The editing experience of Google Plus is fantastic. They have achieved a degree of ease and granularity that WCM systems have been struggling and failing to achieve for years.
First, at its core, Google+ is WCM – web content management. It is the place for you to build your personal brand and promote content and interaction (aka “engagement”) with the public and those in your circles.
Keeping your profile and other pages up to date and highlighting the best happenings, photos and events must be frictionless. Our job isn’t to maintain our Google+ page, our Google+ page’s job is to showcase us in the best light. So editing you pages should be, and is, quick and easy. There are no popups, there is no confusing “edit mode” that shifts the entire look and feel of your page layout. You simply click on what you wish to edit and start typing. Click done and that’s it.
This approach to maintaining your online presence is far and away the best one I’ve experienced. Google+ does not over complicate the experience with widgets, plugins or other “effects” that clutter most other WCM systems. They have correctly identified their place in the flow of information from the user (me) to the world (folks in my circles). They do not try to make me into a web admin or programmer. They figure, if I want deep programming capabilities and effects I’ll be using a different system.
And it is precisely this targeted approach that is both driving adoption of apps like Instagram and sites like Pinterest while driving people away from all-in-one platforms like those provided by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText and EMC. The level of effort to create and display (and “like”, “re-use” and comment on) images in a Pinterest style board in an enterprise portal is huge compared to the level of effort it takes to set up a Pinterest account and start sharing images (that link back to primary web properties).
So WCM systems can stand to learn a thing or two from Google+ 1) keep it simple for users 2) don’t over reach. Other, better suited, systems will take up the feature gap.
BloomThink 