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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Google+ Refresh: Just Like Facebook, It's All About The Apps - Wired News

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Google+ Refresh: Just Like Facebook, It's All About The Apps - Wired News
Apr 11th 2012, 17:37

Barely a year into Google's social initiative, Google+, the company has decided to re-imagine the user interface. But while Google says the focus is on a simpler, less cluttered approach, the refresh speaks volumes about where social as a whole is headed: It's about the widgetization of social.

Overall, the new Google+ look is cleaner and seems to make better use of the real estate. But the most telling revision is the relocation of the widgets —  Photos, Circles, Hangouts, Profile, etc. — from a  static position at the top left corner of the screen to a dynamic "ribbon" flanking the left side of the page. Now you can even re-order and effectively "hide" them in a place called "More," which reveals its contents when you mouse over.

Right now, reorganizing the widgets isn't that big a deal because there aren't many of them. So expanding the place where they live, and giving us more control over their arrangement, is a pretty big clue that Google+ will be adding something else: Apps.

Google didn't say this, exactly. But infer what you will from this statement by Google SVP Vic Gundotra in a blog post on Wednesday:

"A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations," Gundotra says.

Social products (or ones with a social emphasis) like Facebook and Spotify are moving towards becoming app and widget platforms in and of themselves; Facebook at its F8 developer conference last year revealed the 'open graph' to the world for the first time, which allows developers to more fully integrate their applications with the Facebook platform. No more than a few weeks afterwards Spotify became a music platform for third-party app developers.

In a way, this is Google playing a subtle game of one-upsmanship with the world's largest social network it is trying to dent: Facebook, too, has a section devoted to widgets and user apps on the left-hand side of the home screen, where users can organize their apps according to preference. But Facebook's UI is clunky. It isn't readily apparent that it can be reorganized. And unlike Google's app ribbon, it's not drag-and-drop. As Facebook integrates more apps into its platform, I would assume their UI wil improve as well (at least, I hope so).

Google is smart to get the jump on this. The future of social platforms depends in large measure on the ability to wrangle a growing number of services and features than can be referenced on a user's home page. The more you get people to use applications that integrate well with your platform, the more chance you have of increasing user engagement. More user engagement means more ads, the bread and butter of Facebook and presumably Google+ (though Google+ currently does not feature display ads prominently like Facebook, ads that users have +1′ed in Google search results will appear in the +1 section of a user's Google+ profile).

While it's only one part of a many changes — more emphasis on full-bleed photos, the creation of an entire section dedicated to Hangouts (Google's group video chat feature), among others — the it's the most future-focussed, as Gundotra seems to hint at in the blog post. "We've also built the ribbon with the future in mind, giving us an obvious (and clutter-free) space for The Next Big Feature, and The Feature After That," he writes. "So stay tuned."

Photo: The new Google+, as seen through staff writer Christina Bonnington's upgraded profile

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