The Twitter stream started up this morning with a favoured few people talking about their initial reactions to Google+. This is the new Facebook competitor from Google. I am not on the Google+ trials. There is a modicum of envy in this post but not too much.
I want to play with Google+ as a new toy. Something that will allow me to drop into conversation “Oh haven’t you got it yet? I’ll see if I can get you an invite” 🙂
However there is also an element of trepidation. “Oh no not another social networking platform”.
Clearly Google wants a competitor to Facebook that will stop any erosion of marketing money away from its own coffers. Not so far back it tried Google Wave, the new email experience. As I recall it was meant to be a step in the Facebook direction. That product was far too clunky and I dropped it very quickly. I don’t know anyone that uses it now.
The initial comments from the cognoscenti (ie those give trial accounts) seem favourable but notwithstanding this I truly hope that it will be easy to populate a friends list. I spent a long time tracking down old friends on Facebook and the idea of having to rebuild the list on a new platform seems daunting to the point of not wanting to do it. Somehow though I can’t see Facebook just letting Google extract a whole data set in order to make it easier for them to compete.
My networked life is now partitioned thus:
- Twitter is my main means of communication – to the extent that my next batch of business cards will only read “@tref”. It’s all anyone should need to find me.
- Facebook is constrained to people I actually know and in truth I now only use it to keep in touch with my kids
- LinkedIn – I have changed my views on LinkedIn. This site has evolved and I can see that it could be quite a useful business tool. I don’t use it much and in fact I don’t see why a super platform that allowed me to have a single list of friends but enables me to partition them into work and play should not be possible. Might Google+ be this? Don’t know yet but it would get around the need to have too many sites to manage.
Otherwise the other communications methods available to me are Microsoft Exchange email for work and gmail for trefor.net (play!?”). My phone integrates both these platforms including contacts. It can also do the same for Facebook and LinkedIn. I already find multiple address book entries an issue though. Using a single social networking platform would get around this.
So there you go. I want Google+ to be Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all in one giving me a single platform to manage everything including my emails.
Who thinks this is what Google+ is going to be? I guess we will find out soon enough. You can put a request to be a trialist here.
2 replies on “Is #Google+ going to be the answer to my social media management problems?”
It took people a long time to, often through trial and error, whittle down Facebook as their preferred social network of choice and I can’t see Google’s incredibly late attempt to catch up as being able to gain any significant traction; unless they find some way to spam or otherwise force us into adopting it (they’ll probably try something like that).
On the other hand I do like its solution to partitioning contacts into specific groups and thus avoiding your personal clutter from being visible to all. Facebook could easily copy this and thus by itself such a feature is not strong enough. Still, Apple has proven time and time again that you can make something sell that hasn’t previously worked (tablets and Smartphone’s), so perhaps Google can do something similar here.
I suppose, being in the business of the internet and all, that we should give it a bash.
I don’t think it will be for me!
I Waved goodbye to Buzz 😉
I don’t do MyFace etc.
But others could well find it suits them.
Google’s other Introductions – ‘Plus1’ & ‘Black Bar’
I love Google, but do wish they would live up to their mantra ‘do no evil’ a bit more!
There are lots of people that just like Google’s clean and simple Search.
I don’t want fade/instant/+1/Preview/etc. – it’s great that Google are trying new things but they would make ‘more friends’ (social sic) if they opened up people’s preferences/settings so they could control more functionality and opt out of stuff they don’t want!
Google have asked for some feedback on these new introductions and it isn’t very favourable:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?hl=en&tid=6b698ff5a134894f