Google Plus, Minus
Thoughts after poking around Google+ last night (thanks, JC). Summary: while the micro is right, the macro is still up in the air.
Pluses
Details. Clean UI, basic functionality all there. It’s clear lots of work has been put into this project — definitely not a half-baked public beta like Buzz / Wave. It even works decently in Safari on the iPad / iPhone.
Circles may allow me to finally find the elusive balance between friends / acquaintances / followers — the range between personal privacy and a fire hose aimed at your head. Also like the up-front controls for sharing to a specific circle right when you make a post.
The now-ubiquitous black bar over Google properties displays a Google+ notification number in red. That alone means I’ll check Google+ regularly.
At best, I get the same warm feeling once generated by FriendFeed, which I spent some time on until it was bought by Facebook.
Minuses
But… there’s a somber inevitability about the whole enterprise. Google+ is a necessary project in order to counter Facebook’s increasing dominance — people spending more time within that walled garden instead of the “open” web where Google’s ads thrive. Google+ is also needed to bring all their myriad projects together to avoid fragmentation (Yahoo!).
In a sense, this is an infrastructure project, like Adobe unifying Macromedia’s products under the Creative Suite banner, or… bringing mass transit to Los Angeles. Yeah, boring.
The Google of old won search by providing a clearly better product — accurate results, fast — with a super clean, laughably minimal interface of just a search box on white. Google+ is notably far from that. It’s challenging, full of features, places to get lost. “Original Recipe” Google was a breath of fresh air, looked like two guys in a dorm made it overnight, and yet — through the secret spices of that search algorithm — was a better search engine.
Google+ reflects the work of thousands of designers and engineers, yet it’s not clearly better than Facebook.
It’s the emotional, unbottle-able difference between passion and duty — Google has to build this, but I don’t get the sense that they really want to. Using it is like, oh, here’s the feature from Foursquare, here’s one from Twitter, and this one will really make Skype nervous. Check, check, check.
So at present, Google+ is an alternative to Facebook with no users. But even if they manage to get a significant user base, that still means parity, and then we’re in for several years of volleys back and forth, adding and copying features — like IE vs. Netscape or the ongoing iOS vs. Android battle. Even if Google+ catches on, it is the first salvo in a long war.
For the time being, the larger answer remains unanswered: “Why should I use Google+ instead of Facebook?” And for most, that “Facebook already has everyone I know on it” — is a solid answer.