Google+ Ripples Gets Analytical with Popular Posts

Take THAT, Twitter Trending Topics!

Google has added a whole swath of new features today, starting with Google+ Ripples. A riff on the trending topics concept, Ripples has fun analytics built right in. Above you see a Ripple diagram of a post I shared from a friend, allowing me to see where the post came from, who else has shared it, the relative size of the audiences it has reached. It’s a lot of fun.

Ripples won’t give you a complete history of a post – it only shows recent shares you’re able to see. While browsing those you can see, you can zoom in and out to get more detail. This is handy for really popular posts that have a lot of activity and a long chain of nodes. It also shows all of the public shares as a thumbnail view down the right hand side.

You can find Ripples for your posts by hitting the menu in the upper right of a post and selecting “View Ripples.”

Very popular posts can get spread far and wide, and Ripples borrows from Google Wave’s play book in allowing you to play back that distribution, which can get almost hypnotic on a large post.

Pictured above is a post started explicitly to test the Ripples feature and as you can see it’s going pretty crazy. At the bottom is a waveform showing sharing activity on the post, and below that are the playback controls.

Found any fun posts to replay? Let us know in the comments, if you can stop watching Ripples long enough!