Google+: a mobile app with sense and soul
Sharing is deeply sensory. From cooking a favorite meal to getting together with friends, it's the smells and the stories and the smiles that make human connections so essential. With Google+ we want to extend these moments online …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after introducing Google+ as 'real-life sharing, rethought for the web' in June 2011, Google is reworking the product for phones: a revamped mobile app ships on iOS first, with an Android update flagged as 'coming soon' by outlets covering the launch. The framing — 'sharing is deeply sensory' — recasts the network around photos and moments rather than features.
The arc matters because this is Google tightening a loop it has been building all along: analytics and popular posts arrived in October 2011, then brand Pages in November gave companies and creators a stake in the network. A stronger mobile client is what makes those surfaces usable where sharing actually happens, and the unusually wide pickup — from AppleInsider and Daring Fireball to Redmond Pie and WebProNews — shows the launch being read as a cross-platform story, not just an Android one. GigaOM's earlier piece arguing Google+ could find a home in the workplace adds a second constituency watching how the product matures.
First-order effects
- iPhone users get a rebuilt Google+ app immediately, while Android users wait on a promised update — an inversion of the usual Google rollout order that puts Apple's platform first for once.
- Brands and creators running Google+ Pages gain a mobile surface for the content they have been posting since November 2011, making the Pages investment usable in the feed rather than on desktop alone.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces a rival competing explicitly on mobile experience quality at a moment when social networking itself is moving onto phones — forcing design pace, not just feature checklists, into the comparison.
- Apple-ecosystem commentators engaging with a Google product (the reason AppleInsider and Daring Fireball covered it) signals that Google+ is being judged as a consumer app in its own right, raising the bar for every subsequent release.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social products stop treating mobile as a port of the web product and treat it as the primary design target — with each network's identity layer (profiles, Pages, +1s) following the user across devices.
- For Google specifically, a credible consumer mobile app strengthens the case GigaOM raised in 2011 about workplace use, since business adoption tends to follow wherever employees already share comfortably.
The trend: Social networks built for the desktop web are re-founding themselves on mobile apps, and Google's iOS-first revamp marks the point where Google+ joins that race in earnest.