Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT

Google+ for Small Business Networking

Wednesday, June 29, 2011 by Michael Lewis

There were a host of announcements from Google this week. Chief among them was Google+, their long awaited social networking service. Unlike Facebook, Google+ is a series of tools that leverage Google's existing services and packages them together. The modular approach to the product design gives Google flexibility to launch, tweak, and kill tools as they see fit. This uniform branding and cross-tool intermigration is something that Google services have lacked for a long time.

In broad strokes, Google+ lets you organize and communicate with your contacts in several different ways. First, Circles lets you organize contacts in an intuitive way. We already think about our relationships in terms of "groups." It is a logical leap to organize email and chat contacts into Venn diagram-like circles instead of a flat table. Circles lets you communicate with these groups across a number of methods: Chat, messaging, or send status updates to just the people who need to see them.

Other tools let you share bookmarks (Google +1) or leverage search with Spark. Spark is interesting. It is a hybrid Twitter (a timeline of links, videos, and comments) and Google Alerts (a curated list of links generated by the search algorithm). A user creates a Spark about an interest and Google finds and drops it into a timeline. Users can then post those links directly to their Circles. Both tools look like they will talk to the search algorithm and influence search.

The final important aspect of Google+ is its deep integration into mobile in general and Android in particular. Integrated and effective group level communication is the part of the mobile puzzle that both Apple and Google have failed to capture from RIM.

And that is the real story. Google might be looking at Facebook off on the horizon, but LinkedIn is in firing range. By tying Google+ directly into people's existing network of friends, colleagues, and business contacts it lets them communicate in a far more efficient way. No longer do you have to switch between LinkedIn and your email if you want to communicate or share information with your business connections.

Google's marketing of Google+ has thus far centered on personal networking. They want to go head to head with Facebook. That is, perhaps, a smart long term strategy. Google has a more mature advertising system and a better track record with user privacy. Google+'s user design feels less industrial than previous Google products. This is due to the involvement of Andy Hartzfeld, the UI designer on the original Macintosh team. Google+ is slowing being rolled out and is currently by invitation only.

Until next time -

Mike Lewis

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