Google plus has got many users registered, but it has not been really getting users hooked to itself as even a recent survey suggested that Google plus has an inactive factor of almost 90%. Users still find Facebook way more interesting and social as compared to Google plus. This may be a reason for Google to integrate its well known Gmail service to its social networking site. Since Google plus was introduced, this has been in the agenda for Google, to get its social networking site the limelight its other services have seen.
The thoughts behind this integration was of a Gmail engineering manager, Mark Striebeck who routed a way for surfacing Gmail people widget. The procedure here is simple as a user will be able to get those Google plus posts which have been shared by an email sender. Mark in July, had promised that this was coming and for a confirmation then, he had even offered a screenshot. The screenshot had the feature integrated on Google plus and there was a code nicknamed ‘unicorn’, which was for their internal Gmail test environment. This time round, Mark said that one can still expect something more to come for the users as this is just the first launch.
The request for integrating these services was a big ask from Google plus users. Reason being that most of the Google plus user do have a Gmail account and it would be really convenient for them to get integrated updates. However, this is not the first time any social user had this request. Back in 2008, social inbox was a hot topic which had many engineers and developers thinking for it. Later on, Xobni came out with a preliminary social inbox which was stormed in the market.
For Google, they have trying integrating Gmail with their other social services too. In 2010, Google attempted Gmail integration with Google Buzz. The service here was competitive as Google launched the integrated widget in May this year. This was a helpful service for those users who like being in Gmail and at the same time prefer displaying content from friends and even other contacts. This step from the search engine giant was seen by many as a punch back to Microsoft as it even has its Outlook Social Connector feature as an important element of Outlook 2010.
Talking about Gmail-Google+ integration, Mark had raised a few questions in the earlier month via a survey form which was on Google Docs’ spreadsheet. The questions were directed for Google plus users and they were:
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What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
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How could we integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
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How can we integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?
The feedback from the early birdy Google plus users would have been of great help to Mark as he had received some solid suggestions. Some of these suggestions were of the basic nature such as users should be able to post content to Google+ from Gmail, while a few suggested having an option to read comments which are posted by someone else on the posts from Gmail.
Google would be hoping that after this integration, there would be less inactiveness on its social networking site. Google plus now has a bunch of other Google services which just gets bigger with this update.