my thoughts about Google+

reposted from my email to a discussion group i’m a part of.


1. it seems that google is not leveraging its full tech prowess with (the current version of) google+. i want to see an entirely new type of social network that harnesses google’s strengths.  i don’t want to see a social network for the sake of being a social network. for example: google is amazing at search, and widespread adoption of google products means it owns a ton of information about us, our preferences. so why is google+ just a “simpler (or, at its best, improved) version of facebook”? it is problematic that this very statement was made over and over again as users’ gut reaction to google+ when it came out. it seems there’s huge potential for google+ to redefine what it means to be a social network as a holistic internet experience. more stuff like +1’s around the net, please. (i guess sparks is sort of supposed to do this, but there has been pretty much no buzz about that feature. and it’s mad clunky. and not automatic.)

2. i’m not sure how much internal testing occurred before google+ was released to the public, but there are key lackluster areas that make the google+ experience suffer for users, and platform adoption itself suffer as a result (such as the circles page, which is ridiculously—really shockingly—clunky and painful to deal with. again, why is google’s amazing search ability not in play here???). if google really wants to go up against facebook, it seems to me this is a one-shot opportunity. if people get turned off now, it will be a massively difficult task getting them back.

3. google+ has so much more potential than facebook, but facebook has such a huge head start in implementation. it will be interesting to see how this plays out. the possibilities of web-wide integration through google+ are staggering, as i mentioned before. already, ads are showing up tailored specifically to me because google remembers my browsing history. google+ can do scarily awesome things, but the key will be to catch up with and then outrun facebook’s extremely visible omnipresence on the web, what with facebook connecting, the host of facebook developer tools, etc. again, though, the fact that google’s plan for doing this is not completely clear in the launch version of google+ is regretful.

4. random something to share: i heard someone explain the whole circles philosophy as a way to (eventually) phase out email. an email, essentially, will be a google+ post shared with only one person rather than a circle. this seems like a pretty fun exercise in futuristic thinking, and if this really is what google’s thinking, they well may be hitting on something profound and game-changing (like apple’s macbook air launching without an optical drive, which got people in a furious tizzy initially….now optical drive-free devices are commonplace). this is cool stuff, but i’m not sure the public is ready for it at the moment. maybe some of the quirky features we’re seeing on google+ are paving the way for an inevitable future we just don’t understand quite yet.