Google Plus
Obviously haven’t tried it out yet, but did wander around the demo. Am intrigued for a few reasons:
- Circles sounds genuinely useful; I have never totally gone all-in with Facebook because it puts all your “friends” in one basket. Circles allows you to corral people into different niches, say work / friends / online acquaintances / cat nerds etc.
- Sparks — filtering your interests from the relentless info stream — might work like FriendFeed search did, and we really need filters to cut through the fire hose as of yesterday.
- According to this Wired article, Andy Hertzfeld (from the early Mac days) was involved in the UI.
- Google gets that this is their one last hope to stave of off Facebook — this could be as pivotal a moment as Bill Gates’ “Internet Tidal Wave” 1995 memo that made the Internet Microsoft’s number one priority. For Google, the “tidal wave” is Facebook / social — and the Google+ internal title “Emerald Sea” is all too appropriate.
That said, who knows if Google+ will eventually succeed. Google’s trying to layer a product over a myriad of fragmented properties, they may simply be too geeky to get social, Facebook is ubiquitous, and the weak execution of Wave / Buzz means Google+ is starting from a place of skepticism.
But the drive is there, and that tends to create great products. I look forward to checking it out, eventually.
PS: It better work on the iPhone / iPad.
I’m all for competition, but I admit that I’m on the skeptical side of the fence for this one.
I’ll try it out, of course, but I think a lot of what I need to know can be summed up by the name of the service “Google+”. What horrible branding (imho), much akin to the “+1″ (like button) branding which sounds more like something at home in a geeky game of D&D than the kind of terminology that would roll of the tongue of your average internet user.
But I guess we’ll see how it pans out. Google is might and has done a lot of great things, but can they do social?
I found Dave Winer’s take to be pretty interesting as well:
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/06/28/googleYawn.html
Yeah I saw a nerdy Slashdot comment that at the very least, Google could have called it “Google ++” as a nod to the programmers.