G+ Improvement Ideas

Oh NOES, I am out of space, so I have posted only part of my entire entry here, there’s lots MOAR, read it at

THESE ARE MY FIRST THOUGHT IDEAS WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE REST OF THE ENTRIES
1st Edit
This is the first of my 1 million ideas i will give for Google+, and the idea is "give me an option, a check box, to prevent people from adding me to their circles". I don't want to know if XYZ random has added me to their circle, fine then i can stop receiving notifications, but XYZ can still add me to their circles, i don't want to be seen in XYZ random person's profile under their circles list. People have just come out of the Facebook era and when they receive a message saying "XYZ has added you to their circles, add them to your circles or block them" it equates to "You are now friends with XYZ". XYZ who? WTF! I know and most people know, that if someone adds you to their circle it doesn't make one bit of difference to your privacy until you add them to yours, but WHY? Why allow this to happen? Unless Google has deliberately added this annoying functionality to use some psych ploy to tackle the Facebook mentality of adding people as friends, i think we need an option to prevent any random guy/girl from adding us to their circles.

Next idea, so Facebook added the little nifty icons which showed-off people's status symbols below their status updates, right? You know those little blackberry and iPhone icons. Well kill those, only Android icons. Because only Android rules. Ah well gotta be inclusive, so then G+ needs its own style - instead of the icon of the device manufacturer/OS G+ can collect info about the device itself and show a the profile picture of the person inset in the screen of the device - so if i sent a message to one of my circles using the G+ app on my tablet, it would show as my profile pic, a pic of Samsung Galaxy Tab with my profile pic in the screen, a mouse over the profile pic will give details about the device.

More ideas coming soon.


2nd Edit & 3rd Edit
Instead of showing status updates why not show live people webcams (if people choose to show it) in the news stream. Because isn't that what Social Networks should be aiming to do? Bring people closer face-to-face no matter where they are, instead of converting their thoughts and feelings into words and a particular format. This way by showing live web cams and partly recorded/deferred live (i.e. recorded just a little while ago) video messages in the friend stream, one can get closer to friends and family. This is how it could work - you check your stream, just 10 minutes ago your uncle left a video message on his G+ speaking about the game last night, you want to talk to him, you buzz the video message, he gets the buzz in his stream, if he is still online he joins you immediately, you guys talk, then other contacts in the "Family Circle" can see you two talking and can also join in so it becomes a group video chat. People not in the "Family Circle" do not see these live video conversations happening.

I gave this idea on my Facebook page last year - allow people to call a toll-free number and either put a voice status update or use the speech-to-text function and convert the voice message to text and post it on G+.


4th Edit
The suggestions bar on the right side of G+ can be made a lot more intelligent. Currently it shows only people who we might have conversed with on gChat or gMail and who have gPlus accounts. Instead, there should be at least 2 more tabs apart from this "existing contacts" tab - dating and similar. Dating is pretty straight forward, the suggestion list should show people of the opposite gender who have kept their relationship as single, who are nearby, and who share similar hobbies, likes and dislikes. The Similar tab on the other hand would suggest people who are similar to you in terms of thinking and field of work - they could become your business partners, team mates, employers or employees. gPlus would need to use an intelligent algorithm to auto-tag each person with words that are extracted from their posted activities. Mind you, it needs to go beyond the obvious, just because someone +1d something that i also +1d should not qualify them to be shown here. The suggestions shown here should be more "recommended urgent" rather than "suggestions", i.e. the people shown there should be extremely close in thinking and likes and dislikes, work, etc. to make them worthy enough to add to your circles.

The icons next to the Google+ logo on the top navigation bar are not descriptive enough (yet), i'm sure i'm not the only one who needs to hover the mouse above them to see what they stand for. Maybe a year down the line when people are absolutely familiar with G+ and it becomes an even more iconic interface, then they can be used like they are now. But for the moment, it is absolutely necessary that there is identifier text under or on the buttons without the need to hover mouse, it saves many seconds and lots of hassle.

What makes FB very appealing for businesses and fan pages is the huge space it gives for adding long profile pages on the left side. That allows for good branding. So does Twitter with their custom backgrounds. G+ should allow for custom colours and design elements for Fan Pages so that when ABC brand's post shows up in my feed it would have their colours, logo, plus the entire Google Places info (maps, working hours, reviews, contact numbers). Actually i'm not sure if fan/brand pages exist right now on G+, i haven't come across any, but they should, albeit not as brazenly and explicitly commercial as FB, FB is going down the drain because after the millions of likes people have done, all they see in their feeds are Ads, Brands, Ads, Sell, Buy, Discount, New - ADVERTISING, instead of connecting with people which is why they came on FB in the first place. So G+ needs to keep it within limits but still allow it. G+ is already doing great by not allowing cheap ass mafia wars and other bullshit games. Plus they have launched some good games, now how about some proper 3D games - i am talking about BF3, CounterStrike, MW3, or at least their stat display and server info, so friends can see you play online and join you. Google should go beyond just showing its own little flash casual games and encompass all games installed on the comp or on the cloud and connect it with G+.

Did i mention above that even without the big banners and custom colours, we still, definitely need a bigger profile picture. And since G+ is so inspired by the Forum phenom of using +1 rep, how about adding gif or flash animated profile pictures, just like those of the forum phenom.

Currently G+ profile ID's are monstrously long - plus.google.com/252953248223423423, OMG how can anyone remember that! They need to make it simple like FB - facebook.com/userName, they can do it differently by doing it userNAMEplus.google.com, so my id should be kbx911plus.google.com

Drag and drop functionality - in all probability people using G+ also have the Google Toolbar or the Google Search Box on the top right corner of their browser. Whatever link, name, brand, noun, name, place, animal, thing, picture, video they encounter of G+ should have the capability of being drag-dropped into the Search box to do a custom Google Search, i.e. if you just saw a Steve Jobs (May He Rest in Peace, What A Gr8 GREAT Inventor) video, then if you drag drop it to the search box, you get to see additional resources, web pages, info about that video separately, and then below the separator you see the normal Google search results for Steve Jobs

Allow people to customise their G+ interface, i'd like to see a small section showing my gMail inbox.

A MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE: Play Pause Button on the G+ feed: Today surfing G+ or even FB for that matter is like watching a Movie, no one likes to rewind and forward to where they left off. They want RESUME function. Besides i'm sure the average user checks G+ dozens of times, and also there are many interruptions (like the boss) whose entry forces you to quickly close the page and lose track of what you were doing, who you were chatting with, which video you were admiring etc. The PAUSE button on the corner of the page will FREEZE your session, then 10 minutes later or whenever, when you come back, and hit the PLAY button, your session will continue as is, not 1 thing will be changed. This is a much better functionality, because when people check back their feeds after some time they browse for a long time until they can spot a feed that they had already gone over and then they continue reading all the new ones after that, let's remove that hassle for them! Also just the way YouTube has added the auto-refresh feature where new comments are automatically displayed, G+ too needs to have  Auto-refresh of shares and posts and status updates without the need to press "load the latest 23 updates" that one is required to in FB at the moment. Also it would be cool to display a Stock-market Ticket type ticker that shows all the new incoming messages.


THESE ARE MY POST READING-OTHERS'-IDEAS IDEAS, i.e. IMPROVEMENTS, INSPIRATIONS, TRIGGERED IDEAS
Haven't gone over these yet, will go through and hopefully get loads more ideas to suggest