Google+

There has been alot of hype on Twitter recently about the new Google+ so I thought I would check it out. At the moment Google+ isn’t fully accessible to the public, you have to be invited to join it. Google clearly thought this would add an appealing element of exclusivity to the site and it allows Google to let the more technology savvy trial the product and highlight any problems before the site goes live to the world.

If you have friends on Google+ you can get invited and join at plus.google.com.

Google+ is a social network site that allows you to connect with your friends and colleagues in the exact same way as you can on other social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. You can arrange your contacts into different groups called circles, you can upload photos, post comments onto your stream and do pretty much everything else that you can expect to do on one of these sites. Here’s what it looks like:

But how does Google+ compare to the already well established sites. Well in my opinion it is exactly the same. The home screen looks clear and has a similar layout to Facebook, the only slight difference I can see is the use of circles. On Google + you arrange your contacts into groups called circles which for example could be friends, family, work etc. Using circles enables you to contact one specific group, you can post photos from a night out to your friend circle and your work colleagues wouldn’t see them. This is an intelligent feature but I pretty sure you can do something similar on Facebook already. The idea of circles is a good one but I am reluctant to like it. I currently split my online social networking. I use Facebook to contact friends and family and I use Twitter to network and talk about business things. By doing this I am not tempted to post something inappropriate to the wrong people. My friends don’t really need to be updated about all the business things I do and the same for twitter, they don’t need to know what I am doing with my friends. By having all contacts on one site, it creates a unified point of contact, but I imagine it would be all too easy to click the wrong circle and post a funny comment to your work friends that you never intended them to see. I have also spent alot of time setting up my Facebook and Twitter accounts, so would be reluctant to spend more time setting up and establishing another site which at the moment is not generating much activity.

Another feature that Google is promoting is Huddle. Huddle is basically instant messaging. Again can be found on other social networking sites. Google+ is simple to use and provides another platform for communication which is great however how much Google+ will catch on is unknown. Facebook currently has over 750 million users all across the globe, can Google+ really take that on?

I have been using Google+ for just over two weeks now and I have to say I have hardly used it. All of the people in my circles are uni friends (expect one family member), who are all in the same industry as me, so are clearly just checking out the hype. I have all of them on my Facebook and generally communicate with them there. Not many of them use the stream so there is no great activity at the moment. This is clearly a drawback from the site not being public yet. As the site is not fully live, not all of my friends are logged on, therefore the traffic and potential of this site is limited. Maybe when Google decide to launch Google+ fully, it will hopefully be better. But at this point I will stick to Facebook for my friends and Twitter for my networking.

What are your experiences of Google+? 

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• Would Google plus help your blog? (blogavenues.blogspot.com)
• Google plus or minus? (therunninglibrarian.co.uk)