I finally managed to get hold of Google Plus.
And just when I thought I can invite my friends to use it, they shut down the invites!
So Im stuck being lonely in this new social network, which has still not stopped trending worldwide. Most of the reviews seemed very skeptical on whether this site will manage to gain the eyeballs and sustain the user inflow for a long time. After a rather lukewarm response to BUZZ and the largest migration of people (apparently) which happened to Facebook from Orkut, the question remains whether Google has finally found the formula for a FB-killer and a Twitter-assasinator.
Im trying to get a hang of the Google+ Ui for now, and it seems promising. The factor differentiating Google+ from Facebook and Twitter would be the share option customization where you can select exactly the circles to whom you want to show what you post. The “Circles” is more like a grouping your friend list into certain classes like Family, Friends, Acquaintance or just people whom you Follow.
The idea behind this is that people behave differently with different circles of people. You certainly don’t want to discuss what happened at the party you attended last night with your family, and you don’t want to be sharing embarrassing baby pictures with all your friends and you can share pics of you hard at work to your bosses. So this feature helps you to hide stuff from certain people.
Also you can classify people exactly the way you want to. You can name a circle “obnoxious” and put suitable people from your friend list in that without your friends having to know where you’ve placed them.
Also the profile and the look of the website is more pleasing and has a simple-ness to it, which is a typical Google trait, keeping it simple and stupid.
You have to auto connect with picasa to get into G+, which is quite a pain for people who have albums they don’t want to share with any people in their circles.
A “Sparks” button lets you to explore your interests. The +1 button is integrated to your G+ profile, which means people can see what you’ve liked before.
Pretty soon the phrase “Sure ill ‘Hangout’ with you” will have a different meaning, with the new feature of Hangout in G+ which allows you to have discussions with several people at once
But the plus factor is you can “take out” whatever you’ve updated or shared or worked with on G+ by clicking on the “Take out” button at the sign out.
All in all, Google+ looks pretty promising, but they will have to come up with more than just new sharing options and different terms for features which already exist in most of the other social networking sites. But, since its still in its Beta stage and its just been 2 days from its launch Im optimistic.
The exact middle spot between undersharing and oversharing seems to be the factor the people at Google are looking at.
I’m ready to quit Facebook and Google+ seems to have helped my cause at it.
