Nice first jump out of the gate, and good for Google for starting to get social networking and social media. The games addition is a good thing because honestly that is what it will take to get people to come along and try out the new system. Games seem to be the lowest common denominator for people when it comes to social anything, people just like games. But like everyone else there are things I would like to see and be able to do with my G+ account that I simply cannot do yet, but would give parts of my anatomy to do. While I seriously doubt that anyone over at Google will read this, it is worth my time to push this out and hope that somewhere this list will end up somewhere in the Google Plus revision cycle. I’ll break them out into must have and nice to have so that a project manager somewhere can just pull the list and then grade them according to internal Google standards.
Must Have
- The ability to delete comments, I have seen some comments that make me cringe on some of my interaction. While I like the person, having them talk about other people in non-respectful manner makes me personally cringe. I have to delete the whole thread which is interesting and I want to keep but cannot delete the comment that makes me uncomfortable.
- Ability to export data to Google Reader – sure I can cut and paste, but think about how much cooler this would be if I could dump an entire thread into Google reader and open it up to a different audience of people.
- Ability to simply export data into text format and dump it anywhere else, like a blog (ooh integration into Google Blogger or WordPress?) or some other system that would make the sharing of information much cooler across a bigger range of systems.
- I know that 2 and 3 are aka Microsoft integration, but you know people are used to that, an export function to some other Google product would work here.
- Ability to tweet stuff – yeah I know it is a competing system, but wouldn’t it be cool if I could bring in the audience from another system to interact with G+? Don’t worry about Facebook right now because they are being very weird, but Twitter seems to be ok with G+, use that to your advantage while you have it.
- Business pages – I know everyone is beating you up on the idea of having pages for corporations, businesses, and other things. You might need to suspend your real name thing for a bit for this, as there is no real name for a corporation outside of Coke, Pepsi, or even my own company Comics Forge. There is a real person in there somewhere, but it might be a lot of people.
Nice to Haves
There is always something that someone wants, but does not really meet the must haves. These can be anything from a simple UI tweak, to colors, or additional functionality that does add to the experience, but might not be necessarily critical to operations like the must haves. Here is my list of nice to haves.
- Giggle – integration with Facebook – I can always dream.
- More apps, like let me import my smugmug as a gallery or my deviant art page as a gallery.
- Capture some awesome third party application developers and let them go crazy, start building that eco-system that proved so valuable to Facebook, Twitter, and other systems that really made a dent in getting people to join in. So far there have been no third party apps that I have seen outside of games; you need to start building an infrastructure to support third party programmers. Just for fun, make a G+ app for Apple devices and see what happens.
- Sparks are cool but they are really more about potential, it would be cooler if I could share sparks and use them for other purposes than me looking at my own stuff, why not integrate sparks into my Google News Feed (news.google.com) and let me share some of the cooler news of the day with one click rather than cutting and pasting URL’s?
Consider this a starting seed list of things I really want, and things I think would be cool to have. If my readers have anything to add to this drop a note here, or better yet, start your list on Google Plus and see if we can vote these puppies up.
Related articles
- Google+, Day 9: Playing With Sparks (pcworld.com)
- If You Post Something On Google +, It’s Going To Show Up In Google Searches (businessinsider.com)
- Subscribe to Google Plus Profile Feeds (madrasgeek.com)
- Google+ Queries & Tips Cheatsheet[Updated] (techtimely.wordpress.com)
- Google+ Posts Now Appear in Google Search Results (mashable.com)
