Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Google+, Cure for What Ails FB?

Now that I have spent a whole 2 days on Google+ I am still learning about it. But what is interesting to me is the sense of hive.

Google gets the hive mentality. Call it social, collaboration, whatever, but Google gets it, and can do it, because Facebook is really one uni dimensional. Sure everything inside Facebook may feed it, but that is never how (I feel when I use it. I feel like it was cobbled together.

Google+, or G+ as some call it, still does not have somethings needed, like RSS feeds or ways to suck in blog posts, but it does an excellent job of finding all your "stuff" and making it easily accessible. And downloadable. yes you can download your posted items, to a point. But it is possible. Something Facebook is fighting now.

The thing you may hear so much about is the Circles. Dante is probably ecstaticly happy. Circles allow you to quickly follow just your family, friends, work, or whoever you add to a Circle...without the clutter of everyone/everything else. yes there is the river flowing of streams but the ability to break it up into tributaries that you control is probably the number one reason people are loving G+. I know for me this is a great reason to use it. I rarely use Facebook, even though I only have friends there, but really I don't care about your politics people.

What is also interesting is you can search for someone and add them, nothing about how do I know this person or what's their email(sorry Linkedin), just, yes I want to follow them. Very Twitter like. and it works well because how else would I or you get to interact with various Entrepreneurs or thought leaders otherwise?

Will G+ kill Twitter? Perhaps in time. But for now, Facebook serves a few purposes, mostly around calendar, meetings and events for me. But little else. Ok, the Birthday thing is nice too.

So will Facebook fight back? Will Twitter or Linkedin? Will they embrace and extend rather than fight and exclude? Let's check in after 90 days and see shall we?

2 comments:

  1. I am probably seeing the emperors new clothes (or lack there of).

    Functionally the only difference between FB and G+ is that FB has horrible spammy apps and hides your ability to privacy.

    Other then that, FB can already do functionally what G+ does, but uses a different UI experience in which to do it.

    I don't like FB, and G+ is certainly has a better user experience, but nothing ground breaking that I can see yet.

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  2. @Anon, I beg to differ than there is no differences.
    Perhaps because I am not and never was a fan of FB that I am less familiar with where these things sit. The ability to only see certain people's inputs is a main draw to G+ over FB.
    Not saying it is genius and the end all be all but it is a different feel to it. My experience with Novell's Vibe which is similar to G+ also shows different views.
    One problem has been Twitter is limited to 140 characters and this stops that problem AND makes FB things I and others prefer to use, the focus, instead of stupid games and other useless items.

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