Google+ needs a priority stream and better mobile apps.

Google+ has been out for a few weeks now and I’ve been in the project for about 3 weeks.

Of course in the beginning everything is all nice and beautiful and I was following just a handful of other geeks who are in the project as well.

But finally after the first week, closer friends came in and started to discover. All very rosy and beautiful of course 🙂

Strangely, my use of Google+ has been going down lately, and this is for a couple of reasons:

• I miss a lot of my friends posts
• The iPhone and Android app sucks

To start with the first one, I miss a lot of my friends posts.

How can you miss them you ask me? They´re just there in the stream or in the circles…It’s so obvious… !!

Yes it is indeed obvious if you have a few people whom you follow. But when you start to follow more then 100, then it´s getting more of problem.

I know I´m not a power user by far but it struck me that you cannot give a preference to your circles. For me it´s obvious to prioritize posts from Family and friends. These should be the more obvious and sticky then for example my Blogger circle. Or that I should be able to exclude a certain circle from my stream, in case of the acquaintances circle for example. These posts I can always read when I click on the circle.

I only have to look at my Gmail inbox where it is integrated quiet nicely actually, with my Priority Inbox and Other inbox.

Furthermore for example Friendfeed had en still has a great group feature where you can choose if you wanted to have the posts of that group posted in your main stream.

For me it´s a bit a pain in the … that I have to click everytime on my Family and Friends group to not miss posts from them. And that is just the most obvious reason to be on a social network for me.

Now we’re getting to the Mobile app.

By the way, number 1 is actually more obvious and needed in the mobile apps and the mobile view.

But to be short, the mobile apps are really not on to par on what you can expect from Google. Ok, first we had the saga of the iPhone app, it took 3 weeks to get it into the App Market, I know that´s not Google´s fault. Then it came that it doesn´t support the iPad and iPod touch, only the iPhone running iOS4. Sorry guys but that´s all you can create?? You have been testing the bloody project already since last year (2010) and this is all you get?

For an iPad I can understand, it´s a different screensize and you had to develop already for so many different screensizes in Android, developing for 2 screensizes on the iOS is a big problem. But then not supporting the iPod touch, what is exactly the same thing as an iPhone? It doesn’t have a celular antenna in, but that’s all the difference there is. Now you are just being stupid.

Furthermore, what can you do with the app?? Both the iPhone app (when it’s working) and the Android app. See the streams, manage your contact and upload some photos. You can’t even see videos from posts in the app.

On top of that, there is something strange with the Google Huddle. For an Android phone, it takes plenty of time to load when you don’t have the app open and you have 2 versions of the app. One is situated next to the Google Plus app and the other one is situated in the main Google+ app and for the iPhone app it’s only integrated within the Google+ app.

This makes no sense to me, maybe someone else can explain me why.