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Oh, this just gets more and more mind-boggling. I was just going through my Gmail spam folder and saw that I'd got an invite from a friend. Worryingly however, Gmail is warning me that it might be dangerous.
I have no words left for the pecularities associated with Google today. I'm all worn out. Come back tomorrow. :)
It seems to be a fairly clear trend - when Google releases something, they release a whole bunch of somethings. As well as the Google+ project, they have been playing around with the way that search works, and incorporating Plus into it as well. I'll go through the changes as I see them - they may not be what you see, but that's the beauty of Google I guess. I'm using Firefox 5 and .com for this by the way, and am logged into my Google account.
The first thing that people are noticing is the black menu bar at the top of the screen.
And this stretches right across the screen:
The +Phil in the left hand corner links me to my Google+ account. And, I had to be pedantic about this, but if it's Google+, why isn't it Phil+ as well? Isn't this just another sign of Google's astonishing inability to be consistent? Furthermore, the 0 on the right hand, with the 'Share' option are also Google+ links, so why is it sensible to split up resources like that? Where is the sense?
Some people don't like the black bar, others do, and I think it's pretty much down to personal taste. I quite like it myself. The next change you'll notice is the search bar.
They have gone for a light grey approach, increased the size of the search box and removed the word 'search' and replaced it with the magnifying glass.
The left hand menu is also different:
They've taken the grey colour option and added in a red highlight for active options. What I've also noticed is that some of the search tools are beginning to come and go, such as the WonderWheel. My friend Jenny Luca tweeted to say that it had gone - I checked and it was there, and now it's disappeared for me as well. Once again, a worrying inconsistency.
Finally, the actual results display is now slightly tweaked as well.
We now have Title, URL, Cached, Summary. Gone is the 'similar' option, and I also remember that we used to get the filesize of the page as well. That's now disappeared. We're getting far less data than we've had in the past, and that's never a good thing. From a cosmetic viewpoint it's nice. From a functional viewpoint it's puzzling, and from a searchers viewpoint its a backward step. Ho hum.
Well, after much expectation, Google is inching towards releasing a social networking product in an attempt to emulate Facebook, only of course they're not actually talking about it like that. It's still very much in a closed beta, with only a few people being allowed to play with it as yet. This is probably wise, given the mistakes that they made with Google Wave and Google Buzz. I'd rather wait a while and get a better product than launch into something that wasn't very good earlier. So I don't have much to go on, other than the official Google blog and the posts of informed commentators such as Danny Sullivan. However, let's take a look at what's out there anyway.
It's called what?
The first thing that completely puzzles me is the name. Google+. What they're thinking about I've no idea - it's hard to search for, it's even harder to pronounce (I plussed it? I Googleplussed it?) and it's way too close to their other recent project the Google +1 button. So as Danny said in his post, we're going to be in a position to say "I plus one'd your site on Google+" Hopeless and very confusing. Anyway, that apart, what can we expect? Here's the first of several videos:
(As a trivial aside, isn't it possible for Google to actually *edit* the audio? Do we need the um's, ah's and uh... like, err, that sort of stuff?) So this first video doesn't actually tell us that much. Facebook or indeed any other social network could have said pretty much the same thing about their offering. We do know that there will be circles of friendship groups (Why couldn't they call it Google Circles? They already have the 'oo' in the name. It would have been quite neat), and you can click and drag people into certain groups. Well, in Facebook I can also create lists of people, so that doesn't particularly excite me. And if you have thousands of contacts? Can't see that working terribly well to be honest.
Here's another one, which basically says nothing fresh at all, other than a basic and fairly pointless discourse on the nature of friendship with a voice over from some guy who sounds like Leonard Nimoy.
I can't honestly see that this would make me want to spend time using the product, so let's take a look at some of the other elements of it.
Sparks
Here's the video introduction.
'For nerding out. Together'. Right. This is, as I understand it, a way that you've got to share stuff with your friends. That's fine, and any social network is going to want to do this, so it's an integral need, but again, I have Facebook Like, or even Google +1 button or Delicious or Twitter to do that for me already. So again, I'm kinda underwhelmed. (I know that I'm coming across as negative, and I'm sorry - I really want to like this project, and I'd love someone to take on Facebook directly, and Google seems to be the only hope there, but I'm not seeing that 'wow factor' or spark of excitement yet.)
Hangouts
This is much more interesting. Again, the video to start with:
I love the informality of the 'hangout' idea, and can see how useful this could be. With the ability to share sites or webpages this becomes an excellent tool for training, guiding, inductions and so on, as well as general chatting. You're limited to 10 people, and that's reasonable. However, you can't save the chat, and you can't have other people watching it but not participating. So the idea of having say - a panel discussion goes straight out of the window, which is a real shame. If Google can tweak this around a bit, that's a clear winner in my book.
+Mobile
This is the smartphone element of Google+ and given the almost total lack of any decent Facebook mobile interface, this could be something of a winner. Google+ has decided to concentrate on two areas - saving pictures and chatting. You can save images into a private cloud because apparently saving images is difficult (really? Doesn't everyone just add their phone images directly to something like Flickr? Takes a couple of moments and it's a doddle.) The video for that is available, but to be honest, think of what it would look like and you're there. There's also a 'huddle' where you can do what's basically an MSN chat with a group on your mobile. Nice and simple, it looks interesting and exciting. Here's the video.
So, 4 different elements so far. Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and Mobile. There is a level of interactivity that I like, and can see how this could be used within our (information) environment. If you have roaming members of staff it would be quite cool to quickly use the Hangouts element to have chats back and forth, especially if you had an enquirer directly with you. The mobile huddle element could also be useful, in that you could discuss a query with a colleague AND the original enquirer. Small induction groups would work, as would sessions covering different subject areas. This could all be planned in advance or casually, as Google suggests. Really nice. I'm actually becoming quite enthused at this point!
Downsides
However, there are downsides to the whole project, as identified by Danny in his post. Lots of things that don't actually work that well - which is ok since it's beta, but nonetheless are worrying. First off is the idea of who you're going to have in your Google+ group. You can't import your friends from Facebook. I only have a couple of hundred tops, and that's way too many for me to want to add in from scratch - and people who have built up thousands are simply not going to do it. Facebook simply would not allow this to happen. Do I want to start the whole thing again, from scratch? Nope. Any contacts that you have in your Google contacts will be available. But do you even know who they are? This is a real problem for Google in that they've been so bad at social media even when they have tried something, no-one knows or even cares. I could perhaps use my Gmail contacts, but that's everyone! I don't always associate an email with a person either.
Another WTF moment is that the things that you +1 don't get incorporated into Google+. (See where the confusion is already starting?) That's as though the Facebook Like button doesn't do anything in Facebook. Pointless. Surely this needs to be an integral part of what you do within the social network - showing people what you like. As Danny says "But when it will launch is unclear, and it really feels like an incredible mistake that it’s not part of the launch." I can only agree.
Summary
So, is it going to be a 'Facebook Killer'? (An 'anything killer' is a pretty stupid phrase in my book, but what the heck) Absolutely not. As it stands, there's not enough to make me, or I suspect most other people want to move across from Facebook. I think that Google has left this way too late. The momentum is all with Facebook now, and Google is left (as it so often is nowadays) playing catchup. There is some nice - really nice functionality, but most of it is already available elsewhere. There needs to be really tight integration, an easy way of importing friends and sharing stuff, and I'm not seeing this yet. I wish the project well, if only to spur Facebook along, but I can't see this causing them any real concerns at all. Which is a shame.
This is a new Google resource designed in theory to help you find information, in practice to illustrate the (admittedly wide) breadth of knowledge and resources that they can provide you with. Simply type a subject that interests you into WDYL and you'll get a series of widgets or modules that open up with information about your subject in them. Or not, as the case may be. Let's take a quick look, using 'CILIP' as my example search, along with the modules.
Maps: A European map, but nothing on CILIP there!
YouTube: I get a result, but it's just the first result. In order to see any more, I have to go to YouTube, so I could have saved myself some time by doing that in the first place.
Sketchup: Nothing there, but since it's a drawing program that's not too surprising.
Calendar: That opens my calendar, and so I can see the value of that if it's returned an event in the future. Unfortunately it hasn't.
Patents: Nope, no patents to be found there. Well, not about CILIP, but there were another couple which may have had something to do with the abbreviation in a different area, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Blog Search: Success, and it returned 4 results.
Picasa Image Album: Returned one image, but it was a false positive.
Chrome: Just an advert as far as I can see.
Books: Yes, that was a hit, returning 3 examples.
Translate: Yes, another CILIP hit. I can now translate and pronounce 'CILIP' in 57 languages. Most of them sound rather like 'Chill-Ip'.
Scour the earth for CILIP: I need the Google Earth Plug in for this to work. I'll presume it comes up with something helpful.
Mobile search: Just another advert and link.
Call someone about CILIP: Great if I have Google Voice available, and if I don't, not so much.
See pictures of CILIP: Works, using Google image search.
Latest news: Yes, this uses Google news, so it's fine.
Email someone: Great if I've got Gmail, pointless if I don't.
Measure the popularity: Useful one this, linking me into Google Trends.
Organize a debate using Moderator: I'll confess that this is one that I didn't know Google had. So points for that. Apparently it's something like a bulletin board/forum. As if there weren't enough of those already.
Start a Discussion: Using CILIP groups. OK, fair enough, but who uses that any more?
Buy all kinds of CILIP stuff: Using Product Search. Nothing there, no surprise, no point.
Alert me: Links to the alerting service, which is a good one.
So... all in all, fairly close to pointless. It doesn't really do anything that iGoogle doesn't or couldn't do, and it doesn't work as easily as the Netvibes Dashboard option. This really does look like a 20% project from Google. You can't move modules about, can't create any, you need to go directly to source if you want to look at something in detail. Waste of time, waste of space. Seriously Google, if you have engineering time to waste on this, couldn't you put people to work fixing search?
Librarians are there:
To help, aid, assist. To teach, collate, enthuse. To catalogue, index, arrange, organise. To find, discover, promote, display. To interest, intrigue, amuse and amaze. To instill wonder. To help children, adults, old people, the underprivileged, the rich, the poor, those with voices and those without. To protect resources, to archive them, to store them, to save them for the future. To provide differing viewpoints, to engender thought, conversation, research, fun. To provide the best answer possible, to match the answer to the enquirer, to provide just enough information without overwhelming the user, but enough to always help. To better a local community, a company, a school, a college, an organisation, a country, the world.
Google is there:
To make money.
[Edited: corrected spelling (thanks!) and added 'a school' as suggested to me.]
Couldn't resist the title - sorry. I mentioned in a tweet earlier today that if you want to turn off the Google personalisation you can add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search") to the end of the Google search url to turn it off.
Here's another tip, if you regularly travel from country to country and get fed up with Google redirecting you to a local variation, which may well not be in a language that you understand. Use: http://www.google.com/ncr to disable this function, with NCR=no country redirect.
Worried about personalization? Did you know that Google personalizes your results? If you're logged into your account Google takes into account your web search history, and also your location, IP address and cookies. Those last are important, because even if you don't have a Google account, what you see is not necessarily what someone else will see. We've gone beyond the days of search results being the same for everyone. You probably won't notice the personalization element, because if it's well done, you'll just see that you get good results - or what are good results for you. You can easily check this by taking a look at a set of Google results. At the very bottom of the page (or perhaps to the right of the search box) you may see an option to View customizations and this will tell you if your results have been personalized or not. You can also see what the results would look like without it. There's more on customizations in an FAQ response and more details on localization as well.
Is this something that should concern you? I think that it probably is. Firstly, it's not clearly stated that Google is doing this. Yes, I know there's a bunch of pages which I've linked to that explain this. And yes, there's the view customizations option as well. If you knew about that, all well and good, but in my view, the link to customization is so far down the page, how many people are going to see it? Secondly, if you're working with a client/user/etc you need to be aware that saying 'do a search for xxx and it's the third result down' doesn't actually work too well - it cannot be relied upon. I suspect this is something that causes much confusion, certainly within the search optimization world. If your machines are public access, it's worth remembering that they'll return certain sets of results based on the set of users that you have. This is great when you're working with those users, but if you happen to use a machine for a totally different type of search, the personalized results won't be much help. And you may not even realise it.
Here's another point, and it's one that I don't want to push too far, but it's worth making. If Google localizes results based on a particular country, and people have a certain belief system, with the majority of people clicking on a certain type of result, might this not then emphasis the majority view of something? So, if a country has a specific religious system that decries homosexuality, could not Google results end up returning results that would be inclined to rank homophobic results higher than they would normally be expected to? I'm not saying that this is the case - I doubt that it is but couldn't say for sure - but the point is that it could be. Even if it isn't now, it wouldn't be hard to do. Can you trust a search engine with your results? Is a search engine as unbiased as an information professional? It's not difficult to 'googlebomb' the engine to get results that really shouldn't be happening (the famous 'miserable failure' for G. Bush's biography is an example), and while Google says that they've ensured this can't happen by tweaking results, it's still a worry. What you end up with is confirmation bias. This isn't helpful. I'm not going to say that you don't also get it with an information professional, but I'd be happy to bet that it's a lot less than you'll find with a set of computer based algorythms.
To be honest, enterprise search isn't something that I've ever particularly got involved with, mainly since I don't work in a company with a bunch of data that needs to be searchable. However, I know that a lot of people do, and they're always on the lookout for products that can be used to manage this need. Pandia Search in conjunction with Stephen Arnold have produced a very useful ebook/PDF which identifies, highlights and summarises the options available - Vivisimo, Exalead, Microsoft, Google, Autonomy and so on. It's priced at $20 which is very reasonable, given the work that's gone into it. More details on the Pandia site.
There's an update on the official Google Blog to tell everyone that they're closing the Google Health product. If you didn't know that they were doing this it's not a big surprise, certainly if you're not based in the US as it was country limited. If you are in the US and you didn't know that it existed, this is one of the reasons why it's closing. It didn't get enough 'broad impact' as they wanted it to. Which actually means that it wasn't bringing in the dollars in the way that they hoped it would. Don't forget folks, Google isn't a search company, it's an advertising company. If a product doesn't make them money in some way, it gets canned.
The second reason is pretty much that even now, or especially now, people do not trust the cloud with their really personal data. There have been enough scares recently to firmly cement this in people's minds - these things, however good they are, can get hacked. People are very precious about their medical details - understandably - and while having them available online isn't a problem for many of them (and Microsoft have a similar product called HealthVault), trusting that stuff to Google is a step too far for many people.
I'm honestly not surprised about this. My initial reaction when I heard that Google was starting this project a few years ago was that even if it was available in the UK, I wouldn't use it. If something is really sensitive, don't put it in the cloud, on the web, on a computer or on a piece of paper. Draw the line as appropriate. This is simply the latest in a very long line of products that Google has canned, and they're quite cold blooded about it - no matter how many people are using something, how valuable it may seem, or how much work people put into a project, the bottom line is that if it doesn't make money quickly, it's outta there.
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