Before Google’s senior vice president, Vic Gundotra announced the new Google+ Wednesday at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, I sat down with Fred Gilbert who heads up design for Google+, who explained how the company arrived at this new, improved look; I see it as a hybrid of a stream and Pinterest-style cards that doesn’t look awkward and ungainly.

It is a responsive design and with a click you switch how you want to see your content — as a stream or as these tiles, Gilbert pointed out. A lot of the new design actually takes a lot of cues from the current mobile versions of Google+, which are actually more advanced compared to the desktop version. At first blush this looks like a unification of mobile and desktop, but there are changes that are visible only on Google’s Chrome browser.

Fred Gilbert, lead designer for the new Google+

Gilbert, who has worked for Google for over five years, explained that a lot of the new design has been shaped by how the web has changed. He pointed out that we are sharing more things more often and as a result the social web is getting busier. You can say that again!

“What I saw was a chance to make people and the content they share the star,” Gilbert said. “Everything else just fades into the background.”

Flat design for a busy world

The design of the new Google+ is muted and flat. The colors are actually quite neutral, allowing mostly the content to shine brighter. “Flatter design keeps the distraction away,” Gilbert said. This new philosophy is reflected in this new version of Google+, which is marked by simplicity and fewer distractions. For instance, unless you are ready to engage with a piece of content, the links appear as regular text, without the distraction of the blue link. Both the left and right sidebar and menus disappear, sliding in and out as needed.

Google has come up with a unique twist on the #hashtag concept and is using it as a way to surface contextual information on the new Google+ service. The new design also liberally uses the concept of cards (that first showed up on Google Now). Hover over an item, and on the back side of the card you get more information and related links and action items.

Gilbert explained that when Google started working on the new look, the idea was to take a lot of information and show it in as simple a manner, giving the eye the visual cues to understand the importance of content. Bigger photos, for instance are indicative of their importance. Photos become bigger based on analysis of past relationships to the people and the content and their ensuing interactions, Gilbert explained.

Data, Design, Experience

Underlying these visual cues are a lot of data analytics. This data-informed design is actually a clever approach and the wave of the data-informed design. Gilbert said that usually when companies undertake a redesign of their website, it is based on some kind of data they have collected over a period of time. For Google+, data is informing the design, except at a much faster speed and is hyper-personalized based on who you really are. “Data and design have to be used together to tailor experiences,” said Gilbert.

We’ll take a close look at how data is informing design at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco. If you sign up here you can get first access to tickets that will go on sale this Summer.

While Google still is a few years away from developing the human quotient of Apple, the new Google+ shows that the company is thinking correctly about its design identity, not forgetting that its core competency is its infrastructure: its ability to crunch large sets of data cheaply and quickly and then deliver them at blazing speed to our browsers.

The biggest challenge for Google is that Google+ doesn’t really feel like a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Instead it is something that was launched because of a degree of fear and a dash of hubris. It was a social network that Larry wanted, not you and I.

However, it has slowly evolved and has found some fanatical users such as photographer Trey Ratcliff, blogger Robert Scoble and our very own Janko Roettgers, who has turned to Google+ to build a community for his Cord Cutters show and podcasts. Google needs accidental visitors such as me to become active participants. I think the new design will help.

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Here’s what Gundotra said in his post on Google+:

While Google+ is all about creating a better experience across Google, it’s also a destination. And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app).

This may sound a bit like there are now 100 million people posting to and reading posts on Google+, but the reality is somewhat different.

Google began to unify its messaging products at the end of July, replacing the traditional Google Talk video chat experience with Hangouts. The upgrade was rolled out gradually, but by now, most users should by default launch a Hangout whenever they’re starting a video chat from GMail or Google Talk. And, guess what: Hangouts are part of Google+, which means that each video chat automatically takes you to plus.google.com.

It’s unclear how many of those 100 million active monthly users simply visit plus.google.com as part of a video chat as opposed to actually browse through profiles and posts on the site. Gundotra didn’t break out any specifics about the data, and a Google spokesperson wasn’t available for comment on the matter. However, one can assume that the timing of the active user milestone shortly after the Hangouts integration is no coincidence.

Google has gotten plenty of criticism in the past for releasing less than transparent numbers about Google+, and the critics will likely eat this one up as well. However, the issue also shows how difficult it is for Google to compare Google+ to competitors like Facebook.

Google has long positioned Google+ as a social layer that permeates all of its other products. That’s very different from Facebook, and it means that Google needs to spend more time explaining the network and its unique benefits and features. Otherwise, we might one day all be using Google+ — but still think that no one is using it.

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Actor/geek Wil Wheaton started to see the results almost immediately, posting late Wednesday afternoon:

Did G+ roll out some new “invite everyone you follow to an event” thing? My feed is completely overwhelmed with “everyone’s invited to XXXXX event” notices, and I’m having a hard time actually seeing posts from people I’m following. … Is there a way to opt-out of event invites from people I don’t follow or have circled? Is this yet another thing Google rolled out without thinking it through clearly?

A little later, he was getting a better understanding of the new feature but it was too late:

It’s too bad that I’ll never use it, and will kill it with fire, because Google has, yet again, made a product that may be useful and cool, but forced it upon users without giving users any control over how invasive it is.

Wheaton not only has a large following, he’s an active poster and checkers his Google+ feed every half hour or so when he’s online. He likes Google+ and is just as frustrated by what he sees as Google’s failure with it as he was with this feature gone awry:

Instead of talking about how cool this thing is, and how excited we are to use it, a significant number of G+ users — and people like Linus Torvalds, who are way more influential than I am are among them — are talking about how annoyed they are and how much they hate it.

Is that the rollout that Google was hoping for? Has Google learned nothing from doing things like this in the past? I’m starting to believe that this isn’t an accident, or poor planning, but by design; I just can’t figure out why.

Author John Scalzi was irked enough to post around midnight Wednesday:

My newest circle is “People who send me a ‘test’ Google Events Invite, and must therefore be torn apart by ravenous bears.” Try not to be in it. The bears are getting tired.

By Thursday, Wheaton was trying again, providing examples, to back up his contention that only people in your own circles should be allowed to send you Events. Among them: unwanted invitations and messages about the Guild Wars 2 release date. The last straw was someone who set up a fake event with Wheaton’s name in it, prompting him to warn “the system as it’s set up right now is ripe for abuse.”

That finally drew a chagrined response in Wheaton’s comments from Vic Gundotra, the Google SVP of engineering responsible for Google+:

“We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.

We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will.”

The right response, although Gundotra shouldn’t have limited it to “celebrities” and should have been more clear about the fixes and bugs.

An exasperated Robert Scoble was still dealing with the aftereffects late Thursday afternoon when he broadcast on Google+ and Twitter that Google+ Events was “The worst social launch ever. WTF were you thinking Google?” He called out Gundotra directly, adding a new twist:

Not only did it spam the crap out of my notifications and my Google+ events page but it added events — hundreds of them — onto my calendar.

My calendar is MINE. Not yours. You should NEVER put anything on it that I don’t approve of.

Scoble said declining the events didn’t make them disappear, requiring hundreds of entries to be deleted by one by one. It’s not the end of the world but it’s the kind of tech time sink that can frustrate to the point of a primal scream.

Google also is showing an Events opt-in screen on Google Calendar. I was in a rush when I first saw it and decided to adhere to a rule I’ve been trying to follow: don’t opt in if you don’t have time to read the fine print.

Even now, it’s difficult to see from the splash screen or the “learn more” page just how much noise you might be agreeing to if you opt in.

If you look at events through Google+ instead of your Google calendar, you can start to figure it out by choosing settings and scrolling around a lot. There is still no simple or direct way to set parameters specifically for events, as far as I can tell.

Google needs Google+ Events to work for a number of reasons: it encourages interaction between features like Google+, calendar and Gmail; it’s social so should bring more Google+ users together; it encourages photo sharing; and it should bring new users in.

If Google can manage the parachute-bike-rappel routine that wowed the Moscone Center crowd, someone there ought to be able to figure out how to introduce new features without alienating its users.

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“We’re not interested in a mobile or social experience that’s just smaller. We’re embracing the sensor-rich smartphone (with its touchable screen and high-density display), and transforming Google+ into something more intimate, and more expressive.”

Key parts of this new experience include photo and video sharing. Take a look at some of the changes below:

iOS has been a bit of an afterthought for Google+, with new features generally launching on Android first. However, with this update, Google decided to innovate on the iPhone and then take some of those new features to its own mobile platform. Gundotra said on Google+ that a similar update to the Google+ Android app will be rolled out “in the next few weeks,” and he teased that the Android app would include “a few additional surprises.”

Google+ still doesn’t have a native iPad app, and a Google spokesperson told me Wednesday that the company has “nothing to announce at this time for the iPad.”

The update of the iPhone app isn’t just a big step for Google+ on iOS, it also hints at where Google is going with its social network. The company recently rolled out a revamped Web app for Google+, which features a much simpler layout and also includes a better presentation of photos.

That could point to Google viewing photos and other kinds of media sharing as a key part of the Google+ experience, which the company has in the past described as two sides of a coin: One part is Google+ the social layer, which enables users to personalize search and add functionality to Google services like GMail and Google Drive. The second part is Google+, the social network, which is more directly competing with Facebook. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google views media and especially photos as a key asset in this competition.

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“One of the first things you’ll notice is a new way to get around the stream. Instead of static icons at the top, there’s a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left.”

The key term here seems to be “applications.” The sidebar is essentially an app launcher, and users can use it to get quick access to certain actions available through individual apps. Want to share a photo from your phone? Then simply hover the photos app and select the relevant action. Check out Google’s video below for a closer look:

Apps can also be rearranged in one’s personal order of importance, or completely hidden from plain sight. All of this makes it easier to use the Google+ apps that are available today, including Hangouts, games and photos — but there’s really not that much of a point in constantly reorganizing a half dozen apps. Instead, this seems to be built for something much bigger. Again, Gundotra:

“We’ve also built the ribbon with the future in mind, giving us an obvious (and clutter-free) space for The Next Big Feature, and The Feature After That. So stay tuned.”

Google could of course just use the sidebar as a way to integrate more features on its own. Or it could open up Google+ to developers and use it as a launcher for third-party apps.

Google+ has been open to external developers here and there already. Most notably, developers are able to integrate their own apps into Google+ Hangouts. The search giant has also partnered with third-party game makers like Zynga to power its Google+ game platform. The logical next step seems to be to extend these partnerships to other developers and give them the ability to launch apps right from the Google+ launchbar.

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I longed to play baseball and wanted so badly to learn how to hit and pitch. Then I joined Red Herring magazine. Like many San Francisco publications of the past, the magazine employed a lively and colorful cast of characters. We played against other magazines, like Wired, and advertising agencies. Despite my lack of experience, I talked my way onto the Herring softball team.

When it came time to bat, I suddenly realized that I was holding the baseball bat as if I was playing cricket. When the pitch came to me, I took a step forward and drove it to right field, much as I was driving a ball through the covers on a cricket field. No matter what I did, I couldn’t hit the ball hard enough to drive in a run. This went on for a few games. I just didn’t have the baseball swing. Cricket was so ingrained in my thinking and how I related to a bat and ball that it may as well have been encoded in my DNA.

Ain’t Got That Swing

I love baseball and will always await the first day of spring training with the ardor of a lover coming home after an exile. But I will never be a baseball player. It’s just not in my make-up. My misery over my failed baseball career is no different than Google’s. The world’s largest search engine covets a key to the magical kingdom called the social web. It would do anything to become part of that exclusive club that, for now, is the domain of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and to some extent, Twitter.

Google will do just about anything to get social, like spend a rumored $182 million on San Francisco-based Slide, a head-scratcher of a deal. Some rumors say the price was as high as $228 million. Now, I’m happy for Max Levchin and his investors, but frankly, the deal shows that Google not only has no idea what to do about social, but actually lacks the imagination to even think of anything worthwhile on its own. If Google is really trying to go social and get on the social gaming bandwagon, this deal is comparable to buying a Kia and hoping it can help you race past a Mercedes AMG 65 on the Autobahn.

On Quora, a social Q&A services, someone asks, “Why did Slide and RockYou miss/avoid the social gaming trend that Zynga and Playfish capitalized upon?“. The answers are quite telling, but the response from Josh Elman (formerly of Facebook) stands out:

I think that Zynga and Playfish both started with gaming as their sole focus. They weren’t trying to “pick the trend,” they just believed that you could combine casual games with the new distribution models of social networks and create new businesses. Both of them discovered the extraordinary opportunities of monetization after a lot of hard work and failures. I think one of the challenges of Slide and RockYou during those periods was they probably did try harder to “pick the trend” and optimize it rather than just build towards something deeper and more sustainable.

Ironically, what Google is doing is exactly the same — pick a trend and optimize for it.

By the Engineers, for the Engineers

This only amplifies what I felt earlier this morning. Having failed to hire a head of social, Google decided to put its man for all seasons, Vic Gundotra, in charge of social. Having seen Vic at work (first at Microsoft and later at Google), I just wonder if he is the right guy for the gig. He’s a smart and analytical product manager — his work on Google Mobile only shows that — but social needs more than the ability to add games, features and music.

Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.

Google, thanks to two brilliant engineer-founders, has become a great company seemingly able to solve the world’s most complicated engineering problems. That ability made it turn search into the great money machine that it is. It knows how to tweak machines and make them do unfathomable things. But what it can’t do is internalize empathy. It doesn’t know feelings. It doesn’t comprehend that relationships are more than a mere algorithm. You can see this in its many offerings; they’re efficient, but devoid of emotion, and emotions are what drive interaction. A smile begets a smile, a frown a frown and a conversation a conversation. That’s true in the real world, and it’s true on the web.

IBM, Microsoft & Google

Adam Rifkin outlined this in a brilliant post (summarized here), which, unfortunately, is not accessible online. His argument, and I wholeheartedly agree, is that you are who you are and that’s the way it is. Google can’t change, just as I couldn’t change my batting stance. The whole company is built around “goal-oriented behavior,” which essentially means “come to Google, do your search and move onto the next thing.” That’s its fate and also its destiny. If the company doesn’t recognize it, then it’s going to go down the road IBM took in the 1990s and Microsoft is currently walking along, an argument poignantly made by Dave Winer in this lesson in technology history.

The way I see it, Google is facing pressure from two different directions. On one side, the social web is moving toward a future where serendipity replaces search. Facebook is on this side. On the other side, with mobile apps, Apple has helped popularize a new goal-oriented, task-specific paradigm that essentially starts to obviate the need for search. These two behavior changes are clear and present danger to Google, as I pointed out last year in a GigaOM research report (subscription required.)

Buying Slide, investing in Zynga or launching Google Me are great ideas in theory, just as is the idea of me playing baseball!

Gundotra has had an increasingly public profile, with on-stage presences at the company’s recent Android, real-time search, and Google Buzz announcements in the last year, as well as interviewing Conan O’Brien when the comedian visited Google this spring (the video of that chat has nearly 900,000 views).

Google had looked externally for a “Head of Social,” retaining a recruiting firm to see if it could find someone to inject some social web insight into its algorithmic DNA. In the months since, details for a Google competitor to Facebook called “Google Me,” a Google Games product in partnership with Zynga, and a Google music service have emerged, though no such products have launched yet.

We obtained a recruiting letter in May that described the “Head of Social” role as such:

This is a new and very strategic position, as Google knows it is late on this front and is appropriately humble about it. In Google’s view, conceptually, there are two ways to tackle social, each impacting who may be successful in this senior post: 1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

Given the amount of trouble it’s had attacking social, an internal Google employee (Gundotra has been at the company since 2007) could be a risky bet. But plucking someone closely involved with Android is a shrewd move. Given Android’s incredible growth, mobile looks to be be Google’s best front on which to wage a social war (the TechCrunch post has much more imagery on that front, depicting the Google-Facebook war in terms of the epic movie Patton). Gundotra also clearly loves the spotlight, and it will take a certain amount of panache for Google to launch something that really wows its critics and users.

We’ve asked Google for comment and will update if we hear back.

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Google VP engineering Vic Gundotra

Gundotra’s task was to present Android’s new version — 2.2 (aka Froyo) — which is a minor update in the grand scheme of things. But he made masterful use of market sentiment, at a time when the greater technology community is somewhat aghast at Apple’s efforts to cut off Adobe and Flash at the knees. Feature after feature was presented in the context of the competition — Apple’s iPhone and iPad — drawing big laughs and applause from the audience of a few thousand at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

“If you believe in openness, if you believe in choice, if you believe in innovation from everyone, then welcome to Android,” was Gundotra’s rallying cry. He explained that the mobile platform, from the time it was a top-secret product by Andy Rubin, had always been destined for this fight. “If Google does not act we face a draconian future,” Rubin apparently told Gundotra on the latter’s first day on the job.

Where Apple presents Flash as closed and buggy, and offers HTML 5 as an alternative, Google is trying to curry favor by being inclusive of all things web. The new Android will support the latest versions of Adobe’s Flash and Air. Google’s main objective is to advance the web as a platform, on PCs, on mobile and now the TV as well. And by playing nice with Adobe, Google got the beleaguered company to sign on to have Flash support Google’s new open-source video codec WebM, an alternative to Apple’s codec of choice, H.264.

Gundotra posed Google as the benevolent enabler of users and the competitive marketplace:

“It turns out that on the Internet, people use Flash. And part of being open means you are inclusive, rather than exclusive, and you are open to innovation. It’s really fun to work with other folks in the ecosystem to meet the needs of users, much nicer than just saying no.”

Gundotra walked through a new set of mobile ad formats quite similar to Apple’s coming iAd advertising platform and network, which has drawn fire for the tight grip Apple is holding over the creation and deployment of ads. Gundotra pointed out that Google has been in the advertising business for 10 years.

In introducing new Android APIs for communicating and updating the device, Gundotra poked at Apple’s equivalent, alluding that they were “designed for basic lack of functionality like lack of multitasking in the operating system.” Then Gundotra pitched Android’s new tethering and portable hotspot function as a mobile wireless solution for the iPad, receiving a big laugh.

He also demoed JavaScript performance improvements on the new Android, which is a supposed two to three times faster, by using an app to show a speed test vs. the older version of Android and the iPad. Froyo killed the other two, easily lapping the iPad’s performance within a few seconds. “I really wonder if we’ll be able to get that in the App Store,” Gundotra said of the speed test app, jabbing at Apple’s tight grip on the software available on its platform. Then came the punchline: “Oh, it’s a web app; how great is that?”

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