purplecat

So after several failures I managed to get a Google+ account thanks to my sister's magical "connect the internet together" abilities.

It seems to be full of people vaguely worrying about if it will be successful, what it has to change to become successful and why it will currently fail to be successful. I feel that observation is a wonderful psychological data point since I have precisely 7 friends on Google+ of whom 2 have never posted anything and 3 of the others have posted virtually nothing. Ergo when I say "Google+ is full of people doing something" I mean "I know three people who are doing something".

So errr... yeah... I like the idea that it is designed from the ground-up with privacy control (at least from people who aren't Google) front and centre. Whether at the end of the day that will actually make any difference to anything, I don't know. I find it's interface a little clunky, rigid and unintuitive but I suspect that will change quite rapidly. I potentially like the idea that you can follow people and, to be honest, if it had a better front end to RSS feeds than Safari's built-in RSS reader then that might sell it to me. But what I really want is one place to which I can go to compose a post and from there decide to which of the numerous other social networking sites that post is to go. I love, for instance, the ease with which DreamWidth posts insert themselves into LiveJournal (though obviously, given they started from the same code-base, that was a comparatively simple problem to solve) but I find controlling how those posts end up in Facebook difficult, and there seems to be no immediate chance of cross-posting to Google+. Obviously, I'm a little eccentric when it comes to where I chose to want to post stuff, but I can't see Google+ gaining much traction without decent interoperability with the other social networking sites. People don't want to have to type the same thing into both their Google+ wall and their Facebook wall (or both Google+ and twitter). Until they can type it just once and it will get cross-posted automatically then they will probably stay wherever it is most of their friends are.

In the interim though, and possibly as another interesting psychological data point, I've come up with the cunning idea of using it as a surrogate bookmark sharing program. For complex reasons I wound up regularly having two separate browsers running and Mac has given up on syncing bookmarks separately between work and home. For simplicity therefore I want my regularly visited pages stored on a web page somewhere, so I've bunged them into my Google+ profile and marked them "visible to me only". I'm aware that this is not the purpose for which Google+ was intended, nor is it the ideal tool for shared bookmarks out there, but for some reason, just right now, it seems to make sense to me. Go figure.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/49509.html.