Social Networking is a big thing in the world right now. Can Google+ be the next big thing? Here are my first impressions of it.
Google+, the new attempt by Google to go up against Facebook. I was able to get in it last night, and immediately started poking around, seeing what was what, and how things worked on a basic level.
Basic is the best way to describe the look of Google+. so basic and spartan, which is nice in some respects, but maddening in others. It is easy to see your stream, your circles, etc, in fact the basic layout of where things are located is very similar to Facebook. The learning curve on what is what, is not too bad, although a few hours in I was still trying to find some settings.
The biggest issue I ran into with the main stream page, was the stream itself. It seemed like there were posts put in random order. It made things rather confusing, and I have yet to find a setting to force it to be in an actual timeline that makes sense. This is something I feel needs to be addressed, and pretty quickly, as Facebook’s news feed is well beyond Google’s stream in look, feel and custom-ability.
After looking and tearing my hair out with the stream, I went into Circles and started setting things up. Circles, to me, is the nicest feature. I proceeded to set up a few special circles for myself and started adding people I knew into different circles. Being able to segregate people into different areas so they only can see what I want them to, allowing for certain things to get out, while other things don’t, is a great idea, and well done by Google.
Posting to one’s stream, you get some nice options, including sending the post to people you know who are not in Google+ yet which would work as an invite to them. Other options such as which circles, or even down to individual people are allowed to see the post, gives a granularity of privacy that Facebook does not have, nor cares about.
Sparks is probably the second most interesting aspect of Google+. The idea of getting what amounts to a RSS feeds based on a keyword for an interest, is amazing. Again, you can get real specific with you information and search. this is definitely right up Google’s main alley, with its search engine.
Some areas where I find it to really feel beta, or need to be improved, besides the stream order, include the Settings. It is not as easy to find some of them, especially the privacy settings, as I would like. Its definitely no more difficult than on Facebook, but I think Google can do better. Also, there is no event calendar system for setting up events. Considering that could be integrated with Google Calendar, I am surprised that they didn’t do that out of the box.
Google did give a tab on Your profile page to keep up with Buzz to some extent, but I haven’t played with it enough to really see how well Buzz got brought into Plus.
Keeping in mind that this is still beta software, and there are bugs, slowness issues, and other things that can and will change or be adjusted, what they do have right now is a good start. Its a solid base upon which to build on. the question really is, will Google advance with this or will it drop the ball like it has in the past.