Like every other early adopter (read: dork) in this planet, I signed up on Google+ as fast as I possibly could, urging a Googler friend of mine to send me an invite back when it was actually a scarce thing. All the initial rave about Google+ was about social, and most of it still is – people think of Google+ primarily as a Facebook competitor.
But we’d be foolish to think that Google would roll out just another Facebook clone with evolutionary improvements such as Hangouts and Huddles. As Vincent Wong, “a first time tech founder” explains in his awesome slideshow, the Goog aims much higher: it wants you to put your entire world there. Your pictures and videos will be in Picasa Web Albums, your documents will be in Google Docs, you’ll check-in and put your places in Google Maps, you’ll blog in Blogger; and you’ll be able to share these at any point, with whomever you want in your Circles. That sounds pretty awesome.
Again, you might think this is a threat to Facebook. Well, think again. The greatest potential for competition for Google here is Apple. Dubbed “iCloud”, the ambitious cloud storage service was announced (start from minute 79) by Steve Jobs himself in WWDC 2011 and is due to be released this fall. This service comes with a simple but powerful premise: “it just works”. Cupertino really went the extra mile on this one, as it always does; and at least from the demos, the simplicity is staggering. You upload your picture to “the cloud” from any device, and it syncs back to all your devices. You purchase music, edit a document or add a contact; same thing. At least in the demo, it really just works. We’ll obviously see the blemishes once the service actually surfaces, but I think it’s safe to say that Jobs and the gang will deliver on their promise eventually, even if it takes one or two more releases.
Since I joined Google+, I thought I might as well put my pictures to share later with friends, so I spent some time during the past weekend in Picasa organizing my albums. The Google product is awesome, it was a really fun experience and there’s a whole array of options available for the simple user as well as the power user. When it comes to the cloud though, it’s nice, but it misses that extra mile. Picasa allows you to sync your albums to Picasa Web Albums (PWA for short), and the new Google+ options allow you to easily share new photos from virtually any device, but it doesn’t work the other way around – the version from PWA is not synced back to all devices. This means, that your golden image is actually in your hard drive. This seemed so strange to me that I asked about it in Picasa help forums, only to realize that the two-way sync is just not a service provided by PWA.
Yes, this is just one small feature. But it does sort of represent the extra mile lacking in Google’s cloud products. When will we have a Google Docs desktop version, that will sync to online when we get WiFi, and sync back to my iPad seamlessly? I paid $2.99 (which is hard for a Jew like me) for “Web Albums for iPad“, when will such a tool, with more powerful caching and uploading features will be in Google’s portfolio?
The Midas touch of Apple has always been due to the “it just works” approach. On this one though, they really nailed it with the observation that “keeping these devices in sync are driving us crazy”, and I believe they’ll get a great foothold on the new battlefield that is the cloud. Google, on the other hand, has one key factor that will always work for them – most of us still work with PCs since we don’t want to pony up the premium that comes with using Steve Job’s shiny but restricted toys. If they manage to go that extra mile, this battlefield is theirs, and the cloud will drive more and more users to Google+. If they don’t, then Apple will certainly fill the void and leverage the cloud to get even more users to the closed Apple world.
Either way, the users are looking for a brand new world where their devices are synced and backed up always, and where they can create and consume content from anywhere they like. Man, I like being in 2010s.
