So yesterday while I and my #socpharm friends were talking about Google+, my daughter, Melissa Sameh, was already on it and using it. I asked her to share her experience. Her thoughts are below:
A benefit of having young, smart, technology-focused friends means that I get invited to all the cool parties when they’re announced, such as Google+. I’ve had accounts on several social media sites, both successful and unsuccessful — hi5, myspace, twitter — and I like to think I’ve gotten a handle on what helps a site like this succeed and what won’t. The core secret to success is the same as in any other business — give people what they want, and/or do it better than everyone else. Of course, that’s easier said than done — when twitter took off, Google thought people wanted something like that in conjunction with their email, so they launched Buzz.
However, Google really seems to be on the right track this time around. My first impression of Google+ is that its design and structure is similar to facebook, but easier to use. When I first heard about this service before my invite arrived, the introductory screenshots did not impress me. Circles? Another friend update stream? Don’t we have enough of these already? But really, the user experience is so much more smooth and intuitive than you can tell by pictures and video of people dragging and dropping contacts into groups.
When you first begin creating a profile on Google+, whatever information you’ve previously released in your Google profile is auto-loaded. As in Facebook, there are notifications and integrated chat, but no ads or endless invitations to play farmcityville cafewars. I also personally find the Google+ integrated chat more useful because it uses google chat rather than creating a whole new system to check.
There are also circles, which function more or less like friends lists do in Facebook. However, instead of being a peripheral feature, they are a central focus. People are not your connections unless you place them in a circle. Each connection can also be in more than one circle. The starter groups include Friends, Family, and Acquaintances, but you can add more for whichever custom categories you might want. The actual process of adding people to circles is easy as well — it’s all based in dragging and dropping contacts from an automatically imported list containing your gmail contacts into whichever circle you wish to add them to, either one by one or in groups.
The ease and widespread use of circles basically eliminates the need for separate business and personal profiles. You can set your chat status so that it is only visible to people in certain circles. Every time you make a post, you are able to filter it easily to specific circles as well, which leads to added functionality for things like planning a get-together (Nearby Friends circle only) or a moving announcement (all circles), for instance. Work-related updates could be shown only to your Co-Workers circle or Industry Professionals.
If I had to choose one killer feature of Google+, however, it would not be the circles; it would be hanging out, their name for group videochatt. Even today, equivalent videoconferencing systems usually require expensive equipment and still end up lagging, but this free online system works surprisingly well. I personally tested it for up to six people chatting at once, and at five and fewer participants I had no problems with lag. It is a full-featured system involving video thumbnails of everyone in the conversation forming the bottom row of chat with a larger section of the screen focused on whoever is talking. The “focus” shifts based on speech, or it can be forced by clicking on one of the thumbnails. Also, even if you’re the one speaking, it does not focus on your face, instead showing you someone else. Despite sounding awkward, within under a minute of use the switching focus feels very natural.
Hangouts is another feature that can be filtered by circles, though there are also options for recruiting people from your extended circle — analogous to friends of friends — and from the general public. Remember all those heartwarming facetime commercials from the iPhone 4? This has potential for all of that, and more.
Though it lacks the hangouts feature, the mobile site is nearly as full-featured as the regular site. There is already an app available on the android marketplace, but as an iPhone user, I only tested the mobile web version of Google+. Unlike most mobile webapps, it’s a much more full-featured and smooth user experience than I expected. The stream is accessible in the same capacity, as are live-updating notifications; you can update your circles, though without the same drag and drop functionality; you can view, but not upload, photos. As photo uploading is one of the features of the android app, however, I expect that the forthcoming iPhone app will contain this capability as well. A neat feature in the mobile site is the ability to show updates from people physically near you, which would be useful during conferences and the like. It’s also easier than I expected to enable and disable location information per post — the setting is not hidden behind a menu or in a settings page.
Google+ comes off as what it’s meant to be: the site that aims to displace Facebook. Not every feature in it is groundbreaking, but the showy whiz-bang features are honestly excellent and unique, and the rest of the features seem to be in more accessible condition than they are on other social networking sites.
So it seems that Google may have finally gotten social right. If Meli and her friends are any indication, Facebook should start looking over their shoulder.
Patching the Boat 