Archives / July 2011

Re my review of Google+ yesterday, some followup links suggested by readers and commenters:

• FastCompany writes about "circle fatigue": "Google Plus might have a sleek solution with Circles, but it's one that requires a great deal of effort." (Initial shine apparently starting to wear off already.)

• DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn't track your every move, as explained at donttrack.us. Thanks to @pswam.

• Behave on Google Plus or Your Gmail Gets It - what would happen if you were locked out of your Gmail account, and all its archives? Read Bit Literacy for tips on being self-sufficient online. Thanks to C.

Also: the comments on yesterday's piece are worth reading.

Google+ is going to succeed. At least that's what I've been telling people when they ask my opinion of the service. The cleverly designed interface, and the immediate popularity among influential techies (due in no small part to the lack of a Facebook logo), all point to a hit in the making. The latest estimate I've seen is that Google+ has almost 18 million users already. This is a major accomplishment. After some high-profile missteps in social media - Google Wave, Google Buzz - the company has conceived, designed, and launched a success.

My larger conclusion, though, is that Google didn't fundamentally fix any of the major problems of the Facebook experience. And that was the point of the endeavor: beat Facebook. Out-innovate Facebook. Take users away from Facebook. But in the end, the innovations in Google+ are mostly helpful to tech insiders and experts - the exact people, not coincidentally, who are praising the service so strongly right now. Once that initial excitement from the A-list wears off, Google+ will feel, to most users, similar to Facebook.

Consider the circles (which I love, by the way, on a tactical interface-design level - kudos to Andy Hertzfeld). The most prominent part of the Google+ interface is a clever way of categorizing your contacts: friends here, work colleagues there, hackathon buddies over there. The point? To designate the exact subset of your acquaintances who should be able to see any given post that you publish.

The problem with this... well, let me be blunt: how many Facebook users wish that fewer people would read their posts?

If you found an average Facebook user - here I'm not talking a top 1% A-list blogger, but rather someone in the middle of the pack of 750 million - and observed them, say, reading their friends' posts, possibly commenting on one or two, maybe even uploading photos of the recent vacation or playing Farmville - what might you conclude? Would you conclude that the urgent pain point in the Facebook experience is not being able to publish to a subset of your contacts?

I doubt it. At least we've never found that, when Creative Good has done user research in social media. I've heard, and read, lots of complaints about the Facebook experience over the years, and "publishing granularity" has never been one of them.

Now I understand the thinking behind the circles: people often have very different contexts in their lives that they want to keep separate. True enough. And as I said, the interface design is brilliantly executed. I just don't think it's the right strategy, for a simple reason: most users are more concerned with the inbound than the outbound.

If you watch enough people posting on Facebook, and pay attention to the (not infrequent) negative comments they make about Facebook itself, you'll quickly see a pattern. "Why does Facebook hide who's in my News Feed?" "Did Facebook change how Top News works again?" They tend to be comments about the reading, viewing, consuming, receiving experience - not about publishing. The pain point for average users is the overload of incoming information, and the lack or confusion of the interfaces meant to deal with it. Unfortunately, the "stream" on Google+ is nearly identical to the Facebook news feed: a scrolling list of update after update after update after update, with metadata attached to each. It's Facebook without the logo.

Now. For that minority of Facebook users who are posting frequently, here's the main pain point I see mentioned: how do I get more people to read my stuff? How do I get more people to "Like" my project, my post, my group? More followers, more buzz, more influence, more more more publishing reach. Google's response: here's an interface to let you post to fewer people.

One final point. I know that much of the negativity around Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg, centers on the issue of privacy. The privacy settings seem to have been intentionally designed to be hard to use. And it just feels like Facebook wants to share - and thus sell - more of your info than you might want. To many, the Facebook brand is just a little... dodgy. Thus Google+ is an especially welcome arrival: it's a social network and it's not Facebook!

But this, too, will fade as a competitive advantage. As I've pointed out (as have others), you can flee Facebook for the respect-your-privacy confines of Google+, until you realize: this is the company that drives a car down your street to take pictures of your house. I like Google as much as the next guy, but I'm not about to start posting personal info on Google+... even in a "personal friends" circle. (Other users may feel differently, but I don't think they'll end up trusting Google+ more than Facebook in the long run.)

For now, I can understand the enthusiasm of the tech elite: a brand new UI to play with, new ways to obsessively organize digital stuff, new opportunities to pontificate about "the social graph," and did I mention, it's not Facebook - not a whiff of Farmville about it. All things that geeks today love.

But happy geeks aren't enough. To really out-innovate Facebook, Google will have to consider what average users want. Get out of Mountain View, find a non-techie who uses Facebook, sit down as they log in, and just watch.

Until that happens, average users will enjoy Google+ just fine as they stream, then flood, onto the service. They'll just find, once they get there, that it all feels oddly familiar.

"Usability is going to be the single greatest impediment to physician acceptance." Interesting NYT piece on problems with the electronic medical record.

One way to make information vanish is to cover it with overly complicated details.

In a recent post, Philip Greenspun writes that the U.S.'s economic troubles are poorly understood, due to the complexity of the explanations.

[Looking at America's situation,] an accountant would say, "You're spending more than you earn. You have to stop or you will run out of money." ... Instead of accountants in public discourse, however, we have economists. ...

Instead of the sober accountant showing up on TV or in a news article saying "You aren't rich enough to do stuff like this" or "All of your wealth was siphoned off by the following cronies of the current rulers" we have Economist A saying "Really the U.S. is in great shape if only we printed more money here, had one government agency issue some bonds there, had another government agency buy those bonds, and changed some assumptions in making projections about the costs of Programs X, Y, and Z".

If you want to impart real understanding to a user, keep it simple, direct, and short.

And whenever you see someone presenting an impressively complicated framework, beware. All those details may be hiding something.

Photoshop allowed non-expert users to play with visual effects in static images. Now the wide availability of video tools is now enabling amateur movies with surprisingly good special effects. Examples: Plot Device and Epic War. (Other good examples? Post in comments.)

We'll see more of this. People have uploaded shaky, un-edited home videos to YouTube for a few years, but now that there are low-cost options for editing, we're going to see a LOT more kinds of expression like those above.

The entrance of the mass-market enthusiast to this area has helped bring on nostalgia for earlier days. As often happens, when the masses catch up with the expert, the expert goes retro. Elite designers (I mean that in the nicest possible sense) are now showing off their skills with animated GIFs, a low-tech format from the early days of the Web that went out of fashion about a decade ago. Example below:

In Animated GIFs Triumphant, Anil Dash expertly describes the phenomenon. I'm not sure I'd agree that animated GIFs are "the most popular animation and short film format that's ever existed" - I think the word "popular" would need a bit more definition - but it's nice to see the trend put into a historical and cultural context.

Meanwhile, the masses continue to flood into the world of editing their home-cam, h.264, Quicktime-exported mpeg. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Charlie O'Donnell, a venture capitalist in New York, just wrote a great short course in innovation. If every budding (or veteran!) entrepreneur in the world would just read these two paragraphs, we'd all be enjoying more useful, enjoyable, and meaningful products and services in very short order.

Quoting, emphasis mine:

What I find most disappointing about many of the ideas I see [is that] they appear to be more about solving for what will get funded or what's a derivative of a product they saw on Techcrunch that they don't even use themselves versus understanding and improving the lives of the population at large. Entrepreneurs ...too often extrapolate non-existent trends or false perceived needs from their very homogeneous social circles.

If you're going to design a product, it's so incredibly important to not only diversify the kinds of people you interact with socially, but spend a fair bit of analysis and contemplation to really understand trends in their behavior. Why does someone use or not use Service A? Entrepreneurs are, to their own disadvantage, punting on the understanding of human behavior they need to design products for the masses. Perhaps if you spend a little less time pitching and more time listening--figuring out why people use the products they do and observing how they interact with others, you'd have more users. Before you get confident that you've got something, get curious about why people are doing what they're doing.

Charlie makes a great point. Listen to your users BEFORE you make all your strategic decisions. Yes, even users might actually tell you something you wouldn't have thought of. Don't wait until the last minute to bring users in. (If you could use help, contact us at Creative Good. This is what we do.)

Subscribe here for Charlie's newsletter (where the text above appeared) - weekly, focused on digital innovation in NYC. On Twitter he's @ceonyc.