Three For Thursday: Things I Like About Google+
Welcome to my blog feature – "Three for Thursday." You may not see an installment every Thursday, but when I can manage it, I'll be sharing three cool – er – somethings.
I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, as I've talked about several times on this blog. Kind of like that crazy neighbor lady who smells bad but always tells me I look like I've lost weight. But I digress.
And then along came Google+. I won't waste my time and yours giving you some sort of history or high level overview of Google+ – you can get that in a thousand other places. What I want to share is what has struck me as some key advantages of Google+ in the two weeks since I joined:
1. The entire system is built on the concept of Circles. Circles are essentially like lists on Twitter and Facebook, except where lists are a bit kludgy on Twitter and an unintuitive afterthought on Facebook, they are front and center in Google+. Circles are easy to build and manipulate. I can envision some lovely functionality down the road when they enhance the drag and drop capabilities. You "follow" people by placing them in a circle. It's best to think in advance how you might like to organize yourself, but it's easy enough to change it down the road if you make a mis-step. I have three circles entitled Tiers 1 through 3. If I only have a few minutes, I check only the Tier 1 stream, more time and I check 2 and still more time and I check 3. I also don't put anybody in a circle just to be nice – I put them there because I am interested in their posts.
2. At the moment, Google+ is filled with Type-A people. Early adopters are cool peeps and are busily sharing wonderful content even as we speak. If you are dragging your feet about getting on Google+, please don't take offense – I'm not saying YOU aren't cool too. I simply mean to say that it's a very interesting place to be right now. There are almost no spammers and I have not yet encountered anybody who's trying to do the hard sell on me. Everybody is still exploring and learning.
3. Privacy and Security are user-centered, not "big brother"-centered. Rather than feeling like you're signing over your first-born when you join the network, you have a feeling of being in the driver's seat. You can customize your security settings easily. The best privacy feature is being able to easily select how widely you want your update broadcast: to an individual, to a small group, to a circle, to multiple circles, all your circles, your "extended circles" (the circles of your peeps) or public. That's some serious flexibility and it's there at your fingertips rather than having to dig through multiple screens to find it.
So, two weeks in and I have to say I'm a convert. Facebook still has a lot of value to me but only for the connections that I've made there in my personal account and on my fan page. So, I'll still be hanging around that neighborhood, too. But I'm also kicking the tires of Google+ and liking what I see so far. If you're interested in joining, I happen to have a few invites, so just drop me a line.
Are you on Google+? What are the things YOU like (or dislike) about it?
