How is Google+ not better than Facebook? Seriously, let us know. As a product, Google+ is better. It has everything FB has and far, FAR superior managment of people with Circles. Superior video chat of up to 10 people for free. You can 'follow' people the way you would on twitter. Google+ doesn't have an API for coders to make their own games and apps for it, but you can bet they will soon. The only downside I can see is it may take an extra click or two per post if you post to different circles often. The reason FB is 'better' right now is because that's where everybody is. That is the only thing that will make any product of this sort great. FB could be an even worse product than it is now, but if everybody was sharing on it, it would be the 'best' one. Now, maybe Google+ won't gain traction, and they will lose this battle due to bad timing, screwing up Buzz, and being so late to market. But it won't be because the product is bad.
And for the nerds who are interested, this is the best writeup yet of the G+ vs FB- this time from a former Google engineer who was involved in the G+ product. http://rethrick.com/#google-plus Long but great read. In a nutshell: - Paul Adams composed a slide deck called Real Life Social Network, which Google incorporated as the major differentiator in G+. Adams now ironically works with FB. - The slide deck is public. FB knew that this was coming, and they made a similar product to beat G+ to the punch. FB created: - "Groups." Which is a crap product. Difficult to use and nested away in the corner, near invisible, unused by almost everyone. - FB just can't up and make 750 million people change direction. Any time they change anything in the user interface, there is an uproar from the users. Quoting the author: "it is incredibly difficult for facebook to make fundamental changes to their product suite to answer competitive threats." If G+ looks like a real threat, there's no question FB will try harder and risk a fundamental change to their UI and incorporate something similar to Circles. This will be an interesting fight.
Groups is a crap product? You are delusional. Google+ absolutely has no chance. People just love to root for the next big thing. Like I said, i tried this thing for a week and its absolutely nothing special.
The guy saying that google+ is better than fb because it allows animated gifs and sounds is ridiculous. Its better to keep things simple. To put things into perspective, google+ is like realgm with all the ugly things like sigs and crap they allow on their site and fb is like clutchfans where it has far more appeal due to its simplicity.
That was intentional. I wasn't being serious by those comments (my more serious analysis of G+ can be found in other posts). Obviously animated GIFs aren't the difference in G+ being a $500B+ business or being a complete failure. That said, they are a nice addition. And I disagree that they make it worse in any way. They're not like signatures. At the absolute worst, they're on par with normal pictures and embedded videos...which are also on Facebook (unless you have a text-only version of Facebook, for ultimate simplicity). And most people like sharing things like those (myself included). G+ just 1ups Facebook by allowing users to share animated GIFs along with those other formats. I usually like sharing one funny/interesting video, picture, or GIF a day with my friends, and with G+, I definitely have more options on what I can share. Signatures are a distraction because people aren't going to Clutchfans (or other boards) to check out awesome signatures. They're there for things like discussions, so those things would be distracting. This doesn't apply to social networks (well...maybe some people go to Facebook for serious discussion...but they'll be very disappointed I'm sure). And FWIW, I'd definitely trade the "SomeGuyYouSharedACollegeClassWith just leveled up on Angry Mafia Birds. Click here to see more!" messages for animated GIF support. The fact that most (all?) G+ posts so far have actual, meaningful content (basically ads) has made it a much better experience overall. That stuff will definitely be coming to G+ (unfortunately ), but I'm hoping Google does a better job of integrating it. It is one of my biggest complains about Facebook. Worst-case scenario, I could probably filter out that stuff using a very easy-to-use interface. Things like that are why I like G+ better. For stuff I want to share, things are easier to do (e.g., Circles), and there are more options (e.g., animated GIFs). It isn't radically different, but for me, it doesn't have to be. It matches what I like about Facebook, but does it in a much better way. Presumably, it will begin to offer things Facebook can't match (e.g., integration with other Google products like Docs, Calendar, etc.), but that's getting to far ahead of the game at this point. Probably shouldn't downplay just how much better the G+ UI is too. Facebook UI was always at least partly broken for me, at least on Chrome. With their latest update, it is really broken, at least for me (and even when it worked, it is kind of ugly). Text overlayed on other text, hidden/difficult-to-find links, etc. G+ has been pretty solid from a UI standpoint, despite this being early and probably very prone to bugs. Hopefully it stays that way. (also, I often get wordy, and I swear I freaking hate the character limits on Facebook. You can post it as a note, but not sure why they separate the two to begin with. Definitely hasn't been a problem with G+. Quite nice not having to worry about whether I have 405 characters or 455 characters.)
Been on G+ for little over a week now... Im using FB less and less... especially since more and more of my friends are on G+...
I prefer Facebook. My biggest beef with G+ is that I can't send messages to people. And no, clicking "share only with" is not the same thing -- it's lame. It drives me nuts that they don't have something so basic. I will say that Circles >> Groups, but animated .gifs is not enough for me to fully switch. MySpace had animated gifs -- I would actually prefer a site without them. Just seems cheesy, IMO -- or rather, I know people who will abuse them/post stupid ones that annoy me. That said, g+ is brand new and has plenty of time to get better. We'll see. Edit: Also don't like that there is no "walls"
I would be much obliged to my Rockets bretheren for an invite or three. megamark74@gmail.com roxyglenda@gmail.com jodilh1@gmail.com
Bah! Humbug. G+ feels just like Facebook, a chore. But it must be just me, since the mass majority looooove social networking...
I agree (well...sort of). I don't have a problem with the existing system (not that hard to use IMO), but I don't think it is well-presented. The functionality for sending messages is more or less built-in, but Google needs to make it easier to use. I rarely sent messages via Facebook (or Myspace before that), so it isn't a big deal to me, but it does need work. Can someone explain why animated GIFs are so much worse than say videos or regular pictures (and thus, would prefer them to be off)? Each of them can be abused. Don't really see why animated GIFs are 100x worse or something like that. If you can skip over a dumb "Obama is a Keynesian!!!" picture (or, of course, those auto-generated app messages), then surely you can skip over dumb animated GIFs. At worst, you should easily be able to ignore them pretty easily, but at best, you have a new way of expressing yourself. Got a chuckle because after I posted last night, I went to my G+ account and noticed a new post from Chris Pirillo (someone in my "Following" experiment) which said this: (the joke being that your stream(s) gets overloaded with posts from Chris since he posts so much.) Guess you might find that stupid (probably is a lot more so, out of context), but it made me laugh. And not something easily reproducible with a video or picture (you could link to a video of it, but then you'd have to click play...just to get 5-10 seconds of content). Actually, along with GIFs, can someone tell me why they want walls? I know we're used to it, but I'm not sure it is the best way to do things. For privacy purposes, I think G+ has it right in that only the owner of a profile should have the ability to edit what shows up publicly on his/her "page" (or "wall" if you prefer). Otherwise, we get those "Dude, we got so drunk last night!" messages that end up being read by the parents, bosses, etc., of that person (maybe Facebook has some obscure, 24-step process that can prevent this, but I'm not aware of it). If you want to share something with a particular user, but also make it viewable by others, just tag the user ("+user") in the post (so they get the notification) and share it with whomever you want to also read said message (ideally not that person's boss, parents, etc., if you're going to talk about how drunk everyone was).
Well, when I think of animated .gifs I think of multi-colored bears dancing or something. I couldn't stand MySpace because of the animated gifs on pages.. was just too distracting and just looked trashy, IMO. Obviously, each person uses them for different purposes -- I guess I just know a lot of stupid people that would abuse them/cheapen the site with distracting/crappy ones. Regular pictures don't distract me (don't "blink" as animated .gifs would) and I can choose not to play videos if I don't want to see something. I think walls are great -- I usually want to share something with one person, not an entire group of people. If I want everyone to watch a funny video I've seen, I'll just put it up as a status update. But if I'm trying to tell someone happy birthday or write some funny inside-joke, walls are pretty key. Obviously the "lets smoke a blunt today" wall post are stupid and should be deleted immediately, but that's more on the company you keep than the functionality of the walls. In the end, each person's purpose and experience with social network sites are different. I'll keep G+ and keep checking it, but I think it needs to adopt a lot of FB features (messages/walls) for it to truly catch on. Just one man's opinion.
Would really appreciate an invite, will provide rep for whoever is able to invite me. Thanks! Brandonmauterstock91@gmail.com
MySpace definitely had issues. Though IIRC (it has been a while since I really checked out MySpace), most animated GIFs were on the profile pages (ugh...MySpace profile pages were/are horrible), not being shared via comments or whatever. Maybe some were, but generally in spam messages anyway, and I was just as annoyed by static images or even just worthless text in those types of comments. Ugh...I think I've blocked most of my MySpace experience out of my head, but now little flashes of it are coming back, and I think I'm going to have nightmares again. Guess it is best to wait and see how the community treats G+, but I don't really see it being a problem. I think it ends up being like most other things users abuse, and with G+, worst comes to worst, you can filter out those posts (rather than getting rid of whatever functionality the user was abusing). If nothing else, I bet they can probably make it an option, formally or informally (probably could have a Chrome extension that disables them...if there isn't one already). But you can do this with G+. Pretty easily ("Happy Birthday +LongTimeFan!" -> share with LongTimeFan). Friend gets the message, and can even respond. Walls aren't needed (unless you wanted everyone that is friends with that person to see that you wish him/her Happy Birthday...though you could share that with your circles). As I mentioned, I think the only thing a Wall would offer is that it is an easy way to say/share something with someone else, but have it publicly viewable (at least to anyone that has access to that Wall). But I don't think that is something is actually desirable, at least given the alternatives (only let friend see it, notify friend about message but also let your friends see it, etc.). Note quite related, but I saw this from a G+ user (Mike Elgan, think he is a tech writer for various sites): One of those "simple yet nice" features of G+.
