Google+

Google+ enabled!

So far, I find this very interesting in concept, it will be even more interesting if/when more of my actual social circle joins.

Here are my initial thoughts, good, bad and waiting for...


The Good

• The interface: This is the best of webapp interfaces (for the most part) from a look and feel perspective. The user experience also looks to be much more refined than typical utilitarian Google services.
• Integration: Works well with all the Google apps, I like how it has the feel of a "Dashboard" of sorts with its positioning on the Google "Toolbar" that has now shown up for Google services. Having your chat contacts shown in the chat widget, email contacts available to drag into Circles, and major media personalities also prominently displayed Twitter-style is very good.
• Hangout: Not only a good "chat room" alternative, by far the best multiple party video chart service of its kind.

The Bad

• Some activities aren't immediately obvious:
• I can't tell when my status is getting posted to my stream.
• It isn't obvious that adding someone not in Google+ to a Circle isn't actually giving them an invite to Google+
• I couldn't find all the "pre-canned" sparks that are initially shown on the Sparks intro page once I had entered a Spark search. It would be nice if there was an easy way to navigate and add Spark interests and sort them by activity or other criteria.
• Sparks look to be mostly harvested data by Google's crawlers. I'd rather these spark topics were more curated for valuable content or could be pointedly RSS feeds for specific content providers.

Waiting For...

• More of my friends to get invites. This could be an issue for Google in two ways:
• Phased roll-out seems overly cautious, there is a lot of buzz around this new service and it seems like a perfect time to capitalize on this positive momentum. Not rolling this out faster might mean a much slower adoption rate in the long run to me.
• Drawing technical and/or social media type people like me to Google+ should be no problem but most people will only use one social media site (if at all) and making a compelling reason to migrate away from a competing platform (most likely Facebook) will be a major challenge. Right now, there is only one feature that does not have a viable alternative on Facebook: video chat rooms (Hangout). I suspect that will change in the very near feature if people continue to use this service regularly.

Overall, this is an interesting and compelling product being demoed by Google and I look forward to seeing it mature over the coming months. Google+ feels rather skeletal in content and social networks at the moment but I'm sure it will continue to grow and refine through time.

One thing that surprised me: this product doesn't feel like a direct competitor to existing social networks. It isn't as intimate as Facebook, nor as simple as Twitter, nor professional as LinkedIn. What it does feel like is the beginning of a skeletal service that can encompass all of those services in a slightly different way, all wrapped up in the Google biosphere.

That is neither a good nor a bad thing. The service just doesn't feel as defined or specialized as anything that currently exists. We'll leave it to the community and Google to figure out where to fit in the long run.