But, it’s a time saver so I don’t mind. It’s just my own personal note of inquiry.
Recently, Google has added a new service to Google+. It’s called Collections. The first descriptor I read about it was that it was “Pinterest-like”. I took a look at it and it was easy enough to access. It just is another service added to Google+.
Then comes the million dollar question. What would I use it for?
Well, what would I use Pinterest for? It turns out that I use Pinterest as just another place to collect my blog posts. It started out as just a demonstration in my presentations about how to use Pinterest. Instead of collecting recipes and clothing ideas, I wanted to show that you could easily collect anything. Depending upon the browser that I’m using at the moment, I either use the Pinterest Pin Button or Shareaholic to post my stuff there. It takes just a couple of seconds and I had another way to collect blog content (and another backup).
So, I decided that I might use Google Collections as a way to collect my own blog posts. I’m not short of ego so I set up a collection for the task.
Now, I already share my post posts to my Google+ friends. It just gets added to my Google+ stream of consciousness. It actually works very nicely – I just paste the URL to the post in a new message and Google reaches out to the blog to get the details and include an image to spruce it up a bit. I changed my morning workflow just a bit. I paste the URL in my main stream and then open my collection and paste it there. That’s it. Nothing else done on my end.
But, a couple of days in, look what happened.
Unknown to me until I thought I’d look at my collection and see how things were going, Google+ somehow made the connection that I was posting URLs to my blog both on my main feed and in the collection. I guess the folks in the “Let’s make things easier at Google” department decided to streamline things for me. It appears that it recognized what I was doing and made the post for me automatically. Me, being somewhat oblivious to things, continued to post the URL in both places.
I did a “Whaaaaa?” and decided to test the theory for a few days.
Sure enough. When I post something in the main stream, Google+ was adding the entry to my collection automatically for me. Now, I might understand it if I was using Blogger for a platform but I use WordPress.
I’m at a loss to explain this and would appreciate any insights that anyone, anywhere have for this. Artificial intelligence? Learning how I work? Did I touch a setting? (I swear that I didn’t purposely.) I really can see the advantage of a Collection taking a big stream of things and breaking it into little digestible pieces. (See my Diigo account for a dog’s breakfast of things)
Right now, it’s just a mystery and I hate it when I can’t explain things.
doug --- off the record 