On Robert Scoble‘s Blog, Robert provides thoughts on how

Google+ Could Still Blow Facebook Away

“Facebook announced new photo features that take away yet another cool thing about Google+. This has got to be frustrating for the Google teams, even as they keep a stiff upper lip in public, right +Vic Gundotra?”

I will add my own user experience and blogger-engagement ideas to Scoble’s:

Why do we keep posting on Google+ and not on our blogs? Robert likes the competition between Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. I would like to send a titled, formatted, visually-dynamic and credited (optionally) post to Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, and/or WordPress.

What did Facebook do this time – learning from G+, but still falling short?

“Facebook, yesterday, turned on a new “interests” feature on my account that totally rocks. Would we have gotten that if Google+ hadn’t shown up on the scene? Probably not. But, now that Facebook has shipped these features, what is special about Google+? The search engine and video hangouts and YouTube integration. The search engine isn’t that far ahead of Facebook, though, and is missing huge features. For instance, why can’t I see every item you’ve plussed? That’s really lame Google and Vic should be ashamed that the search team can’t even do that yet.” (Robert Scoble)

What I Would Suggest for Google Plus Improvement

Enrich features for About page.

Where are “My family relations?”
Relationship status, and with whom?
Political views
Favorite movies/Books/Music/Sports/Teams/current passions
Even comparatively tiny network, Circle.Me, allows us to do a bang-up customization of our about page. We do care about style. An offering of fonts, background photos, logos, and for the quickie types, “themes” would be a smart addition.

Ronald de Block's new OsakaBentures is now the background for my Circle.Me main page

We have (some of) that on Facebook and Google could be giving us that – and in no time.

Not having a writable API is a major hole. Being anti OpenGraph-style is a glaring slight on the community of developers.

Give us an iPad app that blows away Twitter and Facebook and makes it a joy to use all of Google’s things on.

Turn down the suck / turn up the good

Fix the goofs that you left in, every since you let Google+ loose. Every URL in G+ has only a cantankerous, lengthly, numerical end – and no built in shortener. That makes it hard to tweet and your URLs look like crap. Listen to us; we’ve been telling you we don’t like this stuff – from the day you invited us to the beta launch.
Give us custom domain names
Let us see all the stories we have liked.
Allow us to follow more than 5,000 people. Twitter is whipping you because of this (and Facebook will not do this go this route any time soon; Zuck thinks no one is important enough to have affiliations with many people or any reason to follow-back many people).
Let us have a REAL blogging tool here. Google has Blogger. Why isn’t it integrated here yet?
Work with the other blogging platforms, and let us send formatted posts from G+ to WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Posterous, and/or Tumblr.
Allow us to add videos and photos in our comments. Facebook has them and it’s important.
Let us clean up our social graphs. Show us people who no longer post. Also, show us, as Connex.us is about to, who we have the most engagement with and preferably (again, kudos to connex.us) across more than one social network. Make it easier to see people’s content, trends, and stats, and delete, people from our social graphs.

You could still win out over Facebook, Vic, you certainly have the cash to put behind initiatives. You’d win the admiration of millions – besides Robert Scoble and I.

What irks you about G+ / is great about Facebook?

How could Google+ or Facebook (or both) behave the way you’d like it to?

What are three core features that would make you leave G+ open for hours on end?

About Saul Fleischman

Founder of emerging social media tool sites. Bootstrapping innovation with lean startup development teams. I do project management, user experience, PR, marketing and community development.

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Stan Faryna

I don’t know if any of the big social platforms provide obvious, intense, organic opportunities today. I don’t mean gamed value. Beyond the hype about this or that new feature, I don’t see much of a reason to commit more time and attention to any one of them. In that regard, Triberr was the most exciting app of 2011. It drove intense value in the blogosphere without having to game it. Emphasis on “without”.

Scoble’s failure to recognize Triberr’s value suggests to me that his interests are focused – or prejudiced. The distinction depends on how you want to look at it. [grin]

I do like that you are tracking value and opportunity, Saul. I respect your intensity and dedication to your search for the next big thing.

Keep up the good work.
- Saul Fleischman
  
  Triberr was exciting throughout 2011 Stan @faryna. Still is useful. Like Google, funnily enough, they avoid listening to their users at all costs. They take a defensive stance, and rebuff those who would help make them better. As in our last talk, they would do well to come to terms with how the Tribe Chief sees his lack of messaging, .rss approval, Twitter acct. approval, etc. At the most basic level, Triberr has insisted – from when they opened their beta doors in February, 2011 – that we agree to their TOS. A Chief is expected to manage people problems; so where is the “accept this tribe’s rules (or TOS)” when people act on an invite…? You’d have to see things from a Chief’s POV to understand why WE DESERVE THIS CONSIDERATION.
  
  As I just posted in the FB Triberr Chiefs group today: “Does anyone else find that the “free riders” (those who have correctly figured out that it doesn’t pay to be a chief, and members actually do better) who have not built a tribe, have not helped members with problems, situations, questions… these are the ones that tread on what you’ve built the hardest, and get offended when you ask them why they’re approving little-to-nothing?”
  
  You see, Triberr tells them they can assign whatever .rss, whatever Twitter acct to each Tribe. As a Chief, they then leave it to me to chase down the perps who have a Twitter acct with real interaction – but think its honky dorey to install their “other” Twitter acct to my tribe. They also are not led to read the rules before joining, and so, “surprise, surprise,” no one ever has.
  
  Perhaps 2013 will be the year in which Dino begins to listen, rather than defend. We’ll give him time to have one of those “aha” moments, the kind that do not leave you humbled, but rather, appreciative. Then, he’ll see better who it is who would like to help.
Steve Hughes

This fight was over before it started. Market Share, Market Share, Market Share. People like there neighborhood (Facebook) and basically care less about the new development (Google) because no one is moving there, so why would I want to move there…It has some pros, but not taking over Facebook unless they buy them. Catch you soon Saul.
- Mike Simon
  
  I don’t think Marketshare is really it. MySpace was king of marketshare before Facebook came and beat their ass. Facebook picked up on the weaknesses of MySpace and capitalized on them. MySpace was a mess. Over-customization had made it almost unusable. The little control panel with the friend button and navigation was being styled so you couldn’t even find it half the time and varied in placement on every single page. Facebook standardized things, gave people the ablity to add goofy widgets like MySpace, but cleaned up their placement, then totally weened people off of them slowly. To beat Facebook, you have to have a better design philosophy, but come close enough to theirs to let people transition smoothly. You also have the additional challenge of making it easy to get people and their friends on your system.
  
  Google+ failed at this partly because the common person doesn’t want to clamor for invitations like us SN addicts do. They want to be able to join immediately and with no hassle. Also, they needed to have a strategy for ingesting FB profiles and photos in a way that when someone wanted to migrate, they could hit a button or go through some steps and import their entire dataset into the new system. Alternatively, they could have wrapped Facebook so that people could use G+ and share transparently (which is what Connex.Us will start out doing) both inside and outside Facebook. Google+ could have had Autofriend invitations right out of the box. If you click this link and sign up, you will immediately have me as a friend on the system, and be presented with your own autofriend invitation where others who click on it will join and become your friends. That almost ensures a lot of quick engagement and turns, then whenever you shared something on G+, it would share it with your friends there, and also on FB. Eventually you can cut the chord to FB, but the idea is that you make it easy to maintain your friends both places without a lot of duplication of effort.
  
  I understand they might have had scaling problems, but the staggered approach led to a lot of stuttering in terms of people getting invitations. People were already getting tired of the ghost town by the time it hit a month old. With the money Google has, there really isn’t an excuse for not being able to scale quickly in case demand grew faster than expected. Even if there were hiccups, you and your friends could have complained about them together…on G+.
  
  (apologies for the blatant plug)
  - Ross Quintana
    
    Mike you hit it on the head. Being a success is more about strategy and design, you have to shadow box with your competition and then you don’t force a change you facilitate it naturally. We still need to connect on your project as we have similar ideas on what it takes to slay the giant. I would be interested in seeing if we can work together.
  - Saul Fleischman
    
    I agree, @nixkuroi Mike that design is much how FB trumped MySpace. Allow people to customize, but don’t let them go overboard with clashing colors and the command.
Andrzej Marczewski

I just can’t put my finger on why I don’t like G+. It just doesn’t feel right or even needed!
- Saul Fleischman
  
  Thanks @daverage but show us your UX superpowers; what should be different, more fluid, more focusable…?
Michal Hudeček

I would really appreciate better search in the news feed and Save for later feature. Sometime I am just checking Facebook or G+ for a minute before I have to leave and don’t have time to browse my friends photos or links at that moment. I can never find them again. Within a few minutes it is buried under newer posts.

But I don’t believe this is a Facebook killer feature.
- Saul Fleischman
  
  We always appreciate hearing fro you in English, @michalhudecek ; Chechs bounce (one for the Americans). @nixkuroi has connex.us going, and that should isolate conversations most urgent. Great for you, and I, who can just pop in and out of social media.
  
  Scoble wrote on the same point your raised – organizing by interest, friends’ stuff, inner circle stuff (you know my mantras), and agreed, not a FB-killer, a “consenser” of sorts would be great. FB tried with “close friends,” but I wonder how that is serving people. When I get people asking me to add them to my “close friends,” I go “hmm…” – fi they need to ask…? Also, I’ll soon show you what
Del Williams

I think you are wanting another Facebook. G+ is G+ and has lots of things going for it. I like the 5,000 limit because it causes me to actually follow people and brands I want to. Second, you want “family relations” then name a circle that and you are done. I agree about the people who no longer posts, but the same could be said on all the networks. Sure you can follow tons of people on Twitter, but you will get tons of spam and auto tweets as people move away from talking there. Here’s a clue, the ones who have millions of followers and follow them all back can be guaranteed to have a 50% bot rate and those who follow keywords. Just tweet anything with Justin Bieber’s name in it and see how many new “followers” you get. I like G+ because of the interest I have and oddly enough the people who like those interests find each other, particularly photography. I don’t need another Facebook or Twitter and the comparison game has gotten really old since clearly the people writing about it don’t know the differences in the audiences on each.
- Saul Fleischman
  
  Thanks @delwilliams and though I can see how you’d read it that way, no, one FB is one too many, for me. On the other hand, beyond the profile issues, and how G+ could very easily let us enrich those, bigger issue beg answering – particularly in regards to reducing what’s “fed” to us based on the network’s study of who we never actually interact with. Even FB is doing this, over time, for its users.
Catherine White

My opinion on G+?

In the words of Cary Grant in Gone with the Wind, ‘frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
Ross Quintana

Nice one Saul. I agree there are huge missed opportunities for both Google+ and Facebook. Too bad the majority of people have to suffer as these two try and do something that they aren’t great at. I’m interested to see Mike’s site. I still haven’t got together with him and should.
Sia A

Google+ did not start with a college campus “in” craze like twitter and facebook, and if its trying to be the place where you can talk to your actual friends and close base like FB has it will go nowhere. honestly, the only thing they can do from here is make it a business/ memetic/ “meta network” friendly place where you can conduct business, and feel safe interacting with likeminded people online who you would otherwise never talk to.
davergallant

A quick note Saul. I currently use Blogger and there is a sharing component within the platform, but it still does lack “finesse” . I think one of Google+ biggest issues is there lack of accessibility with their api. I believe once they open that up, the playing field will be more level….IMO
Scott Wendling

Google doesn’t have to beat Facebook with features. It is and will be much better for SEO. As more people realize this moee money will be routed that way. As avtivity picks up Google will modify the system to adaot to how people are using it.
- Saul Fleischman
  
  Thanks, Scott. The SEO noe is key. We’ll see proof of that – and then put in the time in G+, I’d say.