Full posts on our streams

If you are a webmaster, +Google lets you create a Google+ page and connect it to your webpage. It also lets you create a Currents edition linked to your feeds. One is useful if you want your followers to get your Google+ posts, the other if you want them to get new content from your webpage. But there is no way for them to get both.

In fact, many webpages use their Google+ page primarily in order to promote new content. See this post from +Cracked.com:

However, these posts are often semi-automatic (there is an actual person writing them but they use the same introduction in all social networks) and not very attractive. And since their comments sections are separate from the web, they often don't have much interaction.

Now, imagine if Cracked could grab their feed RSS and create automated posts from it. Imagine if every new post on cracked.com could get to your stream automatically. Something like this:

Now that's much more eye-grabbing, and more importantly: it didn't take any effort from Cracked's crew because it was pulled from its RSS. The user can add their page to her circles and have all their content delivered to her stream, as if it were an improved Google Reader.

Cracked obviously wants to attract traffic to their website, because ads. But many bloggers just want to get their content to as many people as possible, and this would be the way to do it. For example: yesterday +Yonatan Zunger posted on +Google's and +Blogger's blogs about their new Commenting system. But in order for his followers to get the update he had to create a Google+ post about his blog post about it, which Google and Blogger quickly proceeded to reshare so that their own followers would also notice.

This is not how sharing to Google+ should work. If Yonatan wrote the post and it appeared on Google's blog, both Yonatan's and Google's followers should get the article on their streams automatically. Something like this:

Let's recap: because I follow Yonatan on Google+ and he told Google that he wrote that blog post, I get it in full in my stream as if (again) Google+ were some kind of vitaminated Google Reader, or some kind of web-based Google Currents, if you will.

If I don't follow Yonatan, but I follow Google, I will get it all the same because it was published in Google's blog.

And thanks to the new Google+ Comments it doesn't matter if I comment the post from Yonatan's profile, from Google's page or from the blog. The conversation is always the same, so I can comment right from my stream...

...and see my reply appear on the blog.

But what about all the SPAM?

Some pages do post a lot of content, and could potentially flood your stream. But Google Currents and Google+ Communities give us the answers.

If you have ever created a Currents edition, you know that it lets you grab contents from several different feeds. Each of them because a section, and users can then subscribe to the sections they like and unsubscribe from the ones they don't. Shame that Currents doesn't have a web version, isn't it?

Well, why not use Google+ as a web version of Currents? In this mockup we can see that +Google Plus Daily has set up four different sections; the visitor has checked two of them but unchecked the other two, meaning that she will only get blog posts from the topics that interest her.

Would you like to see something like this? Do you have a different idea? Please leave your comments!