Google+ – What’s Missing

Not long after my last blog about Google+, I realized I missed a few things. While it takes hints from Facebook and Twitter, and lessons learned from Wave and Buzz (though I never used Buzz), it’s missing a lot of things. Hopefully some will be added; we know that some things are in the works already.

In no particular order, except that the Twitter comparisons are first…

1. Verified accounts. There are a lot of celebrities on Twitter. There are even more fake celebrities. I’ve seen posts questioning Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi profiles on Google+. How will we know if they’re real or fake? Mark was verified via Twitter. Felicia Day posted her own G+ profile on her verified Twitter account. Twitter seems to have stopped verifying, but enough celebs are around to let us know about the newer joiners. G+ needs to get a handle on this.

2. Muting. This is kind of a feature in Twitter, but G+ needs it. Sometimes I may want to mute one person for a while without removing them from my circles or blocking them. Another option that would be great is even more selective muting. When Felicia Day posts something to Twitter and gets 200 comments, I don’t see them unless I deliberately search for them. She has 30k following her on G+ already. I would like to see her posts but not see any of the comments unless I choose to view them.

3. Events. Google already has a Calendar, so they need to integrate it into G+. I noticed that my Calendar doesn’t show the +You link or the notifications in the toolbar, but someone said that his does. Maybe they’re still working on it.

4. Businesses. G+ accounts are specifically for individual people. There are no fan pages like FB and no business pages. They say this is in the works, though many business have already created accounts. Will they make it easy for them to switch to business accounts?

5. Photo Uniformity. Adding a photo album is easy; adding more photos to an existing album looks like it will be simple too. A few people have needed help finding where to upload their profile photo (under Edit Profile). Adding photos onto your profile page is kind of a nightmare compared to uploading to an album. There was no drag and drop and the “manage” option took me to Picasa, which I’ve never used, and even when I put photos in the Scrapbook album, they still didn’t show up until I fought with G+ some more. It needs a little more consistency with the various ways of uploading photos.

Also, when I uploaded an album, in one view, they appear in the correct order while in another view, they appear in the order they finished uploading, which is out of order.

Felicia Day uploaded an album in a way that posted each one to the stream separately and she had to apologize for spamming everyone. But that might have been entirely due to the third party app that she used.

6. Exclusions. This is something that FB has. If I post something and want to share it with all circles except one, or hide it from one person, I have to individually choose every other circle or every other person instead of just specifying not to that one.

7. Games. Currently. I understand these are coming so enjoy it while it lasts. Hopefully G+ will have a way to block games better than FB, where you have to block every game and every quiz separately. I think I have hundreds if not thousands blocked. If G+ can do a block all games option, that would be nice.

8. Edit, delete, disable comments. This is not missing. When you leave a comment anywhere, you can easily find the “Edit” option. But if it’s your post, the problem is finding the edit option because it’s a tiny, light gray button on the right of the post. People keep asking how to edit. There are more options in there too. Maybe they should make it a blue arrow?

9. Instructions and Updates. Wil Wheaton asked how to show who is in some of his circles and not others. He probably has about 100 replies, many with instructions to do exactly what he wants. Instead of following all the Google employees, maybe they should have set up one account to announce as they changed things. I didn’t remember seeing that functionality, but I know I have seen some changes the past two weeks. Maybe they’ve changed something I was looking for but I haven’t gone back to look for it. If they announced all updates somewhere, that would be nice. Or is there a blog with all of it? Does anyone know? I need instructions to find the updates.

So far, I have only noticed one person complain about privacy issues. G+ suggested friends to him and he kind of freaked out that it would know who he knows. But Facebook does the same thing based on who your friends know; I think he’s never seen that on FB. I have been invited to a Huddle, so I got to use that. It’s a slow, quiet huddle, but cool nonetheless. I’ve used the Hangout a couple times and used the chat function because a friend’s computer is in the dark ages with no microphone or camera. (The chat function was basically Gtalk in the browser. My Gmail tab picked up some of the conversation, Pidgin connected to it also.)

Now, if someone would just teach Google to open up their market to ALL Android devices so I could easily upgrade the app they just upgraded. (Both Twitter and Facebook recently updated their apps and I can’t get those either.)

2 thoughts on “Google+ – What’s Missing”

  1. I wanted to comment on your Tuesday, 24 May 2011 post on What Sploggers Think. You should always put your name and a link back to something on your site in your post. I put mine at the end. They say that the thieves sometimes delete it, but not always. There is some information on what else you can do at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=792116fa64dae2ec&hl=en . Note that it comes from Google. They don’t like those sites anymore than you/I do. The site you/Tamara Jones mentioned got a 403/404 Forbidden/Not found result when I just tried it. It must have also helped to ‘sic’ another ‘big gorilla’ onto the case, namely Mr. McEntee at geneabloggers. It helps to get someone bigger than you are on your side.
    Also: I wonder where Rosie O’Donnell would go back _to_? I doubt the people of Ballintur townland, Co. Down, would appreciate a sudden influx of all my mother’s relatives. They left in the first place because there was no room for them. But Rosie’s episode was good and no problems with her here.
    Nice blog, forgot how I found you, but I bookmarked your RSS feed and look forward to your critique of WDYTYA next year, as well as your well done research. Remember, it’s only TV:)
    And I apologize in advance but I don’t think my profile comes through right on Blogspot since I moved my blog to my own site.
    Ed H

    1. Thanks Ed. Besides splogs, we also have to deal with spam. I get so much random spam on old entries, I thought I’d curb that down a bit by turning off comments on old posts. I hope this comment doesn’t jinx me, but I took down the captcha and the spam is, so far, about the same.

      That splog didn’t copy from my blog, so I had nothing to throw at him anyway; I hadn’t blogged in a bit at that time, so he couldn’t steal anything. I had that conversation before MacEntee got to him. And I did notice that his site came down not too long after.

      Glad you enjoy my series on WDYTYA; I enjoy writing it. Now that they’re going to re-run season 2, it will be great motivation for me to finally write up the last episode, which will air very soon.

Leave a Reply to Ed Hamilton Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *