My Take on Google+

I’m an early adopter of all things internet (I was on Facebook when you still had to be a college student to register) and—now that I’ve been using Google+ for almost a week—I think that it’s high time I throw my two-cents’ worth into the vast arena of opinions surrounding industry giant Google’s latest big thing on the web.

For my readers who aren’t technology nerds like myself, I should explain that Google+ is simply Google’s answer to social networking. The “+” in the name is indicative of the strategy behind Google+; Google sought to make it an extension—or an addition, if you will—to their myriad existing services (which include Picasa for photos, YouTube for video, Blogger for blogging, and even a Twitter clone called Buzz, among others). Google+ is currently invite-only during a period of limited testing.

my Google+ presence

For the sake of full disclosure, I need to admit that I’m something of a Google devotee:  I’ve used Gmail for the past 5+ years, I use Google Apps for multiple web sites that I administrate, and I’d be lost without my Android-powered mobile phone. (I even blogged on Google’s Blogger service before installing WordPress on my own site.)  Now that that’s out of the way, I can start my review with a clear conscience.

Google+ is based around a “Stream”—which is nearly identical to Facebook’s “News Feed”—and this is one of the reasons I really love Google+ so far, and why I see real potential in this service as an alternative to Facebook. There are no individual walls on which to write comments directly to other users to whom you are connected and the Stream centralizes activity and—for my purposes, at least—makes the entire service more conducive to sharing interesting links to blogs, tech articles, and the like. That is primarily how I use Facebook now, so it's nice to have a more simple option other than Twitter (which is far too basic and limited for my purposes).  After explaining it to my mother-in-law, she asked if it was like Twitter, but with more space to write. I think that’s a good analogy that captures the simplicity of Google+.

Another oft-touted Google+ feature is Circles, a quick and easy way of organizing connected users into groups. The developers realized that many of us are linked by social networks to a wide spectrum of people, including personal friends, co-workers, folks from church, followers of our blogs, and many more. Circles offers an intuitive way of grouping people into categories—friends, family, acquaintances, etc.—and sharing any link only with specific groups (and the interface is easy on the eyes, too).

There are also a few other additional features which I haven't explored very thoroughly. Sparks allows you to enter various keywords for topics that you find interesting, and then pull up a list of recent web content that matches these keywords. Hangouts offers group video chat; I don’t see myself ever using this feature.

So far, I’m happy with Google+, but find myself longing for just a few of the features I’ve gotten used to using Facebook. I’ll continue to use the service as it grows, and I’m excited to see what new innovations the future holds. The public launch is July 31st; after that date, we’ll truly see how relevant Google+ really is.