Google Wave » Dave Jenkins

Early Impressions of Google+

Jun 292011

Yeah, this is pretty much sums it up.

My friend at Google hooked me up with an early invitation to Google+, the new social networking interface from They Who Do No Evil. So far, I like it, if only for the possible catharsis it offers me for starting over on whom I invite/include in my circle of friends. I don’t know enough about the nuances yet to give a full-blown analysis, and the population isn’t wide enough for me to see many of my friends yet, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Google+ already knows most of the people I deal with. It has all the email addresses from my GMail account, so that makes sense.
The first thing I was prompted to do was add all my contacts into “circles”: friends, family, etc. I could make up my own circles, also: Mishifts, SLC Punks, Tokyo.
Google already has my photo albums on Picasa, and taps in directly to those. The result of this is that the photo quality seems to be quite a bit better than what we are getting on Facebook.
Google+ wants me to create “hang outs”, which are essentially open threads/chats/webcams. This seems to be the most direct successor to Google Buzz, and perhaps the surviving nephew of Google Wave. I don’t see any hangouts yet, so we’ll see.
I can “follow” people that I’ve never met, but are in the system: Robert Scoble, Randall Munroe, Matt Cutts.

That last point may be the most killer point here: Google can quickly subsume Facebook (the interface is almost identical), but then move beyond Facebook’s fatal flaw: Facebook was a response to the aliased teen anarchy of MySpace, and succeeded because of the strict requirement that you had to certifiably know everyone of your contacts. Twitter grew up because it allowed a one-way gate of communication where I could “follow” people but they didn’t have to follow me back. This works well for rock stars and stand up comics, politicians, not so much. Google+ now offers a big step forward: one common place where I can do all that facebook sharing thing with my friends, follow rock stars (like twitter), and chat/interact in real-time like I was supposed to do with Google Wave.

Prediction: Google+ may actually have drawn a winner this time, and Facebook’s $100B valuation is about to take a big kick in the nads. Twitter, you’re going to take a hit as well.

Google Wave is Somewhere in-between

Good or Bad, Network, Social Media 4 Responses »

Nov 052009

Every few years someone re-invents real time chat. Back in the 70s we had teletypes in the high school computer lab. Internet purists had IRC to keep themselves entertained in the 1980s, while the early 90 gave us AOL chat rooms for the rest of us poseurs. Soon, we all had ICQ numbers (I still have mine memorized), then AIM aliases, which were soon replaced by jabber handles, Google chat IDs, and then came the facebooks. All shared some basics: real-time typing, conversation windows, text-centric, and just below the speed of verbal communication. Still, they’re all just variants on the real-time chat, a communication path that’s been around since The Beginning.

If we were to graph a spectrum of communication forms, spreading them out along the x-axis in terms of speed, and y-axis for quality of information, then email would be somewhere to the left and slightly higher than chat: It’s not real-time (you send something, and an answer comes back whenever the other person feels like it), but it can contain pictures and video, so it’s arguably better quality. Below and to the left, we would have twitter: asynchronus, poor quality (short). To the right of chat we would telephones (real-time verbal), and above that we would Skype: real-time verbal communication with the bonus of your friend’s beautiful face on your screen. Skype’s real-time video conferencing should be superior (above and to the right) of all of them, right?
Why do we still have the other forms around?

Is it because we don’t necessarily always want to see the other person? [yes]
Is it because we sometimes don’t want to deal with the other person (your boss or girlfriend or bosses’ girlfriend or boss-you-wish-was-your-girlfriend) in real-time? [yes]
Is it because we want to spew something out of low-quality and not have to burden ourselves with the responsibility that comes with actually having to put forward a cogent logical position? [yes]

So, it seems there is room for something that can land in that flexible in-between the safe distance that asynchronous email gives us, but the conversational flow of chat. If it were an open platform, people could start grafting on the higher-quality content elements like music and videos and pictures of cats eating cheezburgers.

Enter GoogleWave. I’ve had it for a little while now, and I see some promise if people understand the construct. Google is betting that people will want to sometimes be real-time, sometimes not-so-real-time, sometimes lo-fi, sometimes hi-fi. I bet they’re right.

My GoogleWave ID is tokyodave@googlewave.com. Hit me up.

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