So Google+ has been released to the world and his dog (providing they have an invite at the time of writing), Google’s answer to Facebook, Twitter et al. I’m managed to wangle an invite and have since messed around with the mobile web site and the Android app, and so far from that (and reading loads about it over the last week or two), I’m really impressed and looking forward to seeing what they can do with it. For me so far the highlights have to be:
- Circles. I never bothered grouping friends in Facebook, or anything else really, with maybe the exception of my Gmail contacts. The main reason is because I had no reason to. I only shared things I was happy for everyone to see, and I didn’t use it for mass-messaging. G+ and its Circle mechanism are great though, they’re basically just nice, big, friendly ways to group people together. The sharing of everything under G+ (photos, links, posts etc) is based around which circles you want to share it with. People can belong to as many circles as you like to, and you can have as many different ones as you like. Simple eh? Why’s no-one made it this easy before?
- Photo sharing. Much more intuitive and integral. In fact the phone app can be set to intercept every photo you take and upload it to a private album. This way you don’t need to manually upload pictures before grouping, they’re already there. You can move them about to other albums once they’re there, but on the whole it feels far less disjointed than the Facebook approach.
- Huddle. Huddle seems to be a bit of a mix between SMS and MSN. It’s a group messaging thing that lets you chat with your Circle members in a text/instant messaging stylee. I’ve not got enough people in my circles to test it yet, but in theory it sounds great. I hate not knowing who’s been texted in a group text, or trying to remember to add everyone for every reply.
There’s lots of other stuff I’ve still not even touched yet, such as Sparks and the group ‘Hangout’ video chatting, but for the time being it all seems very promising. The way it all hooks into my phone and the ‘always connected’ way smartphones are now feels a lot more natural than Facebook ever has.
Once I get a chance to try to full web service I’m sure I’ll be able to form a more informed opinion, and hopefully get some invites out to the people I know will want to use it, but for the time being Google+ gets a firm thumbs up (or should that be +1) from me.