I’ve been really excited to check out Google+ and here’s a quick set of observations:

3 Things I Like

• Circles – It’s very easy to add people into Circles and you can make a ton of them. So far it seems very intuitive and the fact that an email is set to all the people you add into a Circle makes this very viral.
• Notification Toolbar – I love the fact that I can easily access Google+ and other Google properties while doing a Google Search or checking my gmail. The notifications section in the upper right hand corner is a constant reminder that something might be going on in Google+.
• UI – The experience is very clean and the feeling is very familiar (since it feels like a very close facsimile of Facebook). Things seem to be where they should be and that’s always a plus (no pun intended).

3 Things I Don’t Like

• Lack of Refinement – Yes, I know this is a beta but I guess I expect more out of Google products. Certain features seem to stall or lag when they shouldn’t. For example, typing in the stream update box just seems to be a tad behind the speed of typing. I’ve seen notifications that a comment had been made on a post without the post updating with the comment first.
• Lack of Engagement – While it seems like people are signing up in droves, the amount of engagement is definitely lacking. It seems like most people are taking a wait and see approach and this is causing my stream to be quite boring.
• The Stream – There seems to be a bit too much going on for each individual post. The number of +1s, the number of shares, and the number of comments all seem to take up more space then they need to for each post. A big part is due to the listing of names of people who did share or comment. I also don’t like the fact that you need to click ‘More’ to view more of the stream. I like Facebook’s functionality of automatically loading more posts as your scroll down.

3 Things I Question

• Do we really need to be on both Google+ and Facebook? Proponents of Google+ say that it serves a different purpose than Facebook and there’s room for both but I’m a skeptic. So far, when I check Google+ I also check Facebook right after.
• How will businesses use Google+? As of now there’s no brand/fan pages nor is a business product out yet. It’ll be interesting to see how they’ll differ from Facebook. I can see people adding brands under a Following circle where they can “subscribe” to updates.
• How Sparks develops for users? It’s a quiet subtle way for Google to push more content onto users. It’s less search and more discovery. Very Stumbleuponish.

Usually movies that are rated well and have had good word of mouth disappoint since expectations are elevated. The Social Network was one of these well received and anticipated movies that I finally got around to seeing last week.  I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised that The Social Network was a compelling and engaging film. A few things stuck out after watching the movie to me:

• It’s amazing that Facebook only started in 2004. I remember when I first got invited to sign up from a old college friend and there was very little activity since it was still a closed network to only those with college e-mail addresses. In 6 short years, Facebook has transformed life and society as we know it. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t check my Facebook account to see what’s going on.
• I loved it when the movie used technical terms that I actually understood, showed images of the Facebook reaching member milestones, and evangelized the idea of dreaming big. It reminded me a lot of the days when I worked at a start-up in Silicon Valley.
• Who knew there was so much behind the scenes tension and lawsuits revolving the founding of Facebook? Facebook’s PR team has done a great job (prior to the movie) of sweeping the issues under the proverbial rug.
• I didn’t think that Justin Timberlake looked like the founder of Napster. The reason being that I thought there was only one founder, confusing Sean Parker with Shawn Fanning.
• The parties that I went to at Cornell were nothing like the parties shown in the movie.
• David Fincher is a really good director. Here’s someone who can bring us movies from Se7en to The Game to Fight Club to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That’s some range!

All in all, the movie was fantastic and highly recommendated. It definitely lived up the hype and I give it two thumbs up!

The new Gap Logo is starting to look like a pretty good case study for what companies need to prepare for in this fast-paced, info-centric society. Gap seems to have made a pretty big goof by messing with an iconic logo, especially when no one knew that the change was going to take place.

A quick synopsis of the issue is…

1. Gap changed their logo on Monday.
2. Pretty much everyone hated it.
3. Gap quickly used social media channels to help reach out to its customer base.
4. Gap partially backpedaled from the logo change admitting that they love their new logo but would “like to see other ideas”.
5. Gap will try to use crowdsourcing to harness customer engagement and user-generated logo ideas.

Will it work? I think so. They seem to have addressed the issue and are engaging its audience from the ground up. By the looks of the wall post they made on Facebook about the logo, their customers have awoken and will definitely be participants on the issue. They got over 600 comments while most of their previous wall posts had under 100 comments, with most being around 50.

How Gap handles the crowd sourcing project will ultimately determine how this future case study ends. If they receive a lot of entries but stick to their new design, the outcome could be disastrous. Gap wants to reconnect and become more relevant to its customers. Here’s their chance. What do you think will happen?

I’ve been messing around with Google Realtime today and it’s definitely pretty interesting. It’s basically a constantly updated list of news updates from sources like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. In the screenshot above, I’m checking out the activity for my brother’s company, 3Par, which is right now in the middle of a bidding war between HP and Dell. I definitely like the timeline above the results as it shows the concentration of when there’s the most amount of chatter and buzz.I think each spike in the timeline is when a new offer to buy the company was made.

As Google starts to refine its listing and figure out what users want to see, you can bet that this feature is going to be more prominently featured within the main search engine. Three things come to mind to what would make this page more interesting:

1. Updates/tweets/feeds that have been shared or retweeted the most.

2. A listing of the top links that were being shared. Apparently that’s exactly what the top links are in the right hand nav. Cool!

3. Being able to filter the graph by Tweets, Facebook Posts, etc.

Although I’d been a part of Foursquare for sometime now, I really hadn’t been too active. The reason? My circle of friends in Los Angeles are not members of the Foursquare community and the app being so social in nature had less appeal.

Everything changed this past week when I was up in the SF Bay Area for work. I decided to really use Foursquare and chronicle my trip with digital footprints. As an added bonus, My friends within Silicon Valley were power users of app which made it even more interactive. I was constantly getting pushed alerts of their activities and conversely they were receiving mine.

After using Foursquare heavily for a week, I can definitely see the appeal of geolocation apps. It lets you know what your friends are doing without asking them or checking a social media network for a status update. It was actually fun to get badges (I’ve upped my count to 7 in a weeks time) and discuss with your friends the tricks to get certain ones. It was also addicting. Every place i went the iPhone came out to check-in.

As a marketer I truly see this as the future. With Facebook’s timely release of their new Places feature, they seem to think so as well. By just using Foursquare for a week, I had already begun to look out for “special deals” nearby my location and was being influenced by the tips that people left about businesses I was considering patronizing. I also tied my Foursquare updates to both Twitter and Facebook. By letting my social circles know where I was and what I was doing, spurred comments and recommendations for places to eat, see, etc. — a truly social experience.

I’m definitely on the bandwagon for Foursquare and similar geolocation/tagging apps. I’ve continued using it even in LA. I can’t wait to see the adoption rates with Facebook Places now that geotagging is readily accessible for millions of active users to try. I’m expecting it to be high and if everyone likes it as much as I did, the question becomes how as marketers can we capitalize on it?