The Google+ Gamble
This is the story of how I got punched in the face by the internet.
It’s the summer of 2011, a few months after one of my darkest periods. I’m working day and night on freelance projects and need to find something to keep me sane.
Meanwhile, Google+ comes out of the doors exploding & growing virally (mainly due to it being imposed on all Google users & the large supply of disgruntled Facebook users). Either way, growth is growth. Unfortunately, as more people join, the confusion about how Google+ actually works reaches an all-time high. So I have an idea. I figure that if I can find a way to get a decent sized audience early, it will naturally grow as more people start using Google+. And so I begin working on what I call “The Google+ Start-Up Guide”, a slideshow to explain Google+ to the newbies. I’m thinking if people like my slideshow, maybe I could get a couple hundred to follow me.
So in the little free time I have, I get to work.
In the first 4 days, I outline the content of the slideshow in a text-editor. This turned out to be the hardest part. It’s takes heavy concentration and deep thinking to deconstruct a product or concept into its essential elements and then reconstruct it in a way that’s digestible to a wide range of audiences. Being home, the occasional raids from the nieces and nephews didn’t help.
In the last 5 days, I fire up my favorite slideshow program — Photoshop of course — and dive into the visuals.
With the deep thinking out of the way, it feels more like playing in a sandbox — except my sand was pixels, way better. Of course, the process of design always reveals fractures in your original thinking.
It’s now the morning of Saturday July 23, 2011. I type up a short message to introduce the slideshow, hit “Share”, and wait.
Ten minutes pass, nothing. Thirty minutes pass, yes! I got one. One hour later, I have a few more shares, awesome. After twenty shares things start slowing down. Just my luck. Two more hours go by with no more than a handful of shares. Then suddenly out of the blue… Pete Cashmore’s account (Mashable) shares my post.
All hell breaks loose. For the next 24 hours I don’t sleep. The share count keeps climbing, people keep commenting, and I’m keeping my head above water. At the end of the 24 hours, my presentation had been shared over one thousand times (over 8 thousand now) and I had gained over two thousand followers (over 10 thousand now). For a while, the share count seemed to be stuck at one thousand because I had surpassed the maximum number of shares Google+ could display at the time.
And then something interesting starts happening, people start remixing it. James Lawson Smith even animates it with an awesome accent (with permission of course):
I was also started getting a lot of requests from people all over the world to translate the slideshow into their native tongue. So over the next few days I set up a system to help people edit the Photoshop document and upload different versions. In no time, I find myself managing a global team of multi-lingual designers to translate the slideshow into 32 languages, some of which I didn’t know existed. Ok… many of which I didn’t know existed.
Needless to say, this was exhilarating. I got to experience first hand the kind of power the internet has and the kind punch it can deliver. Despite what you’ve heard, the world is full of wonderful, helpful people from all walks of life.
PS: One of the interesting people who ended up following me was Tom Anderson aka “Myspace Tom.” Tom if you are reading this please take a breaking from exploring the world and come to SF so we can hang. OK cool, thanks.
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