My review of Google+

Created by Blacklite at 9th Jul 2011, last modified 9th Jul 2011

Just started on Google+ - a few comments.

Firstly, it's interesting Facebook came out with group video calling only a few days after Google announced Google+ which has this feature... Anyway, let's just get straight into it.

Circles

So, Google+ added a permissions feature called "Circles". There are four default Circles; "Following", "Aquaintances", "Friends", and "Family". You can individually specify permissions for individual profile fields, posts, and a whole lot more. And the best part is, the people you add to Google+ don't get to know what Circle you have put them in!

The main issue with Circles is that you're no longer posting things for everyone to see. You have to be really careful to make sure you put people in the right Circles, so they don't see too much and so that they don't miss out on cool things that such friends should see.

Profiles

Here is something that Google+ has done a really good job of. There are lots of cool fields to fill out and display on your profile, and it's really easy to edit them and specify who can view them. The "Places lived" thing is pretty cool - it shows green tags on the world map to show people where you've lived, and of course you can choose exactly who can and can't view it, right down to individual people.

Pictures

You can have a profile picture and albums full of images, like most social networking sites. The main difference here is how they're displayed. Google+ allows for much higher-resolution images to be viewed, using its full-width/full-height image browser. They have a cool layout when shown on feeds too:

+1

The +1 (as shown in the picture above) is basically the same thing as Facebook's "Like" feature, but in my opinion, tidier. It also doesn't turn the word "Like" into a word only used for talking about "liking" things on Facebook. +1 has already been around for a little while (maybe 2-3 weeks?). As a website owner, you can set it up so that people can +1 your pages, and according to Google, lots of +1's can even have an effect on your page ranking.

Sparks

And lastly, Sparks are basically "interests". You can have as many "Sparks" as you like on your page, but as far as I can see, they are really pretty useless at this stage. Hopefully more to come on this.

 

 

 

Well that's all for now, I might make another post about it, I might not. Who knows!

EDIT: Just thought you should know - Google+ spams your email inbox just like Facebook does! :)

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