Erstellt am: 19. 7. 2011 - 17:06 Uhr
Google Plus
It wouldn't be Google without some Scandal. Despite having done some things right in the policy department, the anti-avatar stance Google has taken in it's registration policy has a few people upset. They really really want you to sign up with an actual name that would identify you IRL. Anyone with a few years or multiple online communities under their belts might be more than a little unhappy with that. A good summary of the situation has come up and been posted on a Second Life oriented blog. It is worth spending some time on it.
nwn.blogs.com
When I first heard about Google Plus (lets just call it G+ from now on okay) my first reaction was "ooh let me in" and my second reaction was, "not another one".
Remember Orkut?
Buzz?
Or how about that Wave fiasco…
In other words, I was a budding skeptic. And I'm also a bit burnt out. As much as I like the promise of social networking, I've had about as much as I can take from social media marketing, SEO bozos and advertising in general. Twitter keeps me going because despite their push towards business friendly services, it's still really easy to block spam.
Unlike Facebook.
As much as I have enjoyed having a way to keep in touch with long lost friends, it's become pretty useless to me. Their heavy handed filtering of my feed, and the massive number of friends I have accepted makes it a bit difficult to keep tabs on the things that are important to me. The latest change to messaging and chat were enough to make me ready to jump.
Google Plus What?
For those of you who are fine with the rules, and don't fear the Google, the best place to start wrapping your head around G+ has to be the collaborative document I featured a while ago as the webtip. It's a massive collection of information and tips about the service, and is available in multiple languages. It's also a pretty interesting example of crowd sourcing documentation.
docs.google.com
It took me a while to figure out where Google was going with the name. I mean, Plus doesn't really scream social networking does it? Or was it meant to be a reference to their +1 button, the Google answer to "Like"?
Nope.
It's literally Google plus..
Google plus your social circles. For people already using Google services, that means search, email, news reading, instant messaging, document sharing, calendars, photos, voice and video chat, and all of the other stuff they have to offer are now put together in one place. Google has turned itself into a gateway to a whole mess of different network services and G+ is now your dashboard. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Just the basics
People using other Google services who haven't joined Plus yet might have noticed a black bar at the top of their accounts. The bar contains links to Gmail, reader, and the other stuff they offer, as well as a quick link to your public profile.
Members of G+ have an added tab at the very front of the line. In my case +David. That takes you to the stuff Google has added to their lineup.
Home
This is your stream. Like the wall in Facebook. It's a constantly updating mess of comments and information. It gives you access to the streams created by your various circles of friends, your sparks, chat and hangouts. Pretty basic stuff, and not really very different than most other social networking home pages.
Well it is a bit more minimalist.
Now I could go on and break down all of the stuff that makes up G+, but there have already been so many stories about it, that I won't waste your time. You can always google that.
A lot of the action and discussion in my stream over the last couple of weeks have been about peoples attempts at making sense of the whole thing. Despite it being so familiar to things we all already know, it really does have some fundamental differences. And most of them are because of one thing. Google is wrapping up the net.
Facebook, and most of the other social networking sites feels like a place. You go there to find your friends, see what's going on, and maybe get some links to stuff that is happening outside. But there is a very solid feeling of within and without. Boundaries.
That's not the case with G+. If you are used to using Google as your way to find stuff on the web, the whole thing just feels like an expansion to search. In the end, everything Google is offering now is just slightly different faces to the wealth of stuff just beneath the surface of the internet. Google Plus has now become that surface.
The Good
One of the best ways of explaining it, is an example I found that tries to make clear the way Google has changed the idea of basic communication. There are no longer hard boundaries between mail, IM, microblogging, blogging and commenting.
But let me quote Mike Elgan (via Andrea Maria Dusl)
Instead of saying, "I'm going to write a blog post now," or "I'm going to send an e-mail" or "I think I'll tweet something" you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you're going to say it to.
If you address it to "Public," it's a blog post.
If you address it to "Your Circles" it's a tweet.
If you address it to your "My Customers" Circle it's a business newsletter.
If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.
In other words, it's not so much a social network, as it is a communication platform. Which makes sense, since the web has always been social, and it's always been a network. Or rather a network of networks. And protocols. But it's always been about communication. G+ just sort of takes that idea and wraps it up with a bow.
Or it will, once it actually starts to work well together as a whole.
In the meantime G+ does give you some pretty nifty ways of hangin out with your friends. Or I assume it would, if I actually had any friends with webcams who were awake in the early morning hours. Hangouts is basically a group chat that can be a cozy little affair between you and someone special, a invite only group chat or a wide open free for all that anyone can join. In other words it takes Elgans explanation of the messaging idea and applies it to video chat. It could be very very big.
The Bad
Right now, G+ is still a bit patchwork. I guess that's better than the overly complex mess that Wave was, but it can be frustrating at times. Buzz pulls all of my feeds from other services in one place, but I can't inject that into my stream. It all ends up as a sort of orphaned collection of posts in another tab.
Circles are a lovely metaphor for organizing your contacts and friends, but the pretty design interface is unwieldly to work with, and there is no connection to the contacts I already have organized in Gmail. As cute as it is to drag and drop friends onto circles, working with lists and labels like any other contact program actually works a lot better. It becomes even more frustrating since I ALREADY HAVE groups and labels that could have been translated into circles.
Sparks, the new name G+ has added for a very minimalist version of the saved google search, is weaker than anything else Google has offered. I don't know how they are looking for things to fit the terms I am using, but it doesn't provide a lot of results. Letting me use my RSS feed groups from Reader would be much easier.
The End
The thing I am most struck by is the different feeling of place. If Google actually gets around to integrating it's various services in a sensible manner, G+ will really become a way to feed your personal communications throughout the web. Rather than the fixed destination of Facebook or MySpace, it could be the collecting point of strands that run between all of the other websites out there.
But, since this is Google we are talking about, I'm still not sure if that is a very good thing. It feels more like the way I always wanted the web to work, but there are more than a few cultures out there that consider getting what you wished for to be a curse.
I guess we will just have to wait and see.