21 Jun Google+ Keeps Playing All Sides

Fortunately for Google, the same rules of art for other forms of design don’t apply in social media design. If they did, Google+ would be getting called the pathetically derivative child of social media marketing, or worse, a thief. Google has always sat and watched what others do and taken the best of it and thrown it into Google+, and called it a “new design”. That’s how G+ started as well. Google patiently waited until knowing exactly what to do before creating G+. And the truth is that their usurpation of everyone else’s best ideas have worked really really well.
The Brilliance of FacePinTwit, or “Mom, Google stole my social media design!”
G+ works. It’s easy to find and attract followers. Google fully takes advantage of their other services, like YouTube, and makes it easy to upload and post a video, plus Google’s new integration of services allows for immediate corrections of the most common picture and video problems. The new features of G+ include:
1. New two to three column design format.
2. Auto enhancement of pictures and video.
3. Auto-tagging of content
4. Flip card presentation with additional tag related posts on the back-side.
While the column design is straight out of Facebook, and no one likes it there either, the flip feature which lets users go levels deep into a tag or series tags give the new design a dimensionality that moves away from search and refine search. Immediate gratification and instantaneous gratification has become nanotaneous (yes, made up word) gratification. What does it mean that something is considered an improvement in social media?  It’s when it eliminates the four steps to go to a search window, type something in, and then type a more refined idea in again. I think I’ll write a letter with pen and paper and put a stamp on it and see how I feel. But I digress.
Using the flip cards on G+ feels good. I don’t know why but it does. The best thing about the flip card feature of G+ is that it acts as a quick search and your post can show up on the backside of another persons related post. Bad news here is that you don’t get to choose tags. The Google brain does that for you. It “figures” out what your social media post is about and then adds tags to it, thus cutting down on spamming opportunities. But, sigh . . . such a thing was coming sooner or later.
For more on the new G+ design check out this article here: http://pegfitzpatrick.com/2013/05/15/google-gets-pretty/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=google-gets-pretty