Today I had my first look into Google+. After waking up here in Sydney on a fresh autumn morning and seeing the Twitter stream alive with this new Google+ release, I felt a tad indifferent in my expectation of what I would experience due to the previous service releases by this search giant. I guess they can only improve, right? or not.

A few questions surfaced, "Has Google cracked the social puzzle? Will this experience make me say WOW? Is this a modular development from Google that will organically grow with our (the users) feedback?" (*yes, that last question happened about 802am Sydney time).

So I took the online excursion and did the tour of Google+. Several thoughts came to mind and they were feelings of indifference, hopefully, someone at Google will see it as feedback. Let me start with some roots then we'll build out to the fruit of this story.

There are several key factors that have made Twitter and Facebook social media success stories and both have taken different routes to get there. Twitter is still a little green in my opinion but has the bones to really blow the socialverse apart.

Facebook and Twitter both have 'grip' or 'stickiness' as the marketing vernacular goes.

Facebook's intial 'grip' was to bring you and your friends/family together in one place to share our stories (via the status update) and reinforce this experience with our personal pictures. They then grew into the stuttering newsfeed which 'they' choose for us to see. Sometimes, we want to see everything that is shared by our network of friends.

Twitter at its core is a real time social communications platform that enabled us to share information and connect with each other based on knowledge. This explicit knowledge was formed when we see a tweet of value in this sea of information. Now this information came from anywhere and everywhere.

Space doesn't matter, only time, who, where and why. This is the world of real time conversation, connections and context. You may not have known who was sharing details about the earthquake in Haiti from Haiti but the economics of information dictated context created extreme value of information via a connection to a finite resource (fellow Tweeters).

Whether you are in marketing, fitness, food, travel, life coaching and/or cars, consistency of topical sharing disintermediated the physical bookshelves to enabling people to become 'trusted sources' of information/knowledge sharing. 

Where Facebook connected us to people we knew, Twitter on the other hand connected us to people we want to know based on the value they bring to our lives.These are 2 separate paradigms of thought at play here and Twitter has the more open approach and sharpest point of the social knife and Facebook (with its momentum) is the blade. 

So where does this leave Google+?

My questions for Google are, "where's the cut?"..."where's your edge"?

Currently, all I see with Google+ is a service that has a long way to go to evolutionise the socialverse. Here are my very very raw thoughts on what Google can do to 'make a ding in the universe' as Steve Jobs once said:

1. create a platform that enables horizonal AND vertical conversations to take place (see Tweetdeck, Hootsuite)
2. the beauty of Twitter 1.0 was anyone and everyone could follow each other and SEE each other's tweets regardless of follow.
3. meet @Loic and buy him out then you'll have Seismic and Ping in your stable to give you reach and amplication across the social networks back into the Google eco-system, crawl this data, identify and analyse which content deserves SERPs juice (SEO is now SMO (social media optimisation)). Google does not want to be the Yellow Pages we use as a door stop.
4. live off the Twitter firehose until you gain momentum
5. allow 3rd party development to enable external developers to bring in their communities into your platform and co-develop the new experience
6. mobile utility is increasing. Enable users of your new service to connect with their friends via voice and video using only their usernames. GChat via Android?
7. integrate Picasa as pic service of choice
8. integrate GChat and Gmail as a backbone service to "Guanxi" (new Google social network name ;) ..just a bit of fun. It will get copied in China so Google might as well own share of mind in Mandarin for 'social networks' and 'trust' ;) ..or "You Qù" which is fun in Mandarin ...*thank you* @rassailor for translation))
9. use labelling as Google's 'Twitter list' function and that function automatically places people into circles. In fact, do that for our entire Gmail address book without us having to do it for ourselves.
10. when people join "Guanxi" or "You Qù", create a function that will automatically migrate our Twitter 'following', 'follower' and 'lists' into 'Circles' and 'Hangouts'
11. automatically migrate our Facebook friends lists AND copy our photos/albums (if possible into Picasa)
12. as for Google 'Sparks', my initial thought is this service is redundant. Why? because it doesn't matter to many people what Google says now. It helps but first and foremost, when it comes to services/products, we 'trust' what our friends say. The 2nd circle of trust could be the dedicated forums where people exchange their personal experiences of products/services and the outer layer are the branded or vested interests. 
13. listen to your audience and co-develop "Guanxi" or "You Qù" with us.
14. actually take the "G" and "Google" out of everything you do. Keep it subtle, take a leaf out of BING and let our new homepages be our pictures or that recently shared by our friends.

These are some intial thoughts on what Google can do but this is just to enter the game. By the time anyone releases a new product these days, it's old. What companies have to do now is take a leaf out of Apple and my friends at Victor Churchills book to redefine the game with beautiful shock and awe. That's just the price of entry now.

What do you think?

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Here's a classic track that summarizes the socialverse that you may like and remember ;)