Is Google+ Communities another group product?
Originally published on Kapuno in the Technology community
🔗 Official Google Blog: Google+: Communities and photos (Article)
🔗 The Epic Video: Robert Scoble Rages Over Google Events Spam (Article)
Google+ released “Communities” today and I was intrigued to see whether we (http://kapuno.com) should be scared and quickly found that no, there’s nothing to fear because YES, it’s another groups product.
Google has created another product for group leaders to engage their groups. Similar bells and whistles then all the other platforms: posting, events, etc. Actually, it’s not at feature parity with Facebook Groups just yet, but that’s a separate discussion.
I’ve spoken to group leaders today who are banging their head hoping that they won’t need to use Google+ in addition to LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups and Twitter.
Going a bit deeper, here’s where the new Google Groups fails to move the needle.
A failure to deeply integrate with Twitter and Facebook
Google creates another walled-garden that’s not integrated with the other networks. I’m amazed that the company that touts openness fails to realize the internet needs to be more than a network of Google properties. The future of interest-based conversation includes the ease of distributing your conversation to the right people seamlessly.
Lack of community curation and taxonomy management
Google allows users to create groups at will. This means they’ll have countless permutations of the same interest owned & managed by different people. Scientific societies will create their own community, and scientists will create separate groups that compete for attention. Check out LinkedIn Groups and search Marketing to figure out which one of the 32K you should be in.
Interests are a hierarchical graph
Google’s new groups are not hierarchical and connected. In reality, groups are all interconnected. Content that interests a sub-group may interest a parent group.
Event spam
Event spam has been a huge issue on Google+. You’re notified on events and it’s automatically added to your Google Calendar. Because of the problem of multiple groups that cover the same interests, I’m sure that people will be posting competing invites to the same event.
Long-form publishing / reading is painful
We all agree that there are conversations which require more than 140 characters; but, must it lack any and all formatting! Long-form posts on Google+ break my heart and make my eyes strain. I hope and pray people don’t spend a their time writing novels that we must read there.
But, Google has hangouts
True, but thankfully you can share a Hangout to any platform as a embed/object.
Summing it up
I’m sure some great groups will take root on Google+; however, there are great groups on Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The fact remains that this product doesn’t solve, and actually exacerbates, the problem of fragmentation of groups that exists in the market today.
What do you think, did Google knock it out of the park?
Oh, and, thank you Google!
We look at building community deliberately. Check out our Ocean Conservation community: http://kapuno.com/conversation/apuwheyabbrak
Responses
Jonathan Langdale
December 08, 2012
I’m not convinced Google knows what it’s going with G+ yet. All it knows is to integrate.
Manuel Arciniega
December 08, 2012
One of the most interesting (and sad) points on the google communities, is that the old ‘plustars’ came back again and create communities and there’s nothing against them is just that if I create a community is for feedback, knowledge and exchange point of views, something that probably will not happen with that people it’s also read copied own post of their blogs.
So I expect in my community the knowledge and feedback of the members no another ‘post blog’ experience.
I hope here to find that.
Greetings.
Cyrus Radfar (December 08, 2012)
Greetings! What do you mean by “post blog” experience? Do you just mean that it’s for link sharing your posts with no context.
Manuel Arciniega (December 08, 2012)
Yes, I’m not against to copy the post’s blog, thats ok, but most of the time I’ll prefer interact with my community and theres is when a community really works, may I explain?, my english isn’t the best, jeje, sorry for that…
Cyrus Radfar (December 08, 2012)
No problem, I don’t think too much is lost in translation.