I’ll rattle off (in streaming conscious fashion), my own personal experiences with Google+. 1st of all (and as mentioned in numerous entries), I understand Google’s ulterior motives in most everything they do; it relates to garnering as much personal information about you so that they are able to better target specific ads that interest you.
This was just one of many reasons why until this year, I was adamant about maintaining an anonymous presence online. The thing with advertisements is this… I normally don’t see them because I block them on my home network in several stages. One is at the firewall level on my primary router (which is an OS X Server box). The next is on the host machines (using a hosts file with ad servers redirected to local host). Finally, there is blocking at the browser level with AdBlock. And when I’m mobile and do see them, I ignore them.
As far as Google+ goes, I “upgraded” to it just to see what it was like. Plus I know that eventually, Google will end up requiring all accounts to “upgrade” since they are trying to rebrand a bunch of acquired products (Picasaweb, Blogger, etc) under a singular brand. The article mentions the lack of vibrancy and active engagement compared to Facebook or Twitter. My general impression from futzing around with Google+ is that Google has all these properties, but the integration of some of them is generally lacking. I didn’t really like that comment provided by Google’s VP of product management, that “Google+ acts as an auxiliary to Google services—such as Gmail and
YouTube—by adding a “personal” social-networking layer on top of them.” because that implies that full integration isn’t the goal.
YouTube—by adding a “personal” social-networking layer on top of them.” because that implies that full integration isn’t the goal.
Blogger for example… why isn’t it fully integrated into Google+. I needed to create a separate profile rather than it pulling everything it needed from my Google profile. Why aren’t posts from here (Blogger) shown under Posts in my Google+ profile. And that is just one simple example. What about Google Sites? Google+ has pages which one can create. Why not include the functionality of being able to quickly and easily build a site, integrated into Google+ pages? I understand that a large number of Google properties were acquired, and that integration can be a daunting task. However, this should be their priority.
Then there is YouTube which is sitting out there. Google at least in my opinion, missed out on taking the engagement (stupid as plenty of it is) from there, and integrating it into Google+. Google+ from my personal observations, lacks fun. Twitter is spontaneous in its micro blogging nature. Facebook, I don’t really use much personally for myself, but I can see why Google+ isn’t enough to pull users away from them. Basically, Google+ needs to offer a platform that is way better in many aspects than what some of these other social networking sites offer. Facebook owns the ability to connect people together. Google+ on the other hand often can’t find people that I’m looking for when I do a search. That’s the ironic part because Google owns search and finding a user on their own platform should always turn up positive results. I had a couple of my colleagues either create new accounts, or upgrade their current profiles. There were times when I searched for their names to add them to my circles, they could not be found (and vice versa). In one case, I had to resort to sending them to my exact profile URL so that they could add me.
Google+ however seems well suited for more business/professional uses (based on my playing around with the pages function; again, integrating the tools from Google Sites would make it even more powerful). I can put specific people into specific circles and broadcast information. It’s just a matter of learning the entire platform better which is another crux. People are creatures of habit and drastic change can turn people away if that learning curve is too steep. This is where fun comes into play. If that process is fun, people have no problems playing around and thus picking new things up. The lack of full integration with many properties again comes into play. Settings are still all over the place (I manage my account settings here, privacy settings there, settings for photos aka Picasaweb over there, Bloggers settings elsewhere, etc). It’s tedious and annoying after awhile. For someone like myself, it doesn’t really matter since I’m used to tech world’s general inability to provide smooth integration. People like myself aren’t the main target though.
This of course leads back to something a Google software engineer ranted about late last year about Google+ being a kneejerk reaction. Doing anything based on a kneejerk reaction (i.e. reactive as opposed to proactive) will usually reveal itself as half-assed efforts. When you are building a foundation, you want that foundation to be a solid as possible. The key things Apple is doing now is rooted in the NeXT purchase. But all that did not happen overnight, and it took lots of patience and hardwork to get from point A to point B. This is what usually makes Apple stand out. Some of the stuff they release seems obviously simple in hindsight but if you look at the overall process that it took to get there, it required discipline and quite a bit of planning. Microsoft too, has acquired a number of products but one thing they always did fairly well was getting them integrated into their own solutions. Google on the other hand loves putting stuff out there with the beta tag all over it.
As for myself, I’m basically here with Google+ because I’ve been a user of Picasaweb for awhile and enjoyed its simplicity (plus the fact there is a desktop client which makes mass uploading easy). That’s about as far as my loyalty goes which is yet another crux that Google has to overcome. If Facebook (over time), does prove they can manage privacy related matters (by not having any more major snafus), I myself might end up creating a real profile there since there are more people who I know that have accounts over at Facebook.
