do, and more importantly, what they have accomplished with their Facebook profiles. Members of my family and friends, primarily the women, have uploaded what seems to be every single photo they’ve ever taken since the beginning of time. They had already established relationships, have all their “friends” setup, and at the end of the day, made it a habitual to visit and spend time every day of every week.
How did anybody at Google think for even a second that people would jump to replicate hundreds of hours of effort to their G Plus space? That was the first thing I said to anybody asking whether Google Plus would actually compete with Facebook. I would simply ask, “Are YOU going to transfer all your efforts from your Facebook page to a Google Plus page? And why would you even bother?”
And that’s just it… why bother? Facebook had everything their users wanted. People couldn’t even find it in them to boycott Facebook when Facebook was selling their info to advertisers, so why would they leave because Google says so.
Sorry Google, stick to search. And even then, you need to step up your game on that IMO.