[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E77HpMMbDYc]
via youtube.com
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Google Plus gets one thing really, really right.
When Google Wave came out and I was given an invite by kind friends who tolerate my perverse desire to try out Cool New Shit, I paid it forward by raffling my own parcel of invites off on Twitter with a haiku and limerick contest. What goes around comes around, it seems: after I went all passive-aggressive on my negligent Googler friend who really should have gotten me in on this Cool New Shit, two other friends had sent me an invite. Bless!
Whoever says Google Plus is a lot like Facebook isn't wrong. 'Sparks' is a stupid buzzword. I haven't yet tried 'Hangout', the casual group video chat thing, but considering that my friends all live in very diverse timezones I don't see this becoming a part of my life. And the previously introduced +1 button, Google's answer to the Facebook Like button, is still a me-too response to something I always considered kind of dumb.
But Google Plus looks nice, works well, is ubiquitous and unobtrusive at once, and there's one thing, one central thing, that it gets super duper right about social networking.
All the major social networks, from LiveJournal to Facebook to Twitter, support Lists or Groups and they're all kind of not very awesome. It's a chore to manage who you put in those groups, and if you want to see the activity in a particular list or share something only with one list and not another, expect to click and double-check a whole lot more.
While 'Circles' seems like another stupid buzzword, this is the part that Google has got really, really right.
Organizing your contacts into Circles is quick, intuitive and fun. Let me say that again, to make sure you don't read any unintended irony into it: organizing your contacts is fun. Have some Kool-Aid.
Circles are central to Google Plus, not tacked-on afterthoughts like Lists and Groups are pretty much everywhere else. They give you security and privacy, but they don't feel like a tool for keeping secrets. You're encouraged to think about what your friends and contacts have in common with you, with each other, what you're interested in sharing with them. Circles even comes pre-populated with sensible Circles for you to use: Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following, but you can add as many as you like.
There's stuff I deliberately don't share on Facebook because I've got some coworkers on there, or that I don't post to Twitter or LiveJournal because it's too public or because managing the privacy levels on those is a chore I never got into. When I see something interesting on Google Reader I'll sometimes hit the Share button for my handful of followers, or I'll excerpt it and post it to my blog, to then be autoposted across my myriad social networks. Or sometimes I'll e-mail it to either my nearest friends or my family.
We're all constantly thinking about what we share with whom, not just because we have secrets to keep, but also because you want to share some things specifically with those people with whom you share those particular common interests. With Circles, Google has figured out the best currently existing way to make those decisions natural and easy in social networking.
In Google Plus, it's almost no effort to share or post something in public, with a Circle, with a single person or with five specific individuals. It's baked in; as elemental as the To: field in e-mail. I always know who I'm sharing it with, and that doesn't just help me keep my dirtly little secrets: it also frees me to geek out about stuff that probably the majority of my friends and acquaintances don't care about because I can share it specifically with the people who do.
Google Plus learned from Wave and Buzz. From the former it learned that people have to be able to understand what it's for right from the get-go; from the latter it learned that people, you know, value their privacy. From both, it learned that nobody wants to be the first guy with a fax machine, so Plus is rolling out across Google's holdings, and will integrate more and more of their services. Bring it, Big G.
Still, those buzzwords. Circles? I mean, it fits, and the UX is symbiotic with the word, but still. Actually, it probably helps best to imagine Circles as a social Venn diagram with you in the center.
And as we know, Venn diagrams are super cute.
- Alex Vance
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Synchronized hand and finger tapdancing. Yeah, really!
We No Speak Americano ft. Cleary & Harding. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iANRO3I30nM]
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
+Usted, +Sie, +Vous: Google's new foray into Social exposes an interesting linguistic quandary.
It frustrates me no end that my Googler friends take their NDAs so seriously and every new announcement from Big G catches me completely by surprise. Harrumph.
The newest thing is Google+. While I certainly won't be betting money either way whether this time, this time for real you guys, Google's going to strike a chord with the online social graph, especially given the paucity of concrete information (though the introductory videos are really good) there's a small, subtle, yet complex problem with the service.
One of the top-level items in the new experiment's structure is called +You.
Doesn't seem like much of a problem, right? Not in English, no, but English is one of the only European languages that only has a single form for the second person. The rest of us still use two: formal and informal.
Quick sidebar, here. English used to have two versions of the second person, too: you and thou. The latter is still used by the Amish, among family – which is how it was traditionally used. You'd say thou to your family and friends, it was the informal second person; you'd say you to an elder or an authority figure. It always struck me as weird that Modern English speakers consider the archaic thou, thee and thy to be pompous and lofty. According to eminently reliable sources (Wikipedia) this is due to the exclusive used of thou-thee-thy in early English translations of the Bible which, with the exception of Shakespeare, represent the only contact modern speakers of English have with those words. In the context of such a solemn holy text, it's no wonder that this form of the second person seems lofty – despite this being the exact opposite of how it was actually used in conversation!
Back to the action. When I visited the Google+ site it was automatically localized into Dutch and I noticed in the top left, where I'd expected to see +You, the rather odd +U. It took me a while to figure out this two-character combo was the Dutch translation of +You – u is indeed the Dutch formal second person. It's how you address a teacher, elder stranger or a cop. It's weird to see it out of context, so it took me a while to parse, and I was strangely uncomfortable with it.
I think I'd have been just as uncomfortable with +Jij, which would be the informal address, since it's a bit rude for a web service to address me so casually without so much as an introduction.
Which is a weird problem. It's not even a problem so much as… an oddity. I can't quite articulate how I feel about it, or how I'd solve the issue, only that I can feel it's not quite right.
Given Google's excellent track record in internationalizing their services I'm quite certain that substantial discussion took place about whether to translate +You as +Jij, +Du, +Tu and +Tue, or +U, +Sie, +Vous and +Usted.
I'd be very interested in learning the arguments that ultimately led them to choose the latter path.
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