Like many people I have been having a good play around with Google + in the last week. As more people come online it is easy to see the potential of this platform, and I am looking forward to it being integrated into Google Apps.
However, I think there are a couple of key things that need to be added to Google + to really make it fly in the Google Apps corporate and education market:
1. Shared circles – in a corporate and education context there needs to be a way of pushing out shared circles across a domain. There is no way that with a staff of over 90 people we want every staff member having to create their own CORE staff circle, and keep it up-to-date with new staff, and removing old ones.
2. A more permanent congregation space than the Hangouts provides - hangouts are great for the one off synchronous gatherings, but there needs to be a place to easily gather for, or review, ongoing asynchronous discussions around a given topic or interest grouping. This could be as simple as a way of showing the activity stream for a shared topic in addition to the personal circle limits that the activity stream currently has.
Additional note – 23/07/11 – looks like Google are taking care of number 2 at least – http://allthingsd.com/20110721/frid-ge-acquired-by-google-to-build-groups-in-google/
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the usefulness of these two additions in your Google Apps context.
