Google has announced its latest attempt at social networking, Google+. The search engine giant stresses that Google+ is a project, not a product, and it’s aim is to make the entire Google universe more social. Whatever that means.
In reality, Google+ is intended for sharing information with small groups, not the entire internet. As a Google vice president of product management, Bradley Horowitz, explained to Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world.”
The project is a social network, connecting your friends, family, and business associates in a collection of “circles.” Each “circle” is completely separate and can be used to share different kinds of information.
To add an individual to one of your “circles,” you use Google+‘s “chip” interface to drag-and-drop them into the appropriate “circle.” Any individual information you’ve added to Google Contacts is available—contacts can also be added from an exported file in CSV format—and any number of “circles” can be created. In any case, Google learned at least one privacy lesson and all contacts must be added manually. What would ordinarily be surprising, but isn’t in light of close observation by government agencies around the globe, is that Google Buzz is, for now, completely disconnected from Google+.
Steven Levy, writing for Wired, spent almost a year following the project within the Googleplex and has the best analysis. Google knows who should be in your “circles” but doesn’t want to risk telling you. Reading Levy’s take on Google+‘s intelligent “circles” makes me shudder and glad that I don’t use Gmail:
“Right now, Google won’t even suggest who should be in your circles. But it has the technology to do so—it’s already making suggestions on who you might include on Gmail mailing lists. So in the future it’s conceivable that Google might indeed provide plenty of nonbinding suggestions for who you might want it your Circles. ‘We’ve got this whole system already in place that hasn’t been used that much where we keep track of every time you email someone or chat to them or things like that,’ says [former Plaxo chief technology officer and recent Google hire Joseph] Smarr. ‘Then we compute affinity scores. So we’re able to do suggestions not only about who you should add to a circle, or even what circles you could create out of whole cloth.’”
In an email to Danny Sullivan, writing for Search Engine Land, Google answers the only question that matters. Is Google+ a Facebook competitor? “No. We realize that today people are increasingly connecting with one another on the web. But the ways in which we connect online are limited and don’t mimic our real-life relationships. The Google+ project is our attempt to make online sharing even better. We aren’t trying to replace what’s currently available, we just want to introduce a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.” Which, of course, is a round-about way to say, why yes, yes it is a Facebook competitor.
When someone in your network shares something, it appears in your Google+ stream. Want to share something? Either enter it in the Stream field on your Google+ page or click the Share… button that will appear in the top bar—called the “sandbar”—anywhere within Google. What’s potentially very interesting about Google+ is the granularity with which you can share certain information with certain circles but not others. You can also share information publicly, as on Twitter.
Google Sparks is intended to be sort of Google Alerts for your Google+ stream, allowing you to follow specific topics of interest, each as a separate element.
Google Hangouts allows up to 10 individuals to engage with each other in a video conference. Focus shifts automatically to whomever is speaking. Similarly, Google Huddle is a group text chat service, geared mostly for mobile users.
Google Instant Upload, currently limited to Android devices, lets users upload photos and videos from their mobile devices to a private Google+ archive.
From what I’ve seen—only screen dumps at this point; Google is rolling out Google+ slowly, initially to the chosen few, not the rest of us—the user interface for Google+ is quite atypical for Google and quite compelling. No surprise, as Levy reports that the interface design lead was Andy Hertzfeld.
Miller, writing for the Times, opines that Google+ may be too late. “In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, versus 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore,” writes Miller. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.”
According to Levy, the initial parts of Google+ included in the launch are only a sampling of what’s to come. Using what it calls “rolling thunder,” Google will continue to roll-out additional Google+ parts (Levy says there are well over 100).
Google has spent the last month trying to convince publishers to add the Google +1 button to their websites. While everything within Google+ can be Google +1 buttoned, all of the Google +1 clicks outside of Google—which is to say everywhere else—are not integrated into Google+. Wait, what? That’s right nothing from native Google +1 on the web—the entire web—returns to Google+. Get it? This tremendous shortcoming will almost certainly be addressed in the future in one of the “rolling thunder” additions.
Levy points out that Google knows that the social network may be its great undoing, referring to Albert Bierstadt’s 1878 painting Emerald Sea (Horowitz had the painting copied on the wall across the elevator from the development team). Levy cites Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social, as saying that what turned out to be Google+ is a bet-the-farm project. Levy writes that shortly after Larry Page took over as Google chief executive in April, Page reportedly tied 25 percent of every Google employee’s bonus check to the company’s social efforts. “Google still wants to organize the world’s information,” Levy writes. “But this time, it’s personal.”
Google initially put a premium on effective search-and-release: Users would find what they were looking for and leave in pursuit of it. With Google+, Levy notes that Google’s business model has at least expanded, and perhaps morphed. “If Google’s original goal was to expeditiously dispatch us elsewhere, with this near-clairvoyant stream, Google could turn us into search potatoes who never leave,” he writes.
What does all this mean for users? Well, for now it’s just another corporate data silo like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the rest; I’d warn against putting anything important in there. Levy reports there appear to be no negotiations between Google and Facebook to make their platforms interoperable. Google+‘s biggest shortcoming—one that hopefully will be addressed—is that it follows the corporate roach hotel software development model: You can put your data in, but good luck getting it out.
Update: Tuesday, 28 June 2011 6:17PM CST: Oops, Google has, in fact, created a way to get your data out of its roach hotel. Today the company also introduced Google Takeout, a service that lets users export their Buzz feed, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, and Profile to formats that are actually usable.
Update: Tuesday, 28 June 2011 7:29PM CST: Dave Winer has written the definitive analysis of Google+. “All you do is make your core product heavier,” Winer writes on Google baking Google+ into search. “The thing you wanted to kill doesn’t go anywhere. It hardly notices what you did.”
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