It’s clear that Google has created an interesting suite of tools and is trying to take advantage of how people rely on their social networks to discover new content.These days, you may rely on your social networks to find the latest news or funny cat videos rather than using search. Google+ clearly is an attempt to move with the times.But does it work? The short answer is that there’s a lot of potential in Google+. We’ve heard that before — Google Wave was a tool that had nothing but potential. But it was hard to define what Wave did in a way that made sense to the average user. In some ways, Google+ falls victim to the same problem. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages. We’ll start with the pluses:
Google+ uses “Circles” to help you group people into categories and makes it easy to share content with specific people. I have circles for my friends, my family and my professional peers. Creating circles is easy and Google+ uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to let you add people to each circle. You can add the same person to multiple circles if you like.
Sharing using circles is a breeze. If I want to share a funny story about my day, I may only want my friends and family to see the post and keep the rest of the world in the dark. No problem, I just select those circles when I create the content and everyone else is spared my anecdote. Or I might choose to share it with the world and keep the post Public, meaning anyone could read about my hilarious misadventures.
The hangout feature is a blast. Hangouts let you create a video chat room with up to nine other people. Whomever is talking — or speaking more loudly than anyone else — takes center stage. As one person finishes speaking and someone else begins to chat, the main video feed switches automatically. Considering most of the people I know on Google+ right now are tech journalists, this feature makes it feel like you’re hopping from one podcast to another.
The Android integration is great, particularly for huddles. Huddles make it easy to create a social group on the fly. Imagine you want to organize a quick get together among friends but you don’t want to broadcast it to the world at large. Creating a huddle lets you send messages to this specific group while excluding everyone else. Everyone in the group can read and respond to messages, turning the huddle into a party line. This is sort of what Twitter was supposed to be and what services like Beluga are doing now.
Sharing photos is easy. You can create photo albums, tag people and share images with whichever circles (or the public at large) you like. I have some images that anyone can see and others that only my friends have access to. And if you have Google+ on your phone, the instant upload feature makes it insanely simple to share a photo snapped by your phone that very second.
Now let’s look at some of the minuses as I see them:
It’s still a little confusing, though nowhere near as mystifying as Google Wave was.
Many of the features in Google+ are in other social networking sites or services. Facebook lets you create filters (though it’s not quite as easy or intuitive as it is in Google+). Beluga lets you create quick messaging groups among a set number of people. Google+ might be a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist. I’m not sure there’s enough there to compel people to use it in place of (or in addition to) other services.
Sparks, a Google+ service that pulls links related to your interests, hasn’t blown me away yet. I can’t see it replacing Google Reader or other RSS services for the moment. But maybe that will get better as time goes on.
I know a lot of people who have multiple email addresses, apparently. I don’t see an easy way in Google+ to consolidate these addresses into a single contact. I know I can do that in gmail and fix the problem that way but it would be nice to be able to do it in Google+. There may even be a way to do it and I just haven’t seen it yet.
Pulling content from other sources such as Facebook, Flickr or even YouTube isn’t intuitive. And it’s a little perplexing that YouTube compatibility isn’t built in at the beginning considering it belongs to Google. You can share videos on your Google+ stream but you have to upload them — you can’t just link to a YouTube account. I hope Google adds in a YouTube feature in a subsequent version of Google+.
It’s also difficult to really see the full potential of Google+ with such a small number of users. I don’t count that as a minus — Google wants to give the product a field test before unleashing it upon the world at large. But it does mean that getting a handle on exactly how useful all the features will be once the service goes gold is a bit tricky.
For the moment, Google has put a freeze on invitations to the network. I know that’s frustrating for people who really want to give the service a try but it makes sense from a quality assurance perspective. Will Google+ manage to do to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace? We’ll have to wait and see
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