SROYS

The basic problem is that no one is really sure what the perfect social application would be - Facebook, twitter are their best bets right now but there is immense room for improvement and there will be changes which will come in the future which will get us closer to a real online life social experience.

What is being social? Social means different things to different people - to the constant chit-chatter sister it’s about hyper connecting with all her friends, to a family person who wants to remain in touch it’s about sharing, liking replying to various family updates, to a business person it’s about developing new connections and keeping the existing ones. Each group has a different idea about being social and the reason Facebook is winning is because of it’s modular design.

This is a very long post about some new things which can help improve our online social experience.

Why is Facebook winning the biggest pie of online socializing?

• most or all of family connections
• some of the business connection (possible lead: linkedin)
• some of the event connections (possible lead: Google)
• some of the news sharing connections (possible lead: twitter)
• some of the interesting article sharing connection (possible lead: twitter)

Ease of use, modular design, the stories about Facebook, first mover into the news feed model, gained momentum so most new people joining already had friends with active accounts and relevant content for them to read.

Why is twitter winning the news/article sharing battle? It’s fairly obvious - I don’t want to read elongated paragraphs about what you are saying - keeping it short, simple and fast wins hands down as I can focus on more people and connect with more people much more quickly. Twitter is a different breed and will become the plugin for shorter versions of your public post for any social network that emerges.

What exactly is Google+? real life sharing, rethought for the web. Google+ aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in real life. That’s their goal. The tag line on the sharing box says “Share what’s new…” Hmmm.

Facebook’s share box says “What’s on your mind?” - anyone can see which seems more human or rather which would seem more “real life”. But let’s not rattle around such small issues like tag lines - the issue is much deeper and we can possibly get better if we attack the problem rather than trying to see which little thing each company is doing right or wrong. I just wanted to start with that because that is what most people seem to do.

So let’s get on with the problem.

The problem we want to solve is building the perfect online social platform. Social is never JUST about sharing (stuff on our mind or in our hands or computer) - it’s also about connecting - that is what we expect when we go to any social gathering. Share stories, photos and also meet new people - talk about new experiences and opinions. We also talk about news, politics and stuff. So if we are to move this to an online platform we need to look at different aspects.

Design: Making it easy to share “what” we want with “who” we want - I think the Paul Adams presentation has drilled this well into the minds of the designers at the top social network and they are making good progress in solving this problem - circles or ajax dropdowns both work well - and one may only give the network an aesthetic advantage. But that said the Google+ circles interface is really quite a feat.

Here’s what I think will be part of that perfect social network.

• Make ALL the items the same size and balloon up larger versions of images or videos or text when the user interacts with them. NONE of the social networks do this well. It’s confusing and irritating to say the least - you brilliant ajax developers can DEFINITELY do better than this.
  
  
• Make connecting with new/unknown people less freaky. What I mean is you need to create validated accounts if you want to do “real” new connections. In a social gathering we generally won’t appreciate someone just coming up to us and acting all friendly - but when a friend introduces us we respond well.
  The core of the reason is the validation - you don’t always need people to introduce yourself to others in an online platform. Validation can be solved by doing credit card checks to identify people - piggyback on the visa verification process. Simpler and faster. Only people with verified accounts should be allowed to do public posts. Then identify the personalities and show glimpses in a separate section. AGAIN - making the items fit properly and ballooning additional information would make people more open to reviewing the material.

• Social is also about collaborating - specially collaboration of ideas and organizations. There needs to be a well designed space for ideas or organizations inside the social networks. Pages are good but can be improved by addition of some collaboration tools and possibly some brand insights - I would pay to see what people are saying about my brand.
  If brands can be identified in comments and if permission to copy the comment on the brand’s page can be asked for at the time the person is making the comment it would add a lot of value. For example someone saying “My Nike+ is awesome” and when they hit enter they are shown a dialog where they confirm if they would like to share it on the Nike+ page also - it would be a real connection and the person may then join the Nike+ community and be more involved.
  There can be many such small improvements that can be made to help people make connections with other people, ideas and organizations.
  
  
• Tagging can be made intuitive with the use of a little color on the boxes. It would help us visually segregate different kinds of items - in a real world social experience color plays an important role in our interactions.
  Having everything - an article share, an opinion or comment look the same is not the best we can have. The idea is to try to replicate the reactions we have in a social interactions - for example when someone is telling a fascinating story the reaction and mode of hearing is different from say when someone is breaking the news of getting fired.
  If an intuitive legend of colors (even if very light backgrounds) could be incorporated into the news feed it would really liven up the reactions and our eyes would flow smoother and stop at what interests us the most.
  I guess some sort of AI would be required to judge the mood of the item and color them with a light tinge of the mood.
  
  
• Avoid temptation to grow fast - when you focus on that you do silly things like put a youtube search bar on the side or try to encourage people to do things they don’t want to. Like when I clicked on the “Click to see popular posts” (this section looks different from the rest of the site - seems like a different designer) - I saw items which almost seemed like stuff my teenager cousin forwarded me - I am NOT INTERESTED in that - I don’t want it there! Stick to what you are here to do - and solve the problem instead of trying to promote other products or trying to push users from other services. Integrate it well and the users will flow to the social experience also.
  
  
• Do not blend too much - keep services separate and clean from clutter. Do cross promotion carefully and in a minimal fashion. Google was on the right path with the toolbar at the top but they seem to be loosing it.
  
  
• It seems that the +1 is somehow lacking some flare - in Facebook when I “Like” something - I am saying I really like this - but where I am not “Liking” an item I am not really saying anything. But in search I need to get this feedback which I think Google is missing out on. Google has a lot of data on each profile - so it should be possible to avoid fraud of negative marking. But this is important information they are missing out on. If adding a social element was the goal it’s important to embrace both negative and positive rankings. It should’ve been called +- or show the +- status with a slight indent in opposite direction. Users could click and drag the search listings which they thought were good.
  
  
• How many people are public speakers? Remove the word “Publicly +1 this”… unless there is some important privacy issue being addressed but even so - this can be worded better.
  

Marketing:  Anything Google does doesn’t really need marketing the tech space will hype it to oblivion but adding some in-product blending may get a lot of users. So here are some marketing ideas:

• Millions of people forwarding emails - the so called laggards who are still not on twitter but use gmail - but it’s a decent size of the pie. Having a small +Plus to share the email in a nicely formatted manner may get the laggards in and connecting.
  
  
• In the words of Sean Parker’s famous line “Drop the Google”. The name is not right - adding Google the “verb” into a product will always seem to have a search taste. Just call it “Plus” or “Circles” - unless there are some trademark issues - these seem like better names.
  
  
• Find a way to intuitively integrate it into Android - the best way would be to have it seamlessly integrate into the contacts application - with beautiful notifications - make it free for people to sms and add content to their plus account in developing countries. The Samsung social hub doesn’t allow people to add Google Plus - this should’ve been addressed before they launched their hugely popular S2 and Note.
  
  
• Do some marketing using Google earth and maps - invite merchants to create their plus accounts and business pages and link them to their local listing. Send them a sticker to put on their shop - it would probably cost Google 2-5 dollars to print 1 sticker - can you imagine what 100,000 customized stickers can do? Google/facebook can afford this.

Some comments and more ideas from other people here: http://www.quora.com/Is-Google+-a-failure-Or-does-it-still-remain-to-be-seen