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Thinking of Creating a Business Profile on Google+? Better Wait.

Posted on June 30, 2011 by jessestay

Danny Sullivan posted a great critique of Google+ today – the fact that in order to create a business profile on Google+, you have to go through the motions of creating a user profile on Google, which includes putting an age (of which is a minimum 18 years old at the moment to use Google+). It turns out Google doesn’t want users to do this though, as Bradley Horowitz, from the Google+ team responded with this:

“Let me be clear – and I’m sorry if this wasn’t obvious – we are not currently supporting brands, organizations, and non-human entities in the Google+ field trial. While we should have been clearer about this, there are some fields in the registration form (asking for a first name, a last name, an age and a gender) that indicate that.

Supporting these non-human entities is an obviously great feature – we have no allergy to it at all! It’s just not part of the system we are currently testing.

The field trial has limitations that I know are frustrating – ranging from lack of “obvious” features to inability to invite the people you most want to share with… We weren’t kidding when we said this was early and a test… and if the product leads to more frustration than you can bear, then that’s understandable and I promise that you will see fast and meaningful progress… and you can jump back in when we meet your bar for minimum viable functionality.

+Danny Sullivan, there is good news also on the way regarding namespace – it’s something I believe you will like, but sadly it’s not here yet either.
Apologies again for the frustrating experience.”

Currently only a couple of brands – namely, Mashable and TheNextWeb, have tried this, but it may be a wise choice to wait until Google releases an official solution for brands.

Looking at experience from Facebook, many brands were left scrambling to create their own Facebook Pages after they had done similar with user profiles back in around 2007 or 2008. There are still brands trying to convert their Facebook Profiles over to Pages even today.

So if you’re considering a brand presence on Google+, for the moment, it might be best spent just learning about the service and getting your users and fans using it and promoting your brand there. It’s also unclear whether Google will start removing accounts that do this, so be careful. It’s great to see Google coming out and providing a roadmap on this – let’s hope they make this even more clear in other places so others can know as well. For now we just have to sit tight!

The Power of Google+: Privacy "Circles" the Entire Experience

Posted on June 30, 2011 by jessestay

Facebook has always had one strength that no other social network (other than perhaps FriendFeed) has seemed to fully get: The fact that you could add friends to lists, and target your updates so only those lists, and specific people you chose, can see the updates you post. I share this in my presentations often – it’s Facebook’s best kept secret. The problem is just that – it’s currently buried in the Facebook interface and not many people know about it.

With Google+ it’s different though. The entire experience is built around its equivalent to Facebook lists: Circles. From the very beginning you have to choose who will be in what circle, and every time you add a friend it automatically pops up your list of circles with little to no effort. To “friend” someone, you don’t friend them – you add them to one of your lists. It’s that simple.

Not just that, but the default privacy setting on Google+ is nothing. If I just post on Google+ without saying where I want it to go, no one but myself will see it. I have to specify a Circle just for anyone to see this. It forces me to make a conscious decision before I post as to who will be seeing my updates. I think it’s genius!

With Facebook, the friendship is always 2-way. This forces a much more intimate environment, but a closed one as a result. No one can just “follow” me and get the updates I want them to see. I have to let everyone into my network, and as a result, they have to let me into theirs. As a result this does cause closer relationships and more of a social contract, but it also keeps me from posting updates that Google and other 3rd party bots can index, or that just anyone can follow.

On Google+ it’s not that way – they take more of a Twitter approach, allowing anyone to “follow” anyone, no matter what. In a sense, this puts Google Circles at a greater risk to putting Twitter out of business, as it takes the Twitter follow model and lists, and adds privacy settings to it, using those lists to make that happen. I bet we’ll see Twitter do this in the near future as a response to Google Circles.

Regardless, Google Circles, alongside a “follow” strategy removes the need for any type of Brand page like Facebook Pages, and allows the poster to completely decide who, and what sees the posts that they share on Circles. Not only that but they are 100% conscious of those decisions the entire way (as long as someone doesn’t reshare their private posts to a more public stream, which is possible right now if you don’t consciously turn off the ability to reshare, which is buried).

The biggest thing Google did right this time around is they did what no other social network was doing. They took privacy, and put it smack in the face of the user to make their own conscious decisions. There’s no avoiding Circles in Google+. It greets you every step of the way and that’s quite a pleasant thing to see in a world of growing privacy concerns.

I’m excited to see where Google goes with this. I’m extremely excited to see how Facebook and Twitter compete in this new game. The cool thing about it all is the game is no longer focused on who has your social graph or your content (although that is certainly a part) – it is now about who has the best privacy controls and that’s a great battle to sit between as a user.

As always, you can follow me on Google+ at https://plus.google.com/107833107845497630206.

Google+ Just Beat Facebook to the Future

Posted on June 29, 2011 by jessestay

Facebook’s entire purpose has been to get to this moment. The moment where they have brought your close friends and family into every element of your browsing experience, following you to every place you go. Allowing you to share everything you do, everywhere you are. They’ve already been rumored to be working on a much stronger mobile strategy, bringing Facebook’s powerful platform to the apps you use on the mobile devices you carry, to every place you go. It’s that which has had Google scared and hinging employee bonuses on the success of their social program this year. However, it seems in one fell swoop Google just beat Facebook to their own game. Google+ is that good, and it immediately puts them ahead of Facebook. Here’s why.

Google has a few things Facebook does not yet have. First, they have search. Google has slowly been integrating a few features into search, making search a much more social experience. Second, Google now has a pretty widely used browser (Chrome). Google even has TV experiences and desktop (Chromebook) experiences with even their own operating system. Lastly, Google has Android – the largest smart phone experience on the planet right now.

Facebook Should be Shaking in Their Boots

I was given access to Google+ today (sorry, no invites available yet unfortunately), and Facebook should be shaking in their boots figuring out a strategy to keep up. It’s that good. For the first time, a social network aside from Facebook has come up with a way to fully integrate privacy controls (called Circles in Google+) throughout the entire experience. For the first time, I’m excited about another social network that could potential see me flocking away from Facebook in the future.

It’s inevitable, whether I actually fully leave Facebook or not (I likely won’t, but never say never), that I’ll be using Google+ regardless due to the number of integration points in the Google experiences it touches. You won’t be able to avoid Google+ in the future – it’s impossible. I can’t say that for Facebook right now.

Google+ Branding

Google has done some amazing branding with the whole experience, too. Remember the +1 button (seen on every post on this Blog)? There is no “like” on Google+. In place of the “like” is a branded +1 button that looks just like the +1 buttons you see here.

In fact, Google has integrated their branding throughout the entire experience, making it a unique enough experience you’ll want to try, and you’ll feel it to be a slightly different experience than that you get from Facebook or even Twitter. For instance, in Facebook and Twitter you use “@” to mention someone. On Google, it’s “+”, furthering their branding experience.

If you use other Google social products such as Buzz or Google Reader (excluding Orkut), Google+ automatically imports elements of your social graph into the experience. It brings in chat from Gmail (and on the Android device even adds an element called “Huddles”). It adds automatic news discovery called “Sparks”. It even integrates Google Video in an experience they call a “hangout”, allowing you to collaborate as groups over live video chat, something Facebook and other social networks do not do.

Throughout the entire experience a “Feedback” button in the lower right greets you, and they use some pretty innovative code to automatically take a screenshot of the page you’re on when you submit your feedback (I hope they share how they did this at some point, because JavaScript screenshots are not possible to my knowledge). The whole thing gives you a feeling that Google is listening, and that they care, something their competitors have serious issues with right now – I hope this stays around.

The Power is in the Permeation and Integration Points!

But the power of all this isn’t even where it’s at right now, it’s the fact that all this does, to an extent, and will even more in the future integrate with all things Google touches. I just went and ordered an Android Nexus S for this very reason – Google has the potential to deeply integrate Google+ throughout the entire mobile experience and platform, bringing your friends on Google+ to everything you touch, with privacy controls the entire way (through Circles).

One element of the new Google+ which you should already be seeing is a common toolbar that spans across all Google products. Well, in Google+, this toolbar starts to show notifications of new comments and likes across all of Google. It allows you to share more items to your Google+ activity stream, straight from the toolbar. The entire Google+ experience has been integrated throughout the entire Google platform.

Now imagine this same toolbar experience being put into the browser, through Chrome. Very quickly your friends will cross-pollenate the entire web browsing experience, integrating not only with the Google products you interact with, but with every web site you cross. The cool thing about it will be that websites will not even need to integrate Google+ into their experience for the experience to happen – the browser will automatically bring these things into your web browsing experience.

Google hasn’t yet reached their full potential with this yet, but if you ask me, integration-wise, they are already ahead of Facebook. Just a few more steps and it’s going to be pretty hard to catch up – I’d really like to see what Facebook has up their sleeves in response to all this (as I’m sure they haven’t been clueless on what Google is doing).

In the meantime, can I have dibs on writing Google+ Application Development for Dummies?

You can follow me when you have access over here. In the meantime, click the link anyway and you’ll get an idea of what a Google+ profile looks like.