I got invited to try Google+, which has been writ­ten about a lot. Short sum­mary: Face­book should be scared.

The Stream (sim­i­lar to Face­book) is pretty nice UI/UX. Intu­itive icons, clean design. Sparks, the newsy thing (explained by Poyn­ter with a screen­shoot above), not so, though it’s where I think the more inter­est­ing jour­nal­ism poten­tial lies. The Sparks design cur­rently is pretty yucky. Inef­fi­cient use of real estate. Too much white space between posts and to the right (is that for advertisements?).

I only get three posts before the “jump,” whereas the gen­eral use case is some­one who is look­ing to scan really quickly, and wants to see more rather than less, prob­a­bly at least 5–7 posts prob­a­bly). I think they should have an expanded view and a col­lapsed view, where the visual ele­ments can be smaller.

That being said, I think there is a lot of poten­tial there. I’ve often felt there is a sweet spot in the “newsy” space between the furi­ous text-only pace of Twit­ter and the jum­ble that is the Face­book Newsfeed.

With regard to Face­book, the idea of a sep­a­rate “news” (or what­ever) tab has often been floated, where you can get seri­ous stuff sep­a­rate from the per­sonal posts of baby/vacation/cat pic­tures. It’s often dis­con­cert­ing to have it all tossed in together on Face­book. But that kind of prod­uct change now would be her­culean to guide though a bureau­cracy now.

Also, like Groups, a news tab would a retro­fit to Facebook’s evo­lu­tion, so wouldn’t  feel nat­ural. Remem­ber, Face­book started out being about all peo­ple, and not entities/institutions. Thus folks cre­ated all kinds of workarounds to fake their orga­ni­za­tions as peo­ple pro­files, which Face­book would then quash. It was only in the last few years, due to a clear demand, that  Face­book allowed Pages to essen­tially pub­lish a feed rather than being sta­tic pro­files. And it was really only in the last few months where orga­ni­za­tions can adopt the per­sona of the Page like it was a profile.

What could Sparks do? Well, right now it’s search term-driven — which seems like some­thing between Google News Alerts and #hash­tags. But I feel that Sparks could poten­tially set up chan­nels for insti­tu­tion­sid­ual pub­li­ca­tions that we could sub­scribe to, per­haps based on pub­li­ca­tion profiles?

This is a bit like RSS, and a lot of peo­ple are ask­ing about Google Reader inte­gra­tion on Google+. That being said, RSS read­ers seem to have a nat­ural audi­ence cap of around 15%. I don’t use one. Too wonky. Instead, Twit­ter kind of became my RSS.

It’s more intu­itive for me to fol­low or sub­scribe to a pub­li­ca­tion like The New York Times, TechCrunch, and Good­eReader — which are already pre­de­fined (some­times gran­u­lar) inter­ests, than for me to think about ran­dom terms I want to search for, which feels more like Google News alerts). I cre­ated one on “dinosaurs” just because I had recently been out look­ing for fos­sils, and it’s actu­ally a pretty good chan­nel. Appar­ently WTF makes for an amus­ing serendip­i­tous channel.

The his­toric prob­lem for news out­lets like The New York Times and NPR on Face­book is they have to judi­ciously parse out  the num­ber of posts they put up or read­ers’ feeds will be flooded, since those posts algo­rith­mi­cally float to the top given their huge fol­lower counts and com­ment­ing activity.

Media out­lets are not like other con­sumers brands, so the Face­book fan­page for­mat has been some­what awk­ward.
For exam­ple, Ann Tay­lor LOFT (which I am a fan of, I buy like 80% of my clothes there) main prod­uct is cloth­ing. So LOFT sends out two or three posts a day at most, some­times it’s a sale announce­ment. I see it, then I go some­where else in real life or the Web to buy/consume the stuff. But The New York Times and NPR’s prod­uct is infor­ma­tion, or sto­ries, or posts. So those posts essen­tially are their prod­uct.  So the one-size-fits-all approach of Pages has often been hard for media outlets.

Now the prob­lem on Twit­ter for media brands is that the man­power needed to curate and be clever means many pub­li­ca­tions just auto­mate it. Many use auto­mated RSS feeds as their Twit­ter feeds, espe­cially their sub­feeds. This usu­ally con­sist of just the link with the head­line, which is not suit­able for the 140-character commentary-driven for­mat Twit­ter. You can tell just with a scan because the head­line one are cap­i­tal­ized. And I espe­cially use to hate when Slate’s feed had the ellipses “…” in their feeds, because it was like not even good automa­tion. So, not sur­pris­ingly, the­se auto feeds do not do well in click­thru rates (except for maybe The Onion), because Twit­ter users can smell automation.

So, what Google could have in Sparks is the free­dom for the pub­li­ca­tion to post (auto­mat­i­cally or not) as much con­tent as they want (since they users are opt­ing in via sub­scrib­ing), but with a fuller con­tex­tual dis­play (videos, images, para­graphs) than the short-form bursty Twit­ter for­mat. And I can group them: food blogs, tech, MSM, gam­ing, etc.
This approach can also help answer the ques­tions that pub­li­ca­tions have, the “how do I get on Google+” as a media out­let. For exam­ple, do they cre­ate a Google pro­file? Mash­able did.