Remember all those blog posts asking if Facebook would be ready for business? I’m not sure that was ever answered but it did give rise to business-oriented Facebook competitors including Salesforce.Com’s Chatter and Yammer.
Now I’m guessing that Google’s new Google+ offering will become a business question. With one day of experience under my belt I guess I am as much an expert as anyone else right now. Here’s my quick take.
1. The most obvious is that this is a Google product and interaction will take place outside the confines of corporate IT. The issues of compliance, privacy and security in corporate environments don’t go away here. Google+ is a lot more sensible in its approach of setting up groups at the start rather than Facebook’s trying to clean up the friend/family/business contacts mashup, but I’d like to see what Google can do to help work with business oriented users here.
2. Google+ and its use of Sparks, Hangouts andhttp://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html Huddles addresses a lot of the issues surrounding the mobile enterprise. Businesses have become dispersed and mobile applications have not caught up with the mobile world. Sparks, hangouts and huddles as a model for the new business apps in terms of making dispersed teams effective makes a lot of sense.
3. Google+ is mobile from the start. That is smart
Bottom Line: Corporate execs and tech execs need to jump into Google+ not so much as they will use it immediately in business but for the direction it sets in developing a new universe of mobile business applications.
