Google Plus

My first post on Google+ was made on July 1 at 9:06am. My boss had scored an account over the weekend, and was wondering if I was using it too. I actually hadn't heard of it until he told me; I had been a little bit out of the tech news loop because of a big project at work, but when I heard, certainly I was interested! He had "shared" something with me - at the time this was the only way to get an account - and so I was in. The post was a link, shared only with him, to this Mashable article about the then-upcoming Gmail update.

I was immediately hooked! This was like Facebook, minus all of the things about Facebook that constantly annoyed me! This was awesome! This was... this was... well, sort of empty. It was like arriving at a party at the newest, coolest venue in town, but nobody had arrived yet. The primary attraction of Facebook is that everybody is there. All your friends. Everyone you've ever met, it seems, is on Facebook. The only people on Google+ at the time were you and the person who shared something with you, and the other guy who you shared something with and talked into trying it out. All the coolness, but none of the people.

On those counts, things haven't changed too much 2½ months later. It's a little easier to get an invitation (in fact, if you need one, feel free to use one of mine), but so far the general public hasn't particularly seen a reason to jump ship on Facebook, or even bother to try out another social networking service. And heck, after Google Wave in 2009 and Google Buzz in 2010, who could blame anyone for not jumping on a Google social networking site right away? I think Google is getting it right this time, though. The interface is Facebook-like enough that it's not too hard to understand what's happening, but it's different enough in good ways that the experience is much nicer. I have several friends who actually have jumped ship on Facebook for G+ (although I doubt most people will completely abandon Facebook any time soon... too much history there). I'm not deleting my Facebook account, but I'd love to go all-Google+. Problem is that there are a few things that are making that difficult at the moment... and there are a few more things that, should they happen, would make a move to G+ almost a no-brainer for me. Keep in mind that G+ is really still officially "in wide beta-testing" which means that the public has access, but it's not to be considered a complete product yet. It's entirely possible that some of the things I'm going to mention are in the works. I think it's probable that a few of them are on the drawing board. Let's see how prescient I am!

I'm so impatient about the lack of an API for programmers. At this writing Google has released a very minimal, first-iteration API limited to only reading public profile information and public posts. I can't wait for the release of something more substantial; I use TweetDeck for posting to Facebook and Twitter, and I would love to be able to use it (or Hootsuite, or whatever) to post to all three. Right now it seems the only way to post to G+ is using the Web interface or one of the mobile apps. I have a mobile phone, but it's a Java-only "messaging" phone, a free feature phone from several years ago; it doesn't run Android or iOS.

That leads me to another thing I'd like to see: better SMS support. I have G+ set up to forward status updates from several of my friends to me vis text message, but I can't respond to those messages via text, and I can't send posts of my own via text. I text posts into Twitter and Facebook several times a day most days; I'd love to be able to do the same with Google Plus. Even just sending new posts that way to a default bunch of circles that I specify ahead of time would be useful. I'll be getting an Android phone when my contract runs out on this phone, and at that point I'll install the G+ app, but even then I could see SMS as an easier way of firing off a quick post than starting up an app. And with SMS posting, I can actually cross-post to several services very easily, just by sending to multiple recipients.

I'd like to see RSS feeds made available for posts. You can already use third-party hacks like this one to pull down a feed of your public posts (or roll your own using the API that was just released), but it would be nice to be able to create "private" feeds based on your circles (something you can do with calendars in Google Calendar). I'm using the hack I linked to above to cross-post my public G+ posts to Facebook by running the feed through Feedburner and Twitterfeed. It would be SO awesome, instead, to just share a post with a "Facebook" circle or a "Twitter" circle and immediately shoot the post out via a custom RSS feed!


Part of the talk when G+ was first launched was about incorporating it with other Google properties... Picasa was of course a launch-day incorporation, but what about other properties? Here are my two favorite no-brainer Google properties to incorporate into Google Plus:

Google Reader. G+'s "Sparks" functionality mirrors some of the functionality of Reader; how difficult would it be for G+ to represent your Reader feeds or lists as Sparks? Or, coming from the other direction, wouldn't it be cool for Reader users to be able to easily do a one-click share to G+?

Blogger. Many G+ users are very nearly using G+ as a blogging platform anyway; why not optionally integrate Blogger blogs into Plus so that there's none of this post-the-blog-entry-then-share-it-on-plus nonsense. Just magically allow the blog post to show up on Plus when it is posted to Blogger. An added bonus: combine blog comments and G+ comments so that if I post a comment on a Blogger/G+ entry in Blogger, the comment also shows up in G+, and vice versa. I would LOVE to automatically have more comments on my blogs because comments flowed in from Plus users! Another bonus integration: automatically (but optionally) convert a blog to a Spark, so when you see a blog post from someone you like (say, a friend of yours reshared it) you could follow that blog without having to circle the blogger.

There's a lot of potential in Google Plus! I hope to see some of this stuff happen in the near term. If Google suddenly today rolled out all of the things I've mentioned in this post, for me it would be like knocking the walls out and letting the sunshine in. I really would love to be able to use Plus as my social networking hub and flow information out from there. With these kinds of adjustments, it could happen.

Twitterfeed: The Sequel

Last week I posted a blog entry about Twitterfeed... but then just a few days later Twitterfeed itself got a makeover! The big change that immediately became obvious to me was that now Twitterfeed can post to Facebook in addition to Twitter. I've had my Twitter account and my Facebook account linked up so that my blog posts would show up on Facebook, but this allows me to decouple them and let the blog posts go separately to Facebook. I like the idea of the "description" going to Facebook and just the "title" going to the more character-restricted Twitter, but your tastes may vary.

Twitterfeed is also now reportedly supporting Pubsubhubbub, which is a technology which should allow feed posts to show up on Twitter/Facebook nearly instantaneously. When I tried it on the day that Twitterfeed posted the announcement about the new upgrades, it didn't seem to happen that way, but it should be come apparent over the next week or so whether that is working.

They have also added some Google Analytics integration; I don't actively monitor my Google Analytics, so I can't really comment too much on this.

Twitterfeed

If you follow my Twitter account, you'll notice that whenever I post to one of my blogs (there's a list of them on the right-hand side of this page) a tweet always shows up. I don't do this manually; I use a great service called Twitterfeed:

http://twitterfeed.com main page

Twitterfeed is a simple service... you set it up with an RSS feed and with your Twitter account(s), and then when new information is added to the RSS feed, the link automatically gets posted to Twitter. I don't limit its use to my blogs, either... I use a service called WorldCat.org to keep track of books I read and movies I watch, and it can output RSS feeds as well. So when I read a book, everyone following me on Twitter automatically knows it! That's just for fun... the best thing is that it helps me publicize my blogs without having to think too much about it.

Something else I like about Twitterfeed is that it allows you to create an account using OpenID. This is accomplished using a nice service called RPX which handles all of the confusing parts of implementing OpenID. If you click "Sign in with OpenID" you'll see this screen:

RPX-powered login screen

 Click the logo of one of the services on which you have an account, log into that service (if you are already logged in, as I usually am with my Gmail account, you're all done without having to log in again at all!), and your Twitterfeed account is ready to go! It couldn't be simpler. I'm planning on incorporating RPX into the redesign of my Guide to Petra Web site, coming up soon. As it is now, people have to go through a series of click-a-link-in-this-email steps to use the interactive portions of my site; this will work MUCH more smoothly!

You can set up multiple RSS feeds with one single Twitterfeed account, and you can actually post to multiple Twitter accounts as well. It also supports some services I hadn't heard of... laconica, ping.fm, and HelloTxt are in the drop-down. I've tested it with more than one Twitter account, and it worked great. You "link" the account using OAuth (basically, you log into the Twitter account from Twitterfeed) and then you put in a "Feed Name" and the URL for the RSS feed. And then you're done! Of course, there are some great "Advanced Settings" you might want to look at:

Twitterfeed settings for this blog

My favorite things to change are the "Update Frequency" (I set it really long because my blogs seldom update more often then once a day) and the "Post Prefix" (which is added to the beginning of each tweet), but there are also some other settings you might want to look at... whether the tweet is the title from the feed, the description from the feed, or both, for example, or whether the "newness" of the posts is determined by pubDate or GUID (if you don't know what that is, try one and see if it works as you expect... if it does, you're good). You also have the option of using any one of a large batch of URL shorteners... I use bit.ly (you can even give it your account information, if you like to use a bit.ly account) but TinyURL is there, and SnipURL, and a couple dozen others.

Once you have some feeds set up, the feed dashboard (which shows a list of all of the feeds you are automatically sending to Twitter) provides some interesting information; link click-throughs are tracked and displayed as bar-graphs. If you use Feedburner, as I do, you can even set things up so that you know how many click-throughs came via the bit.ly (or other service) link, and how many came directly through the Feedburner link. If you are thinking of using Twitterfeed for a business purpose, these kinds of metrics could be very informative.

The only time I've found the service to be anything but reliable was during a recent Twitter outage... but during the outage, Twitterfeed communicated status reports frequently through their own Twitter account. There was never a time during the outage that I felt like I didn't know what was going on with Twitterfeed. It truly is a set-it-and-forget-it situation; it just works, day-in, day-out. It's the glue that connects my social network friends with my blogs, and I've seen more comments than ever before on my blogs in the weeks since I started auto-tweeting my new posts. It's been a great help to me in getting my blog posts noticed!