After playing around with Google+ (aka G+) this week, I have had a couple thoughts about future improvements to the service…
- Social Media Aggregation: provide for the import of your various networks & services (a la FriendFeed), but provide the ability to limit what actually posts directly to your Stream. This would limit the firehouse effect and allow for refinement of your content to G+.
- À la carte (filtered) Content Viewing: provide the option for followers to selectively choose which of your imported services filter into their Stream. One of the gripes I have had with FriendFeed was how much clutter there was. While some people have interesting tweets, photos posts, etc, a great majority of posts are less than engaging. Give the user the power to craft the content of their Stream, based upon the information imported by their followers.
I see G+ as a service, once the bugs are worked out and it’s out of beta, that can actually give Facebook a run for its money and pull in the non-techie user. While I am by no means an expert in Social Media or the like, I just happen to have an affinity for such things. And in this brief week of dabbling with G+, I fell G+ is heading in a direction that is, to this point, entirely positive.
(G+ icon via Ney Ricardo)