Search Engine Giant Google is not being complacent, in fact, it has opted for the dynamic path and is changing select features of its recently launched social media network Google Plus based on user feedback.
This indicates that Google has well learned the lessons from its failures – Buzz and Wave, and, realizes that it just cannot sit back and watch what it has created grow viral without timely and much needed intervention.
In his google + account post, Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Social at Google confirmed, “there is a lot of criticism for Google+. Not only that, but before the end of the week we should start seeing changes to address those criticisms.
On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, Google Product Manager working on Google+ Profiles said that based on the feedback from users they had introduced a privacy feature in Google+ Profiles. This means that you will be able to set the privacy setting of your gender on Google+ Profile just as you control other information about yourself.
If you opt for privacy setting of your gender, Google+ will address you with the universal “they” or “theirs” instead of ‘His and “her”. For eg., Frances has added you to ‘their’ circles. Though grammatically incorrect, Haugen said that they were more concerned with privacy rather than syntax.
You can view Haugen’s YouTube on the subject below:
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Geek.com extracted a list of comments Gundotra’s post received, most of which have multiple +1 votes and they are as below:
- Ability to modify circles a post is shared with after posting it
- Reading sparks and +1 comments in the Android app
- Lifting of the 5000 circle cap (really?)
- The ability to overlap circles
- Option of a circle that doesn’t show up in your stream
- Menu follows you down the stream as you scroll
- Easy private messaging option including to person who starts a thread
- Google+ app for other platforms (WP7)
- Blocking working 100% of the time
- Easy way to merge circles
- Sharing and refresh updates in the Android app
- Link to hide all comments again after you’ve clicked to show all
- Better integration of Google Chat with Google+
- Fix issues with instant upload for photos
- Ability to share with all circles, but with an “except” option
- Ability to share Google Docs and Calendar with circles
- Revamp Google Reader to make sharing easier
- File-sharing integration
- Nested comments
- Addition of hash tags to aid searching
As is clear from the above most of the requests are for more control and more integration with other Google services. There also seems to be a stress on the Android App to be improved quickly.
Gundotra’s assurance that Google+ would be working on their feedback before the week is out would be sweet music to the users’ ears but could spell bad news for Facebook who now has a serious competitor in the social network space.