There, excuses list is done.
My cousin asked some family members if Google+ would rival Facebook. Actually, he asked on Google+. He might have asked on Facebook, but I haven't check it today.... So I gave my opinion--and I give it to you all.
Google has a serious nerd fanbase already--the trick is to appeal to everyone the way FB has. It's one thing to get everyone to use your search engine--it's a different thing entirely to expand that to getting nearly everyone who has an e-mail address to connect like they already do on another service. FB appealed to a smaller audience at the start, too--but it was a group of socially active, generelly tech-savy people. College students. Making the leap to widespread use was less challenged, too, because there was no serious competition.
G+ has a few things in it's court, though. Right out of the box, they have video integration--both in their Hangouts and in the integrated GChat stuff, which also has voice-only available. G+ also lets you segregate your privacy rules into smaller groups of contacts--something that is POSSIBLE for FB users but un-intuitive and a royal pain. Sparks seem to be an idea similar to StumbleUpon--where the user inputs interests and is shown websites that match up with those interests--though I still haven't played with it much. It's a great way to find stuff to share, though.
One big difficulty I see, though, is in the very way we share on G+ versus FB. There are loads of sites that allow you to easily share content to your feed on FB, as well as third party software that helps you post to multiple feeds (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, what-have-you) at once. How will this work with the option to share to certain Circles only? Will those apps that allow us to share to FB also allow us to share to G+? Will they ask us what circles to share to? They had better, in order to make any difference in the way we use G+.
As far as sharing.... Google has these +1 buttons that people can put on their sites. They show up in the +1 tab on your profile. From there you can share them.
ReplyDeleteI like this, but it is two steps... which means it will be tricky for people to actually use. I expect Google to switch it so that things you +1 show up in your stream (shared with Circles) by default, giving you the ability to change that setting...