How many of you are actually using these services?
When they first appeared around what seems like a couple of weeks ago lots of people were signing up and tech media were predicting that it was going to turn Facebook on it’s ear. ahem (Paul Morrison).
The numbers of people were signing up for the services were enormous as there are already a ton of people who use and trust Google products to begin with. So the growth was probably from people saying sure, what the hell, I’ll give it a try and with the sheer number of Google users to begin with those numbers of new accounts when reported in the media are staggering.
Well Google products have a long history of success and I use many of them daily. Gmail, Google Calendar, Documents, Google Music and Google Listen among a few I use most every day. There have been a few misses with products that may have been a little ahead of it’s time or too smart to catch on universally. Among one that comes to mind was the collaborative tool Google Wave which promised real time online collaborations. I used it once or twice and it was interesting but not enough folks caught on. Kenny and I edit our podcast shownotes in Google docs sometimes simultaneously and Google Docs seems like it took a lot of things from Google wave and integrated them.
As tech savvy as I consider myself I still can’t get the hang of circles. It may be just a little too slick and I just don’t have the energy to figure it all out right now. So my intuition tells me that if I can’t figure it out in a snap that most grandmothers will say fuck it and not bother. This is a huge difference between Facebook and Google Circles. Facebook seems just super easy peasy lemon squeazy whereas Google Circles seems like people really need to sort a whole bunch of stuff out to make it manageable.
Google +? I’ve clicked on that +1 button on a bunch of different sites including this one when there are things that I find interesting and I figure it will share that somewhere but I’ve yet to figure out where that +1 button is visible or who gets to see the post or page that I find interesting enough to click the +1 button for. Again, I consider myself pretty much a 9.5 on the scale from 1-10 on the tech geek scale so for me not to understand it gives me a strong sense that a good majority of people don’t understand it either.
Maybe once my season slows down and once the winter doldrums set in I’ll have time to get more into it but I’m just not sure the masses will and isn’t that what Google wants to capture with it’s products- the masses?
Good Morning Gloucester 
