Google seems to have got it right at last! After the disastrous Google Wave, Open Social and the Google Buzz, its latest social network endeavor Google+ seems to be a winning product. When unveiled, Google+ was viewed skeptically By many. Jason Hiner of ZDNet was one of them.
Hiner says in a ZDNet blog post, “I was extremely skeptical. Still, Facebook is so malignant in terms of privacy and such a mess to use and configure that I was more than happy to give Google+ a try.”
Hiner presumed that Google+ would be a ‘few weeks wonder’ but acknowledges that he was wrong. Commending Google on their decision to let the Press and technology industry insiders into the Google+ system, Hiner says, “It was a wise move considering that they would be writing about Google+.”
Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of Social and the head guy in charge of Google+ said, “We chose the initial seed very carefully. We wanted a lot of diversity, so we have people that represent over 42 of the world’s languages. We are trying to really test the product, make sure that we meet people’s privacy expectations, that the systems are working, and that we can scale. We will slowly grow that initial seed as we are ready.”
The other Google executive running the Plus project, Bradley Horowitz, added,“Field trial is the right term. That’s not a euphemism. There’s a lot of rough edges in there and a lot of learning we have to do. The feedback we got in the first 24 hours is tremendous.”
Even with its rough edges and without the masses of humanity having access to Google+, the core experience is pretty powerful, and it’s easy to see where Google is going with this.
Heaping praise on Google+ Hiner continues, “As I wrote over the weekend while diving into Google+, the most attractive part is how easy it is to find, add, and organize your friends (I cited that as the main reason you won’t hate Google+). The friend issue is the heart of all social networks, although it’s so obvious that it’s often overlooked. In fact, Twitter still isn’t very good at it, Facebook is a little better, but both of them now look like neophytes compared to the way Google+ does it.”
The friend feature on Google+ is called “Circles,” and it turns out to be an intuitive mashup of friending (from Facebook) and following (from Twitter). Circles are basically sets of friends that you can drag and drop into groups, mirroring your existing social circles — Family & Friends, Colleagues, Local Techies, etc. — rather than just the one big lump of friends you have on Facebook that can result in moments of “worlds colliding,” since you have to share all of your updates with all of your friends. On Google+, you can selectively send updates to different circles, and you can quickly click between the news streams of your different circles.
You can also make circles for people you don’t necessarily know but are interested in following their updates (e.g. Tech Journalists, Famous Engineers, Web Celebrities, etc.). This is where Google+ echoes Twitter, because people don’t have to follow you back in order for you to add them to one of your Circles. At that point, you’ll see all of their public updates, and most of these folks make the majority of their updates public in order to be seen by more people (it’s the whole social media narcissism rigmarole, and it has already transplanted itself on Google Plus).
Hiner says that the real killer feature to Circles in Google+ is how easy it is to find and add friends. “Everywhere you see a user’s name or avatar you can simply mouse over it, click “Add to Circles,” and then select which circle to add them to. On Twitter, it took me about three years to find about 200 really interesting people (mostly in technology and the media) worth following. It took me less than three days to find that many on Google Plus. Of course, most of them are the same people, so Google+ has the advantage of speed by letting us quickly re-coagulate our existing social graph on the new service.”