Google+ Review – Can It Beat Facebook? | The Year in Review: Google

 

A good friend of mine who was one of the first people on Google+ shared a photo of his wife with me yesterday. As he shared it through Google+ I was automatically sent an invite so that I could join up and see the photo. This has proved to be a great opportunity to learn a little bit about Google+ before it is released to the general public.

On first glance Google+ is very much like Facebook. Your homepage has your entries on, then you see notifications from friends and acquaintances. Your profile photo is to the left, the search bar above and the menu to change settings all on the top right. It feels familiar to start with.

However, Google+ features something which is very new – Circles. This is likely to be the single feature that will encourage more people to migrate from Facebook to Google. In the news tech reporters are talking about Google+ being more secure and having better privacy settings than Facebook. The main reason for this is that you have much better control over who sees you and your content.

Google+ Circles

Google+ Circles allow you to place other Google+ users and non-users (they receive an invite when you share something with them) into seperate “circles”. This allows you to avoid embarrasing situations such as your parents hearing about what you have been getting up to in the evening, or your boss hearing what you really think of the company that you work for. Here is how it works.

You start with 3 main circles; Friends, Family and Acquaintances. There are also Following and Blocked, which allows you to Follow people without them becoming your friend and also allows you to Block annoying people.

So, whereas with Facebook everyone will see your latest status update or photo, in Google+ you can upload a photo and then select the Friends circle to share with. Everyone else will be unaware of your new photo.

You can of course break this down further, for example you may want one group just for University friends and another for your friends in the football club. Likewise, you could use acquaintances for everyone in your work and business life, or use it exclusively for people you have met online but do not know very well. For example, I had added many people to Acquaintances who I have chatted to on forums and known through blogs etc.

So if I post something specifically about me or my family, I can share with just friends and family. If I post an article about a great new service I have found, such as MyBlogGuest.com, I can share it with Acquaintances only as many of my friends are not interesting in the business of the Internet. You can select people to individually share items with too, which makes it like a private messaging system. This is really what Circles is about. It is simple in theory but can become very powerful.

The other main features are the integration of Picasaweb photos into Google+. Any Picasaweb photos that you upload or comment on from now will appear on your Google+ homepage and be visible in accordance with the rules set in your Picasaweb settings. This is the first of the negative points though. If you chose to follow someone who is very popular then you may find that their photos infest your homepage as each time a new comment is added the photo will jump to the top of the page again. This is where the Mute button comes in very useful – you can chose to stop seeing updates on a post / photo / video etc.

Sparks so far seems to be lacking in any substance. The sites that come up in Sparks are generally not very well chosen. I have nothing else to say about Sparks at the moment other than it is a disappointment.

The other main feature is the Hangout. Here you can chose to arrange a Hangout with up to 10 people and chat in live with video or just audio, and generally use it to hook up. This is another feature which Facebook is severely lacking in and could be something to draw in the younger crowd.

Some Tips for Google+

When you first sign up by default you will receive email notifications for everything that you are involved in. You may want turn off these emails as your inbox will quickly get flooded. I chose to only receive notifications for when someone shared something with me for the first time. This seems to work well.

At the moment it is very clear that the Googlers are still doing a lot of testing, which is why not many people have been invited so far. Down the bottom right there is a “send feedback” button which will allow you to send a screenshot of any problems you are seeing.

The main difference between Google+ and Facebook at the moment, other than the lack of people, is that there are no diversions. No games, no extra add ons. It is refreshing in a way, but Facebook’s strength is that people login in the evening and stay glued to it all night as even when their friends are busy there are games to play or groups and pages to discuss things in. Google+ is a little quiet at the moment, and no groups either – apart from your own.

So how has this experiment gone?

Actually Google+ does pretty much what I it want to do as far as a social media hub.  I know that Google+ has been reviewed and reviewed and reviewed by almost everyone it seems over the past 5 months or so.  Will I add any new or earth shattering ideas on different uses or views about it that others have missed? No.  It is just a review of Google Plus based on my experiences with it and why I decided to make it my primary social media hub.

Things that I would like to see

• post directly from my Blogger blog. Now I have to manually post and link my blog posts, which is not a big issue, more of an inconvenience really, but would seem to be a feature that Blogger/Google+ would integrate more quickly than they have, especially with so many people using Blogger.
• the suggestions for people for your Circles could be more aligned with Sparks or Circle names. My address book is not always indicative of the type of people that I would want in my Circles or to follow.
• Not allowing psuedonyms is a problem for a lot of people for various reasons, but Google seems to have reversed course on this one a bit and appears to be allowing them in the future.
• Have a link to my Google Voice account in the sidebar, I would find that more helpful than gChat.
• Have more of my friends and family on G+ - nothing Google can do about this one. :-)
• Column views for the feed similar to TweetDeck or others. 

I do wish there was a way to make the stream into a column view like I have on TweetDeck forTwitter and could just pull the tab/page over to the side.

Unfortunately, G+ doesn't shrink when you reduce the size of the window, it cuts the page.  If it shrank I could use the G+ stream in a window as a sidebar, continue using the rest of the browser for whatever and still be able to monitor the stream - which is what I do now with Twitter.

                                                                                  

Hopefully, TweetDeck will include G+ into their program like they have with Facebook andLinkedIn, but since it was acquired by Twitter - I wonder if that will happen?  We will see.

Features

• Circles - of course no choice in the matter.  It is more difficult to figure out how to organize and name your Circles than using them. You can just see the streams of those Circles you want or the main stream.
• Sparks - good place to go to find people who write about and share similar interests as you have
• Google Chat - Never Used, haven't used chats in any program or OS since I started using Twitter.
• Profile - I linked it to my blog
• All of my posts or shares are in one place
• +1's - I really like how they keep track of all the stuff you +1, so you can go back to it again if you want
• Picassa - integration is slick
• Hangouts - Used it earlier in the summer - very easy and intuitive.
• Games - I don't usually play them on the web, but they are there if you want/need them
• Just recently G+ started to support #hastags, another way to find subjects/interests.
• One of best one is there are not endless menus of check boxes that you need to find to change settings.
• Data Liberation is easy - I downloaded my entire Picasa/Photo library to .zip files
• The ability to edit entries after posting - you know when you notice how badly you spelled, missed words or other errors that need to be fixed.

Chrome Extensions

Also I have found several Google Chrome extensions that have helped make Google+ more useable.

• +Photo Zoom
• Extended Share for Google Plus
• G+Twitter for Google Plus™ 
• Google +1 Button
• Replies and more for Google+

I even started putting my running log in G+ as an experiment, posting publicly and to my RunLog circle to hold myself accountable. I don't run so much for time anymore and it gives me more of a holistic running log entry, which I am liking so far.

Not a Power User

I am not a Power User, who switched over to Google+.  I am just a 50 something, pretty ordinary guy, who likes many Google products.  I had to look around to get an early invite (thanks Richard) and started playing around with Google+ over the summer, but wasn't too serious about using it.  However, as Facebook began to make all their recent changes, like a lot of people I got really uncomfortable with them - even more than I had been already (which is saying a lot).  As a result of their changes I decided to look a lot more closely at Google+ as a serious alternative to Facebook.

Choice

Although both Google and Facebook both have had their problems with privacy issues in the past, I felt that I had to make a choice about which free service I trust more with my personal data (I don't trust either one completely).  I had to decide whether to use a service that already has most of my personal information anyway (I use a lot of Google's services - Search, Chrome, gDocs, Blogger, gMail, etc.) with the company motto of "do no evil" - Google or continue to use a service that wants to intrude more beyond the confines of their service - to access my personal data and has a bad reputation about how they get it and keep it - Facebook.

Ultimately, I chose Google - Let's hope that I chose correctly.

Impressed

All that being said, since I took the plunge on October 10th, I have have been very impressed with Google+, its ability to do most of what I want from my social media hub and as the API opens up to other developers, I can see the potential for a lot of stuff that real people can use G+ for -- not just power users or techies (which there seem to be a lot of on g+).

Now if I could just get more of my family and friends on Google+.  I guess the attitude is "Build it and they will come" - we will see.

It will be interesting to see what social media looks like next year at this time.