screenshots via Google and Path
The Google Plus iPhone app, at left, looks unfinished next to the Path application.
People love Google Plus. Wait, they hate Google Plus. No, that’s not right, either. Lots of people are using Google Plus. No, it’s a ghost town.
Rather than bicker constantly about who likes it and who doesn’t, let’s agree that opinions are split on whether Google’s latest social network works. But let’s see if we can, together, figure out the problem with Google Plus.
First, it’s not so bad that people don’t try it. Google has no trouble finding new users — a problem that often plagues other social start-ups. Google says more than 100 million people have signed up for Google Plus. That’s a lot of people to play with on the playground.
It’s not a problem with content, either. Google Plus symbols, those little +1 buttons, have better promotion than any service on the entire Internet. You see them on blogs and Web sites. They are tucked into every corner of nearly every Google product on the Web: Google search, YouTube and Google News. And people use them.
It’s also not a problem with service outages, unlike, say a big start-up with a little blue bird as a symbol. Google Plus has never gone down, and likely never will.
What about the assertion that “no one needs another social network,” as some have argued? That, I can guarantee, is not it.
Take Path, for example. Considered one of the best designed social apps for the iPhone and Android phones, Path recently announced that it had crossed one billion moments shared on the service. That’s a lot of sharing for yet “another social network.” And there are others out there that are growing at a rapid pace, including Instagram, Highlight, Soundtracking and Pinterest. Granted, they are narrowly focused social apps, while Google is going for a broad community. But these social networks are battling Twitter and Facebook for eyes, just as Google Plus is.
So what’s the Google Plus problem? There’s really only one thing left: bad design and a confusing user interface.
Google is an engineer-driven company. These unbelievably talented engineers have always put code before pixels. They’ve made the fastest, smartest Web products around. But the design of Google Plus feels, well, undesigned. It isn’t beautiful, and in the age of the iPhone and mobile apps, good design is more important than anything.
We skitter around the world with our smartphone cameras, taking pictures of leaves and sugar cubes and sunsets, then applying filters and making even the mundane look beautiful. Clearly, design is becoming increasingly more relevant to people.
Google Plus doesn’t seem to understand that. Google’s iPhone app, for example, looks like a sketch that was never finished. And if you think the iPhone isn’t important for a good social network, just ask Instagram, an iPhone-only photo app that has more than 27 million users. That’s a quarter of Google Plus’s users, and Instagram didn’t need the Google homepage to get there.
Google doesn’t even need to rethink social networks, for now. It can simply copy someone else. Most social networks do this, to some degree. Instagram wasn’t the first photo app with filters. Path is a slimmed-down mobile version of Facebook. Highlight feels like a newer take on Foursquare. But they are all innovative in their presentation.
Online, especially in social, innovation isn’t about being new; almost every social app can be traced to someone who did an earlier variation on the experience.
Instead, innovation is about presenting the problem with a different solution. Design, user experience and aesthetics are the key to doing that right, even if you do have great engineers.