I feel like I’m dealing with a friend who has a crush on me whenever I deal with Google+.

Dear Google,

We are great together. You make me so much more productive and I know that you’re the go-to guy whenever I’m lost, or need an answer about anything. In fact all the times we’ve hungout (hehe, geddit?) I’ve had a ton of fun. It’s almost like you can do no wrong in my eyes, almost everything we do together are really neat and you’re normally so open, so why so clingy with this one thing?  I mean dude, seriously why can’t we have friends along when we see each other socially? You can’t have all my attention all the time.

Please be more chill,

Love, Dee.

~

Confused? Let me explain.

When I make a post on WordPress I can use a simple plug-in called Publicize to share that post to sites that I control. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo! and LinkedIn are currently on it’s share list, and the post goes out as soon as my post goes live on WordPress. All I have to do is set it up once in Settings and it defaults to share to all my specified sites with every post I make on WordPress.

If I want a certain post to show up in Tumblr because it’s a .gif set and I don’t think it would look great on LinkedIn, I can make it so from the sidebar. I can even edit what text shows up with the post, it’s all very easy to do. It’s not just WordPress! When I take a picture with Instagram (don’t judge me) I can share it with Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr right from the app. You know who’s missing from the social media sharing party? Google+.

It’s not especially hard for me to use G+, in fact, whenever I do I find the experience pretty awesome. It’s aesthetically pleasing, has cool social features and is one of the rare services that the mobile app is as good an experience the desktop. It’s just a little bit awkward to constantly go out of your way to use the service.  For all the ‘seamless integration’ into my general Google life, G+ sticks out like a sore thumb in my social media world. It really wants to be a part of it but unwilling to lump itself with the rest.

Well in my opinion it should. A quick websearch (who am I kidding, I Googled it) seems that Google was unwilling to share the G+ write/read api as they want people to use G+ from the service directly. The rationalisation is that they don’t want it to be a constant stream of posts you don’t care about, it should be information that you want to read. I’ll eye roll at that. Long gone are the days where people commit to one social media outlet. It’s rare that people are soley on Facebook or Twitter, or LinkedIn, so I’m not sure what Google are trying to achieve with G+.

So what do I do? I rarely post on G+ because effort, I wonder if there are others like me.