Google+, the long-awaited and highly ambitious Circle-driven social network from Google, has a clumsy name. It’s a search-unfriendly and seemingly unfitting moniker for the worldâs next great social network. So, why this bizarre name choice?
At launch, Google+ project co-leader Bradley Horowitz told AllThingsD that the name denotes how the product will make every other Google product social. “Itâs almost the smallest modifier on Google itself that you can imagine,” he said.
That small modifier carries one huge meaning. It’s not just Google any longer, it’s Google plus you, where Google becomes your plus one for the web.
A Plus One for Every Web Occasion
The plus one metaphor is an important one. Google+ follows you around the web and on mobile via an omnipresent and inescapable bar that includes a share box and notifications drop-down.
Now, Google+ is your plus one on most Google products: Search, Images, Videos, Maps, News, Gmail, Documents, Calendar, Finance and so forth. As Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook put it, “users wonât have the option of not using Google Plus.”
And, if you think about it, the plus one analogy fits. A plus one in the offline world is a companion or a crutch for a social setting that would otherwise be awkward to attend alone. You probably wouldn’t go to a wedding, movie, dinner party, work function or couple-centric social gathering without a plus one.
As the digital world bleeds into the physical world and personal relationships migrate to the web, the never-go-without-a-plus-one philosophy is carrying over here as well.
Right now, we see it manifested in Facebook’s social graph and the relationships we bring with us when we login with Facebook on a website or app.
But many of us have grown weary of Facebook as our de facto plus one. Facebook, as a plus one, is a little too needy (with our information), a little too demanding (of our time), and it has lost the ability to really please us (with its never-ending stream) in the routine of each day.
For some of us, Facebook doesn’t make us feel special anymore. And so we get (and ignore) the barrage of messages, updates and friend requests, and we tend to “phone it in” more often than not.
Our Facebook fatigue has given Google an opening. Now, there’s genuine widespread interest in this new suitor, as evidenced by the demand for Google+ invites.
The excitement of our new relationship will soon fade, however, and in its place, familiarity or contempt will seep in. But Google+ can keep the spark alive — not with more features, but with feeling.
A Web of Feeling
The press loves story lines involving angst or animus. Google, frustrated in its social ineptitude and lack of foresight, is now on the offensive, and aims to take down Facebook, Twitter or anyone else that stands in its way. You’ve also likely read that Google+ does work for regular folks, such as your mom and dad, or that maybe it doesn’t.
You’ve seen these headlines, and while they all poke around the truth, they miss the plot — Google is trying to understand and capture human relationships as they act on and influence the behaviors of those of us who are willing to put real faces to our online names.
If Google at its core is algorithmic search and information sorting, then the plus symbol denotes a new humanness reigning it all in. Pushing that thought forward, one could deduce that with Google+ you’ll get more of what you already expect from the search giant, albeit with extra layers of humanness and personal relationships baked inside.
“The internet is nothing but software fabric that connects the interactions of human beings,” Google’s senior vice president and Google+ project manager Vic Gundotra told Wired. “Every piece of software is going to be transformed by this primacy of people and this shift.”
This social network war you hear about, then, is not a war over the greatest feature set or the most impressive technology. It’s a war fought on the battleground of your heart. Feelings, not features, will win this war.
Google+, in its current state, evokes strong feelings in a few ways. Notifications draw you back. The Google+ bar nudges you to share what you’re consuming on the web with others, and new followers, comments and +1s double as serotonin injections leading to rapturous feel-good moments.
Not all these sensations will be experienced by early users, but when you have Jenna Wortham for the New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog writing effusively about Google+ Hangouts — “Last night a chartroom changed my life,” she said — you can see that Google’s feel-good mission is working.
There’s still plenty of room for improvement. Creating and managing Circles can be engaging, but when you reach a certain number of followers, the pleasure turns to pain. The reward could be great, however, if we could take a single Circle, as a filtered subset of our larger social graphs, with us to other online destinations.
Validation & the Promise of Plus One
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is right: Google+ is a validation of Facebook’s vision. But, the same could have been said about Facebook in its early days — it was a validation of MySpace’s mission. After all, Facebook took the social network model pioneered by others, tweaked it a smidgen and found a huge audience.
History continues to tell us that in the land of technology, first is not always best and biggest is but a temporary adjective.
Still, the promise of Google+ and its role as our sidekick for the web is only partially realized. The product travels with us, but does little to enhance the other Google products we use. As it stands, Google+ is merely another destination social network.
If Google wishes for the plus to leap off the web page and into our hearts, the euphoric feelings associated with Circles and Hangouts will need to be amplified. And Sparks, the topic content hubs within Google+, will need to embrace the new, social Google and mask the bland algorithmic Google-of-old.
What we need is a plus one that accompanies and comforts us, a plus one that ultimately enhances our every online experience — not just on Google products, but on the web at large. From the looks of its auspicious launch, Google+ is on its way to doing just that.
Images courtesy of Flickr, Swirlyarts, TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ and milos milosevic
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