Initial Thoughts on Google+
So I managed to get myself a Google+ invite earlier, and spend a bit of time over my lunch break playing around with it and getting familiarised.
First impressions are that it’s a prettier version of Facebook. It’s got most of the same functionality (except for Events, which are a key reason in why I’ve stuck with Facebook), and it’s improved on some of the areas that Facebook has fallen behind on, such as grouping contacts together. Having said that, I do use Lists on FB to separate my contacts between close friends and acquaintances, but it’s not an obvious feature, and one that I think most people don’t even know about.
Keeping in mind that it’s extremely early days, at the moment it feels like Twitter did a couple of years ago, when its user base consisted pretty much of just developers and designers. It also seems to fit right in the middle of Twitter and Facebook, in that you can share content with only your friends (such as photos from nights out), or you can keep a public feed, and you can see the stream of various people who might not necessarily follow you back.
I think the route that Google+ could take to really make it a useful tool, instead of just another social network, is to decentralise the content. For instance, let me pull in Events from Facebook, so that I can keep track of what’s going on with people who haven’t switched over. Let me create an album that populates itself from my Flickr feed, and that’s one less extra place I have to update my portfolio. Even better, let me upload a photo to Google+, and have that pushed out to my Flickr and Facebook accounts.
If Google+ becomes more of a hub of services instead of another walled garden, then I could see myself continuing to use it.
Google+ does look like quite a nice offering. I agree about the circles/groups functionality. Facebook has it, but its dug in rather deep, and I usually find myself having to give Facebook novices tutorials on their privacy settings.
About integration with external websites, while they would be cool features, Facebook for one wouldn’t allow content be pushed to user accounts. The way they make money is advertising, and keeping peoplelocked into their offerings.
Flickr however, Google have the Picasa photo service which they have been making slight changes to recently in preparation for this launch. They tie in nicely, and I can access and share my albums. So again, while nice to have, I doubt they’ll rush to support a rival service.
I definitely like the UI touches.
Comment by Harry at 8:53 pm, 30th June, 2011
Thanks, Harry.
I agree, it’s unlikely that they are going to tie in with external sources, as I’m sure this will probably end up with advertising at some point, and so it’ll need to keep people locked into a Google infrastructure.
However, if they were to become a hub, as much as Facebook wouldn’t be happy, I think (but certainly don’t know) that the current API would enable G+ to scrape a lot of the content.
Otherwise, unless it takes off massively — or Circles allows it to be used effectively as a mini-Facebook just for illustrators, designers and developers that in know, in my case — I don’t know if I’ll be using it this time next month, if it’s just going to be yet another place where I’m displaying the same status updates and photos.
Comment by Rob Barrett at 12:08 am, 1st July, 2011