.:aaron.helton:.
musings.of {'husband', 'father', 'technologist', 'international civil servant', 'humanist', 'skeptic', 'gamer', 'dreamer'}

After one week with Google+, I can say I genuinely like using it.  Even in beta, it feels mostly polished, with a few rough patches here and there.  I am not going to reiterate what Google+ does well, or rehash its features, but I would like to spend some time musing on what features it seems to be missing that would take the platform to a whole new level.  Some of these are reportedly on the way, but most of these are just my own observation.  One thing you should notice is that my concept of what would make this service better revolves almost entirely around integration with existing Google properties.These first three enhancements would allow Google+ to be a small team conferencing solution that could take on the likes of WebEx, LiveMeeting, and GoToMeeting.

Hangouts + Screen Sharing: Think about it.  You could use it to make on-the-fly webcasts and/or presentations to arbitrary numbers of people.  You could group-source a solution to a tricky computer problem.  Or you could do anything with it that might benefit from a group of people all being able to see the same graphic, image, or screen (in addition to work teams, I am thinking of role-players).

Hangouts +  Scheduling + Google Calendar Invites: Want to start a hangout, but not right now?  Perhaps you’re busy now, but would like to schedule one for later and invite a few colleagues or friends.  With this enhancement, you could send invitations out, viewing friends’ or colleagues’ free/busy status in Google Calendar to get just the right time or let them get reminders.  It could work like any other scheduled teleconference solution in that the hangout starts, but nobody can see other participants until the organizer shows up.  Or maybe they can.  Either way, this could be a powerful tool for virtual teams to conduct face-to-face collaboration or discussion.

Circles + Google Docs Collaboration: This is in case you want to invite a ready-made group of people to collaborate on a particular document.  The idea is that you may have already set up circles that included current co-workers, or circles that include a very narrow subset of current co-workers.  This enhancement would allow you to select among your Google+ circles for the real-time document collaboration that Google Docs already allows.  In short, it’s a very small step, and quite intuitive.

The next three enhancements are all about how sharing is done.  With the exception of the third item, these of course speculation, but they make sense if you stop and think about them.

Good sharing: Let me share from Buzz.  Buzz is already integrated into Google+ via the profile, but it is buried there and has almost no functionality.  If Google seriously expects to beat Facebook at the nexus between sharing and searching, it’s going to have to allow its users to curate and present interesting web content more intuitively than simply pasting links into the Google+ share box.  Buzz makes the most immediate sense for this, given its proximity to the stream in the first place.  A good start would be to add options to promote items from the Buzz feed to particular Google+ circles (or the public).

Better sharing: Let me share from Google Reader.  Why make me dig into the heart of my own profile to unearth content THAT I’VE ALREADY SHARED?  Lots and lots of people already use Google Reader, so go with that.  Presently the share option in Reader is unsophisticated, but if clicking it brought up a list of Google+ circles you could share with, you could completely skip the step of sharing, then going to Buzz, then promoting.  Instead, you could simply share from Reader with a couple of clicks and, importantly, no pasting links.  But hey, you could still have them displayed in Buzz, as long as their share permissions remained intact.  I admit this could partially cannibalize Reader and its ability to help people find other people who share their interests, but that problem is best solved by better discovery features (see below).

Best sharing: A Sharing API (along with at least one of the previous two).  This is reportedly in the works.  It has to be.  Every other Google product has some kind of API, and no doubt this one will as well.  It would allow developers to create a Chrome extension, or bookmarklet, or whatever, that simply shares the current page in Google+.  Simple as that.

And one last feature deals with the discovery of interesting web curators, as we like to call ourselves.

Sparks + Circles + Extended Circles + Public + Web.  Yeah, that’s a mouthful.  But it shows the order of devolution that would be preferable.  Unfortunately, the road from Sparks (which is some sort of keyword-based auto-curation method) to this may be pretty long.  However, Google IS in the business of knowing how to link information together, and so here is what I envision: You tell Sparks what topics you are interested in, and it starts in the Buzz feeds of people in your Circles, then moves out to Extended Circles, then the Google+ public, and then the Web to find information around that context.  There is no indication that Sparks works like that now, so I am assuming it in fact doesn’t.  Once Sparks finds stuff you might be interested in, it would tell you where in that set of concentric circles the information lies, either within your own network, the extended network, the Google+ using public, or none of the above.  If you find information you like from someone in one of these networks, you should be able to mold the Sparks preferences to either explicitly follow those people or to teach Sparks what it is you would like to see regarding that topic.  I should note that, separately at least, most of these features already exist across Google products, but they aren’t unified.  Google Social Search already lets you know when searches for a particular set of keywords contains articles determined to be relevant by people in your network, but it happens on the Google search page and nowhere else.  And you can find and follow people in Google Reader based on mutual “likes” of articles in Reader.  Just combine these.

I am certain after I use Google+ even more, I will come up with more possibilities, but in the mean time, I would like to hear other people’s take on what kinds of new features will make Google+ an awesome platform.