“Think about it this way. Last quarter, we’ve shipped the +, and now we’re going to ship the Google part”, said Larry Page during the last quarter’s earnings call. And today Vic Gundotra, Senior VP, Social, wrote about Shipping Google in Google Plus. Google, today, have integrated YouTube in Plus. And have also launched two Chrome extensions -- one that lets you +1 any web page (whether or not that web page has a +1 button) and the other that lets you see your G+ notification anywhere on the web.
Well, ship they did. What matters is how well they shipped it. YouTube is a core Google product (and its pretty stupid when they show Orkut on their black bar ahead of YouTube !). Youtube’s integration on G+ was sure coming. The way this integration works now is : there is a youtube slider button at the top in Plus and you hover and it asks you ‘What would you like to play ?’. You say ‘The man who sold the world‘ and out pops a window, which is a cut out version of plus itself meant to play youtube. You have a playlist populated and it starts playing your song. There is +1 and Share on the video being played. When you share, your playlist is also shared, which your friends can start playing from the feed. Cool ? Not totally.
So, what is not cool, you ask. Here it what :
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What is with the pop up ? The very experience is soured. Now how different is managing this popup window vs I go and open a new tab for YouTube. You can navigate the playlist from the slider. Would have worked okay had it been an audio playlist, but its a video playlist we are trying to watch. What Google should have done is perhaps extend the YouTube slider itself to play the video extending till the right end of the Stream. Or maybe something else, something better. But pop-up, no. NO POP-UP !
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The playlist -- The playlist is generated by Google for your string and cannot be changed. When we hit ‘share’ on the video, the playlist also gets shared with our circle. While this works okay if your string was an Artist, it is weird when one enters something like ‘The man who sold the World’ and comes 10 different versions of the same song as the playlist. What purpose is sharing this playlist ? The playlist should have been customizable all along. Initial set of choices should have come and users should have clicked one or more of them to form their playlist -- the way it normally works.
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Does enqueuing work ? When one of the songs was playing and I hit another song in the search bar that reads ‘What would you like to play next ?’, my first song just stopped and it started playing the newly entered one. I should point here : I was working on a slow internet and the first song was buffering when I hit the new song. But whatever. Either way that is not how I expected it to play !
- And again I say -- pop-up ? Seriously ?
Okay, the rant ends ! Whatever follows is all positive. Google also launched two Chrome extensions, that integrates Plus with the larger web. You maybe anywhere on the web but are one click away from +1 and Plus itself. This will obviously result in a lot more +1s and sharing, from at least the Chrome users. This again was seen coming. Someone said -- Google Plus can’t fail. And the reason was -- for Plus to fail, Google itself must fail ! And that is what Page and Vic meant, when they said : ‘We have shipped the Plus, now we will be shipping the Google part’.
This totally interwoven Google framework can in fact work wonderfully well for Google users (and others too). But that will to a large part depend on the User Experience -- how do I feel in this integrated system. I am no design guru but I feel this system will work best when the user doesnot have to leave the Google tab at all to use other Google services. I imagine a day when I will be able to use all of Google’s services from a single tab of the browser. And no pop-ups, please ! The black bar will be there, I assume. I could launch GMail, Youtube, Plus, Reader, Search on the same tab, one at a time, with a flawless navigation between my opened services. That would be totally cool. This unification of all products Google, has already started. And if my visualization really has any merits in terms of UX design, Google could very well be en route implementing it !
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