Will it script?

Google+ is a young social network from Google. It has the possibility of becoming something good, but in its current state it just isn’t. The first, and most severe, problem with Google+ is that it lacks personality and it is hard to define its purpose. Sure, it’s got a few things going for it:

• A clean interface
• An easy way of deciding what to share with what circle
• Messenger
• Hangouts

Google+ is easy on the eye, no question about it. Also the possibility of choosing what circles to share each post with is pretty nifty, and its easy to use works. There is another problem with the circles though, which I’ll come back to. Messenger is great, we had a thread at work where everyone talked about pretty much everything (15 people or so in the thread). I hear a lot of great things about Hangouts as well, since they seem to enable communication in a fun way. But then there are the downsides:

• A not so good iOS app
• No way to integrate with the service
• No integrations with other services
• Who goes in what circle?
• Near impossible to pick up where you left off

The iOS app in itself is incredibly annoying. Google insists on not making native iOS apps. Instead they bundle a web app inside what looks like a native app, which has several annoying behaviors. For instance you get logged out every time there is an update to the app. This is especially annoying if you use 2 factor authentication, since you have to get your second token ready as well. A real native app would have been able to use an application specific password, or even O-Auth for authentication. To make matters worse, the iOS app resets all stream settings every update, so if you’re used to looking at different circles than Circles, Incoming and Nearby, prepare to be annoyed.

Lets say you’re using an app (for example Instapaper) and reading something you want to share. There is no way to do this from within that app. Twitter or Facebook has this functionality at its core, and it is easy to share content on these sites. Google+ on the other hand seems to imply that you should only use Google products (such as Google reader).

Likewise, if you find something interesting on Google+ while not using the web interface it takes a lot of work to send it to Instapaper (or to share it on Twitter).

Circles, in theory, is a great way of separating who sees what. In reality though, it is not all that great. Here’s quoting Peter Pachal at PCMag:

The main problem with Google Circles is that it’s tedious. While I agree that most people separate their contacts into various groups in real life, doing so in a social network is a chore. It’s one of the reasons we have different social networks (LinkedIn for work, Facebook for friends, etc.). Asking people to do this kind of organizing proactively, on a single network, vastly overestimates the patience of Web users. Sure, some people are very organized and left-brained (like the engineers who created Google+), with spotless inboxes and well-maintained lists of contacts, but my feeling is that the vast majority aren’t. And of all the things that have turned people off of Facebook over the years, the lack of focus on friend-organizing tools isn’t one of them.

[…]

People want things easy, and Google Circles isn’t easy. It puts the burden on users to take the time to think about each and every contact and put them in a specific bucket. To use the feature effectively, users will certainly have to create new circles, and that requires even more thought. After using Google+ for a few minutes last night, I was often unsure which Circles to put certain people in and, more to the point, which to leave them out of. And what if you create a new Circle that should include some of the people in other Circles you already have? You have to go back over all your contacts and reorganize. Ugh.

Google, and later Facebook, also introduced an incredibly annoying feature: reordering your feed. What this means is that certain posts in your feed will be moved to the top in order to get your attention. In the case of Google+ the posts that are moved are those that have gotten new content (such as a new comment) after you interacted with them . This may seem like a good concept but it has one serious flaw: it forces the user to remember what posts he/she has seen already in order to spot new content. This is likely a bigger problem for users interacting with a lot of posts since a large portion of their stream get crowded by old posts. Even without the post reordering, the stream does nothing to help the user to pick up where he/she left off. Instead you are presented with the latest posts, sorted in descending order. The user has to remember what post he/she saw last. Compare this with most Twitter clients, who positions you on the tweet you read last (this can also be synchronized cross clients by using the service Tweetmarker. Google should know how to solve this efficiently, since they already do this with Google Reader.

These are, in my book, pretty much showstoppers. You don’t develop a Social Network as a product that live in its own gated community. There are a lot of great stuff on the internet, and Google largely fails to make use of it. Google seem to want to keep its users in, so they don’t consume content on sites that aren’t part of their private hemisphere. This is even more apparent when factoring in their latest move, including results from Google+ with Google Search.