Google+

As of recently, my brother works for Google, which is kind of awesome.  (Probably more awesome for him than me, since I keep reading how they're fun people to work for.)  It also means I got a Google+ invite on Tuesday.

The more I look at it, the more Google+ makes me realize that there's a ton of social organizational tools in Facebook that I didn't realize were there because, well, Facebook's web design is, although generally clean-lined, arcane in its layers.  Recently I've been posting a lot of pictures of the garden, and I've found Facebook's picture album immensely frustrating to work with.  It's confusing to get to the version you want, and I never remember how to.

Google already had a photo-sharing site (Picasa), and for video?  Well, they kind of own YouTube.  Having a + account means that when you're in Gmail and other Google places where you've got that little pseudo-toolbar at the top of the page, you get a notifications icon and sharing box.  (I think Google may have realized that some of us won't download a browser toolbar for anything.)


So a lot of what you can do on Facebook (share pictures, chat, etc.) you could already do with Google in one way or another.  (Chat has been in Gmail how long?  Practically forever?)  From what I can tell, Google's basically just added a way to take all this stuff you could already do with them and create a social layer on top.  They've had some social features before (Orkut, Buzz), but this has the familiar layout of update box and feed that you get both on Twitter and on Facebook.

Plus, it let me import a bunch of contacts and easily sort them into groups.  I'm a librarian; I had done that with my Facebook friends, but not like this.  It's much easier to concatenate sharing among a few groups or limit to a small one without having to go and make a bunch of larger meta-groups.  Example:  I put my mom and siblings in one circle, cousins in another, and my husband's family in another circle.  If I'm going to share, say, pictures from my husband's grandmother's birthday, I'm probably just going to send it to his family.  If I'm going to share pictures from Christmas at my gramma's, it'll be with my family.  If we had had some kind of big party for our tenth wedding anniversary, I'd have included them all.  But I don't have to make the meta-groups; I can just tack on all the small ones and not have to remember if someone joins to add them all over the place.  And if I have people who belong to those groups that aren't on +?  I can add them to the appropriate groups, and then even if they never join, I can use the checkbox to share the information or pictures with them via email.  People can opt out of the network but still stay updated.

Plus, like most of Google's web interfaces, Google+ is pretty clean cut.  This is, of course, a beta phase, and I don't know what all they're going to add to it.  There aren't ads in this incarnation, and I don't know if there will be later, but if they're as unobtrusive (and occasionally hilarious) as Gmail's page-contextual ads, I won't mind them.  (I'm always amused by the spam ads when I go to empty that folder in Gmail.)  I've written about my inherent love of minimalism in web design before; if Facebook remains as navigationally arcane under the surface as it's become, Google is going to elbow it out for me.

Assuming, of course, that the FTC doesn't come in with an axe and tear it all down before it really takes off.