Google+ has added two new features to the mobile Web version that will be coming to the native apps soon. The What's Hot section, which highlights trending and popular posts, now has its own stream. Swipe to the right of the Circles tab to find it. The update also enables users to see who +1'd a post by clicking on the +1 count. Google+ added What's Hot last October. It's one of several ways to discover new content on Google+. On the desktop, it appears periodically in the main news stream as well as on the left sidebar, under the...

Google has always been reluctant to call Google+ a mere social network. Even though it looked like a Facebook clone at launch, the company has consistently said it was a bigger project that would permeate the entire company.

That's only the beginning. As Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch pointed out this morning, Google has a lot of other products that contain personally relevant information. Google Docs has documents, Gmail has contacts and calendar entries, Google Music has playlist information, and so on.

Now step back to the beginning of 2011 for a second. Google was facing a lot of criticism that its search engine had become less relevant, and was littered with spammy links. An engineer from Microsoft's Bing even accused Google of profiting from these spammy links -- a lot of them linked to pages with Google affiliate ads.

So Google made some major changes to its algorithms -- the most publicized one was called Panda -- and as a result, some sites got a lot less traffic than they used to. So-called "content farms" with lots of questionably useful short posts were particularly hurt.

Google defended these changes as improving the search experience and making it more relevant.

Now imagine what happens as Google+ and other "social" signals on Google's sites (Gmail contacts and so on) become a greater component of Google's search relevance algorithms.

Now Google is back with Google+, a new and even more ambitious social service. Fifteen months in the making, the sweeping initiative attempts to make sharing and communicating an integral part of Google’s entire array of offerings—search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and so on. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where every update usually gets shared with everyone, Google+ makes it easy to direct messages to specific groups of people, thanks to its now-celebrated Circles feature. In addition to its Facebook-like stream of updates from friends, family, and colleagues, Google+ also includes an “interest stream”—called Sparks—with shareable items automatically culled from the Net that pertain to your favorite topics. Another feature, Hangouts, lets users instantly create a videoconference with up to 10 friends.

Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph.

An interoperable email system created widespread benefit, and permitted many ecosystems to emerge on top of it, both formal and ad-hoc. Email reduced distance and time between people, enabling rapid iteration of ideas, collaboration and community formation. For example, it's hard to imagine the open source revolution without email.

When the social layer becomes a standard facility, available to any application, we'll release ourselves into a world of enhanced diversity, productivity and creative opportunity. Though we don't labor as much under the constraints of distance or time as we did before email, we are confined by boundaries of data silos. Our information is owned by others, we cannot readily share what is ours, and collaboration is still mostly boxed by the confines of an application's ability.

A social backbone would also be a boost for diversity. Communities of interest would be enabled by the ready availability of social networking, without having the heavy lifting in creating the community, or run the risk of disapproval or censorship from a controlling enterprise.

The problem with this rationale, however rosy it may seem, is that you’re simply moving from one internet juggernaut to another. You’re taking your chips from Facebook and investing them in Google+. This might be a satisfactory solution in the short term, but do you have any rational reason to believe that it’s better in the long term? Is Google a nicer company than Facebook? Google’s record with privacy-related issues (Buzz, Street View, Wi-Fi snooping) is just as bad as Facebook’s, if not worse, and it remains under investigation by governments around the world. Google+ certainly shows that Google has learnt from its mistakes — but just remember that Google makes its money by selling you; by knowing where you live, what videos you like watching, and your entire search and surfing history, Google sells targeted advertising to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Selling you is 96% of Google’s revenue stream.

One thing I’ve been using it for, that Twitter isn’t helpful for, are those times when I want to make a comment about something, perhaps spark a discussion, and those 140 characters simply aren’t enough.

It’s a nice middle ground between the micro-blogging that Twitter offers and the more time consuming effort of creating a formal blog post — and it has the benefit of potentially generating tons of feedback and consolidating that feedback for future reference.

That’s one reason why I can see it being compelling to people like Kevin Rose, who has declared Google+ will be his new blog. While my reaction to that was that no one should see Google+ as a blog replacement, as an in-between for Twitter and blogging, it’s compelling.

Circles is really a reskinned groups, and it's an untapped haven for spammers.

Don't believe me? Go to anyone's profile and see who they have in their "circles" open "see all" then add them all to your own circle, call it whatever you want.

Then send a link of whatever your choose to that circle. Now you have direct access to their email... no questions asked.

Yes, they can hide you, or block you. But what's to stop you from creating another account, and doing the same process over again? Well, if you're not a spammer, morals. But spammers don't have those.

More fundamentally, though circles are used by readers and by writers and they are not adequate to the task. Writers decide who will be interested in what they write: I'm finding that I have to model the mental state of all my friends — will they care about stories of my kids, pictures of gigs I go to, thoughts on technology, rants on NZ politics? And, of course, I can't model this perfectly: many people in my NZ circle won't care about my political rants. But they can't unsubscribe from my NZ rants, they can only take me out of a circle. Unsubscribe isn't fine-grained enough to be useful.

My classic use case for filters is my good friend James. James tweets about technology and his family, and I want to read those. But he also avidly supports a Canadian ice-hockey team and during games he tweets non-stop about stuff I don't care about. I want to unsubscribe from his #habs tweets. I know friends who don't follow me on Twitter because of the floods that come from me during conferences. Google Plus doesn't deal with these common use cases.

For bloggers and other content creators, Twitter has been an amazing tool for broadcasting information to a wide audience, but that is it. If they wanted to get feedback, if they wanted to communicate a thought longer than 140 characters, or have a conversation etc, they had to move to a different platform. (Is it not odd that the best way to use twitter is through 3rd party services like Flipboard or HootSuite?)

Now, through Google+ content creators have an instant way to connect to their core audience. These are people who want to be discovered. For someone who writes a blog or runs a YouTube channel with 5000 unique monthly readers/viewers, Google+ is like market research, mailing list, notification service all rolled into one.

Facebook had little, if anything, ever to offer to content creators. After all, Facebook is for 99% of internet users. However, most content on the Internet is created by the remaining 1%.
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The www is has completely changed and is still changing how we communicate and interact. I think its a little narrow-minded to assume that web-based communication and interaction needs to approximate real-life interaction.

Didn't Larry Page say something like "if you have secrets you shouldn't put them on a social network, social networks are for sharing?" However I agree with you that Google got it wrong.

So what's the deal?

It's too fucking complicated. I'm on day five of regular G+ use and now it's starting to sink in how I can use the circles mechanism. G+ makes you think and that's why it will never ever dominate or compete with Facebook. It's not necessarily a UI issue, it's not a programming problem, it's a conceptual issue that will ruin the user experience for the casual user.

Google+ is a lot more complicated than any of these, but on the plus side (heh), it’s complicated from the get-go, so all users are defining their relationships with each other when they add them, rather than messing with privacy settings after the fact.

I have to say, though, while using the snazzy animated Circle-creation tool may come more naturally to others (early adopters seem to be mad with love for Google+), I think this is likely to be a stumbling block for many people.

Perhaps digital relationships won’t be naturally nuanced and eroded over time like real-world relationships, because digital things just don’t do that. They exist, or they do not.

And it may just be that privacy is incredibly difficult to illustrate and conceptualize. But lots of things seem hard at the start; maybe we as humans will teach ourselves to understand this stuff better over time.

The core failure here is that Google does not understand privacy in a social context. Google understands privacy in an information-security way, i.e. privacy means maintaining the security and integrity of confidential data. Google is real good at this; their culture is excellent at keeping secrets. But privacy in a social realm is not about ACLs (Access Control Lists); it has less to do with maintaining integrity of information - rather, it strongly revolves around the concepts of circumspection and discretion.

These are social concepts that anyone who uses Facebook implicitly understands (even the people who made and/or like Google+). As an example, consider the concept of cliques on Facebook:

Cliques are not a Facebook feature, but an emergent property of interactions on Facebook that have arisen from social norms around discretion. Cliques are semi-overlapping subsets of your Facebook friends who all know each other, like your "close friends" or "college friends" or "work friends" or "family." Often, when you post something relevant to a particular clique, members of that clique will comment on it, and people outside that clique, despite even being friends, will naturally understand that it's not a conversation that they should participate in. Go look at your News Feed right now - you can see it in action. Some of the comment threads will be relevant to you, and others will not - they involve another clique of the friend who posted it that you don't belong to. And you naturally understand that you're not a part of that conversation, while being part of others. So you get involved in some of them, and stay out of others.

A walkthrough of the hangout feature on Google+, you can load up a youtube video and watch it with friends.

In one version of the future of television, you never need to leave the Google ecosystem. As we pointed out earlier, it's easy to think about Google+ as a Facebook clone. At first glance, it looks like any other social network with a profile picture in the upper lefthand corner and the ability to draw friend connections and share links on a wall and all that. A deeper dive into the unique features to Google+ shows that you can group friends into Circles and set up virtual Hangouts with your friends. Hangouts are basically video-enabled group chats. You set up a Hangout, send the URL to whomever you want to join, and as everybody joins you can see their faces via webcam and chat in real time. Maya Baratz at The Wall Street Journal made a timely observation as she was checking out the new features on Thursday night.

Now the geeks are praising Google+ as being the perfect social network, and they’re doing so after about five minutes of using it. The problem for Google is that their praise of Google Plus is based almost entirely on how much they love the fact that no one but geeks is on there. In fact the typical Google Plus timeline is full of almost nothing but bragging. That may soften once they run out hot air and decide to begin actually doing something with Google Plus, if they get that far. The most likely scenario is that, as with users who are already cross-posting to Facebook and Twitter, Google+ will simply become a third place in which they cross-post the exact same status update. In other words, it’ll be just another place to go and read the same things you’ve already read on the last social network. Which is fine for Google if it can win by pulling the mainstream away from Facebook and Twitter and becoming the social network which most users visit first each morning.

See the The Top 100 most popular Google+ users and add yourself to the list to get more followers too.

The most important difference is that Google+ isn’t based on two-way “friend” relationships. Instead of making friends, you create groups of other users—”Circles,” in Google lingo. These people don’t need to approve you, but they don’t grant you any special access to them just because you’ve put them in your Best Friends Forever circle. They can ignore you without you knowing it. Likewise, putting several people into a circle doesn’t connect them to one another the way a Facebook group does. It’s more like a Facebook list. The circle is for your convenience only, so you can share things with all of them, or see their own updates, as a group.

Second, Google+ encourages you to choose carefully which Circles and individuals you share each individual post you make to your Stream, the page of your posts which resembles a Facebook wall. On Facebook, you can similarly fine-tune who does and doesn’t see each of your status updates—click Facebook’s lock icon below the status input box, and choose Customize to enter friends, networks, and lists to add or block. But on Facebook, it’s complicated. Google+ puts the sharing options in your face, to encourage you to think actively about sharing some things with one circle of people, some with others.

I am a design enthusiast myself, and therefore am a bit more critical with user interface and such in websites and applications. The first thing that came to mind when I launched Google+ was this could not possibly be designed by Google. It is actually very nicely designed. Everything is very accessible, yet the site remains clean and simple. Navigation for the stream, which includes the ability to filter activity by circles, and your added interests in Sparks are on the left. All the content is obviously front and center. Then to the right is a list of people in your circles, and the ability to start a Hangout. At the top, you can switch between the Home, Photos, Profile, and Circles views, as well as search for people.

Google+ really shines when it comes to all the little things added to make the experience just slightly more pleasant. For instance, the Notifications view is fantastic. Upon clicking a specific notification at the top right of the screen, instead of being brought to a new page like on Facebook, the post loads within the small area. And if you are tired of receiving alerts for a post that is continuously updating, you can mute it so it is not a bother. Another small thing I noticed is when in other Google services, a sharing option is present now to post content straight to Google+.

Drag your facebook friends there to create new list...

My solution is the two tier system: either someone is a friend and you have to accept them as such. Or they’re a follower — meaning they can opt-in to following your public updates without you having to okay them. When you update on Facebook, there would then be a big switch to decide if you want something to go to just your friends or to your followers (which would include your friends).

I see no reason why there couldn’t be an option to use lists that further filter things beyond that. But friend/follower would be the main list/function that everyone used.

Zuckberg is clearly thinking a different way to solve the lists issue. He thinks it still has to be something like friend lists, but done a different way. He noted that they have to come up with a way for people to control each thing they want to share, but do it in a way so that the tools are really easy to use.

Google has smartly made it so that you have to add people to Circles in order to “follow” them. This is a slight barrier to entry in terms of digging in and using the service, but it does bolster the Circle idea. But instead of creating a bunch of Circles, I foresee people simply shoving everyone into the default “Friends” or “Following” Circles and going about their business.

Who knows, maybe I’m just a Silicon Valley guy who has lost touch with reality. It’s entirely possible. But maybe, just maybe, the opposite is true. Maybe “regular” people have been allergic to using groups in the past because they simply don’t want to use groups. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s a good idea on paper or in a brain-storming session, but doesn’t translate onto the web. Maybe — gasp — the web isn’t meant to mimic the real world.

The first thing Gundotra shows me about Google+, and the first thing you’re likely to interact with, is something called “Circles”. You may recall that talk of this feature leaked out a few months ago — though it wasn’t exactly right. In fact, our story from months prior about a feature of Google +1 (the name of the network at the time which ended up being the name of the button — more on that in a bit) called “Loops” may have been a bit closer. That is, Circles isn’t actually a stand-alone product, it’s a feature of Google+ — an important one. “It’s something core to our product,” Gundotra says.

It’s through Circles that users select and organize contacts into groups for optimal sharing. I know, I know — not more group management. But the truth is that Google has made the process as pleasant as possible. You simply select people from a list of recommended contacts (populated from your Gmail and/or Google Contacts) and drag them into Circles you designate. The UI for all of this is simple and intuitive — it’s so good, that you might even say it’s kind of fun. It beats the pants off of the method for creating a group within Facebook.

Gundotra realizes that many social services have tried and failed to get users to create groups. But he believes they’ll succeed with Circles because he says they’re using software in the correct way to mimic the real world. More importantly, “you’re rewarded for doing this,” he says. How so? A big feature of Google+ is the toolbar that exists across the top of all Google sites (yes, the aforementioned black one). Once your Circles are set, sharing with any of them from any Google site is simple thanks to this toolbar.

Google+ topic page on Quora.com

Tudor Achim:

The UX design of Circles is awesome. Creating different circles of acquaintances is streamlined and kind of fun (you get a lot of the visceral effects you would expect on iOS).

Very few of my friends are on it, and even more annoying is the lack of a facebook friend importer.

A bunch of stuff is still broken (sharing links, sharing via email).

The interface makes it really clear who I'm sharing with whenever I go to share a status or link, so it feels like a more private, secure way to broadcast to my different friend circles.

The group video chat worked very well (better than any other online solution, like tinychat, that I've used), but the interface on that page (text chat / youtube) could use some work.

It's much more polished than the other Google attempts at social networking

Google+ Topic Group page on Quora.com

Is this a set of features or is it a whole package?

Horowitz: We’re calling this the Google+ project for a reason. It’s not a monolithic product. We’ve had products before: Blogger is a product, Orkut is a product, Buzz is a product. This is a project and when we say “project” we mean it’s much broader in scope. This is something that will impact Google.

That’s why it’s Google+, almost the smallest modifier on Google itself that you can imagine.

Similarly, it’s much longer in timeframe. There are features and foundational elements that we’re dropping today: things like the stream, the rich profile, the Circle editor, those are core to everything that will come next and those are new.

But you’ll see increasingly that this is about making these suite of Google services coherent and better. So when you’re on maps and you want to share driving directions, you don’t have to do it in a different way, it utilizes common infrastructure, common gestures.

We already have literally billions of users using these services at Google with the inefficiencies we have today, and we think this will delight these uses and create a common way for them to connect to other people and ultimately on the net.

Emerald Sea is not a Facebook killer, Gundotra told me. In fact, he added, somewhat puckishly, “people are barely tolerant of the Facebook they have,” citing a consumer satisfaction study that rated it barely higher than the IRS. Instead, he says, the transformation will offer people a better Google.

Nonetheless, it was impossible to deny that “+1” (as it was then called) offered some of features closely associated with Facebook. The overall difference is that Google would try to leverage its assets to do certain things more effectively than Facebook, and attempt other things that Facebook can’t pull off yet.

“The internet is nothing but software fabric that connects the interactions of human beings,” Gundotra said. “Every piece of software is going to transformed by this primacy of people and this shift.” Gundotra said that to date identifying people has been “the most epic failure of Google…. Because we were focusing on organizing the world’s information, the search company failed to do the most important search of all.”

But that was about to change.

But when I thought about it more, Facebook and Twitter haven't actually made my social life better. They enhance my career, but not my personal relationships. Sure, the sites let me know about so-and-so's band or fundraiser, but if they are my "real friends," I know anyway. They make me lazier, too—I've definitely written a "happy birthday" or two on people's walls when I didn't feel like calling. The more friends or followers you get, the less you can connect with other people and be yourself and the more you're performing for an audience. For some, these sites become popularity contests of who has the most friends or the most RTs or comments. For the media, Twitter is often an echo chamber that can quickly descend into navel-gazing. Both are rife with oversharing. We've started to take for granted these dynamics of social networking. But does it have to be this way, or could a site actually build on friendships and interests you already have? That's what Google+ promises, at least.

1. Circles: The way you organize your contacts is pretty spiffy. This is the main way right now that Google+ combines Facebook and Twitter…and improves on both. In my experience, Facebook is mostly a walled garden in which you share all of your content with all your friends and no one else, whereas Twitter is a mostly public place where anyone can follow you and read any of your tweets. Google+ allows you to very easily set up multiple modes of interaction instead of having to choose one. (Yes, I know Facebook has group things or something, but I’ve never been able to get them to work, whereas I figured out Google+ in under five minutes.) I am able to follow anyone I want, and don’t need to get a friend request approved. However, I am under no under obligation to follow anyone back. And if I do wish to follow someone back, I can click and drag them into various “circles,” which are absurdly easy to set up. For instance, I can have a circle for close local friends so I can easily check and see who’s free to have dinner with me tonight. And I can have a circle for my family, or my college friends, or whatever I want (the names of the circles are private, too). This is great for writers because we will no longer have to wonder how to use Facebook: do we friend fans, or direct them to our Fan Page? Instead, we can just broadcast certain messages publicly, in which case all our followers will see them, OR we can create a circle for our fans, while still being able to be more personal with our real-life friends. Also, I’ve already created a circle called “Writers” so that if I want to talk craft (or the next big convention), I can show those conversations only to the people who care. (Note that Circles neatly sidesteps most of the drama inherent in Facebook; no more awkward friend requests that you have to ignore, or sudden realizations that someone has de-friended you. Less drama leads to less stress, which makes me happy.)