Google+ Feature Suggestions

Google+ is awesome. But it’s not perfect. This is Google’s first real take at creating their own social network to compete with Facebook and Twitter. Let’s be honest, MySpace isn’t much competition these days.

Over the past week, I’ve been seeing things that Google should do to be a better platform.

• Shorter profile permalinks, ie profiles.google.com/jdingman is just too long, maybe acquire gpl.us or use goo.gl instead
• Endorsements; think..LinkedIn and Namesake meets true social networking. LinkedIn is never going to be a full time social network. It’s great for business, recruiting, job seekers, etc, but for simple social network, it’s never going to be prime time. Think about endorsing your friends for say, the subject of WordPress or SEO or advertising or people management. Then being able to filter and contact friends based on those endorsements. That could be huge.
• Writing on someone else’s “wall” is difficult (if not impossible.) You can “mention” someone in an update, but you can’t just message them directly…without emailing them

Circles should update faster. When I first joined, it took 3-4 days to update…I’ll give them some slack that it was probably just a bug

• Ability to sync up Flickr photos. I don’t use Picasa really, so my photos are really lacking in my profile. On Facebook, I update directly to Facebook and I’ll eventually do that for Google+…however, I have a ton more photos in Flickr and to have the ability to either sync those up or import, would be amazing
• Real-time comments (instead of having to refresh the page) apparently this is only a Safari issue

Overall, Google has done an amazing job on a product they can be proud of. Plenty of room to grow, but they’ve come a really long way in such a short time.