I received a Google+ invite earlier this week from a friend who works for Google. I messed around with it for a little while, added some friends, the usual kicking of the tires. Here are some disorganized thoughts I have on the newest social network on the block.
It isn’t pretty. I’ll admit that most other social sites aren’t winning many beauty contests either, but Google+ is-like most Google products-clearly designed with function in mind. The upside, though, is that users of other Google products will feel very at home.
It’s very obviously created to be a direct competitor to Facebook. They picked different names for things (Circles instead of Groups, +1 instead of Like, etc.), but the core functionality is essentially a feature-for-feature Google-izing of Facebook’s offering. I’m not picking on Google for this, mind you; Facebook, for all their faults and privacy-related missteps, have built a pretty amazing platform. The fact that it can sustain the sheer number of users it has is kinda mind-boggling, to be honest. So, it’s not surprising to me that the world’s biggest advertising company would want to get in on that kind of action.
That said (and as I’ve previously pointed out), I don’t really like Facebook very much. Granted, most of why I don’t care for Facebook is due to how the people use it, not the service itself, but just as Google+ brings the same features as Facebook to the table, they’ll also be subject to the same “sandwich and bowel movement” usage that plagues Facebook. Sure, it’ll take awhile for them to (maybe) build a critical mass of users, but once the non-nerd set becomes the primary user demographic, it’s going to be sandwiches and bowl movements.
I’m ambivalent about the +1 business, frankly. The fever pitch with which people spam their various “friend” lists with links to every freaking thing they’re reading needs to slow down, if you ask me, so the +1 button is going to take its place alongside the ubiquitous “Tweet” and “Like” buttons (which I do use on this site, that’s true) and we’ll now have a third social metric by which to measure the influence (or whatever) a particular piece of content has enjoyed.
Will I add the +1 button to this site? Perhaps. After all, I have a financial interest in people coming here and I also like it when people read and share what I write. If adding another button brings me some more readers, then it’ll probably be worth it. Hell, I keep the Facebook crap on this site because a *lot* of people use it and it brings me enough traffic to justify its presence.
The bottom line is that Google+ simply holds almost zero allure for me. I already do plenty of sharing on Twitter (and, more recently, Tumblr) and have more that enough content shared with me on both those platforms that anything else just becomes another thing to “check”. It’s not even that I actively dislike Google+: it’s that I actively like my current amount of social involvement online and I don’t want to disrupt it by adding another “thing”.
a better writer.make a predictionyou can use…
this technique to discuss and profile a particular product. you can write about the pros and cons and give a prediction on where on where you think this product is going, it doesn’t even have to be a full on review…