Well then! I finally got in to Google+ at the weekend and have been spreading the love with some of my nearest and dearest tech heads and no tech heads to get a bit of a perspective on it. Jump past the break for more…
Firstly, lets talk about the ‘Social’ side of this new social network. By this I mean Google+, thus far, has done one thing that has really surprised me. It’s brought people out of the wood work. Friends who’s activity on Facebook as been some what sparse and their Twitter accounts that have posts in the single digits, seem to be flocking to Google+.
As a note, some of my friends on there are suing the short hand ‘G+’ for the name, thus i will start using it here – its efficient, you don’t have to let go of the shift button!
These friends have seemed quite engaged with the service, asking about porting friends and image over from Facebook. This is a new scenario. Remember when you started to let your MySpace profile rot in the corner of your favorite list as you fed that other little Blue and White web page with your inane life casting, opinion shouting and picture tagging? You never wanted to or needed to port things across from MySpace to Facebook. But now, most people have so much of their digital life on that monolithic site, that you want to take it with you. For photos for example, http://move2picasa.com/ did a good job for a short while, but has now had to turn its self in to a Chrome Extension. But whats really represented beyond photos, is the opportunity. The opportunity for a clean start with people organised properly, as you want them, in your own defined Circles.
But all of that is the existential side of G+, lets look at the technical and importantly the design side shall we? That will be in Part 3 of this Google+ review.