Google Takes Another Crack at Social with Google+

I’m on Google every day. For hours a day. When new logos pops up for Father’s Day or the anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, those are hard to miss. But the smaller changes are easy to notice, too: a subtle Google Docs redesign, a new menu here or there. Even a tweaked icon stands out when I see it dozens of times a day. When the white ribbon that runs across the top of all Google sites suddenly turned black, I knew something was coming.

That something was Google+, a social networking platform that aims to integrate elements of real-world social interaction into the web medium. In other words, this is Google’s apology for Buzz: a deeper, broader system for sharing media and communicating with other people. Google hopes to change the way sharing works with Circles, encourage face-to-face chatting with Hangouts, and bring people with common interest together with Sparks.


Here’s everything you need to know about Google+.


Like every new endeavor Google embarks upon, the Google+ project begins life as an invite-only beta available to a select few. That black pinstripe now adorning the Google family of sites gains a “+You” button once you’re enrolled in Google+, and from there the social networking experience begins. Google isn’t really calling it social networking, though: the official description is “real-life sharing rethought for the web.”


That sounds a little sappy, and Google’s introductory videos for the + project are a bit sappy themselves. It’s an earnest description, though: Google clearly put a lot of thought into how we interact with people in our real lives and tried to build that into a social system on the Internet. Social circles and casual hangouts inform the backbone of Google+, making it an extremely different platform than Twitter. In fact, it’s the very thing Gary Whitta was recently wishing for on This Is Only a Test: a communication tool for sending out messages to specific groups of people instead of every living soul on Twitter. This all assumes your friends are using Google+, of course.

Will they want to? Will you want to? Here are the features that make up Google+.


Circles allow you to separate out your contacts into different groups just like you would in real life. You have your friends from high school, friends from college, co-workers, family, neighbors you might invite over for dinner once a year. We interact with all of these people differently--some we share more personal information with, some we want to see more often, some we mostly just goof off with. Circles builds off that. This is hardly a new concept--other sites like Facebook have groups for interacting with different people--but Google wants to do it better, dancing the line between sharing with too few people and too many. It remains to be seen if Google+’s attractive web design and hooks into the Google ecosystem make these Circles more popular than other groups.


Sparks has Google+’s best tagline: “Nerding out. Together.” That’s exactly what it is: a system for discovering cool stuff you’re interested in, be it comic books or photography, and sharing that with the right people. Given Google’s strong background in search, this should be a powerful component of the Google+ social system. They call Sparks an “online sharing engine,” which mostly looks like an integrated Google search bar with some pretty featured links for popular topics embedded below. Think of your Sparks as a personalized Facebook stream--you’re only looking at stuff you actually care about.

Instant Upload isn’t so much a social feature as it is an extension of Google’s cross-device integration. An 
Android Google+ app will upload every photo you take on your phone to a private folder in the cloud for later sharing. You have to give it permission first--Google definitely doesn’t want to recreate the Buzz privacy debacle here. An iPhone app is also on the way.


Huddles are--seriously--just group chatrooms. Google’s apparently banking on the idea that implementation really matters when it comes to building a successful chatroom. We’re not sure if the average group of friends wants to get together into a big IM chat to plan out all their activities, but Huddles hopes to alleviate some of the stress of aligning schedules by getting everyone into a virtual room together to bang out plans. Optimistic, but they’re off to a good start with the Google+ app and web browser support. Platform agnostic access is key.

Hangouts represent Google+’s strongest core idea and perhaps its least-likely-to-succeed feature. Hangouts want to tap into that experience of spending long nights with friends doing nothing but chatting and enjoying the company of the people you care about most. Those are the nights you remember for years: not because of what you did, but because of who was with you. Google aptly realized that adult lives with adult schedules make those moments rare.


That’s a powerful experience to chase after, and Hangouts use video chats for up to 10 people to try to capture those moments. It’s an open-ended design that encourages people to stop by rather than plan get-togethers. Do people regularly do this with video chat? Some, definitely, but probably not as many as Google hopes.


Those are the basics of Google+. You can put your name down for an invitation here. And you should, because Google+ represents something different for Google. This is not a product, like Wave, that will disappear if it doesn’t perform well. Google+ represents an urgent need to add a social layer--a people layer--onto Google’s library of services. Instantly becoming the replacement for Facebook or Twitter isn’t the goal--this is the first step towards a transformed, more tightly integrated Google experience.