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Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good — Now For The Hard Part

Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good — Now For The Hard Part
Last night, you may have heard talk of a mysterious black bar appearing on the top of Google.com. Or you may have even seen it yourself. No, you weren’t hallucinating. It was a sign of something about to show itself. Something big. What is Google+? Sort of. You see, the truth is that Google really is trying not to make a huge deal out of Google+. How’s that for downplaying it? “We believe online sharing is broken. What he proceeds to show me is a product that in many ways is so well designed that it doesn’t really even look like a Google product. The first thing Gundotra shows me about Google+, and the first thing you’re likely to interact with, is something called “Circles”. It’s through Circles that users select and organize contacts into groups for optimal sharing. Gundotra realizes that many social services have tried and failed to get users to create groups. Next, Gundotra showed off a feature called “Sparks”. “Our goal here is to connect people. So when can you try Google+? More:

Google+: First Impressions Using Google+? Add Mashable to your circles. You'll get the latest about new Google+ features and tips and tricks for using the platform as well as top social media and technology news. Google has just unveiled Google+, its ambitious answer to Facebook. It turns all of Google into one giant social network, thanks to a core group of social products and a new navigation bar that integrates sharing into every single Google product. I spent much of Monday testing Google+'s features. SEE ALSO: PHOTOS | VIDEOS | POLL: What do you think of Google+? Design: Aesthetically, it's all Google — minimalist with plenty of white space. SEE ALSO: What Do You Think of Google+? Conclusion: Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. Overall, Google+ is solid. If Google can persuade users to come back every day, it has a winner.

First Night With Google Plus: This is Very Cool I thought I'd type up some notes after an evening of using Google's new social network, Google Plus. This is a really big deal, a super ambitious effort involving scores of engineers over months of near total secrecy. (Though some helpful sources and I scooped the core Circles part of all this three months ago.) The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it's the opposite of Facebook and Twitter's universal broadcast paradigm. Above: Anil Dash on Plus. Google Circles to Challenge Facebook Connect When asked about a Google Plus API, Google's Joseph Smarr said the following tonight on the site itself. That sounds exactly like Facebook Connect, in particular the get up-and-running quickly on a new site part, and makes sense given the degree to which Plus is understood as a challenge to Facebook generally. The list, group or Circle creation interface is interesting and really easy to use. Above: XKCD tells it like it is. The end result?

Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter  Google, the world’s largest search company, is formally making its pitch to become a major force in social networking. The product it announced Tuesday is called Google+, and observers might wonder whether it’s simply one more social effort by a company that’s had a lousy track record in that field to date. ‘On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction.’ — Shimrit Ben-Yair, product manager in charge of the social graph. Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we’ve seen before. The second important app is Circles, an improved way to share information with one’s friends, family, contacts and the public at large. But as I learned in almost year of following the project’s development, with multiple interviews with the team and its executives, Google+ is not a typical release. The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. Some think the battle is already lost.

Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? There seem to be three forces at play when it comes to education and social media. The first is a lack of force, quite frankly - the inertia that makes many educators unwilling and uninterested in integrating the technology into their classrooms. The second is the force of fear - the pressures on the part of administrators, district officials, and politicians to curtail and ban teacher and students' interactions online. (See Rhode Island's recently passed legislation that outlaws all social media on school grounds as a case in point.) And finally, the third force is that of more and more educators who are embracing social media and advocating its use on- and off-campus - for student learning and for teacher professional development alike. I spent this past week with many of those teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Philadelphia, and when Google unveiled Google+ on Tuesday, most of us were otherwise preoccupied. Plus Potentials for Schools

Good First Sign: I Have A Strong Desire To Keep Using Google+ I’ve spent the last several hours using Google+. That’s a good sign. While I first got a glimpse of the project when meeting with Google last week ahead of today’s story, such meetings are usually little more than fast-paced tutorials or worse, sales pitches. I definitely prefer to sit down and use things myself in a somewhat regular setting and see how I react. And seeing as the roll-out for Google+ is very limited right now, I thought I’d share some of those thoughts. First of all, Google+ is easily already the most compelling social project Google has ever done. That’s not to say Google+ doesn’t have bugs — it does. To me, Google+ feels closer to Google Buzz — but it feels like the version of Google Buzz that should have launched. To that end, Google+ actually may remind me more of FriendFeed than anything else. But it’s also substantially different from both Buzz and FriendFeed in that those services rely heavily on users importing data from other services to populate feeds.

Google opens up, then closes Google+ invites due to “insane demand” If you were desperate to get a Google+ invite, there’s a very good chance you could have landed one tonight as Google gave existing Plus users the ability to invite anyone to test out the service. But the revelry didn’t last too long — Google ended up turning off invites due to the sudden rush of new users. “We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand,” Google’s head of social Vic Gundotra announced on the service. “We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way.” Google+ launched on Tuesday to a small cadre of users, so tonight’s invite rollout is the first time the service has had a chance to spread to normal folks. People seem to be engaging with the service, judging from the number of folks on my Twitter feed who have been wrestling with Google+ all night. Even tech-savvy users will likely be confused when they first join Google+, so it’s no surprise that some mainstream users are having trouble.

Why Google+ won’t hurt Facebook, but Skype will hate it Google launched its much awaited and highly anticipated social networking platform today to a limited number of users. Dubbed Google+ (Plus), the service may take its cue from social networking giant Facebook, but in the end it is about the harsh reality of Google saving and enhancing its core franchise — Google Search. It is search (and, by extension, advertising) that made Google a company that has run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission because of its huge size and influence. At the time of Google’s founding, search was broadly defined as a sifting through a directory of websites. As the web grew, search became all about pages. Google, with its PageRank, came to dominate that evolution of search. Today, search is not just about pages, but also about people and the relevance of information to them. Google’s senior executives — long dismissive of the idea of importance of social to search — were contrite during their briefing earlier this week. Why? What is Google Plus?

Five reasons why Google+ will fail The verdict is out on Google+ until Google finally opens the floodgates and lets the masses in to decide for themselves. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look into our crystal balls. Dueling columnists Andrew Couts and Jeff Van Camp debate the merits of Google+ from both sides of the aisle. The tech world collapsed into a fury of excitement Tuesday with the announcement of Google+, the latest attempt by the Mountain View, California, search giant to penetrate into the cliquey world of social media. It’s a Google social network Time and again, the tech press has gotten all lathered up with Google’s hot new social offering. Then came Buzz, and we all know how far that went — or, rather, we don’t, since everybody stopped paying attention to it about 17 hours after the location and sharing service went live. In short, Google has a miserable track record. Facebook has too much of a head start Right now, Facebook has 750 million active users. Google+ lacks the cool factor Editors' Recommendations

Wow, Google+ Looks EXACTLY Like Facebook Google Now Lets Those In Google+ Offically Invite Others Already in Google+ and want to let others in? Google’s now allowing this. Just look to the bottom of the right-hand side of your stream. You should see an invite icon, like this: Select that, and you can invite anyone you like! About 30 minutes ago, this post covered an alternative way to doing invites before this official way became available. Officially, Google+ users still have no way to invite other people. When I clicked on that “Learn more about Google+” button, I was taken to a page where I was invited to sign-up for Google+ using this alternative address.In short, if anyone sends something out of Google+ to those not already in it, it appears Google is letting some of those people in.Why do it this way, rather than give out invites? Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Overnight, Google has removed the invite feature. We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Google+

novaspivack: Google+ seems a bit corpor... Five reasons why Google+ will succeed The verdict is out on Google+ until Google finally opens the floodgates and lets the masses in to decide for themselves. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look into our crystal balls. Dueling columnists Andrew Couts and Jeff Van Camp debate the merits of Google+ from both sides of the aisle. Here, Van Camp looks on the positive side with five reasons Google+ is positioned to rocket to the top. For a grittier take on the challenges Google will face, be sure to check out Couts’ five reasons Google+ will fail. There are plenty of reasons to write off Google’s first full-fledged foray into social networking. It’s simple and easy to use Early impressions from those in the beta have been largely positive. Impressions of the interface were also decidedly positive. At least from a usability and visual standpoint, Google finally seems to have hit the mark. Google has learned from Facebook Its has defining features The social network is launching with six core areas: It’s integrated everywhere

Does The Google+ Interface Remind You Of Facebook? You’re Not The Only One There’s no question about it: Google+ genuinely looks good. But, as thousands of people have already noted and joked about, it also really does look a lot like Facebook. UX designer and consultant UXboy agrees, and put the two interfaces side by side to showcase just how much the entry pages of both services look alike. Judge for yourself: Update – from xkcd:

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