Time for another just in time review from your’s truly. Today, I am going to look at Google+, the new social networking offering from Google.
Google+ right now is in somewhat of a closed beta, meaning that you need to know someone who is already on the service to get an invitation. Even then, the invite system is only opened occasionally so if you do manage to get someone to invite you, you may be waiting a while before you can actually sign in and play with it.
At first, meh
My first impression of Google+ was one resembling a ‘meh.’ The “killer app” for Google+ was the way you organize friends into circles. Yes, its flashy (literally) but it something that in actuality you use once or twice and then never go back to, at least in my experience. It’s a novel way to create a list, but sometimes just old fashioned checkboxes work equally as well. Once you start to get friends signing up you will be notified, and its a one click affair to put those new friends into lists, which make the whole flashy looking orbity thing a non-factor.
Someone blocked already? Wouldn't you like to know!
The other major contributor to ‘meh’ was the fact no one was on the service. That’s what one gets for being an early adopter! But now that invites are coming more freely, and the population of Google+ is exponentially growing, there are more photos, status updates and chats to be had.
I really like Google+ and I didn’t think I would
The interface seems cleaner to me than Facebook. It seems easier to read. This could be a font thing, a size of font thing or just the fact that right now Google+ isn’t showing ads or any other stuff. Ironically, there are no business pages on Google+ (yet) so I am also free from seeing a bunch of advertising masquerading as “status updates” as well.
I like the clean interface of Google+
Facebook has a ‘live’ news stream as well, but Google’s feels more live (if that is possible). When someone starts a hangout (or stops one, more on that in a bit) the stream gets updated immediately. I believe Facebook ties the reloading of their stream to some type of a click or mouse action, so if i am just being a mouth-breather and staring at my screen passively, I might miss something new if I am on Facebook. This is totally not a deal breaker, just an observation.
Let’s like, hangout?
Google+ has this pretty cool feature called Hangouts. It doesn’t work for me at all at work, which is where it might actually be useful. That doesn’t stop it from being pretty neato, and it does work on my home network so there is always that.
Tea time!
Basically, Hangouts is like an open, video chat room. You can do just audio chat, and you can also do just group text chatting but the innovation here is in the ability to have 10 people hanging out on video chat all talking together at the same time. Google will switch the camera view to whoever is talking, which is really neat. You can also go ahead and open up your Hangout so the public can join, or just certain people.
Another super neat feature is that you can host You Tube rooms where you can watch videos with your friends. Its pretty easy to do, but seems to be one of those features that just isn’t talked about much. Reminds me of (a very little bit) Turntable.fm, which is a killer site for sharing the music playing experience with friends.
I think towards the future when this can be done over mobile connections on your iPhone and get really excited. That would be really, really impressive. Hangouts is kind of what Facetime should have been in my opinion.
There are still some things missing
Google+ has potential, but there are some things that could be improved upon or just added in the first place.
Still not sold on the whole +1 concept of Google+. They didn’t want to come out and totally jack “Likes” from Facebook, so they made the same thing and called it +1. Unfortunately, if you +1 a web site or a post or something off of Google+ you don’t ever really see that reflected in your news stream, which means, your friends don’t become aware of it. They do show up on your own page, buried under a tab.
The photo albums on Google+ need some work. I have a project I’m working on that has me taking pictures of Tejava tea bottles every day for a year. Each day I upload a new photo, but the album itself doesn’t allow me to switch which photo gets placed as the “default photo” for the album itself. It is kind of just an oversight/pain.
Sparks are basically like baked-in web searches on topics you specify which feed into your Google+ experience but are buried and honestly, no different than just going to the web and doing a search. The stories which come from Sparks should come from public postings on Google+ and help to introduce me to people who have similar interests as mine. Right now, it doesn’t.
