Jul

We're Decidedly Non-Plussed!

General

Firstly and for the un-initiated, Google basically run 2 Gmail services. Plain old gmail that everyone is probably familiar with and Google Apps. Apps allows you to tie a ‘proper’ company domain to a Gmail account and adds other services aimed specifically to business users. Uptake of Google Apps has been impressive and offers a great value, viable alternative to running your own in-house mail servers. Apps is free for up to 10 logins. After this, you can pay £3.50 per month per login or £33 a year. This is still great value compared to running your own servers.

Early in 2008, Google introduced Public Profiles. Without going into detail, a public profile is a bit like your calling card on the internet. If someone searches your name, the may well come across this profile which contains any info that you specifically want to make public. Not a lot seemed to be happening with Public Profiles until September 2010, when Google Buzz was introduced.

Google Buzz was a new product that allowed users to share and discuss stuff they had come across while surfing the ‘net. You had to have a Public Profile and at this point it became apparent that you could only have a Public Profile linked to a Gmail account. Google were effectively ignoring their paying Apps users by barring them from the service.

Google indicated at the time that this was due to potential issues related to internal security policies of companies using Google Apps and that they were actively working on Profile integration for apps accounts. I can understand these potential issues. You wouldn’t necessarily want all of your users having a public profile, but surely there must be some compromise. For instance allowing admins to control what info appears on an Apps Public Profile for their domain(s).

As such, no business user ever used Buzz and from what I can see, it pretty much died a death because of it.

Next up, Google +1, introduced in March 2011. This is Google’s answer to the Facebook ‘Like’ button. Once again, tied to Public Profiles. Once again all Apps using businesses cannot use it.

Now in July 2011, we have what could be the most significant introduction in the form of Google +. With businesses being well aware of the importance of social networking sites from a marketing and customer engagement aspect, this is likely to be the service of most interest. There was also a lot of speculation that the Apps/Public Profile issue would be sorted with the introduction of G+ but this has not been the case.

What on earth are Google thinking? Social networking relies on early adopters to give the service interest and value and yet they are still ignoring the very business communities that are likely to provide such value. It even makes testing the service a pain. I am having to use 2 different browsers, one logged into my Apps account and one into my vanilla Gmail account. I cannot post anything from G+ to an Apps user because this stupid situation renders any links I send them unusable.

Back in March when Google introduced +1, they posted an official blog statement indicating that +1 and Public Profiles) would be coming to Apps users ‘soon’ (see here).
Well guys, that isn’t good enough. We business users need to know WHEN. Not the ‘in a few weeks/few months/soon’ that we are being palmed off with at the moment.

There are enough disgruntled Apps users in the user forum (see here) to show Google that this is a problem that is not going away, and it’s well past the time they did something about it!