I’ve been using Google Plus for the last few days. For people who aren’t aware, Google Plus is Google’s attempt to unseat Facebook with their own social networking system. It’s still in Beta testing, but it’s not too hard to get an invitation nowadays. You should have at least one friend who’s sitting on a couple of invites.
So far my experiences with Google Plus have been positive. For a beta, it’s very polished and I haven’t bumped into any bugs. It is missing one or two feautures that I’d like to see in the finished product. I would like to be able to condense the people who have multiple email addresses into one contact. Right now, I have circles with one person being represented by three separate emails. But I love the Circles and I love just dragging and dropping people to different places.
I haven’t played with the Spark feature much (plug in a keyword and Google will find you a wide variety of videos and articles about that item to peruse) and I probably won’t use it that much.
I also really dig the transparency behind the privacy options on Google Plus. While I’m still not 100% how private my data is on Facebook, I know exactly how private each aspect of my Google Plus profile is. And that kind of reassurance is great to have.
The one thing I like the most, though, is how simplified it is. It doesn’t have all of the bullshit that currently clutters up Facebook. There are no farms or vampire wars or mobsters. There aren’t hugs and pokes and wall graffitis. It’s very spare and I hope to God it stays that way. Facebook is so overburdened with third party apps that it looks like a three-year-old vomited partially digested skittles all over my news feed.
The main problem I forsee is that not all of my friends will migrate to Plus and I don’t blame them. I spent years and years building up my network on Facebook and, honestly, Google Plus hasn’t offered enough for me to ditch all of that quite yet. At the very least, I’ll keep a foot in both worlds when Plus does go live.
Dylan Charles
dylancharles.net 