Pop quiz: Should your busi­ness be doing some­thing about Google+?
– Yes
– No

The cor­rect answer is yes and no. Google has not rolled out Google+ for busi­ness yet, and in fact they haven’t rolled it out to every reg­is­tered Google user, either. Google has invited sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple to try it out, but we don’t know yet if Google+ will catch on in a big way. When they roll it out to every­one else, a +You but­ton will appear on the upper left tool­bar.



In the mean­time while you wait for Google to open the taps on Google+, read on to get a basic under­stand­ing of Google+.

Are you ready for some new ter­mi­nol­ogy? This won’t hurt…much.
“Cir­cles”. That’s Google+ talk for groups of peo­ple that you can orga­nize by theme, like Work, Sports Team, Friends, Hobby Group, etc.. To add friends to a “cir­cle”, you can just drag and drop your con­tacts into a cir­cle. If your con­tacts are not in Google, you can import them, although I haven’t tried that.

“Sparks”. No, this is not used to build a group list of all your friends who are poten­tial arson­ists. It’s more like Google Reader. You spec­ify your inter­ests and Sparks will cre­ate a page for each topic and pop­u­late them with links to related arti­cles, videos, and pho­tos. This might be handy if you have to keep up on a cer­tain topic, or can’t get enough of crazy ani­mal trick videos and don’t want to have go look­ing for them. Sparks may be one more rea­son why SEO will mat­ter to busi­ness web­sites, but it’s too soon to know if Sparks will be a pop­u­lar feature.

“Hang­outs”. Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in long time, at least not as a noun. For me it con­jures up images of hip­pies sit­ting around tables made from drift­wood, but maybe that’s my west coast upbring­ing. In Google+, a hang­out is a vir­tual room for video chats. Sounds like it might be fun once in a while if every­one has a good inter­net con­nec­tion. Will it work as a solu­tion for cheap busi­ness meet­ings across mul­ti­ple locations? “

Hud­dles”. Remem­ber “Cir­cles”? Well, “hud­dles” is group mes­sag­ing within a “cir­cle”. Select a cir­cle, and every­one in that cir­cle can use hud­dle to par­tic­i­pate in mes­sag­ing. Sounds like Skype to me.

Blog­gers have been busy writ­ing about Google+, and opin­ion is, as you might expect, divided. It’s either the great­est thing since sliced bread, or redun­dant because many of us already use Skype, Face­book and Twit­ter. Will Google+ be suc­cess­ful at get­ting us to change our habits? Given the lack of suc­cess Google has had with Buzz and Wave, I’m not opti­mistic about Google+. If there was noth­ing else like it, no way to do these things now, I would say Google+ could be a game changer, odd nam­ing con­ven­tions aside. But as it is, I am way more excited about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of Google Gog­gles. I would espe­cially like to see a “nature” edi­tion of Gog­gles, where I could take a pic­ture of a leaf or bird and have Gog­gles iden­tify it for me. That’s a ser­vice I would pay for, wouldn’t you?


Biography / Resume : Karl joined Mediative’s service delivery team in 2008. A year later, he moved to the company’s research department where he conducted online surveys, eye-tracking studies, one-on-one interviews and usability testing. Most recently, he transitioned to the marketing department. Before Mediative, Karl worked in sales and marketing. In 1997, he caught the digital bug and became the original “webmaster” for Roland Canada Music. Around the same time, he began teaching the relatively new topic of Internet marketing to college and university students. Karl’s insatiable curiosity and drive to get to the core and substance of every situation has served him well in his various roles at Mediative.