I’ve had a lot of folks ask me about Google+ (Google Plus) and the related Google +1 (plus one) button you will be seeing on webpages and Google search results.
First off, Google+
Never to be outdone, Google is launching it’s very own Social Networking service, which appears to me to be a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. Here is my Google+ profile. Right now it’s in a “limited field trial” and you can only join if you have an invite but I suspect it will be open to the public very soon. Since it is in a limited trial, there’s not too many people on it and chances are you won’t find many of your “friends” there.
In Google+, instead of “friends” you have circles, the default circles are Friends, Family, Acquaintances, and a circle called Following. The “Following” circle is for people you don’t know personally but who’s post you find interesting. This is where the similarity to Twitter comes in. You can “follow” people like Twitter, even though you don’t know them. I think this is a pretty cool feature, especially if Facebook and Twitter go the way of MySpace and everyone ends up migrating to Google+. After all, I really don’t need another social network, I already have multiple Twitter accounts and various Facebook pages to maintain!
The cool thing about circles is you can segregate all your peeps into different groups. This is nifty because you can make your posts visible to only the circles you want to post to. You can even create your own circles, like your book club, or your co-workers, or your band and all it’s fans. You can also place your peeps in multiple groups. People will not know what groups you have them placed in, they will only know that they are connected to you. I really like the ability to only post things to certain groups as there are things you might share with your friends and family, that you wouldn’t share with your business contacts, for example. You can also easily select which “stream” of posts you want to view, so if you only want to see posts from your friends, just select that stream.
There is also a feature called “Sparks” which is sort of the equivalent of listing your interests in Facebook. Only this is way cooler because once you’ve selected your “Sparks” you can click on any Spark in your list and it basically gives you a news feed of recent articles, blog posts and web sites related to that Spark. This is very similar to Google Alerts where you can set up a news feed based on a keyword.
I think Facebook should be worried. Facebook was the pioneer and with the insane growth of the popularity of the site, they’ve been kind of building it like you would build a car while it’s barreling down the highway at 100mph, not a great way to do it. Google had the time and the resources to sit back and study the whole Social Media phenomenon and take the best parts of everything and combine it all into one very streamline, Google-like package.
Now, how does this all relate to the Google +1 button?
It’s kind of like “liking” in Facebook. The idea is that if you have a Google+ profile, and you “plus 1″ something, it’s your own little recommendation or “thumbs up” for that site, or blog post, or news article, or even an individual web page. There is a little bubble next to the plus one button showing how many people recommend the site, and if anyone in your circles have “+1′d” it, you could see who. So if you were searching for a restaurant and you ran across one you were interested in, if it has a +1 button, and someone in your circles whose opinion you trust had +1′d it, you might be more inclined to check out that restaurant. As far as the similarity to the Facebook “like” button, it kind of ends at the web site level. The real power of this is since it’s Google, it shows the +1 button right in the search results so you can see how many people recommend it and if anybody you know has recommended it. This is something Facebook can’t offer. Google doesn’t say this (at least I haven’t seen it) but I would suspect that if you perform searches while logged into your Google account, the results you get would favor sites that people in your circles have +1′d.
So, if Google was the 800lb gorilla on the internet, it’s about to become the 1,600lb gorilla.