Google Plus + Google Reader
Google Reader gets redesigned and plusified: Google Plus now on Search, Blogger, Google Apps; http://eicker.at/GoogleReaderPlus
Tagged: Google Buzz Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Google’s Graveyard III.
Google shuts down: Buzz, Jaiku, iGoogle Features, Code Search – goes music? http://eicker.at/GooglesGraveyard2011
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “[W]e recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products. – Here’s the latest update on what’s happening: Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012. – In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout. – Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku. – Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are. – The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012. – In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search. – Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”
Horowitz: “What did we learn from Buzz? Plenty. We learned privacy is not a feature… it is foundational to the product. And this awareness gave us the resolve to design privacy in from the very beginning, which led to Circles for sharing the right information with the right people, as well as transparency around which parts of your profile can be seen by whom. We also learned how compelling it is to have meaningful conversations with interesting people, which we’re happy to see happening all the time in Google+. – But probably the best lesson we learned is about how to introduce a product. We started very slowly with Google+ – in a limited Field Trial – in order to listen and learn and gather plenty of real-world feedback. Your participation in the process is helping create what Google+ is today.”
GigaOM: “Has Google really learned that much from Buzz and Jaiku? … Is that because Google wants to be social, or is it because the company wants to be able to including being able to sell you things? The existence of Google+ seems to have more to do with the company’s need to harvest the “social signals” that emerge from such networks in order to improve its search and advertising business – and fend off Facebook – than Google’s desire to create a welcoming environment for social sharing. An engineer for the company described not that long ago how Google has no real interest in social networking for its own sake, but saw it as an information-harvesting strategy. – Does Google have an ‘if we build it, they will come’ problem? … The amount of resources that Google is putting into Google+ is admirable, and it is good to focus on one thing, even if it means beheading other services like Buzz and Jaiku – and CEO Larry Page has made it clear that he wants the network to succeed. But wanting something and having it come true are very different things, and Google could well learn another lesson from Google+: that even if you build it, and it is well-designed from an engineering perspective, people may still not come.”
RWW: “Even though Google Buzz wasn’t terribly good at anything, from a user standpoint, we at least enjoyed its developer-centric nature. It was all about open data. That may have been all it had going for it, but that meant something. Its replacement, Google Plus, is awfully slick and smooth and secretive. The few APIs released so far barely enable developers to make anything, much less anything interesting. – Google sure is a busy place. Its whole business is undergoing rapid transformations, even if its quarterly earnings are reported so generally that they seem stable. – Google is spending money and changing shape. It’s launching social networks and buying handset manufacturers. It’s hiring new people, buying new infrastructure, and now it’s shedding old products. When will Google start to break a sweat?”
NYT: “Five months after it introduced a cloud music service with limited capabilities, Google is in negotiations with the major record labels to expand that service and also open an MP3 store that would compete with Apple and Amazon. – According to numerous music executives, Google is eager to open the store in the next several weeks. It would most likely be connected to Google’s existing cloud service, Music Beta, which lets people back up their songs on remote servers and stream them to mobile phones and other devices, said these executives, who all spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private and continuing. … Music Beta was announced five weeks after Amazon opened a similar unlicensed service, Cloud Drive. – Apple got licenses for iTunes Match, which will instantly link a user’s songs to Apple’s master collection. With an unlicensed service, users must upload each song individually, a process that can take hours or even days.”
RWW: “Google reportedly had a hard time shoring up deals with music labels ahead of the initial launch of Google Music, so they launched it anyway. Traditional content owners have often been wary of Google, who has gained a reputation among some legacy media organizations as being too soft on piracy. The company has extended a few olive branches recently, making public efforts to discourage copyright infringement and buttering up media executives. … Google has an uphill battle to fight if it expects to take on Apple in this space. Amazon might provide a fairer fight. Either way, Google is hoping to bolt additional revenue streams onto its business model, which remains heavily bolstered by the money it makes search advertising.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Business Profiles
Oestlien: We expect to have an initial version of business profiles in the next few months; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusBusinessProfiles
Xenu are discussing. -
Gerrit Eicker
Oestlien: “A few weeks ago we mentioned we would be doing a test of business profiles and asked people interested to apply. Believe it or not we actually had tens of thousands of businesses, charities, and other organizations apply to take part from all over the world. … With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for everyone in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers. … In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google Plus.”
TNW: “The change of heart comes after anger about Google’s apparent favouritism towards organizations like Ford, Mashable and ourselves from Jason Calacanis and others. Google Plus has shut down and reactivated these accounts on multiple occasions – our own was shut down a few weeks ago before suddenly becoming available again, and the same thing happened this morning after the most recent ban wave. We’re not too sure what’s going on. – It seems however that Google is encouraging businesses, for the time being, to pick a real person from its organization as a mouthpiece who can share links on the network.”
Sullivan: “Hey Google, I’d say I know you’re all new to the social game and should be forgiven that you have messed up with how to handle brands here so badly. Except, you’re not new. – For one, you know that Twitter and Facebook both support brands, and that there would obviously be demand for this here. You failed to implement that support. Bad on you. – I know it’s all ‘field trial,’ but that’s not really an excuse, given that you knew – had to know – this would happen. – Worse, you gave no clue that Google Profiles were suddenly changed to bar non-humans from using them. Before Google+ came along, this wasn’t a problem. I know. I remember Google Buzz, when plenty of brands, including our own +SEL on Google Buzz account, started up. – No one said a word against this. No one told us not to do it. So when Google+ happened, no one had any idea the rules had changed – and especially changed for Google Profiles which are a superset of Google Plus.“
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Xenu
Business ad revenue is a big piece of Facebook income, yet Google+ provides nothing for small businesses who either want a Google+ presence or want to advertise. You are alienating your income sources before they are even on board. Who makes these business decisions at Google? Are they getting a big bonus this year?
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus is still in its field trial. They are going to offer Business Profiles (see above). And I’m pretty confident that they’ll offer advertising opportunities lateron.
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Xenu
I’m fully aware this is a “field trial.” But even someone not in the social media world could anticipate and had better systems in place prior to such a launch. Calling something a “field trial” does not excuse professional negligence and/or incompetence regarding such an obvious issue as business profiles (and subsequent advertising). Of course, it is possible the entire Google+ is being run by teenagers with no business background whatsoever, in which case I retract and apologize my criticisms.
Gerrit Eicker
AdAge: “After three months of testing the social-network waters, Google+ is finally ready to make a big splash. … At Ad Age’s Digital West conference last week, Christian Oestlien, group product manager for social advertising at Google, announced it’s close to unveiling Google+ business profiles that will permit companies to create pages and circles like those of an individual user of the social network. … Asked how Google+ plans to police the network for authentic and inauthentic users, Mr. Prosser said it is taking a few different approaches. If companies notice that a logo or profile is being improperly used, it can report the profile to Google, which will respond with what it calls a ‘soft takedown.’ The user will be given a few days to change the name or appeal the finding before Google takes further action, but even if the person is found guilty there won’t be other ramifications; it won’t shut down Gmail or other services for the user.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Navigation Bar
The new Google Navigation Bar will make Google Plus a success: a tiny red square against the big blue; http://eicker.at/GoogleNavigationBar
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Differences
How the Google Plus services, Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Huddle, differentiate from Facebook/Twitter; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusDifferences
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Circles makes the biggest difference between Google Plus and Facebook: Google Plus Circles bases on Twitter’s paradigm of non-reciprocal following, with the option to establish a closer relation like Facebook’s reciprocal friending. Additional, ‘circling’ is a must: while Facebook Friends Lists and Twitter Lists are optional, following/friending on Google Plus requires to move users to at least one circle.
Evangelos: “I have read many of the initial reactions to Google+ and most of them compare it to Facebook… Unlike Facebook, you can add someone without their permission. This is pretty much like following someone on Twitter – their public posts appear in your stream. But unless they ‘follow you back’, your updates don’t get into their stream. As soon as they add you, too, the Twitter-like following feature becomes a Facebook-like friendship relation with mutual posts in streams, depending on which circles you are in. This is a) a great way of getting a network going early on (and have a lively stream from the very beginning) and b) combines Twitter-like publishing with Facebook like media and commenting. I keep thinking this might turn out to be more dangerous to Twitter than it is to Facebook. … Now that I understood their adding mechanics, I see why there is no initial Fanpage product: It is not necessary.”
The Google Plus Stream reflects this main differentiator:
VB: “There are numerous comparisons between Google’s new Google+ social offering and Facebook, but most of them miss the mark. Google knows the social train has left the station and there is a very slim chance of catching up with Facebook’s 750 million active users. However, Twitter’s position as a broadcast platform for 21 million active publishers is a much more achievable goal for Google to reach. … When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes ‘everyone’ as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+’s default setting would be public posts. … While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube.”
But the Google Plus Stream is one of the main cons of Google Plus, too: it’s noisy! There’s a strong need to add an option to mute users or even better: +Circles. And there’s a strong need to add better ranking algorithms. Believe it or not: Facebook seems to be far ahead of Google in this place!
Mashable: “Google+ is designed to minimize noise in the stream through the use of circles, but it’s still too noisy for most users. The big issue is that posts are pushed to the top whenever there’s a new comment, something that most users think is unnecessary. There are also still issues with collapsing posts with long comment threads. … Google+ needs to stop bumping posts to the top of the stream anytime there’s a comment, and this change needs to be implemented as soon as possible. There needs to be a way to see ‘top stories’ from your stream. Yes, it’s a Facebook feature, but it’s a really good Facebook feature.”
That’s all? No more differentiators? No, not yet. Sure, there’s Hangouts – currently a Skype-clone. And Google Plus can be found on (nearly) all Google properties on the Web. But more conceptual differences? Obviously we’ll have to wait.
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Mobile, Huddle
Google starts its own social network Google Plus finally, the nuance and richness of real-life sharing; http://eicker.at/GooglePlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. … Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. – In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. – We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.”
Google+: “Google+ is in limited Field Trial – Right now, we’re testing with a small number of people, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we’re ready to invite more people.” … +Circles: “You share different things with different people. … Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.” +Sparks: “…looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share.” +Hangouts: “With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let buddies know you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat.” +Mobile: “…Your photos upload themselves. +Huddle: “Huddle takes care of it by turning all those different conversations into one simple group chat…”
RWW: “The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it’s the opposite of Facebook and Twitter’s universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It’s really easy to use and a great feature – but even if you’re communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. … Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.”
TC: “The reality is that Google is in a better position to organize all of the social signals we broadcast online rather than to organize all of the individuals making those signals. – Instead of building another social network, I’d like to see Google focus on helping us search through all the user-generated signals and content and to help us with our search, much of which is done offline through social questions, not keyword-speak. (Although, the threaded comments approach Google+ is using in the main stream it presents to users does lend itself to friends asking each other questions and answering them). This approach would let Google focus on what it excels at, helping us find information online, especially information created by our friends and friends of friends, perhaps even in an instant. Now, that would be a huge plus.”
Mashable: “Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. There’s a reason why Google calls this a ‘project’ rather than a ‘product’ — they don’t want people to think of this as the final product, but as a constantly-evolving entity that permeates every corner of the Google empire. – Overall, Google+ is solid. But I’m not going to call it a Facebook killer or a game-changer. The last Google product I said that about was the ill-fated Google Buzz. Perhaps that’s why Google’s rolling this out slowly via invites, the same style Gmail used to release itself to the world. – If Google can persuade users to come back every day, it has a winner. But the company will have to do even more to provide a truly compelling alternative to Facebook. At the moment, Google+ cannot compete with the king of social, but Google doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to take on Mark Zuckerberg’s giant quite yet.”
pC: “It’s going to be a while before we find out whether or not this is something that will resonate with the public, and that’s actually a good thing: by launching the service in an invitation-only mode, Google will have time to discover flaws and fix bugs among a group of early adopters who are likely to be much more understanding when problems arise than the general public, which freaked out about the mistakes Google made when launching Google Buzz. Google’s taking a risk that Google+ won’t have enough users on board in its early days to facilitate connections, but it seems to have decided that erring on the side of getting privacy features right is more important than building a Facebook killer on Day 1.”
TNW: “A complete video tour of Google+ featuring Mobile, Sparks and Circles“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Social
Google wants social badly: Gundotra becomes SVP of social, bonuses depend on social development; http://eicker.at/GoogleSocial
Gerrit Eicker
Google’s Social Network
Ingram: Sure, I could join a Google–based social network. – But why? http://eicker.at/GooglesSocialNetwork
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus One
Google wants likes too: +1 adds shared links to Buzz profiles, impacts search results of followers; http://eicker.at/PlusOne
Gerrit Eicker
Privacy vs. Publicity?
Boyd: Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both; http://eicker.at/Privacy
Gerrit Eicker 09:29 on 1. November 2011 Permalink |
Google: “Today we’re rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day’s over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements: A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at. The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing ‘Like’), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing ‘Share’ and ‘Share with Note’). … Updates to Google Reader on the web are rolling out gradually and should reach all users by end of day. A new Android application will follow soon. If you have questions about today’s announcements, please check out our Help Center.”
RWW: “After announcing on October 20 that Google Reader would be annexed by Google Plus, Reader has gotten the ol’ +1 today. Google is rolling out the new, clean Plus theme that has already come to Gmail, Docs and elsewhere, and it is replacing the Reader ‘Like’ function with the +1 button. Sharing from Google Reader now produces a +snippet. I guess we no longer need that nice workaround. … For anyone who doesn’t use Google Plus, there are some amazing RSS clients that use your Google Reader as the back-end but let you share however you’d like. And you know you can still add all your preferred sharing services to the ‘Send To’ tab, right? The same settings we showed you before to add Google Plus as a Reader service will let you add anything else, too.”
RWW: “Google has made very clear over the past month that Plus will be integrated into all of Google’s products over time, so this wasn’t a surprising move. However, rather predictably, there has been a user backlash anyway. … I believe that comment was a little disingenuous from Gray, because he knows that Google dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market. There are always alternatives, but the reality is that relatively few people will use them. What’s more, most of the alternatives rely on Google Reader for content. … The RSS Reader market has declined because reading content is a very fragmented experience these days. … Even despite all of the changes in the way people consume content on the Web, Google Reader had been the holdout as a specialist RSS Reader product. It has (had?) a passionate community of RSS Reader fanatics.”
TNW: “The new look falls in line with the rest of the changes that we’ve seen from Google over the past few months, specifically after the launch of Google+. You’ll see a new preview pane that shows you all of your stories, with subscriptions along the left in a list like before. – Sharing in Google Reader is now considerably different than before. Instead of having a network in and of itself, anything that you share is now going to happen via a +1 to Google+, as detailed in a blog post last week. Google says that it has done this in order to ‘streamline Reader overall’, but the changes aren’t as welcome by everyone. … Ultimately it doesn’t take away from the usefulness of Google Reader as a product, and it’s not the first time that Google has pushed its way into your social life, either (remember the launch of Buzz?). At the end of the day it will be up to users to figure out if they want to share content via a +1, but chances are that Reader fans aren’t going to be adversely affected overall.”
TC: “As expected, Google has ignored the cries of the niche community of Google Reader sharing enthusiasts [as well as what seems to be the entire online population of Iran], and has pushed forward in its plans to remove Google Reader’s native sharing features to promote deeper integration with Google+. While the ability to share with Google+ is an obvious important step forward for Google’s social agenda, it will be disappointing change for at least some of the Google Reader community – a community that even went so far as to create a petition to save the old features. The petition is now pushing 10,000 responses.”
Blogger: “In fewer than 4 months since its launch, more than 40 million people have joined Google+, making it a living, breathing space for social connections and sharing to thrive. – Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ – by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile. – In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you’ve shared the post.”
Gerrit Eicker 17:33 on 2. November 2011 Permalink |
Winer: “People should know that there is more than one way to do an RSS reading app. Google Reader is one approach. A thousand flowers should bloom to fill the gap it’s creating in the market. There is a way to do plumbing that’s open, that people can subscribe to, independent of Google. That does what Google Reader just stopped doing. I would try to make it work as much as I could without inventing new formats. … I love when people like Richard put awful ideas out there like the one he did. You’re trapped inside Google’s silo, even for something that was open from the start like RSS. Well I think there are a lot of people who are smart enough to know that that’s not true. Those are the very people I want to work with.“