After using it for last week, I find, It's the same but not the same. The New +Google+ is fast, super light and highly responsive and yes as always is all about the stuff you're into and the people who get you.
The focus is on the redesign, the bold colors, and the improved access to Collections and Communities(these are the places on Google+ where people around the world are spending their time discovering and sharing things they love), but there's a better story hiding there for everyone. As much as I've loved Google+, it was stupid slow to load, it used to leave Chrome often in a laggy state. The last thing minimalism lovers like me want is bloat, and I knew Google could change this. So, they did, and it is freaking awesome to see, how much they've done in the background to get to this speed. So, this change is welcome. Developers have even published a case study on the work that went behind this redesign.
Why are they changing so much?
Reach. Facebook locked up the social network graph, but Google has the opportunity to win interest graph - the place you go to share interests with other people. Google is now really wrapping itself around this opportunity. And I see, shared interests are the whole organizing principle around which the new design is based. The key to success will be to make a massive push, to draw people into this newly minted place to share interests with one another. That is what this new design is also about: building new adoption.
Stream. Google is focusing more on stream now. Why?
Streams are critical for Google because they are:
1) Mobile creatures, the primary avenue to Facebook & Twitter, which are robbing Google of users’ attention; and
2) Adored by advertisers.
Artificial Intelligence(AI). New design of home stream is now having machine learning applied to your interest graph. This means that Google+ learns over time what you're most interested in, what topics you engage with, share, and post about, and those will get more attention in your Home stream.
Also, as we group and cluster things into our collections and communities, we are telling Google about how we humans organize the world of ideas. More than that though, we are building connections between those ideas and each of us. In other words, we are building an interest graph that the company can map to its knowledge graph. Through those connections between people and ideas, all kinds of amazing information becomes possible. It helps Google know what kind of people care about what kind of topics, as well as what kind of people know about what kind of topics. And both of those are important things to know when you are a search company using software at scale to harness the power of people to train artificial intelligence.
One of the things I loved, about Google+ was that it was a power-user's service. Over the years, I had figured out how to use it in very powerful ways to get at information I really wanted. Although, I like this more focused Google+ and fresh design approach, it is still not fully complete, with Hangouts/Trends/Events/Views/Profile/Hover cards and many other features missing, I believe many of our favorite features are going away for us power users. Though, according to +Luke Wroblewski, some of these features might make an appearance in the home feed once the rollout is finalized.
The focus is on the redesign, the bold colors, and the improved access to Collections and Communities(these are the places on Google+ where people around the world are spending their time discovering and sharing things they love), but there's a better story hiding there for everyone. As much as I've loved Google+, it was stupid slow to load, it used to leave Chrome often in a laggy state. The last thing minimalism lovers like me want is bloat, and I knew Google could change this. So, they did, and it is freaking awesome to see, how much they've done in the background to get to this speed. So, this change is welcome. Developers have even published a case study on the work that went behind this redesign.
Why are they changing so much?
Reach. Facebook locked up the social network graph, but Google has the opportunity to win interest graph - the place you go to share interests with other people. Google is now really wrapping itself around this opportunity. And I see, shared interests are the whole organizing principle around which the new design is based. The key to success will be to make a massive push, to draw people into this newly minted place to share interests with one another. That is what this new design is also about: building new adoption.
Stream. Google is focusing more on stream now. Why?
Streams are critical for Google because they are:
1) Mobile creatures, the primary avenue to Facebook & Twitter, which are robbing Google of users’ attention; and
2) Adored by advertisers.
Artificial Intelligence(AI). New design of home stream is now having machine learning applied to your interest graph. This means that Google+ learns over time what you're most interested in, what topics you engage with, share, and post about, and those will get more attention in your Home stream.
Also, as we group and cluster things into our collections and communities, we are telling Google about how we humans organize the world of ideas. More than that though, we are building connections between those ideas and each of us. In other words, we are building an interest graph that the company can map to its knowledge graph. Through those connections between people and ideas, all kinds of amazing information becomes possible. It helps Google know what kind of people care about what kind of topics, as well as what kind of people know about what kind of topics. And both of those are important things to know when you are a search company using software at scale to harness the power of people to train artificial intelligence.
One of the things I loved, about Google+ was that it was a power-user's service. Over the years, I had figured out how to use it in very powerful ways to get at information I really wanted. Although, I like this more focused Google+ and fresh design approach, it is still not fully complete, with Hangouts/Trends/Events/Views/Profile/Hover cards and many other features missing, I believe many of our favorite features are going away for us power users. Though, according to +Luke Wroblewski, some of these features might make an appearance in the home feed once the rollout is finalized.
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