I've had some time to live with the new Google+ Android app by now. iPhone owners will already be accustomed to the new layout, and new users may never know the difference between the new Google+ app and the old one. For existing users, however, the change can be jarring.
The new app has a lot of bugs even after its first update, and some shortcomings, but it also has something else: tremendous potential. Mobile apps have been area where most social networks are rather weak on execution.
I believe the reason is not because most have been rather slow to adapt, but because the app has been treated as a small shadow of the desktop site, an almost deliberately incomplete experience for the end user.
Social networks aren't alone: most mobile website, or apps meant to replace websites, frankly suck when it comes to design. Where do we find good app design? Molly Wood of CNET has it right when she says that the greatest threat to web companies are, "[P]roducts that are born mobile, that skip the Web entirely, that live in the world the next generation lives in."
I believe the reason is not because most have been rather slow to adapt, but because the app has been treated as a small shadow of the desktop site, an almost deliberately incomplete experience for the end user.
Social networks aren't alone: most mobile website, or apps meant to replace websites, frankly suck when it comes to design. Where do we find good app design? Molly Wood of CNET has it right when she says that the greatest threat to web companies are, "[P]roducts that are born mobile, that skip the Web entirely, that live in the world the next generation lives in."
This is where Google is taking the right tack with their mobile app: they've thrown out nearly every part of the playbook from their desktop site design. Google+'s thriving community of photographers and videographers have proven to be valuable parts of the community. It was for them that Google brought full-bleed images to their desktop site, and for them that Google has turned their mobile app into a heavily visual experience.
Text-o-philes, like myself, who enjoy Google+ for its micro-blogging capabilities and value textual content and interaction, may find the new app a shock to the system. It almost completely de-emphasizes text in favor of full-bleed images. Let's be honest, though, images are where mobile is at.
Most mobile devices are poorly suited for lengthy textual content, and smartphones (for which the app was designed) are poorly suited for lengthy textual interaction. Micro-blogging must take a new form on mobile devices, where content needs to virtually jump off the screen at the user.
Twitter, despite the weakness of their own mobile apps, has survived on mobile because its short textual format lends itself decently to a mobile display, even small ones. What Twitter has lacked has been a set of viable features for images and video. Facebook, for all of its users, also hasn't been very compelling when it comes to images and videos.
YouTube, Google+, and Instagram have each been able to appeal to these communities, YouTube (and to a lesser extent Google+ with Hangouts) as the favorite hub for social video sharing, and Google+ and Instagram for social photo sharing.
Instagram, however, has a weak desktop presence (in that they have no real presence to speak of), while Google+, until its latest update, had a weak mobile presence for photography and other forms of imagery and visual art, as well as video, video-chat, and private messaging.
Google+ can now claim to offer a unique mobile social experience, taking a few pointers from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even Flickr in its heyday. The latter is an interesting comparison, since the failure of Flickr as virtually the first social network worthy of the name was the failure of Yahoo! to place the user experience as the highest priority.
The new Google+ app offers a first rate visual experience for photographers and image creators, as well as video sharing and videochat, while still offering a better experience for textual content than most social network apps once you've become used to it.
It does demand a different approach from power users to maximize their strategies across the two platforms, since each post will now be seen in two very different formats on desktop and mobile. The matter might become further complicated should they release a special version for tablets. These are matters for a future article, however.
The new app isn't an update, as it pretends; it's a whole new app, a "child of mobile". If Google+ is to survive in the mobile era, a large part of their success will depend on offering a better mobile experience than the competition, and until now they haven't even really tried.
Now that they appear to be adopting a new design aesthetic that plays to the strengths of mobile while downplaying its weaknesses, it will be interesting to see how it evolves over time.
On a personal note, the new app can start to become quite addictive once you get past the changes and shortcomings, despite my initial skepticism. I'm sold: vibrant visual imagery is definitely one of the primary keys to a compelling mobile experience.
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