Review

Google+: Getting an Invite and First Impressions

 

See the end of the post if you’re interested in an invite to Google +

Last night Google opened up the invite mechanism, and those who received an invite to beta test Google+ got to send their own invites out to anyone they wanted to, bringing on a flood of new users to test out Google’s new social media experiment.  Thanks to @Laslow on twitter, I was able to procure an invite as well and quickly started forming my page, linking content, establishing circles, and setting sparks.  What follows are my first impressions.  Bear in mind that I am not a Facebook user, so I won’t be drawing comparisons between the two services, but it’s inevitable that someone is going to call me out and say “but Facebook already does that, noob”.  I’m not comparing, I’m just giving first impressions of the service.

Starting to use a new service is always a little daunting.  You’re not really sure what does what, and if you hit the wrong button you might just destroy everything.  Thankfully, Google+ has a pretty simple and intuitive interface and it didn’t take long to figure out the basics.  In about 5 minutes I had my profile up to date, and was linking posts to our blog.

The main screen is comprised of your posts, then links to your profile, photos, videos, pages you’ve +1′d.  You can pretty much just enter whatever you like here and add pics, videos, and links to your post.  When you attach a URL to a post it finds it on the web and displays it very neatly with any picture that’s attached as the feature image for that URL.  I love the simplistic interface and how neatly the posts are displayed.

Your profile screen has all the basics, and several filters for the information that allow you to decide which of your circles, if any, will be allowed to see what information.  Perhaps I only want my “Family” circle to see my phone number, but I want my Twitter information to be public.  The “Where I’ve Lived” map is a pretty cool little feature too, which lets you add places you’ve lived and maps them out for people to see.  You can also link other services such as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and others for better integration with all of your accounts.

The photos screen lets you manage, not only your photos, but also the photos coming in from your circles.  Pretty standard fare here.  I like the way you scroll through it though.

Circles are really one of the biggest parts of Google+, and also the most confusing in how they work.  I’ve not figured out all of it yet, but then I didn’t commit much time to solving the circle mystery yet.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• When you add someone to your circle that means they see content you push to that circle.  You also see their public stream.  Unless they add you to their own circle, you will not see information they don’t want pushed to you.
• If someone else adds me to a circle, they see my public content and I see content pushed to me through their circle, but if I also want them to see content I push to a certain circle, I have to add them to it.
• If I add someone to a circle that I never push content to, then they see only my public content, and I only see theirs.
• The home button takes me to a stream where I see all of the content I’m following, unless I apply the various filters to only see certain circles.

M.G. Siegler of Tech Crunch had a very interesting article about his take on G+ after using it for several hours, which mirrored my own thoughts.  They are, essentially, will the circle thing catch on?  Facebook tried to do groups and that never really got going.  How will circles be any different?  When most of your life is online these days, which photos and videos do you share with family and friends and that you don’t want to make public.  The common one is usually the drunken night out that you don’t want your boss to see.  I can agree with that, but a lot of people will use only 2 groups then: Friends, and public, and then forsake the others.  The concept is great in theory, it will just take time to see if it catches on in practice.

The +1 screen is great for sharing content that you enjoyed, but don’t necessarily want to include in your stream.  Or maybe you want to let people browse your blog posts at their leisure.  The +1 tab is great for that.  +1 for the +1 tab, Google.

The stream is where a lot of the action is.  Here you can see the posts in real-time of all the people in your circles.  You can also filter which circles you want to see at any given time.

The notifications system is really nice.  It’s out of the way, and yet always apparent and drawing you back in.  The little red number in the corner of your browser always makes you wonder what just happened, so you click it and check it out.  Before you know it you’re reading your stream updates and seeing who added you to their “following” circle.

Sparks is a great automatic content provider.  It’s a lot like Pulse, but less organized.  Basically you type in a topic you’re interested in and you can choose to just browse what comes up, like on Google, or add it as an interested and have G+ follow it for you.  You can then +1 the content for others to look at, add it to a post, or what have you.

Two of the biggest features I have not gotten to use yet.  Those are Huddles and Hangouts.  Hangouts are the video chats, but from word on the web it sounds like Google has hit upon a very promising video-conferencing tool that’s free for anyone.  Through my stream Vic Gundotra told everyone that at one point they were hosting a 19 person video chat with no problems at all.  I guess when I know 19 people whose faces I want to see at the same time, I’ll give this a try!  Huddles are the text-version, where you can group chat for planning meetings, events, just passing the time, etc.

So after using Google + for a few hours, I really have to say I enjoy it.  I joined Facebook when it was new and fresh, but just never got into it, and eventually left.  Google + is a little more my style, I think.  Maybe it’s just a geekier version of Facebook, or maybe it’s going to be a communications revolution.  Only time will tell as people adopt it, or not.  Right now it’s fairly solid, but it does have its problems.

The first thing I noticed was that I just couldn’t find a way to change the background of my page.  You get blank white, and that’s all.  Maybe there is a way I haven’t found, or maybe that option just isn’t available yet.  Remember, this is beta, so there’s going to be more coming.  Circles need a little work, or a better explanation.  They can be a little confusing until you get used to what you’re doing.  That confusion is going to put a lot of people off their use, which is going to cause a lot of problems down the road.  M.G. Siegler nailed this in his article.  Right now the user base is small, so everyone is publishing content publicly.  As the user base grows, if that trend continues, it will become just another version of Twitter with a lot more noise.  Google needs to encourage use of Circles and do a better job teaching people how to use them.

If you’re on Google +, here’s a few tips I’ve picked up that may help you out:

• You can rotate through profile pictures by clicking on them.
• In your stream you can use ‘J’ and ‘K’ to navigate up and down.
• When you share a post, you can prevent re-sharing by clicking the arrow in the top-right corner and hitting “disable reshare”.
• The “Incoming” stream is from people who are sharing with you, but who haven’t been added to a circle yet.

Google has turned off the Invite Mechanism for the time being, but if you’d like an invite to Google+, just check this post or follow me on Twitter.  I’ll let you know when/if it comes back up and I’ll be happy to invite any of our readers that want to give the service a try.

Related Stories