In general we thought the service borrowed some good ideas from the reigning king of social networks, Facebook, but also offers some cool new approaches to sharing content and managing privacy. In short, Google+ is a solid start to an incipient rival social networking platform that is sure to be enhanced rapidly over the coming months, and it could soon offer a solid alternative to Facebook. Now, let's dig in.
Getting Started
Google+ has an easy set-up with almost no learning curve, especially if you're familiar with Facebook. If you’ve used any Google products before, you might be surprised at how much of that information gets automatically imported to your new Google+ account, to use in a social context. For example, I’ve uploaded pictures to Picasa without allowing others to view them. Google+ first asked me to select a profile picture from my Picasa Albums, and then gave me a choice: Either link my Google+ account with Picasa, or don’t join Google+ at all.
I decided to link. It didn’t actually change the privacy settings of my Picasa albums (it didn’t make them public to my friends or anything). But having the choice made me wonder what the implications of having my Picasa albums linked to Google+ really were.
The next place you go after you’ve set up a Google+ account is to the “About Me” section. You can tell that Google is trying to be a little saucier than Facebook, or at least have an edgier personality.
While Facebook profiles ask you the basic questions: gender, relationship status, religion, favorite movies, TV shows, music and so forth, Google+ asks you to make an introduction, like you’re back in the first day of your high school speech class, and then asks you to list “bragging rights” like “survived high school", "have three kids", etc.
Forming Your ‘Circles’
Google+ imports all of your information from Gmail automatically--and that means all. When you’re updating your friend circles there’s a tab towards the top of the page that says “Find and Invite”; click on it and you'll see a list of just about everyone you’ve ever sent an email to through Gmail alphabetically--even if the last time you sent them an email was four years ago. It's not surprising that Gmail remembers everyone you’ve every sent an email to--but it's a little jarring when all those names come rushing back at you at once.
Now, how to organize all those people. Google claims to have done a radical rethink of the way social networks ought to work, so that they more closely mimic the way we organize our friends in real life. After using Google+ for just a few minutes I began to appreciate the simplicity of the "circles" approach. And I really like the way Google has represented it in graphical form in Google+: that is, you actually pick up people with your mouse and drag them into this circle or that.
Nice job Google--it makes me think you’re finally getting a grip on this social thing after all.
Google+ users can drag and drop their friends into the appropriate social circles. Here I'm dragging my colleague Daniel Ionescu into my "PCWorld Pals" circle.
However, because this drag-and-drop function is behind the Circles tab, I began trying to add friends by searching for them from the Google+ homepage. When I would visit a potential friend's page and add them to one of my circles, it wasn't immediately apparent to them that we were now linked. I hope Google moves the Circles function to the front, making the process of forming connections a bit more user friendly.
Sharing Content
Google+ answers the call of many privacy activists to provide the functionality needed to set the privacy level on each piece of content shared. For instance, when I share an article or upload a camera image, Google+ gives me choices of which friend circles I’d like to share that content with. A picture from my phone might be perfectly fine for my Close Friends circle but very wrong for my Colleagues circle, for instance.
Still, I’m not sure that Google has given us the deep privacy controls that we might need. I’m not seeing the tool that lets me carefully fine-tune my sharing rules with a particular circle. I created a new circle for a new set of friends, but did not see where I could set the privacy settings for that group. Am I supposed to rely on the stock privacy settings Google has applied to the Friends, Family and Acquaintances circles it gave me to start with?
Stream = Facebook News Feed
The “Stream” section of Google+ is analogous to Facebook’s News Feed, and it does almost nothing different except for the fact that before you post anything, you have to decide which circles see it. You can make it available to “all circles” or even to “extended circles” where you basically email what you post to people who aren’t on Google+.
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