The Decline of Google+

So back in July two thousand eleven, Chris Palette, my former co host, and I did an episode about Google Plus. So in case you somehow have missed out on what Google Plus is, it's Google's answer to social platforms like Facebook. It's a place where you can share with specific circles of people. You can create circles based on your relationships, so that you share things with specific circles like communities or co workers, family members, or even the general public.

And it's not limited to just those. It was a grand experiment when it first began, but here's the thing about experiments, they don't always work out. So back in two thousand eleven, the service was still in beta, and

people were clamoring to get in. Uh and it had not come out of beta when Chris and I did the episode, but since then the service opened up, there was this whole brewhaha where it got linked to YouTube caused a real stir with a policy about using your official real name rather than a handle, which later the company backed off of. And also recent changes in the product have prompted some journalists to say it's in the midst of death throws, so you can have your little

moment of silence if you like. But I'm not ready to call it completely dead just yet. I just think of it as mostly dead. All right, Let's talk about what happened, And I have to mention that Google Plus, as of this recording is not dead, and it may be that all those predictions of it going away are premature, or it could just be that you know what's on

borrow time. If you're interested in the original episode in which Chris and I talked about Google Plus, I'm adding that to the end of this part, so I'll talk about what's happened since then, and then if you want to go in the time machine, you can listen to the second half of the episode. And Chris and I will talk more about what Google Plus was like back before it even came out of beta. We were so

young back then. You'll get to hear how excited we were about the platform and how they were planning on it to be a challenge on Facebook, and even then I was making the point that it had a long way to go if it were to ever really be a threat. Meanwhile, Mashable has a really great piece on the rise and fall, although maybe I would just call it the debut and fall of Google Plus. According to the article, google Plus was largely worn out of fear.

It was fear that motivated Google. It was the fear that Facebook would make Google irrelevant or at least heard its growth potential. So around, it was clear that social platforms were really taking off, and people were sharing and following links on Facebook left and right. Now that meant that more people were skipping what Google considered to be an important step, which was where you would use Google

to perform searches. Since Google depends upon ad revenue, you have to remember Google's really an ad company first, and then a search engine is just a product that's offered to us, and we ultimately are the real products of Google. So this was considered to be a bad thing if Facebook was going to eat into these numbers, and a an executive named Vic Gondotra, who was at the time a senior vice president at Google, argued that the company needed its own social platform. So Google had tried some

social experiments before. Google Wave was one those, and Google Buzz was another. If you're a longtime fan of tech Stuff, you might know that Chris and I both really liked Google Wave a lot. We used it to build out our live shows when we were experimenting with live streaming with tech Stuff Live. That was several years ago. But

here's the thing. He and I loved it because it allowed us to do real time layouts of what the show was going to be like and even make changes while we were doing a show, But we couldn't figure out what anyone else would use it for. It was great for what we did, but that's a really narrow use case, and none of these social efforts from Google

had much staying power. They all eventually went away, including Google Wave, So the best you could hope for was that some of the features that were in these products would find their way into other Google products. Like Gmail or something like that. Now, since the Google Plus podcast covers the birth of the social network, I thought a quick rundown on things that have happened since the debut would be useful before I play the old episode first.

Google Plus launched in the summer of eleven and spent about three months in an invite only beta phase. For some reason, I got included in that beta test, which I loved at the time, and I thought Google Plus was interesting. Uh. I love the fact that when it was beta, most of the other people who were involved were either tech entrepreneurs so they were important people who were in you know, startup companies or even more established companies,

or they were tech journalists. So it felt like a bunch of my professional peers and friends all had this playground to ourselves, and frankly, we all thought it was kind of fun. That was obviously short lived because then it opened up to the public and then it sort of fell apart um. It opened to the public in September two thousand eleven, and despite some early interest, the

platform really failed to get any real traction. Now, despite that early interest, the platform failed to get a lot of traction, So people often commented that Google Plus was really just a ghost town. In fact, that phrase was used a lot to describe Google Plus. Certain communities on Google Plus were really active, but they were the exception as opposed to the rule. And the truth is a lot of people just didn't see the need to migrate to Google Plus from other platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

And unless your friends all go to the new place to hang out, it's not so much fun hanging out there. So since its launch, we've learned a little bit more about what was going on behind the scenes. Before a Google unveiled the beta test phase, Google had a building set aside for the Google Plus team and the project was kept a secret. The CEO was moved into that building, so it raised some probably some a little bit of

drama within Google. According to mash Double, google Plus at one point had about one thousand employees working on the project, which is an enormous compared to other projects within Google.

In two thousand twelve, Vic Gondotra addressed an audience itself by Southwest and said that Google Plus was essentially Google two point oh and that it represented a social layer across all of Google's services, So, in other words, all those other Google products people use like Gmail or YouTube would be held together by the connective tissue that is Google Plus. In Google first did some spring cleaning, uh.

It combined Google Talk, which sometimes was also known as Google Chat or g Chat, and Google Messenger, which is an i AM client that was within Google Plus, and Google Hangouts, all under the Hangouts umbrellas, so all of

these became collectively known as Google Hangouts. Hangouts had previously been known as the video chat service that was launched with Google Plus, and now that also included text messaging, so really it was anyway besides email al where you would get in touch with other people who had these

accounts now. Gondatra announced at the Google Io event there would be a total of forty one updates to the Google Plus service, and it included tweaks to photos and videos and how large they would be within a Google Plus screen. Also new animations that users could use automatic photo enhancements. This was kind of fun. I remember taking a picture of a snowy landscape and Google automatically animated snowflakes falling across the picture. But there was a lot

more of that than just those examples. Google also that year made a very controversial decision to tie together YouTube and Google Plus accounts that people absolutely hated. The integration effort required YouTube users to use a Google Plus account to leave comments, and because of Google's policies with names on accounts, this meant people more often than not had to post under their actual names, and it also prompted owners of YouTube channels to change their handle to their

true name. Now, the name debacle was really a big deal because some people wanted anonymity, or as much as it that as they can manage, particularly when just using YouTube. Others had an online persona that was separate from their real life identity, and making the switch would be confusing

and perhaps even damaging to their online brand. There were plenty of legitimate reasons why people didn't like the idea of having to use their their birth name or real name, as well as plenty of reasons that aren't terribly legitimate, like the desire to troll other people while not being held responsible for that action. But the move may have been motivated by the desire to make YouTube comments a

less volatile experience. So in other words, if you are attached to your real name, maybe you'd be less likely to be a jerk face on YouTube. Anyone who has seen a name various comment threads on Facebook knows this is not necessarily the case, but I guess it was a hope. But it also seemed like it was a membership drive to get more people to sign up for Google Plus accounts. If you wanted to play in the YouTube space, you had to have a Google Plus account,

so that didn't go over so well. In two thousand and fourteen, in April, Vic Gundotra, the man behind Google Plus, would announce his departure from the company, and that prompted a lot of news sites to essentially say that Google Plus was dead, although it seems to have been continuously shambling on ever since its death, so perhaps it's reports

of its death have been greatly exaggerated. David Besbrus took over as the head of Google Plus and promised that the company was committed to support the product for a really long time, but six months later Google replaced him with Bradley Horowitz, who's another executive at Google. Two thousand fifteen current year, Google spins off photos into its own app, so it's no longer wrapped up with Google Plus. The photos on Google Plus We're one of the big selling points,

especially among photographers. It was considered to be a superior tool by many two things like the Facebook Google or Facebook Photo app. So the Google Plus Photos app was considered to be pretty good, and the fact that Google is spinning it off from Google Plus maybe an indication that Google Plus is kind of living on borrowed time. On August first, two thousand fifteen, Google shut down the Google Plus version of photos, switching to the independent app instead.

The new app is pretty cool and contains features like image recognition, which makes image searching really interesting. Uh. In other words, Google is using algorithms to automatically detect stuff that's within photos, so that way, when you search for photos, even if they haven't been meta tagged, often the image search can give you some pretty good results. Occasionally can give you some hilariously wrong results. It is still a

fallible system. Google is also in the process of removing the requirement to link Google Plus and YouTube accounts together, which is pretty much an admission that the initiative was not a good idea. In fact, they pretty much said said so in their blog posts. They didn't come out and say specifically that YouTube and Google Plus integration was a complete mistake, or that making you use a quote unquote real name was a real mistake, but the implication

was there. So soon you'll only need a Google account, not a Google Plus account, just a Google account to set up a YouTube channel, and that means that people won't be able to follow you or search you with that just that Google account Google Plus, they could, but not with just a regular Google account. By the way, you should not delete your Google Plus account right away. You should hold onto it because Google says if you delete your Google Plus account before this whole process is complete,

it will also delete your YouTube account. So if you have YouTube videos online, you don't want to remove your Google Plus account yet, wait until this process is finished. Now, in general, Google has stopped the more or less forced push to make users create Google Plus accounts. It clearly wasn't getting the results that it wanted, other than irritating people who didn't have any interest in Google Plus to begin with, which I'm guessing was not an intended consequence.

In fact, Harowitz said that it was time to talk about how Google Plus was pivoting away from its original pitch into something new, and this has already been reflected in that the social operations within Google had changed its

name to Google Streams, Photos and Sharing. Now. Generally speaking, critics say that Google failed to address the real problem, which was attracting users to the platform in an organic way, and instead used force by integrating Google Plus with other services, whether you liked it or not, so you had to create a Google Plus account if you wanted access to these other Google services, and it wasn't so much an indication that you thought Google Plus was actually a good

service itself. They also kept on including lots of features that seemed like whenever they thought that there was a different way to try and attract people, they would just throw random features into Google Plus. This comes from criticism within the company itself, and a lot of people said those features were often unwanted or no one understood what they were for, so no one was using them. Now, Google maintains that Google Plus is going to stick around.

It's just going to be more of a simple social platform and less of the centralized point of sharing across all of Google services. In other words, it's just gonna be a stripped down version of what it was in

the first place. So Google Plus isn't officially dead. But keep in mind Google has been known to pull the plug on services after you know they've died down a bit, and only a relatively small user base would be affected, So it's possible that ins own blog post down in the future, there's going to be one of those lists of Google services that will no longer be supported, and

Google Plus may one day show up on that list. Meanwhile, things like Google Photos and Hangouts exist outside of Google Plus, and while they might have been spawned within Google Plus to begin with, we now can access those through other tools. Like Hangouts you can access through Gmail, for example, and you can even have live hangouts that are broadcast on YouTube, so you can still use those products and they are kind of standalone compared to what they were originally as

a sort of a feature within Google Plus itself. Now, with all that being said, we can go back and listen to this twenty eleven episode of tech Stuff in which Chris and I talked about the very earliest days of Google Plus. So if you want to hear what our thoughts were on the service back before it was open to the public, stick a round. Check this out and be entertained by the amazing and adaptability for the two Yahoo's sitting at this table to chat about a

service that had not yet debuted. Enjoy, So today we wanted to talk about a social network experiment that launched recently. As of the recording of this podcast, we're recording this in July two thousand eleven, and not that long ago, Google made a an announcement that ended up taking at least the the geek world by storm. Yes, definitely, and we've had a few requests, and I think Jonathan and I have decided that we'll go ahead and record a podcast about it now in self defense before too many

other people ask us how it works. And also we should add that well, first of all, we're talking about Google Plus. In case you didn't read the title, we're talking about Google Plus. But I want to add a disclaimer at the beginning of this podcast, which is Google Plus is in a a beta a rapidly expanding beta program, uh and could undergo massive changes and short amounts of time.

So anything we talked about today may very well have be different by the time this podcast goes live, although I don't I don't imagine things changing so significantly that they don't apply at all, but it may be that there are some subtleties that we are not going to cover because they will have emerged between the time we record this in the time it publishes. Because frankly, that's that's true of a good two thirds of our podcast

anytime we don't talk about something in history. Yeah, but but with with something like this in particular, when it's in a beta format and a lot of people are testing it out. Um, and not only that, but the team behind it is listening to feedback and incorporating feedback into their changes. You have a rapidly evolving service that's

going on here. So even though we might record something about say Facebook, and sure maybe some things will get weeked in the Facebook uh service between the time we recorded the time we published, it might be minor. But with something like this, where it's truly experimental and people are implementing changes at a rapid pace, the change it's more noticeable. Yes. That being said, now that we've got

the disclaimer on the way, let's talk about Google Plus. Okay, So one of my favorite descriptions of Google Plus came courtesy of Molly Wood from c Net, who said, google Plus is like you are at this, uh, this really fancy party and you're in a V I P section of the party and there are only a few people there, and everyone's excited to be there, and everyone's talking about

being at the party, and that's all that's happening. That's that's definitely an exaggeration, and it's also paraphrasing, so that's not a direct quote. Molly would put it much more succinctly. But and it's it's also changed in the last couple of days, right. But but early on, if you were one of the few people who got into Google Plus, I was very fortunate in that I managed to get invite uh and and joined pretty pretty early on. Yeah, it turns out I know a lot of people in

the tech business. Um. But if you if you were in there early on, it felt like the people who were there were all these mostly tech and geek culture folks. So you had a lot of people who are from tech companies, including folks who are actually from Google, which makes sense their product, right. You had people from other big companies stuff like Twitter or Facebook even we'll get into that. And then you had a lot of tech journalists, so people like Leo Laporte, tom merritt Um later on.

Molly Wood and Brian Tong have seen it. Um, I as actor who's a good friend of mine. He's he was also on there pretty early on. You had these folks who were kind of populating it, so it felt like a weird social network. It felt like a social network that had been designed specifically for this tech geek world. Oh, you also had some geek celebrities, and I say geeks reason that geeks like me tend to think of them as amazing celebrities. So Felicia Day will weaken those kind

of folks. Um, So it kind of felt like a social network built for geeks. Now that's gradually changing us. More and more people join in, and we're starting to slowly skewed toward a more quote unquote normal population. I use normal just in the sense of average as opposed to geeks are not normal. Yeah, and and I feel compelled to point out that again, like a number of topics on the show, this is one of those things

that has been anticipated for quite some time. Um. It's hard to tell a lot of these things too, things like the Apple iPad and Google Plus and things like this that people say, oh, well, you know, Google's working on a social network that's aimed to take down Facebook, and they talk about it for months and months and sometimes years, and you start going, yeah, sort of like Spotify coming to the Night States, which also just recently happened,

but for for a long time. Again, this is one of those things that I've heard a lot of technicalists called tech unicorns. Yeah, these are like the white iPhone for a long time was the tech unicorn. The iPad was a tech unicorn for a long time. These are streaming iTunes service, which is still Yeah, these are things that everyone quote unquote knows is coming, but it hasn't arrived yet and it maybe years before we ever get to it. And soever. Yeah, some of these are some

of these turned into vaporware, right, tech unicorn vaporware. The relationships pretty tight, Yeah, Duke Nukelen forever long time tech unicorn. We will withhold commentary on what actually eventually published. So let's let's kind of talk about sort of the the we've talked about why, how people wanted to get in. Uh we a lot of people wanted to get in and couldn't get in because they didn't have enough invites. Um. The the expansion of Google Plus has been pretty impressive

to watch over time. You know, why say something, Well, no, I was just gonna say that they're in between the tech unicorn um. It's one of those things. And at least in my opinion, where Google Plus it was so we've heard it for so long, it's like it's hiding in plain sight that they just went, oh, here it is, and we all kind of went yeah. Google Plus kind of launched without a whole lot of fanfare from Google. But it turns out Google didn't need to provide fanfare.

That was provided by that community of users I was talking about earlier, because that that that same group of early adopters who are passionate about trying stuff out, are really passionate about sharing information. So these adopters served as the the champions of Google Plus. Google didn't have to say it anything. Really, they showed off a demo, um, they explained the concept and that, and they let everyone else take over. And really Google didn't just release and watch.

They released, watched and listened and implemented changes. Which that's kind of where I think a lot of the tech enthusiasts have really kind of latched onto Google Plus because they're like, they're not just giving us this. They're listening to what we have to say and they're taking that into consideration. So instead of it being some sort of

ivory tower where products come out. But it's a one way street, right, you know, they're they're providing a service, but they're not listening to what we have to say. We just take whatever they're giving us. Google is more of a two way street, Like you really feel that the people at Google are listening. Now. They may not incorporate all the changes you think need to be there because it doesn't match their vision of what the service

ultimately will do, but at least they're listening. Yeah, ultimately, you know, all of us have our own preferences and choices we want to see in the product, and so Google is not going to make all of us happy. And you know, those of us it does make happy, it won't make us completely happy because we will be looking for one particular thing or two particular things and maybe you know, that's just a few people, and Google

is not gonna change just for a few people. But yeah, as soon as it was announced, um, you know, the tech enthusiasts latched onto it and and it started spreading. But the thing is um. Google was smart about launching it the way they did because they were trying to avoid overloading their servers um and so what they were doing was they were releasing it to a few people at a time. And when I say a few, a few to most of us would be you know, ten people, but you know, a few to Google was you know,

a few hundreds, a few thousand at a time. And uh so people were going crazy the first few days after the launch looking for an invite to the same service. Now, it also makes it seem really exclusive. Yeah, and of course the more yeah, the more exclusive something is, the more people want to be in that because people want to be part of an exclusive group. And uh, I mean it's just natural, right you see, you see the cool click of kids, and you want to be in

that click. And once you're in that click, you're like, this is awesome. And yeah, I don't object to us letting in maybe one or two other people who are kind of cool. Well, but let's not go crazy and let everyone in, because then we don't have a click anymore. So, uh and we can get into sort of the click ish behavior that I've noticed on Google Plus. Not again, this is really really early on in Google Plus. I don't expect that this will last long. There's gonna be

a big change as more people join um. And also there were reports that within a couple of weeks of Google Plus launching, they were already possibly as many as ten million people on it. And at the time we're recording this podcast, which is again just a couple of weeks after Google Plus launched, they expect it to be up to twenty million by uh in a in a couple of days from the recording of this podcast. So if you're looking for let's go ahead and get this

answer out of the way. If you're looking for Google Plus to knock off Facebook right away, it's not going to happen because they're talking twenty million people out off million for Facebook. So the law, the the long term answer to that is maybe. But right now, you know, there's no threat whatsoever. And I don't think Google would

claim that Google Plus is meant to replace Facebook. In fact, that kind of leads us into what is Google Plus because we talked a lot about the the popularity, but we haven't really even discussed anything about the actual service. There are some similarities to other social networks in fact,

there's there are similarities to other Google products. Yeah, and and you will notice if you have used things like Google Buzz or Google Wave, you'll see little similarities here and there in Google Plus, and you'll notice like, Okay, they they've sort of incorporated this idea and the lessons

they learned from that into Google Plus. So Google Plus is essentially a social network, though it's not just a social network, And the way it works from a user perspective is that you will look for people who are on Google Plus or have yet to join Google Plus, people you know or people you know of, and you

put those people into circles. Now, these circles are categories so that you can uh put people into whichever ones fit best in your life, so that you can direct messages to those people and read messages from those people in a way that's more granular than your average Facebook user is used to. Yeah. Now, I mean, uh, Facebook fans would probably say, but yeah, I can do that

with Facebook. Well, Um, basically, the big difference here, I think is that this is like the first thing you do when you add a new person to your Google Plus account if you want to, uh start following Jonathan for example, um, you know the very first thing you say, Okay, oh I found him. Now what circles do you want to add him to? And you can add people to more than one circle, yes, and you can create circles. You you you start off with some basic circles. I

believe it's friends, family, acquaintances, and followers or following. So I've got let's say, I've got there's there's Chris, and then I have to make a decision to I put Chris in my friend's circle. Do I put them in my acquaintance in the circle, or do I put them in my following circle. Chris is not part of my family, so I'm not going to put them in there. And I'm all right with that. Yeah. And and it's nice to note too, especially if you're concerned with issues of privacy.

The person on the other end, the person that you're adding to your circles, has no idea what circles to which you have added them, right, So if you put them in, like, you could create a circle called jerk faces. I know, I know, I know for a fact that I'm in that certain and you could put people in the jerk faces I know circle and they're not going to know that that's the They know that you've added them, but they don't know what circle they are in. So

I'm probably in a lot of jerk faces. I know circles, you're mine and yeah, And now that our listeners have heard me say this, I imagine a lot of them are making jerk faces. I know circles just to put me in them. Um. So you've got these circles. Now you've decided where this your first let's say it's your first person you're following. So I'm going to use Chris as my example. I have decided that I want to follow Chris. I want to I want to hear what Chris has to say. I want to be able to

see his updates. I want to be able to see his photos. Um. I put him in my acquaintances circle. All right, So, now, anytime Chris posts and publishes his post to either the public, which means everyone can see it, Everyone on Google Plus can see it, everyone in the in the world can see it. Um. I mean it's not restricted to anybody in particular, right right, But now, now, if Chris has not put me in a circle, and he publishes it in anything other than public, I'm not

going to see that information. So Chris decides that he wants to publish a status update, but he's just gonna push it to his friends. I am not in his friend's circle. He types in a status update, he sets it so that it only publishes to friends he publishes it. I don't know that Chris has done anything to me.

His his posts still are blank. Now let's say that Chris does another one where he decides he wants to talk about an article he edited, and he wants this he wants the general public to know about this article. He sets that status update to public. Suddenly I can see that particular stats update because they set it to public, so anyone following Chris can see it. Then let's say that Chris notices that I'm on Google Plus and he thinks, oh, well, Jonathan's there. I should add him. I'll add him to

my acquaintances circle. Then Chris publishes a status update and decides he only wants his acquaintances and friends to see it, so he sets it so that this stats update goes out to friends and acquaintances, but not the general public. I would be able to see that stats update now if he had not added me to his acquaintance circle or his friends circle. I would not see it. I would be unaware that he had updated his status. You can get so granular that you can create a stats

update and directed to specific people. So I could create a stats update and just send it to Chris alone and that's the only person who sees it. Or I could send it to Chris and maybe three or four other people. Let's say that it's three or four people who are in different circles. They don't really belong all on the same circle, but I think they all need to see this message. I might just go in and manually put in each name, and those are the only

people who will see that message. Now, there are some other things you have to remember, like, uh, there is the ability to share posts that other people have published. Now if you you can either turn the sharing on or off, so you don't have to. If you turn it off, that means other people cannot share the same message you just posted. If the share is on, your message that went out to just your friends or just your acquaintances might suddenly become public. So Chris sends out

a message to just his acquaintances. He has sharing turned on. He has not turned that off. I read Chris's post and I think, hey, that's awesome. Everyone who follows me wants to know that too. I hit share. Suddenly his message that just went to his acquaintances are now it's now out in the wild. So they attributed to me exactly. Yes, yes, so people can actually follow it back to Chris now.

Granted they're only going to be able to see the things that Chris is published at that point to the public if they go directly to that's the weird thing. They might see a shared post like I share your post, they see it on my feed, then they follow it back to your feed and something that post isn't there because it wasn't set to public when it was originally published. It gets a little complicated. These are things that the

Google Plus team. They're looking into this stuff to see what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, you know, sharing versus private. And because you have the ability to turn sharing off, if you are someone who doesn't want information to go beyond that group of friends, you can always turn it off. Now, granted that doesn't stop your friends from say saying that Jonathan said blah blah blah, and there's always you know, copy and paste, right, So yeah,

there are ways around it. But that's the same for any social network. I sort of count on my friends to be lazy enough where they won't I can't share this, yeah, exactly, And and really, I mean it's just like real life. Just like real life, if I come up and I tell Chris a secret, there's nothing stop and Chris from going around and telling other people that secret. I'm sorry, I told you. I'm sorry. Gee. Yeah, well let's see if you ever get any key line pie from me again.

So so that's the basics behind circles and sharing. And also, if let's say that when you're actually consuming information, you're not just that that's sending information out right, publishing information, you can also look view your stream. That's what Google plus calls your what what Facebook would call the wall, right or Twitter would call it the feed. So it's the same sort of concept. It's it's the stream of information coming from all the people that you put into

your circles. You can view that bicircle. So if you just have it set to the stream, you're looking at everything that people you follow are publishing. So all your friends, acquaintances, celebrities. You might be following people you know of but you don't actually know in real life. All the information gets dumped into the stream. If you want to try and

filter that out, you can view your stream bicircle. So I might click friends, and now I'm only going to see the updates that my friends have published to their stream, and I've cut everything else out. I can even view it by incoming incoming. It gets really crazy for people like me, and more so for people who are even more even more who are actually famous. Because I have, as of the recording of this podcast, I have people following me. If I choose incoming, I see their updates,

so I'm not following them. But by hitting incoming, I'm seeing everyone who's following me. I'm seeing their updates. So suddenly it just becomes a wall of information. Um. But assuming that everything they've published as public, if they published stuff to their friends or their acquaintances or whatever, I'm not going to see that. I'm only going to see stuff that in the circles that I've been included in

and in the public posts. But it means that I get a lot more information from a lot more people, not just the people I follow right. Um, so in a way that can be a lot. Right. So, in a way, Google Plus is like Facebook and that you can follow specific people, they can follow you back and you. In a way, it's like Twitter because in Twitter you can follow people and just read what they have to say as long as they don't have their profile set to private. You can read Twitter posts from people as

they update. So in Google Plus the same sort of thing. You don't have to give permission to someone in order for them to follow you. But people say, well, what about privacy. That's where the circles come in. That's where you can choose which circles see what you have to say. If you don't want random people seeing what you have to say, you publish it to a specific circle. Um. And I mean people compare this product to Twitter and Facebook all the time. Um, I've seen a constant stream

of that. However, I think it's most like at least the ones I've tried. Most like another service that caught on for a little while and Facebook acquired it and it's sort of languished under Facebook's control, and that's called friend Feed. If you've ever been to friend feed dot com. Um, it's very very similar and um, it's it's similar to I mean, the the feed is somewhat similar to the wall on on Facebook, but you can um like and

unlike and make long comments to it. Very much in the style of friend feed, more so than than Facebook or Twitter. But it's it's closer probably to Facebook or friend feed than it is to Twitter. Now, I mean there is some uh you know that it looks a little bit more like Twitter. I mean, just the visual element of it, I would say, um, but there are some other advantages to using Google Plus that there aren't um, And that's probably I think of that more as the

integration with Android. UM. For example, you know, Jonathan and I both have Android smartphones, and we can set Google Plus to automatically post every photo we take with our phones to Google Plus. I don't think that's such a good idea. Well, you can set your privacy, you can set your privacy so that people don't automatically see those photos. So so if you if you had it where every photo you take is automatically published, uh publicly to your

Google Plus account, that seems like a bad idea. Yeah, I mean, even if even if we let's take let's take out the bad behavior aspect, right, So bad behavior that would be a bad idea because suddenly you're publicly showing everyone bad behavior. So let's say, you know, being intoxicated or being acting irresponsibly in some way, and you're like, oh, let's take a picture of this that well that yeah, that's a bad idea. But let's say it's just a

bad photo, like your fingers in the frame. You know, you don't want that publishing because they're like, come on, that's just a I'd rather take that photo again, so you can set your privacy setting so that those photos don't automatically go to everybody, you know. I actually do have instant Published turned on right now because I wanted to try it out, and it's pretty neat. I didn't realize that every picture I take on my phone is instantly published, not just the ones I do through the app,

but through anything. Yeah, so it gets like I've taken photos to upload to Twitter and Twitter pick. It also has gone to my Google Plus account. Now I don't have it publishing publicly, so at least people aren't being flooded by pictures of me trying to take a photo of one thing and like, no, that's not right either. Let me change the lighting a little bit and take three more of these. But you could do that. Yep. And um, that isn't to say that that won't that

functionality won't come to other phones. Now there is a Google Plus app. Actually, there was a Google Plus app for Android, I would say just about immediately since I heard about it, I looked for it. There it was the launch, the launch on the web, and the launch on the phone. In fact, the launch on the phone gave some people work around to getting into Google Plus.

Early on, they installed the Google Plus app on their phone and found that they could bypass the invite system, and once they try to activate the app on their phone, it gave them an invite. And there was another workaround that got you into Google Plus. Um, but those have been patched since then. But they've also started opening it

up to more people too. So I mean, I have hundreds of invites right now, and I just keep getting more, and I'm running out of people who I know would be interested in it, and well, and the personally and the invite system is not entirely intuitive, No, it's not. It's not. It's not the easiest thing in the world. Like when you see the invite system, it's it's easy to get a little confused by it. Uh. I guess we can talk a little bit about some of the

other features of Google Plus. Well, before we get too far away from the the Android app. We have heard that there is going to be an iOS app that's the operating system for the Apple I stuff. As of the recording of this podcast, it's been submitted, but not yet a roofed. Yeah, so there. I don't know if the automatic photo feature will work with those phones, I you know, and I don't know if there will be something coming for Windows Phone or or web os. Um,

we'll see. Yeah, but like a lot of BlackBerry, like a lot of services and products that we're seeing launch these days. Uh, it's really effective if you subscribe to a particular ecosystem in this case Google's, so using Google Plus on Google Chrome and having an Android phone, it works. I mean, it works really seamlessly because all those products are coming from the same company. But when you start

mixing and matching, your experience may vary. Yeah. Now there's another feature, um and uh that that Jonathan and I tried out pretty much immediately, and that's called the huddle. Yes, Um, this is this relates to UH two phones. Yes, So a huddle is like having a group messaging system on phones. So everyone who is in a huddle needs to have uh a phone number attached to their Google Plus account or they have to have the the Google Plus app

installed on their their phones. Um. And what you do is you set it up and you can send out a message. Let's say that I want to have get together after work one day and just hang out of the restaurant and have some appetizers and talk about what's been going on in the company. There might be three or four people I want to invite, so I add all of them to my Google Plus huddle and I

send out a message. That message will go to all of those people, and then all of those people can respond to that message and everyone can see each other's responses. It becomes kind of like a chat room via text message, but only among that group of people. And again this is functionality that reminds me of Google Wave and also other services like Beluga. There are group messaging services Beluga, there are other group messaging services. Chris, give me a look and I can tell you wanted to do the

Bulbous bouffont Beluga, which my wife hates. Um. But the yeah, there there are other messaging services group messaging services that are doing this right now. In fact, a lot of them were launching around south By Southwest and we're making a big, big splash there. Google Huddle is kind of Google's version of this. Now, that was one of the

workarounds too. If you added someone to a Google Huddle, then in order for them to be able to use the Huddle, they were given a link to log into Google Plus and that's how they ended up getting accounts even though they didn't have an official invite. Um, and the invitations at that point had been closed. And yet a lot of people found that workaround. Again, that's been

patched since the uh since since it first happened. Took a couple of days before Google caught on, or maybe they caught on, but they let it happen anyway because they're like, well, this is letting the population base expand, but it's not expanding at a rate that's outside of our comfort zone. Yeah yeah, um. And then there's hangouts. Yep, hangouts are awesome. I haven't tried to hang out yet. I've tried it and it is It is addicting. So

hangout is a video chat session. You can start a hangout with specific people if you want to, or you can start a hangout and just make it public where anyone who follows you will see the hangout and can join. And a hangout is you need a webcam and a microphone and speakers in order for this to work. Says you can hear people, they can hear you, and they can see you, and up to ten people total can be in a hangout at one time, so it's you and nine other people max. And the video switching is

very clever. It switches to whomever is speaking at the time. So if everyone's quiet and I'm talking, then the main video will be me as I'm chatting. As someone else starts to talk, the video will switch to that person and UH the focus changes to them. And if two people are talking, whomever is the loudest will have their video featured as the central video, and so you'll actually

see uh. If in a full hangout, you'll see one main screen of the person who's talking, and then you'll see the other nine miniaturized like thumbnail sized screens below. And it's all moving, you know, like you're seeing video from all those feeds at one time. You can get a little buggy depending upon people's UM data transfer rates. You know, if you if you're on a slow UH, if you're not really on a high speed broadband connection,

you're gonna have some problems with this. There'll be some lag. UM. I was. I was having some really bad lag when I was doing it because I think there were a couple of different UH choking points in the in the data transfer. So I would say something and then about three or four seconds later, I would hear myself say it. So I'm responding to something that someone is saying right now, but then three or four seconds later there I'm starting

to hear it. So there'd be a gap between when I'm talking when they're talking, so you know, they might stop ask me a question, stop, I don't answer. Then they started asking if I'm there, and that's when my answer is starting to hit and I got a little muddled. But on a fast connection, it's pretty cool. Yeah. And then of course, right after all this happened, Facebook had an amazing awesome announcement. Yeah, their video chat, which is UH partnership with Skype and allows you one on one

video chat with another person. On Facebook. It's a difference system, right Like you can use a hangout and just talk to one person if you want to, but you can also talk to a group of people, whereas with Facebook video chat right now as the recording of this podcast, it's a one on one scenario. So um, Facebook may not necessarily see Google Plus as an immediate competitor, but you can bet that the company will be watching Google

Plus to see what features are added next. I mean, uh, and I don't think Google Plus is what Google would consider a finished product even you know, assuming that the features are all robust, they open the floodgates and anyone can join. You have two hundred million people on there. I think they will continue to add new features and

new functionality. For example, something that I I don't know expect might be a strong word, but seriously wouldn't be surprised if it happened would be games, which has been a huge driver of traffic to Facebook. Adding adding other kinds of in uh insight apps like that I think

would would not be a shock at all. Just opening up an a p I would be pretty and you already have starting to see some extensions for for Google Chrome that are specifically designed for Google Plus, things like allowing you to reply specifically to the person who posts. We didn't talk about that. When you do post, people can leave comments on that post, just like in Facebook, on a wall wall post or Twitter, people can reply.

You can plus one the comment Yeah, plus one is kind of like voting up or a comment or saying that you know, I really like this, so I'm adding a plus one to it. It changes the way it displays on other people's streams. Um, but yeah, we should We should mention that quickly. Like in Twitter, you can reply to someone and in general only you and the other person are really seeing that conversation, unless other people

are following both of you. Right, so if I reply to Chris, people only Chris and I would see that reply unless other people are following both of us. Uh. Now with Google Plus, it's more like Facebook and that I can make a comment and then someone else can comment on that. Anyone following me can comment on that if I've made it public and then or and you can disable comments as well if you don't want people commenting on something. Um, and then other folks can comment

and it becomes a discussion. In fact, I've had a few discussions like that pop up on Google Plus recently. I said, wouldn't it be cool to use the hangout feature to have a D and D game where everyone in the hangout is playing D and D of one person being the dungeon master and everyone else is playing a character. And you could do that. You could have people from other states log in and play the game all at the same time. So or any other game

for that matter. Yeah, you could really do that with any game, although once you start getting into things like board games or whatever, it gets a little more complex. Some games you would be able to do, like like poker, because how are you going to deal with all those cards in You know, you'd have to have a video poker game going at the same time, which makes it a a little more complicated anyway. Yeah, any any role playing type game like that. Yeah. Board games you could do too,

if everyone had a copy of the board game. Yeah, and you have to all right, you have to move me forward three squares? Is everyone on Baltic Avenue? Good? Next turn. Another feature we should talk about very quickly is sparks. Oh yeah, sparks. Sparks is kind of like Google Reader in a way. You tell Google Plus what what topics you are interested in, and then Google Plus kind of cultivates a news feed based on whatever interests

you've told it apply to you. So, for example, I've said technology, if I go to my Sparks technology uh feed, then I will see news articles that are related to technology within sparks. Um. That's kind of an feature that people have noticed and said, well, you know it's it's just not fully baked yet. So that's something I expect that we'll see more uh evolution in in the near future for Google Plus. Yeah. I think the idea behind the name Sparks is it's supposed to spark a conversation.

So you see a cool story, you post it to your stream, and then you and your friends have a conversation with it. And I it does that, but you know it's I in looking through the sparks that I've added to my picks. Oh yeah, if you if you add one, say you add technology to your Google Plus account, you'll see it on the left hand navigation um, along with you know things like your you know lists for your circles and you know the other the other features

people who are available for Google Chat that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, so, um so it's available to you whenever. Um. But yeah, I just when I go in there, I just find a few stories and it's not really a very long list. It's not very compelling. Yet, Uh, the idea is there, I mean the I I see nothing wrong with the idea, and I think they need to add something. And I think this is Google's response to the trend of people

getting information and news through stuff like Facebook. Like their friends shares an article that's that that their friend thought was really cool, and then you see it on Facebook and you're like huh, and you click on the link and you read the article and you're like, yeah, that was interesting. Google's kind of taking that and trying to incorporate it directly into the social experience so that you aren't you know, you aren't. You don't have to move

very far away from Google in order to do it. Also, we should mention that Google Plus has a notifications bar that tells you when people have interacted with your your Google Plus account in some way, maybe that they started to follow you, and maybe that they left a message for you. They they've mentioned you in a comment, they've applied to one of your status is. Uh. The cool thing is if you're on any Google site, so including

Google dot Com just the web browser. If you're signed into Google, that notification bar is at the top of your screen and you can actually look at those notifications in real time on that that page and respond to them without ever actually traveling to your Google Plus account. So I might be on Google dot Com doing research for an article and I see a notification thing pop up, and I'm like, I wonder what's going on? Click on it. See that someone's commented on one of my pages. I

want to comment back. I can type in a comment on that notifications page and send it back without ever actually going to my Google Plus uh profile. Right, and um, we also need to talk really briefly at least about

photo albums. Okay. I was going to add to about about that that you can also turn on email if you really want you and that again a bad idea if you have a lot of followers, because you will start getting but you could you can do the same thing as you would with Twitter or or Facebook and say yes, I want to know, send me an email every time or or text message every time someone you know fill in the blank. It's pretty much everything sends me a message gives me a plus one. You know,

there's a laundry choose. You can choose which ones give you alerts in which ones don't. And uh. For for an average user, it may make sense to have email notifications turned on for me because I have people following me. It would be it would overwhelm my email. Yeah, I would. And I learned very quickly, like day two of Google Plus,

to turn all that off for me. Um And and you know, I know that there are people who are far more popular than I, and I can only imagine what their email would have looked like, like like Veronica Belmont or Felicia Day or Will Wheaton, you know, some of these people who have way more visibility than I do. I'm sure their accounts would have been overwhelmed in a second. But yeah, please go into photo albums. I do have

one other thing I want to mention before we finish. Okay, So yeah, photo albums are using picasa, Google's photo web photo album service as the foundation, although Picasa will undergo a name change pretty soon. I think that's gonna be Google Plus Photos or something like that. So but it's it's the same service. So pocas said, normally, if you sign up for a picassa account, which really you can do. If you have a Google account your you can create

a picassa account. You are normally given one gigabyte of storage space for photos, which is not really that much um. But with Google Plus, if you upload photos through Google Plus, it will automatically resize your photos so that the longest edge of your photo is two thousand, forty eight pixels long, all right, will automatically resize it. So whatever the longest edges gets reduced to that size, and at that resolution, it does not count against your one gigabyte of storage space.

So if you upload through Google Plus, you effectively have unlimited digital photos storage. I tested this and I have a photo album on my profile that has one thousand photos in it. That's the maximum number of photos you can have in a photo album. Now you can have unlimited photo albums in Google Plus, so you're not limited that way. It's just that each individual photo album can

only have a thousand files in it. And uh, I recently took a vacation in Europe, and so I have a thousand photos from my vacation in Europe in that photo album. And I probably have about two thousand more photos I need to upload from that vacation so they'll be most impressive. There'll be at least three photo albums of my vacation photos on Google Plus. Now you've gotta keep in mind it's gonna be a lower resolution than your original file, assuming, of course, you took it with

a decent digital camera. Uh So the photo that you get on Google Plus is not going to be suitable for printing out, for example, or enlarging. Um, So you will need to find some other method of storage if you want to to keep the photo at the original resolution. UM. The thing I wanted to talk about was your Google profile. Yes, if you want. If this sounds interesting to you, you

don't already have a profile on Google Plus. You'll need a Google account, and this is you know, the account works for everything from Google Plus to Google Docs and all the other things. Um. If you already have of a profile and you've been keeping it private, UM, that's going to change one way or the other by July thirty one. I'm not sure exactly when this is going to publish. This may put some of you in a

really tight deadline. UM. I don't think a lot of people know this, but Google has plans right now, as of their recording this podcast, to delete any profile that is not public by July thirty one. And you have to have a name attached to your profile, so so you can't just create profiles like multiple profiles and not have an identity associated with that profile. Right now, it

doesn't necessarily have to be your exact name. However, people I have heard reports that people with made up names have been questioned by Google, um as they might on on Facebook. Um, you know, they they want to make sure I guess that a real human is behind it

and they're not fooling around. But uh yeah, I mean this this might cause some issues because I know one of the people things that people complain about about Facebook is that you know, hey, I want to I want to keep this between my close friends, the people I know in real life, and my family. You know, I don't want it to be out there for everybody to see. And this is no longer going to be an option. The thing is, maybe you say, well, I've had a

Google account for ten years now. I have Google account's been around him that long anyway, Um, I've had a Google account for some time now, and you know, I, you know, I guess I'll change my name on Google Plus. What if you do that, it changes it across your entire profile. Um so if you want to rename your Google profile Horatio, your Google Plus profile Horatio T. Wiggle Bottom, then people who you send email to on Gmail will also see that, and they may not realize that that's you,

and then and they make fun of you. Yes, not necessarily, So that's the That's the thing. I don't know. Uh, it's it's sort of unclear to me whether they mean, you know, we will delete your profile, meaning we will delete your entire Google account, or whether they mean there will be nothing public about this account at all. The the the what they call the profile itself, it's what they're just talking about. And that's still unclear to me as of right this minute. But I have the feeling

they're talking about the entire account. And then, and I mean, the whole point of this is it's a you know, to let you connect with other people. So sure, keeping it private means that no one can connect with you, Yes, but this this is happening regardless of whether you have a Google Plus account or not. So yeah, but that's because the Google Plus is on the foundation of that profile exactly. So it's it's forced that to happen. The profile is the bottom of the pyramid is the problem.

So um yeah, so it's it's that's a concern some people have. Um, it's a concern I have. And again this is not necessarily the concern of the average user, but it is for people like Chris and myself and for people more notable than us. Is that people and create um the you know, fake accounts or or accounts, uh, accounts claiming to be people and it's not really that person. Well,

you know. One of the big things is, uh, this first couple of weeks of Google Plus was that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, at a Google Plus profile and they were pretty sure it was him because it was a photo no one had actually seen of him before, and the people he had in his circles were Facebook executives. And then thousands of people followed him. Yes, as a matter of fact, he was at one point, I don't know if he still is, uh, the most followed person

on Facebook. I heard a report that he actually left he tightened up his privacy settings. Really, Mark Zuckerberg, you tightened up your privacy settings. I think you said no one wanted to do that, good thing. It was really easy to find yes, Um, but uh and I've also heard reports as of today that he may have actually deleted that account, but um, there are also dozens of

other Mark Zuckerberg's on there now. Yes, and I know that, like Neil Gaiman, he had a Google Plus account for a while and then he made the conscious decision to to to cut it out. He said it was too much noise and it didn't work for him, so he left. And then, um, he got irritated because he started getting lots of emails from people trying to add him into circles. But because he had left Google Plus, he was getting those invites through email as opposed through Google Plus. So

he deleted his account and then got deluged by email. Um. Yeah, There's the thing I was saying is that there should be, or hopefully there will be, some point a way to verify that you are who you say you are, kind of like Twitter has verified accounts. It would be nice to have a verified account through Google Plus. Because I noticed last night that I had a quote unquote celebrity following me named Selina Gomez. Uh yeah, so uh the Beeb's main squeeze and um, and so I'm thinking, why

is the Beeb's main squeeze following me? And so I decided to do a little investigative work and noticed that it was not truly her. People who had gone into a hangout with this person said, no, this isn't really silly to come as it's a it's a fake account from a fan, which, you know, whether you believe that's ethical or unethical is beside the point. The point being that you know, you kind of want to know the people you're talking to are the people that you think

they are, right, You don't want to be misled. You may have a genuine interest in following someone who is either a celebrity or other notable figure, but uh, you know, you don't mind the fact that they're not following you. You just want to get that information. Let's say it's a politician or it's someone, uh like a notable authority in a particular field that you're interested in. You don't want to be following a fan of that person because

you're not actually getting the information you wanted. So that's that's an issue with Google Plus. As of the recording of this podcast. Yeah, there there are apparently corporate accounts on the way. So yeah, right now, when that happens, there will be a house stuff works dot com account, Yeah, tech stuff account, And I applied for a tech stuff account, yeah, yesterday, So we'll see if that happens. I haven't received any

information back about that yet, but that's that's coming, you know. Yeah, because right now, it's supposed to just be people. That's what Google Plus was designed to do. And they said, you know, we understand there are corporations that want to use this as a way of connecting with their customers, um, their partners, etcetera. But it's just not designed for that. They're working on that right now, they being the Google

Plus team. Yeah. I think I think that they have the Google has done a much better job with this than it did with Wave and and definitely buzz and definitely work. Um is it a Facebook killer? Well, I can't stand the Blank killer thing. I think it can definitely grow into a Facebook rival and that will be good. I think the competition will be good for Facebook. They don't really have at this point a serious competitor. My Space was probably the last one, and it's at least

a serious competitor and most of the world. Yeah, I there are a few places where things like were cut are actually yeah, but um but yeah, I mean worldwide. Uh, Facebook is still a pretty big um nat juggernaut yesty million users is huge. Yeah. Yeah, So I think I think that given time and some added features and some refinement, I think Google Plus is off to a very good start. Yeah. And it may very well just be a complementary service. It may never be one that replaces Facebook, because that

wasn't necessarily what it was intended to do. It may be that you go to Facebook for certain kinds of interaction and you go to Google Plus for other kinds of interaction, and there's nothing wrong with that. No, I don't think so. Um, we'll see. I know there are a lot of people who are talking about the fact that they're going to just drop Facebook. In fact, I've seen a lot of people who have changed their profile pictures to say I have moved and have the g

Plus logo in there, which is cute. Oh and I was gonna say about the clicks behavior. Let's finish off with this because we are running along. But the clickish behavior on Google Plus. I saw a lot of people and I assume most of it was joking about how you know, because they joined early. They thought it would be cool to have a Google Plus badge to show that you were one of the original Google Plus beta testers before it went public and that this would set

you apart. And Uh, I happened to be of the I mean, I jokingly said that would be awesome, but I honestly think that would be a bad idea because it would discourage people. It would it would encourage a sense of clickishness and saying like I'm superior to you because I managed to get an invite to this social network, which, by the way, getting an invite to a social network doesn't mean anything. It just means you've gotta invite or

a work around, which means you know, equally nothing. Um. The so I would say that that's kind of would discourage new people from coming in because they're like, oh, well, this is like a closed off club and also right now it's more or less a boys club. According to Uh. To mash double Um, there was a a survey done to see or kind of an estimation done to see

how many men versus women are on Google Plus. Um, for a while, it like women made up about ten of the entire Google Plus population, and when you think we're potentially over ten million users, that's significant. According to Social Statistics, that percentage is now closer to uh seventy three point seven percent, So there are more females on Google Plus than there were before, but still it's overwhelmingly

a male population. So we'll all have to see. For Google Plus to really survive, we're gonna have to see that expand beyond just the dudes. Yeah, alright, we are wrapping this up. Like we said, there's probably a billion other things we could say about Google Plus right now, not to mention the fact that by the time this publishes things may have changed. Uh. If you guys have the ability to access it, search us out, or at least search me out. Chris. Chris is really good at

at at maintaining a nice low profile. I am one those people that prefers to keep my social networking down to people actually know in real life. And I certainly mean no offense to any of our listeners. No, it's there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I I am a very extroverted kind of guy who I'm like, look at me. So it's just really different personality. None of us have noticed. Yeah, I know you can't tell by the way I dominate every single conversation. Um, anyway you can. You can search up,

search us out, feel free and uh you know. Depending on how long it is from the time we publish this, we may be active on it, or we may have given up on Google Plus because it's still early days. I mean, we've seen a lot of Google products get initial positive response only to kind of fade away over time. So we'll see if this is one of those. I

hope you guys like that episode, that classic throwback. Remember, if you guys have any suggestions for future topics for me to cover or even guests I should have on the show, either as a host or an interview subject, you should let me know. Send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Tumblr, Twitter or on Facebook

to handle it. All three is tech stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this embass into other topics because it has to have works dot Com