Ever feel like when something new comes out that the idea or concept was totally yours first???
False, it probably wasn't. I mean, it's easy to recognize the common needs/wants across many people that encourage those clever geniuses to find solutions to our problems. Enter, Google Plus...I hope.
Back in the summer of (69 - cue Bryan Adams) 2010, when the group of us keen DMAers were trying to change the world, we used (then new) Google Wave extensively. Some of us got the invites, shared it with the rest, and we used it for all our virtual meetings to overcome geography (30mins from a central location does count as geography...next up Google Telepathy?). We used it to host the meeting, chat and share ideas and documents, edit and revise concepts together - pure productivity magic.
PS. The idea for a McMaster welcome week recruitment campaign was developed over wave.
Associate Invite from DMA on Vimeo.
But as Wave began lose it's beta buzz, the Googlites shifted focus back to their core competencies and abaondoning this new tool that we loved.
Before wave and occasionally upto this day, I used Google Alerts - it was an easy listening tool that integrated with the world's best search engine and was of course free. However as twitter took over as a more social way to listen to what's going on in the world, I sort of lost interest.
After 4 or more years of buzz, we've finally been introduced to Google+. While it's sort of Google's answer to Facebook, to me it's sort of an answer to many things - contingent that Google get bored and abandon another google project.
- Huddle and Hangouts provides the most valueable bits of Wave in a smaller more integrated feature within an existing social networking frame. A natural extention to any social network, brilliant (Facebook Skype..what?)
- Sparks is a single stream of all the content your interested in, again hosted in the same social network you'll already be using to creep for updates from friends.One centralized place to download all the information you want.
I'm a huge creep who loves to just be in the know, whether it's marketing/ad, social media, fashion, food, the world - anything! So the opportunity to have it all in one clean, user friendly layout is a dream. Not to mention google is already so entrenched into my life, and the familiarity of that red, green, yellow and blue scheme is comforting.
Hope this isn't another google #fail.
