Koz and Effect

Google+

Google+.

By now, you have it. It’s amazing how quickly this thing has taken off, be it that new car shine, or that everyone loves to bash on Facebook.

While you could debate the pros and cons of both, I figured I’d stay away from that and explain what exactly Google+ is, and maybe what Google might be trying to do.

Most of you have a @gmail.com address. It was the first thing Google launched, and we all got one. Nice enough. But what that actually got you was a google account.

This is an important realization to make. Google is, in their words, about “organizing the world’s information”, and to do that, they are rolling out services to provide you with that. Google+ is merely the latest, and it builds on a number of previous services.

Google+ is not really a new social network, in that you join it. It’s just there. Forget for a moment that you had to be invited, because soon everyone will be able to just enable it like they do every other service. When activated, Google+ does the following things:

• Creates you a profile: This is built largely off the info already available at https://profiles.google.com.
• Your friends are pulled from your google contacts (http://www.google.com/contacts)
• Building on the above, gmail and gchat are derived from those contacts.
• Posts and other items are pulled from Picasa, Buzz/Google Reader, and Blogger. (all Google systems)

So notice, right off the bat, you already have content. It’s elegant, and brilliant, and even devious. And once it goes open, you’re there. Nothing else required.

Now that being said, Google did learn something with the Buzz fiasco, in that people don’t like all of their stuff being shared spontaneously. So while you may be invited to Google+ or have it activated one day, that doesn’t mean that everything will suddenly become visible (and indeed, some people actually think that’s a detriment to its potential success)

It also means, for those of you using it, you’ll have to do some things to get it to work the way you want. Rather than going through everything step-by-step and reinventing the wheel, I’ll just point you here on what is basically a user-written user manual. Don’t be scared, it’s small and reads well.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what Google+ is as well, partictular people coming off Facebook looking to give it a try. Circles is the big one. This is an important point, so I’m going to state it plainly:

Circles are not Groups.

Let me explain. In Facebook, you could create a group and invite people into it. That doesn’t exist in Google+. Circles are meant so that you can organize your friends into different categories like you could on Facebook. Only, the category functionality on Facebook is somewhat buried now. The circles allow you to sort people so that you can switch feeds with a click, and also control what you share with whom. Anything you post, be they photos or links or whatnot, will have a box with blue icons in which you can type in the name of a person or a circle, or all of your circles. Seems complicated? Probably is, and honestly, I wonder how many people will really use that functionality (even though they’ve been clamoring for it on FB.) but there you have it.

Also. Connected accounts. Use Twitter? A blog? Facebook? Those can be linked in with Google+. One thing I see happening quickly is people not knowing which network to share and post things to; I can’t see anyone wanting to post the same link three different places. The quicker Google+ makes it easier for everyone to do this, the better. For me, this is one area that Google Reader/Buzz really shine, in that I like to share links with people for things I find, and it’s just one mouse click to flag something in my Google Reader RSS feed to share/comment on something with everyone. It’s completely replaced bookmarks for me.

So those are my notes so far. Those of you looking to add me can search for “Chris Kozlowski” easy enough. I’ll add more tips and resources on here as I find them.

Until then, enjoy. =)