Google+: What the Critics Are Saying About the New Social Network

Whether Google says so or not, Google+ is a direct shot at Facebook, a social networking project that attempts, from the ground up, to let users control who sees what. But building a new social network in the Facebook era isn't easy--even for Google--so it's not surprising that experts and critics are at once excited and skeptical.

If you have no idea what Google+ is, check out PCWorld's hands-on impressions and list of notable features. Otherwise, here's a rundown of what people are saying so far about Google+:

Feeling the Love

Mark Sullivan, PCWorldHere at PCWorld, Megan Geuss and Mark Sullivan were impressed with the service. "Google wants "Google+" to rival its number one arch nemesis--Facebook, and by the looks of things the search giant may have a fighting chance," they wrote, but wondered whether Google can succeed at pulling people away from Facebook.

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones came to a similar conclusion:

"As for me, I've enjoyed the couple of hours I've spent on this new network--but I'm not convinced I will be spending a lot more time there until I can be sure of finding the same stream of news, gossip, fun and trivia that I now experience on Facebook and Twitter," he wrote.

TechCrunch's MG Siegler likes Google+ enough to keep using it:

"Overall, I'm impressed by Google+ after day one," he wrote. "Of course, like many, I also had fairly low expectations of anything Google tried to do in the social sphere after Wave and Buzz. Still, I used Google+ for hours and kept coming back. And I have a desire to come back tomorrow. That's never a bad thing."

MG Siegler, TechCrunchSiegler noted that many aspects of Google+ still need work. The Circles concept, in which users drop their contacts into big categories like "Friends" and "Family," makes sense, but it's not always clear who sees what, especially when random people start commenting on something you've shared with a friend, he said.

Over at GigaOM, Om Malik doesn't see a threat to Facebook in Google+, but says it could be a danger to other messaging and communication services. The "Hangout" video chat feature in Google+, which supports up to 10 users, he said, could be devastating to Skype. "I personally think Skype Video can easily be brought to its knees by Google Plus' Hangout," he wrote. "And even if Google+ fails, Google could easily make Hangout part of the Google office offering."

Not Feeling the Love

For starters, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land doesn't like the name:

Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land"Google+? Google+! I can't even question or exclaim about the bad name without it looking bad in writing," he writes. "Seriously, I'm cursing whoever made the final decision to go with Google+ as a name. Wasn't the Google +1 sharing service bad enough?"

Meanwhile, user interface designer UXBoy noticed how similar to Facebook the Google+ interface looks. He placed them side-by-side, so you can judge for yourself.

Dave Winer of Scripting News isn't pulling punches. In a blog post titled "Google Yawn," he dismisses Google+ as the product of a "huge scared angry corporation," "designed to meet the needs of the corporation that created it."

"The thing that makes Facebook great is that it incubated in the market with real users," Winer wrote. "It was made by real users. It was formed by actual use. One day at a time, one feature at a time, in public, every home run visible, and every mis-step."

Andrew Nusca, ZDNetOver at ZDNet, Andrew Nusca warns against the whole idea of reading social network reviews in the first place (ahem), noting that these same experts praised Google Buzz as a game-changer and a practical tool--shortly before the status update service faded into obscurity.

"So when it comes out, give it a shot. Decide for yourself. Then ask yourself why you'd need to read a review about a social networking service in the first place," he writes.

Google +1 = Social Overload

I'm not sure how to say this, but I'm starting to think I might be antisocial.

It's not because I've spoken to more smartphones than humans today, mind you -- no, that's just part of an average Thursday. My newfound sentiment stems from the fact that I'm completely unmoved by Google's new social search effort, Google +1. If anything, I'm actually mildly annoyed by it.

Google +1 officially entered the world on Wednesday and is being rolled out to users as we speak. The service is kind of like Facebook's "Like" button, only instead of broadcasting your approval on some sort of wall, Google +1 puts your recommendation right into your friends' search results. Google's +1 button will soon appear next to everything in Google-based searches and -- like the hoard of social approval buttons before it -- will eventually show up on sites all over the Web as well.

If that blasted +1 button had a "Dislike" widget, I'd be clicking that thing like there was no tomorrow.

Google +1: A Two-Part Problem

My problem with Google's +1 program is really two-fold: First, my virtual life is already overflowing with a surplus of social services. I get recommendations from friends and colleagues on Facebook. I get links all day on Twitter. My inbox oozes with references and referrals. The last thing I need is one more place to find endorsements and share suggestions.

That aside, Google +1 invades what I view as a sacred neutral ground. When I perform a Web search, I don't want to see what my old college roommate thinks of the results. I don't want to know if 20 random people approve of this link or that one. I want a clean, clutter-free page showing me the most relevant results based on aggregated global measurements -- you know, that whole "algorithm" thing. To me, all the social stuff in search amounts to a bunch of added noise I simply don't need.

The +1 movement reminds me a bit of Google Social Search, a project that expanded earlier this year to put shared links smack in the middle of search pages. In a way, +1 is also somewhat reminiscent ofGoogle Buzz, which briefly breached my Gmail inbox this time last year. As I wrote back then:

"The last thing I need is yet another social networking site to keep up with when I should be working. And the last place I need it is on a website that serves as one of my main productivity tools."

That pretty much sums up my beef with Google +1, too. I can certainly see the benefit of the programfrom Google's perspective. And hey, some users might love the added social layer. But for those of us who value the clean and pristine approach Google itself ushered into search, it'd sure be nice to have a +1 "off" switch option

'Google Circles' Looms, But do Google's Nerds 'Get' Social?

It's not a revelation Google might take another stab at the massive social networking space, and not an unreasonable idea that it would announce the new service here at SXSW interactive, which is all about social networking sites and apps. So today ReadWriteWeb had the story,reporting that Google will announce a social networking site -- Google Circles

Google Circles, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explains, will allow people to share photos, videos, and status messages with people in their social circle. Google's site will be unique, the speculation goes, because it will seek to understand how we relate to our various social networking friends, determine how truly close to them we are, then adjust the amount of content we share with those people.

If it works well, this could be a major selling point against rival Facebook which, by and large, seems to want us to be close friends with as many people as possible, and share our intimate content accordingly.

But my question still remains: Does Google really "get" social? Services like "Buzz" make me think they don't. The nerds at Google probably spend a lot of time at work, looking at white boards and computer screens, thinking about code. They may have deep theoretical thoughts about social networking.

But do they have a good enough understanding of the nuances of human social interaction in real life to craft an online service that can weave into the natural fabric of the lives of normal people?

Anyway, a little later today, Liz Gannes at All Things Digital threw cold water on the idea that Google Circles would debut here at SXSW. She says Google flatly denies this will happen, but, Gannes writes, Google did not deny that a new social networking service is being developed. But the company did tweet, as @googlesxsw, that "We're not launching any products at #SXSW but we're doing plenty else."

I will attend the Google/ACLU event here in Austin tonight just in case the new service is announced, or demo'd. If we don't see the new service here, it's likely that it will be debuted in May at the Google I/O developer event, which I will also attend.

Google+ Social Network: Hands-On First Impressions

Google's new social networking site Google+ has a few rough spots, but is, overall, a strong start to the search giant's challenge to Facebook.

Google's new social network, Google+, premiered Tuesday, promising a new spin on socializing online with a slick interface and a unique way of sharing content. The service launched to a limited number of users Tuesday in what Google is calling a "field trial." A few PCWorld staffers were lucky enough to be invited (it’ll roll out to everybody in the coming months), so naturally we jumped right into testing the new service.

In general we thought the service borrowed some good ideas from the reigning king of social networks, Facebook, but also offers some cool new approaches to sharing content and managing privacy. In short, Google+ is a solid start to an incipient rival social networking platform that is sure to be enhanced rapidly over the coming months, and it could soon offer a solid alternative to Facebook. Now, let's dig in.

Getting Started

Google+ has an easy set-up with almost no learning curve, especially if you're familiar with Facebook. If you’ve used any Google products before, you might be surprised at how much of that information gets automatically imported to your new Google+ account, to use in a social context. For example, I’ve uploaded pictures to Picasa without allowing others to view them. Google+ first asked me to select a profile picture from my Picasa Albums, and then gave me a choice: Either link my Google+ account with Picasa, or don’t join Google+ at all.

I decided to link. It didn’t actually change the privacy settings of my Picasa albums (it didn’t make them public to my friends or anything). But having the choice made me wonder what the implications of having my Picasa albums linked to Google+ really were.

One of the first things Google+ prompts you to do is select a profile picture. If you have a Picasa album, it’ll allow you to choose images from there.

Either link Google+ to your Picasa pictures or you don’t use Google+ at all!

The next place you go after you’ve set up a Google+ account is to the “About Me” section. You can tell that Google is trying to be a little saucier than Facebook, or at least have an edgier personality.

While Facebook profiles ask you the basic questions: gender, relationship status, religion, favorite movies, TV shows, music and so forth, Google+ asks you to make an introduction, like you’re back in the first day of your high school speech class, and then asks you to list “bragging rights” like “survived high school", "have three kids", etc.

You can pin “places you’ve lived” on a Google map in the “About Me” section--a cool feature for globetrotters (or Army Brats).

Forming Your ‘Circles’

Google+ imports all of your information from Gmail automatically--and that means all. When you’re updating your friend circles there’s a tab towards the top of the page that says “Find and Invite”; click on it and you'll see a list of just about everyone you’ve ever sent an email to through Gmail alphabetically--even if the last time you sent them an email was four years ago. It's not surprising that Gmail remembers everyone you’ve every sent an email to--but it's a little jarring when all those names come rushing back at you at once.

Now, how to organize all those people. Google claims to have done a radical rethink of the way social networks ought to work, so that they more closely mimic the way we organize our friends in real life. After using Google+ for just a few minutes I began to appreciate the simplicity of the "circles" approach. And I really like the way Google has represented it in graphical form in Google+: that is, you actually pick up people with your mouse and drag them into this circle or that.

Nice job Google--it makes me think you’re finally getting a grip on this social thing after all.

Google+ users can drag and drop their friends into the appropriate social circles. Here I'm dragging my colleague Daniel Ionescu into my "PCWorld Pals" circle.

However, because this drag-and-drop function is behind the Circles tab, I began trying to add friends by searching for them from the Google+ homepage. When I would visit a potential friend's page and add them to one of my circles, it wasn't immediately apparent to them that we were now linked. I hope Google moves the Circles function to the front, making the process of forming connections a bit more user friendly.

Sharing Content

Google+ answers the call of many privacy activists to provide the functionality needed to set the privacy level on each piece of content shared. For instance, when I share an article or upload a camera image, Google+ gives me choices of which friend circles I’d like to share that content with. A picture from my phone might be perfectly fine for my Close Friends circle but very wrong for my Colleagues circle, for instance.

For every piece of content you share on Google+ you're asked which circles or individuals should be able to see it.Still, I’m not sure that Google has given us the deep privacy controls that we might need. I’m not seeing the tool that lets me carefully fine-tune my sharing rules with a particular circle. I created a new circle for a new set of friends, but did not see where I could set the privacy settings for that group. Am I supposed to rely on the stock privacy settings Google has applied to the Friends, Family and Acquaintances circles it gave me to start with?

Stream = Facebook News Feed

The “Stream” section of Google+ is analogous to Facebook’s News Feed, and it does almost nothing different except for the fact that before you post anything, you have to decide which circles see it. You can make it available to “all circles” or even to “extended circles” where you basically email what you post to people who aren’t on Google+.

The Stream function in Google+ is very similar to the News Feed in Facebook. Controls at the side of the page allow you to choose which of your circles of friends can contribute items to your stream.

Choosing who sees what in your stream might do one of two things when everyone starts using this: either your news feed will finally have information that pertains only to what you’re interested in, without the blast of “everyone from knitting club message me!” updates; or your stream will become immensely boring, without any of the emotional impulse-statuses that make Facebook a salient place for social information. Would you post a dramatic break-up status to the world if you could just send it to your “Circle of Close Friends”? Probably not.

Of course, people who see your stream updates can comment on them, and Google’s version of Facebook’s “Like” is to “+1” it (Google premiered the "+1" feature earlier this year, which basically allows you to say "hey I think this website is cool" by clicking a "+1" button that appears next to items on your search page). Just as Facebook created new words for using its site (“I’ll facebook you when I get back to the city”), maybe later this year we’ll be telling each other “I plus-one’d your video last night.”

Hangouts

One interesting feature that could really put Google+ ahead of Facebook is its “Hangouts” feature. Google+ Hangouts are a kind of mashup of video chatting through Gmail, and the old “chat rooms” of the days when AIM was our only chat option.

First, you click on the “Start a hangout” button, and it takes you to a separate webpage and enables your webcam and mic (while it's loading it even gives you a “fix your hair and make sure your mic works!” message, so you’re not taken by surprise). Then, you invite circles of friends, or individual friends to the Hangout room for the video chat session. You can create Hangouts of up to 10 people.

Google puts the image of the person who is talking at the center of the screen. If multiple people are talking at once it moves the one who is talking loudest to the center (that’s a good lesson for you kids out there).

Sparks

One of the first ways Google will try to win users from Facebook is by leveraging the assets it already has. Search is, of course, Google's crown jewel. Where at Facebook you have to go wander around the web finding sharable content, Google+ brings the content to you.

In the Spark section I entered one of my interests--punk rock--and the Google search algorithm brought back a bunch of mainstream media articles, YouTube and Vimeo video, and blog posts. After selecting an article about my friend Jello Biafra, I chose which of my 'circles' I wanted to share the content with.The feature asks you to choose from a list of possible interests (biking, sailing, sewing, etc.), or to enter your own specific interest. Google then goes out and gathers relevant content from all over the Web. I found the content suggested by Sparks to be almost completely on-topic, and I even found some content that I could actually see myself sharing with friends. Importantly, you can choose which friend circles or single friends you want to share the content with. The posts show up in those friends’ news feeds, or as Google calls them Streams.

Mobile Apps

The Google+ Android App lets you see your news stream, upload photos, manage your social circles, edit your own profile and start group chats using Huddle. Image: GoogleGoogle also debuted a couple of new mobile apps today, both of which work directly with your Google+ account online. While some other users I talked to had some trouble forming the handshake between the apps and the Google+ service, I had no problem.

Firstly, the main Google+ Android app (available for free from the Android Market) does a nice job of bringing the core parts of Google+ to a mobile device. The app sports a simple home screen with icons for the Stream, Huddle, Photos, Profile and Circles sections of Google+ (see image). You can easily post notes and content, and comment on others’ shared materials, from the app's Stream screen. It also asks you if you want to attach your location to the posts you make.

The Photos section shows you images shared by your friends, uploaded from your phone, stored in your albums, and photos of you shot by others and shared on Google+. A little camera icon in the top right corner brings you your camera app and lets you quickly post a picture to your “From Your Phone” album at Google+. I was a bit disappointed here, because Google made it sound as if photos taken from within the app were automatically sent to your Google+ album; but in truth you have push a "Done" button then go to another screen where you're asked if you want to attach a note or your geographic location to the photo. You have to go back into your album to designate which friend circles can see your photos.

When you are reviewing your photos you can “tag” the people in them similar to the way you do in Facebook. You draw a little square around a person's face, then type in their name in the box below (or choose one of the names Google+ guesses) You can tag people who are Google+ users or just email contacts.

Google attaches this note: “Adding this tag will notify the person you have tagged. They will be able to view the photo and the related album.” This is an important difference from Facebook, which does not make an effort to warn people the they’ve been tagged (possibly in an unflattering or compromising photo) and give them an immediate chance to remove the tag.

The other app, Huddle, is already included in the main Google+ app. So I’m not sure why you’d download Huddles unless you wanted only the group chatting function on your mobile device, and no access to any other parts of Google+. The Huddle function works great, however. I was easily able to initiate a group chat with come Google+ friends. And while there was a little bit of cross talk and out-of-order posting, overall the app worked well.

Privacy Approach

Google makes it very clear that the information you contribute to the social graph underneath Google+ will be used to help refine search results and to help target web ads more accurately. While Google+ seems to put a lot of emphasis on giving users control over the way they share information with different circles of friends, it’s yet to be seen if Google will be more sensitive to the privacy of userswhen it determines which personal data is public--that is, available for use (in aggregate or otherwise) by Google and its advertisers--and which remains private.

Battle Royal Starts Now

Google wants Google+ to rival its number-one arch-nemesis, Facebook--and by the looks of things the search giant may have a fighting chance. How will Google get people to move their online social lives away from Facebook and over to Google+? Google has already amassed a large body of user data search, Gmail, Picasa, Google Videos and YouTube, etc., but it needs the highly personal data that Facebook has been so successful at collecting. Google is said to have identified its social networking initiative as the company's central goal, and has the deep pockets to quickly build Google+ into a the kind of full-blown social networking platform that can challenge Facebook.

Perhaps most importantly, expect Google to build Google+ features into the majority of its products from search to mail to video to documents. With all those great (free) services and now a tightly-integrated social networking platform under one roof, who needs Facebook? Had Google launched this strategy three years ago that may have been a good question. But the burning question now is whether or not Google is too late to the "social Web" to ever catch up.

How Google Could Build a Better Social Network

Since everyone and your mother are on Facebook, users have little incentive to give it up, even with Facebook's existing flaws. What can Google possibly do to get people to make the switch?

Rumors that Google was starting a Facebook competitor named "Google Me" first surfaced in June, right after the latest wave of anti-Facebook furor. Clearly, there is an opportunity to challenge Facebook for the social networking title. If Google is in it to win it, however, the company has to do afew things that Facebook isn't doing--as well as a few things that Google has failed at in the past. Here's what we'd like to see in a next-gen social network.

Before Google Me: Orkut, Buzz, and Wave

Google has made several attempts to break into the world of social networking, namely through the Orkut, Google Buzz, and Google Wave stand-alone services. Though these offerings haven't managed to reach critical mass, bits and pieces of them may find their way into a better Google network.

While Orkut hasn't gained much traction in the United States, it has succeeded in other countries, most significantly India and Brazil. Part of that is due to Orkut's Promote feature, which lets users share videos and links--but unlike on Facebook, after you've promoted something on Orkut you can see how many people have clicked, viewed, or trashed your item. You can follow the path of your promotion to see how many of your friends have passed it on to other friends, and so on.

Perhaps more important, you can also prevent one of your promotions from spreading after you've posted it. Though both Orkut and Facebook allow you to delete your shared items, Orkut's delete function is more robust; for instance, if you share a picture on Orkut and later decide to delete it after your friends share it with their friends, Orkut will delete the image from your account and theirs. Facebook, on the other hand, will not.

Google Buzz may have failed to flourish for multiple reasons, but it remains an excellent example of how location data can be incorporated into a social network. If you use Buzz on your mobile phone, it constantly logs your location so that you can easily check out what topics other people around you are writing about, from popular restaurants to traffic jams. This works because Buzz is readily integrated with Google Maps, unlike Twitter (which posts your location only when you're publishing a tweet) and Foursquare (which is limited to check-in spots).

Then there's the oft-maligned Google Wave, which allows users to create event invitations, working documents, brainstorming sheets, a to-do list, or any other type of communication. People have used it for everything from sharing class notes to hosting an online Dungeons & Dragons game. Regrettably,Wave expires at the end of 2010, having never caught on because no one really knew how they were supposed to use it. Its collaborative features, however, will likely be reincarnated in Google Me--as a more interesting version of Facebook's Wall and Messaging system, perhaps.

Privacy

Without a doubt, privacy has been the biggest problem that Facebook has faced in recent months. The more you post on Facebook, the easier it is to overshare with your boss, your family, or even complete strangers. If the new social network in town wants to beat Facebook, the upstart has to nail the privacy matter on the head.

Toward that end, privacy management controls need to be easier to usefor adjusting your profile and indicating who among your network can view it. Facebook currently has a complicated process that allows you to pick and choose exactly what information will be shared with people in your network. You can opt for items to be publicly displayed to 'Everyone', meaning that people who don't even have a Facebook account could access that information, or choose to make content available to 'Friends Only' or 'Just Me' to keep your profile a little more private.

Though the compartmentalization aspect is ideal, changing your privacy settings is time consuming. Instead of automatically opting you in to a public profile that shares your info with 'Everyone', the default setting should be at 'Friends Only'.

Even if you're vigilant about keeping your Facebook items strictly G-rated, however, you're still sharing that information with Facebook itself. And the presence of features such as Instant Personalization--which pools information from your Facebook page and incorporates it into other sites you visit--means that you don't know exactly who else knows what's in your profile.

Though it's unreasonable to say that your social network shouldn't be allowed to make money from your data (the network is, after all, a business that's offering a free service), its sharing your data with other sites should definitely be an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out one (which is how the setup works on Facebook).

Things get even more complicated when you add third-party apps to your social network. Such apps often have separate terms of service, and no one really knows what they do with a user's information once that person adds the application to their page. Ideally, when it comes to user data, an app would be held to the same privacy standards as the social network itself is--and users could even elect to block their info from showing up on the app's radar.

If you don't want your social networking service to access your information at all, you might want to look to an open-source alternative, such as the Diaspora project due to launch this fall. Though details are scarce, we do know that the Diaspora software will let users set up their own personal server (called a seed) where they have complete control over what information they make widely available.

Because the software is on an independent server, Diaspora will not be able to distribute your profile information to outside sites and advertisers. Your data will be shared with the friends that you choose to share it with, and no one else. The creators believe that getting users' information out of the cloud is the key to privacy, and their goal is to accomplish this without sacrificing users' personal privacy.

Games, Gifts, and Third-Party Apps

Third-party apps are clearly a must for future social networks--even though the constant Farmville spam on your newsfeed might be borderline obnoxious, outside sites provide fun games to play, ways to spruce up your profile, and more-personalized browsing. Even Facebook Connect, despite its privacy issues, makes logging in to hundreds of Websites a far less painful experience. If Google Me is going to succeed, it has to offer better (and less annoying) apps.

Following Google's recent purchase of Jambool (the virtual currency platform that powers Social Gold), we can expect to see plenty of apps--especially games--that use this online currency when Google Me rolls out. Because Jambool takes a smaller cut from app revenue than Facebook does with its Credits, game developers have an incentive to create more games for Google Me than for Facebook.

Google already owns Slide, a social media gaming developer, and has invested in Zynga (the developer of Farmville and Mafia Wars), so social games must be a significant part of the company's plan.

Finding Your Niche

Foodies love Yelp, musicians adore MySpace, and the unemployed favor LinkedIn. That's because each of these social networks is designed around getting users together based on a common interest. Even Facebook originated as a social network for college students, and in the beginning you had to register with your university e-mail address. No ".edu," no Facebook profile.

In organizing people based on an interest, however, Facebook has fallen behind. Its "Facebook Group" feature, which it recently axed, was pretty ineffective for organization. Sure, you could send messages to the entire group or initiate a discussion topic, but the group information wouldn't show up on a users' newsfeed and would often get lost in the shuffle.

So far, Facebook's "Like" feature, which connects people who have "liked" the same thing, hasn't been too effective as an organization tool, either.

Social networking veterans may remember Tribe.net and Ning as two solid examples of how to organize special-interest groups. Tribe users create a profile and add friends in a similar fashion as on Facebook; but in this case you can search for an interest, hobby, or location, and Tribe will recommend communities to join based on those interests. These "tribes" share tips, plan events, start threads, and connect in relation to the tribe focus.

Ning, meanwhile, lets you create your own niche social networks devoted to whatever you like. Though putting a social network inside a social network (so you can socialize while you socialize) is a little extreme, we're hoping that Google Me has better support for organizing and managing groups.

It's All About User Control

Allowing users to be more hands-on with their personal profile in terms of layout, content, and how they share their information will give them peace of mind, knowing that they have more control over their own network page.

In a future social network, it would be nice to see a few options for personalization. While MySpace went a little overboard and allowed users to create profiles that were offensively hideous (and hard to read), Facebook leans too far in the opposite direction--you can't change anything.

Orkut fixes that by providing a collection of themes--similar to Gmail themes--that users can apply to their page if they wish. Because the themes were made by Orkut designers, they work with the existing Orkut layout and simply enhance it, adding a touch of personalization without being overbearing.

Of course, no single social network will appeal to everyone, and it's too early to name a real Facebook challenger, but finding a way to fix the bad parts of Facebook and to incorporate successful features of other social networks is a great way to start. Simply throw in one more feature that other networks lack, and you might just have yourself the next big social site.