Google has a new Social Network

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Google's new social network, Google+, premiered Tuesday, June 28, 2011 promising a new spin on socializing online with a slick interface and a unique way of sharing content. The service launched to a limited number of users Tuesday in what Google is calling a "field trial." A few PCWorld staffers were lucky enough to be invited (it’ll roll out to everybody in the coming months), so naturally we jumped right into testing the new service.

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+.

Social Networking Usage for your Startup Business

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When Maxine Gardner started an online business selling original artwork in 2010, she says she felt compelled to immediately practice social networking usage to promote it.

She had just completed several workshops on entrepreneurship where free sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were a hot topic. She also didn't have enough money to buy advertising because her main source of income until that point—freelance photography work—had dried up.

But Ms. Gardner says she didn't know which social networks made the most sense for her Huntington Woods, Mich., start-up, called Artful Vision, or how to begin. She also had a slew of other tasks on her plate and wasn't sure if joining sites like Facebook should take priority.

"In the beginning, it was helter-skelter," recalls Ms. Gardner, now 59 years old. "You're so busy, you don't what you're doing."
If you're starting a business on a shoestring budget, you might be tempted to build a social-media presence for it right off the bat. Social networks are typically free to join and can be used for marketing, or even as an alternative to a company website.
They're also wildly popular. Facebook users spent an average of seven hours on the site in February, according to market-research firm comScore.

But knowing which social-networking sites to join and how to take advantage of them can be daunting for a rookie entrepreneur. There are dozens to choose from—including fast-growing sites like Google+ and Pinterest—and scores of businesses are competing for attention on them.

Experts recommend waiting to jump in until your start-up is fully functioning because effectively managing one or more social-networking profiles can take a great deal of time and energy. What's more, they say rushing in without knowing what you're doing can potentially result in embarrassment or worse. For example, a poorly executed reply to a Facebook message from an unhappy customer could go "viral"—meaning it could get reposted many times over on the Web—if the recipient were to share it with his or her Facebook friends.

"Your first priority is to get your operation started," says Kevin Ready, author of "Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business" and a seasoned entrepreneur in Austin, Texas. "Social media is a long-term investment and not magic. It's hard work."

When you're ready to test the waters, Mr. Ready suggests starting with just one social network, ideally one that caters to your target market. For example, you might try LinkedIn if your business sells goods or services to other businesses because that site's membership is made up of mostly companies and business professionals, he says.
One caveat: It may be wise to secure your start-up's name on any social networks you're confident you'll use even before you're ready to actually get started. This way you'll avoid possibly losing the name to another business or individual while you focus on building your venture. You can post a "coming soon" message until you're ready to begin using it.

One of the first steps that Seph Skerritt took when launching ProperCloth.com, an online custom-clothing business, was to claim its name on Facebook and Twitter. "Your worst nightmare is someone else gets it and you can't use your own brand name," says the 32-year-old, who began working on his New York-based business in 2008 while still in graduate school.

But Mr. Skerritt regrets attempting to use the sites right afterward because he got burned out trying to keep up with both while still building the infrastructure for his venture. "You could spend all day replying to people and starting conversations," he says. So early on he decided to put his company's Twitter account on hold to make his workload more manageable.

Today, he has two employees, one of whom is responsible for assisting him with social-networking-related tasks, including his start-up's resurrected Twitter page. "We both have access to the accounts so we can jump in and respond to clients," Mr.

Skerritt says.
If you haven't done so already, consider spending a few days or weeks familiarizing yourself with social-networking sites as a consumer before creating profiles on any for your business.
John Coffren took this step with Facebook because he'd never spent time on the site before opening Bliss Bakery, a bricks-and-mortar shop in Virginia Beach, Va., in mid-2008. He set up a personal account and checked out company profiles, including those of his competitors.

"If you see it from the consumer end, you definitely get an appreciation for how [consumers are] going to view your business," says Mr. Coffren, who last summer added a second Bliss Bakery location also in Virginia Beach.
One of his key take-aways: The most popular company profiles were those that engaged visitors with contests, surveys and special offers. He now runs about 10 promotions on Facebook a year that involve giving away free baked goods, such as doughnuts and cupcakes, to a random selection of his company's followers.

"The consumer nowadays is looking for what's in it for them," says Mr. Coffren.