Today Google announces a new suite of social tools, Google+, which includes five products: Circles, Hangouts, Instant Upload, Sparks, and Huddle. Google+ is what we were calling “Google Me” last summer. The easiest way to see what each product does is to take this tour.
The breakdown:
- Circles is a way to silo your friends by your relationship to them, i.e., the “real life” social network.
- Hangouts is group video chatrooms. You indicate you’re “hanging out” and available to talk to certain friends, and they hop in if they want.
- Instant Upload sends photos directly from your phone and shares them with the people you choose without having to tap through several sharing app buttons and controls on your device.
- Sparks appear to be saved searches for relevant web content with easy ways to share with your friends. Sounds like a social custom Google News or Google Alert.
- Huddle is a group texting product. You’re making lunch plans with 4 people, and Huddle lets you text everyone at once.
Steven Levy’s epic Wired piece describes Google’s motivations and processes behind building Google+; Dave Winer yawns. Personally I’m thrilled to see Google take on some of the harder problems around social, and I look forward to trying Hangouts and Circles in particular. While Google’s track record around social products doesn’t bode well for them, I’ll reserve further judgement until I get a shot at field-testing Google+. How about you?
13 Comments
Brice Gilbert
For younger people or people who are used to the internet this could work. However I fear that it’s just too late for anyone to compete with Facebook in what Facebook does well. Which is getting the average person (my parents) who don’t use the internet much to have another method of communication. My parents don’t care what the latest and greatest is. Once they try the first product of its kind (Email, Facebook etc.) they stick with that. The rest of us might move on, but I just feel that facebook has become the place where everyone will go and if they all don’t move on it’s sort of pointless.
cwelle
It was recently reported that FB is losing people in the US. There is a large portion of the internet population that dislikes FB. They may have an account there to interact, but its much like having a membership to a exclusive club. You may not like it, but you don’t see what is going on inside with friends that do go there without a membership. More then likely they go there because there is no other place that is good enough or where their friends or family are. If Google gets this even remotely usable without having to have a technical degree, then I see people jumping.
Justin Cardinal
Assuming these tools interconnect, I’m really surprised that there doesn’t appear to be any algorithmic assistance in creating Circles. I still don’t care for Zuckerberg, but he was right when he said people don’t want to make lists of their friends. I’d expect the success or failure of these new tools to depend on how easy it is to get started. If step one is rebuilding my social network from scratch and then manually putting everyone into Circles, I doubt people will even bother. Of course, if they use the intelligence they use in gmail when suggesting what people I might want to include on an email to help me build my Circles, I think that brings the barrier to entry way down and gives this whole thing a chance at taking off.
Jason Martin
I’d love to hear a discussion about this on TWIG.
Like anything, I think there will be a crowd for Google+, but how big will that crowd be?
Services already offered by Facebook (picture sharing, friend lists and chat for example) are unlikely to be catalysts for change. So what’s new or better here?
But, I’m a Google fanboy, so I’d try it out. Huddle looks interesting.
jaredrbyer
These products are social and the key to social products working is to get everyone using them.
I heavily use Google products, but what Google has never been good at is getting the type of adoption rate for its services that Facebook has for example.
Gmail is a great product, but if it only worked with other people using gmail it would be useless to me.
I look forward to TWiG’s view on this and getting to play with it myself. However what I do see doesn’t appear to be compelling enough to a broad enough audience to make it useful.
I hope I am wrong.
Chuck
I think that your tweet to @mattcutts summed it up entirely….”Google!! Field test the CRAP out of G+ before public release.” I think that Google has the arsenal of tools at their disposal to make this work. However, their track record, in the social realm has not been too good. They need to make sure that this is well tested and that it not only works, but HAS to be better than anything that FB already can do. The masses are not going to move ANYWHERE unless it is compelling for them to do so. In order for that to happen, the product must be superior.
From what I saw so far, it is a good start. I certainly would move from FB if there was another option. So far, there isn’t. Hell, I even tried Buzz (for about a week) and then back on FB I was.
I hope they can do it!!!!
Kaelri
At first glance, I’m worried that Google+ is going to put itself in competition with other Google services, rather than complement them.
For example, Sparks looks like it has a lot of overlap with Google Reader, but if it doesn’t integrate with those services, then as a user, I’m going to be forced to choose between them – and I suspect I’ll be motivated to go with the Reader I know and use (to say nothing of the time I’ve invested adding my feeds and customizing the interface with userscripts).
Likewise, if Huddle doesn’t integrate with Google Voice, then it becomes just another bookmark that I’m going to forget about when it would otherwise come in handy. Likewise if Hangouts isn’t accessible through Google Talk’s existing video protocol.
There’s a lot of great ideas here, and I can see myself using several of them even without the integration I described. But that (forgive the sting) is also how I felt about Wave. For webs services, connectivity is currency, and even when great tools exist in isolation, they evaporate and die.
So, I hope I’m wrong. 🙂
Fred McHale
I have been using it since I received an invite this morning. I am finding it a nice change from facebook. I like that I can switch the Streams view between my various Circles as well the integration with Picasa, Latitude (guessing that is what the are using for “check ins”). It is also nice to have the Android app for it on day one. Unfortunately I have yet to play with Huddle or Hangout as only one other person in my Circles is field testing.
Andrew Cathrow
It sounds like it’s going to be interesting, but once again google shafts the paying customers.
Plus and Profiles won’t be available for paying google apps customers.
It’s sad that I have to sign up for another google account to use the service.
Joseph
Thank God! From someone who hates Facebook, I am looking forward to getting my friends and I together. I just wish WAVE was part of this launch. It might have had a better chance and the market could decide it’s uses.
rrrrrichard
I long ago ditched FB. But I’m not sure I care about G+. I’m really sick of invitation only — Facebook didn’t ask me to wait indefinitely to get in. And half-assed support for Google Apps accounts is ultimately going to drive me away from Google completely. They _really_ have to fix the Google Apps problem.
Brice Gilbert
I think this xkcd best summarizes would could happen.
http://xkcd.com/918/
Jamie
You guys sounded like you were having an awesome time “hanging out” on TWiG. I have a Facebook account for the sole purpose of my wife being able to select me as being her husband in her profile’s relationship status. Everything else is set to private and turned off. I have one facebook friend. To be honest I’m terrified of it.
Facebook feels like a floodgate waiting to take control of my spare time if I let it. Google+ sounds more like a collection of tools that I can use how I want to, when I want to. I’m really excited to use it for group video chat with my sis and dad.