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It was momentous because, in July 2007, I wrote: “I’m on Facebook, now what do I do?” And I’ve been waiting ever since for Google to better it.
Finally, it seems, Google have managed to put together a social networking site that might actually work, and I spent the weekend playing with it. The predominate question I kept asking myself was: “what will Google+ be able to do for my business?”
Google has always had the potential to build a powerhouse of a social networking service but has always managed to get it wrong. Buzz was a direct rip-off of Twitter and the aborted Wave was technically brilliant in every way, but ultimately flawed because nobody understood what it was for.
Yet Google has an excellent e-mail communication service in GMail, a chat tool in Talk, a photo-hosting and sharing system in Picasa that is every bit a rival to Flickr, Places is their business profile page that is longer established than Facebook’s Places fan pages, not to mention superior from every angle, and they have a location-based check-in tool in Latitude that can better both Facebook’s and Foursquare’s service.
Then there’s event-management through Calendar, document manager through Documents, news reading through News, money through Finance. Simply prefix all of those with Google and it already exists...
Each of these components are brilliant standalone tools with which to communicate with friends, share photographs, write blogs or tell everybody where you are. I’ve long wondered why Google has never grouped them all together and taken the fight to Facebook sooner.
With the launch of Google+ they might have started to get there. Immediately, I like the service - there’s an overwhelming sense that this is Facebook for Grown Ups. The interface is clean, white and very ‘Googlish’. It will have a sense of familiarity to anybody who uses it.
Google has recently had a redesign of all their services so that they all meld in to one and the navigation bar at the top of Plus is now the same across all their products. You can quickly hop from one Google service to another within your Google+ home page, and if you are in one of Google’s other services when a friend comments on one of your status updates the Facebookesque notification lights up for you to check without having to interrupt what you were working on.
Other features are similarly slick. I spent hours happily double-clicking my profile pic because it rotated the main picture through older ones on each click; it’s a fun feature that, whilst gimmicky, shows Google has thought through their product this time and that thoughtfulness shows up in each feature they have implemented.
Circles allows you to group your contacts in to different, well, ‘circles’, be they friends, acquaintances, family, or any other name you wish to add. When you make a status update, you can then choose whether it should be public, in a Twitter way, or limited to only people who are your friends on Google+ in a Facebook way, or you can narrow it right down to only the people who are in your ‘Pub Friends’ circle.
Google also recently launched their +1 button. You may have seen this cropping up across the web and against Google search results, and it is their version of the Facebook Like button. Only, this time, if you +1 a site on the web then when a friend searches Google for something similar it’ll show up in their search results that you liked this site too. Be wary of which sites you +1...!
This is where Google may hit a stumbling block. Whilst Facebook works hard to ensure the privacy of its users, Google isn’t beyond collecting data and using it to its own advantage. It remains to be seen just how private your use of Google+ might be, but early signs appear good.
Still, for businesses the future could be bright. If you have a Google Place page for your pub it will invariably be the first site that Google refers to when somebody is searching for your type of establishment on, say, their Maps pages. It also allows users to rate and even comment on their visit to your pub in a manner similar to TripAdviser.
The accompanying Google+ app for smart phones is every bit as slick and grown up as the new site is and, when checking in at a venue, users can easily and quickly rate it and review it; compared to Facebook’s fan page Places service, which only allows users to check in and click Like, this can have huge customer promotion benefits for pub and restaurant type venues.
So, Google Plus. It’s a smartly dressed social networking site that will appeal more to businessmen than it will teenagers and its phone app is a sophisticated blend of Facebook, FourSquare and Twitter. But I can’t help think it’s a little bit too late to the party and therefore might not win the girl.
After all, on the surface it doesn’t appear to offer anything new over what we all already have and, as is so often the way with new Google products, it is currently only available as Invite Only, a sure-fire way of attracting all the geeks and nerds but turning away the beautiful masses Google so desperately want.
It also doesn’t have a Hollywood blockbuster movie to its name.
But, like so many things Google, it could easily worm its way steadily in to our daily use via osmosis - the fact that it is already woven in to everything Google that we already use is probably its most successful attribute.
Sign up and watch it grow...
Mark Daniels is licensee at the Tharp Arms in Chippenham, near Newmarket.
