Google+ and a Revolution of Social

14 Jul

I have been using Google+ for roughly two weeks now. For two weeks, I have been absolutely consumed in playing around with the service, reading about it, following various people to discover how they are using it, and so on. I have been sharing spats of my comments around on various threads, but held off on writing about it at more length here until now.

In my 100th post, I mentioned that I had written a lot about the paleo diet in the first month or so. One of my other topics of at least one early post was about Google+, except at the time it was rumoured to be called Google Me. My post, Why Google Me is Not Another Facebook, was published July 12, 2010 and had no inside knowledge of the service. Read this paragraph and see if it reminds you of something:

Google Me would have the power to become a portal of creation and deep interactions where one could create, share, comment, and/or respond through creating something of their own. All of their individual web applications have the power to do all of these, and more. I am thinking of the near real-time interactions of Google Wave and collaborations with Google Docs that could get pulled into an environment that more people are familiar with. It will be far easier to teach people how to use a Wave application in the confines of a Facebook-clone than showing them a different structured environment which causes more confusion. With the suite of applications available, creation can happen in any media – Blogger, Picasa, YouTube, Docs, Wave, GTalk, and with the addition of a cloud music website, audio could be created in the future, perhaps.

Now, I freely admit that Google+ has not reached that lofty goal as of yet, but it’s pretty darn close. There is no suite of applications to create videos, documents, and such, but there is the ability to share YouTube videos and links. Their status bar does give you the functionality to blog. Kevin Rose even redirected his domain name to his Google+ profile. GTalk is built into Google+, and it has the additional functionality of Hangouts (group video chat). So it is nearly complete in the way I was writing about it a year ago.

The big function that people rather gloss over is how instant the updates come. There is a real ability to have a conversation with people you are not connected with at all, and you don’t need to keep hitting refresh on your browser. A main influencer could post up a question, and sit there to watch the feedback come in right away. I could see Leo Laporte using this functionality on his shows on the TWiT network, for example. They currently use an IRC chat channel, something that is not archival for future reference. A question posed on the Google+ stream will be there for others to see and reflect upon at a later date.

Another function that is not talked about much is Huddle, the group text messaging feature in the Google+ app on Android. I wrote a bit about this a year ago, as well:

In the near future, Google Me could change how we communicate, as well. Through the power of Google Voice, one could call a profile name, not a phone number, when browsing through the site on their iPhone/Android devices. This would eliminate any privacy concerns a user may have about sharing such information, while allowing people to reach out to them.

Google Voice is not connected to the Google+ application yet. The bare function of contacting someone without having a phone number or an email address is there, though.

Let that sink in for a second.

A phone number, and even an email address, is something most people consider very private. Having your email address out there invites spam, hence all the “mcculloj (at) gmail (dot) com” and so forth. People are getting more accustomed to handing out that information to strangers. Google+ will eliminate that need as the service grows. A business card could in theory contain the address to your Google Profile and then anyone will be able to reach out to you via private messaging through Google+, text messaging through Huddle, and video chat through Hangouts.

Huddle is a compelling feature for me because I see it becoming Email 2.0 more so than Wave ever was. Huddle gives you instant messaging to a group or individual. Most people think this is to be used within a Circle, but it doesn’t have to be. You can send a message to individual people (who you are connected to in Google+), email addresses, or a Circle. Right now, messages to an email address are merely an invitation to join the Huddle. That’s not incredibly useful right now, but there is no reason not to think that in the future, someone could respond to that message and have it sent back as a message in the Huddle. If Facebook can do this through their interface, I don’t see why Google+ can’t.

The best part is that people can leave the conversation at any point, or add in people that should be involved. I am sure everyone has been a part of email chains that they really did not want to be a part of, or wanted to pull someone in without sharing everything that happened previously. In the coming year, companies could use Huddle internally to do some quick brainstorming about an issue that has come up, or even plan out a meeting time without a lot of going back and forth.

Another item that will be solved is message length. Something almost everyone hates is a long email, and everyone loves how short Twitter messages are. Huddle gives you that space where a long message would be tedious to write out, and since it is being read on a mobile device (for now), people will generally keep the messages short as a common courtesy.

It is strangely fascinating to me how much conversation there has been about this service and how much people are falling in love with it. It is a subject that I could go on for a while. I think it is better to let this new service sink into me further, read more, and find a better way to describe what is happening.

Resources

I will finish this off with including a few brief resources with some tips for Google+ users, and some people to keep an eye on for future developments.

Tristan posted up a massive list of tips at his site, Blogging Bookshelf. 61 Google Plus Tips, Thoughts, and Requests. I added my own at the bottom of his page, but I will include some of the outside resources here, too.

Eliot Phillips posted some hacks on how to change your profile picture when someone clicks on it.

This Week in Google hosted by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Gina Trapani have been focusing a lot on Google+ in the past three weeks. They provide some great discussion with some guests (three weeks ago, they had the main developers for Google+ on), and some useful tips on using the service. Well worth listening to the previous episodes, or watching them.

Chris Brogan has been writing some great tips and thoughts about Google+. Key quote, so far, “Google+ whiners are plussies.”

MG Siegler has been writing some great stuff at TechCrunch, but is writing even more on his Google+ profile.

What else am I missing that hasn’t been covered by any of those people?

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  • http://twitter.com/21tigermike Michael A. Robson

    Very cool. I’ve been on G+ for a couple weeks, but don’t do much with it. I get it. Google needs its iTunes Ping, its Facebook… the Advertising that emanates from Social. 

    Facebook, for a few years now have been Google’s biggest competition for ads (get real, no one really uses Bing). Bottom line is Google now a dog in this fight. And they’ve answered one of their biggest criticisms: they’ve streamlined the design, and included G+ integration into Gmail/Websearch etc. That’s their distribution platform, such as Windows is Microsoft’s distribution for IE, Office, etc.

    But I don’t get the fake blowback. Who’s upset with Facebook? Are we all suddenly Privacy advocates? Zuck and Schmidt have basically been saying the exact same thing for the last 5 years: if you have multiple identities and want to keep secrets from certain people in your life, just don’t get an online profile because you won’t be able to keep lying to people.

    G+ Circles is Google’s way of saying, “Ok we get it… people still want to be different things to different ppl in their lives.. We don’t like evil, but we suppose we have to let people do this”  Facebook had Groups and Lists ages ago. It does the same thing. When I add someone on FB, if that someone is a Business contact, I don’t want them checking out pictures from my latest party, so I put them in a business list that can’t see much (at all) of my profile. Job security.

    Anyway, maybe the trojan horse here is Android. Maybe THAT’s the thing that Google thinks will push up against Facebook. 550,000 new phones a day.

    • http://www.foursides.ca James M

      I think there is a big difference in how Facebook and Google+ treat lists/groups/Circles. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with Facebook, you create the list and then you had to adjust the privacy settings for that list. Whereas with G+, you start sharing something and then decide on the privacy settings for that one shared item. Instead of sharing all status updates with a list, with G+ you can share certain status updates with a Circle, and so forth. 

      I speculated a bit on why Google would want a social network last year before G+ was in existence and I think their aim is social search. If I do a search for a book, Google will eventually show me a list of books that you and the rest of my social graph have read first, and then list best sellers, and so forth. Circles allows them to see how we are connected to people and who has higher priorities in our lives. Recommendations from friends and family will be slightly higher than people I’m just “following.”

      But you’re right with your last point. Mobile is the future for G+. It’s a staggering amount of Android devices being activated daily. Every Android device is attached to a GMail account, which is attached to… a G+ profile. It’s why people have been spreading rumours about a Facebook phone (which I’m sure would be selling at a million users a day if the phone was good and offered globally). That’s the primary focus. With the G+ app on Android, you have the option to upload your pics automatically to G+ (set as private as the default). I think this will help Google build a larger geo-centric graph and create a better sense of what we’re seeing, not just sharing. Maybe not so much with family photos, but when they start analyzing the data of the scenery behind the human figures in photos, they will be able build a hierarchy of the visual. 

      Going to take a big leap here, but think about the world in Minority Report. Tom Cruise walks down a pathway and everywhere he looks there are ads popping up directed at him. Surely, not all those ad placements will cost the same, but how do you judge which wall should have premium costs involved? I think the groundwork starts with G+ on Android, so they begin development on the Augmented Reality (AR) apps. 

      They already know where we are (GPS).
      They know what’s there (Maps, Places, Latitude)
      Now they need to know what we’re looking at. 

      Of course, it’s late at night and I may be dreaming.