Google Plus - A First Look

Google+ is the new social network that makes sharing your photos, videos, thoughts and life easy. Google Plus is has a clean interface that makes your content POP off the page. 

Google launched with an invite only system. Using my tech contacts in San Fran I was fortunate to get an invite on the day of the BETA launch. This is the first social product by Google that has created a huge BUZZ in a positive way. (yes Google BUZZ was a perceived negatively if you got that). 

The first page you will see is the Google+ Home which includes your news Stream. This is very similar to the News Feed on Facebook. It takes all the posts visible to you and puts in a simple way to keep up with friends, family and contacts. On the left side of the page you have the option to quickly organize news in the feed by the Circles that you have created.

The news stream allows you to post photos, video, links and your location. 

The way the news feed is presented with the options of being able to sort through your Circles reminds me of a Facebook meets Twitter. Google+ has the best of both worlds!

The Photos tab allows you to organize your photos, albums and photos from your circles. Similar to the news stream you can quickly filter the photos that you would like to see. The picture above shows photos from my phone. I LOVE the option to have photos automatically uploaded to a private folder for photos to be easily shared. It is one less step you have to make to share photos taken from your phone.

The Google+ photo gallery integrates with Picasa. So if you have thousands of photos already stored on Picasa you do not have to upload them again to a new Social Network. They are already there for you to keep private or share.

The profile page is that what others see on the web. You can make your profile Public or Private. Their is an easy to use "View profile as..." feature that allows you to type in someones name to see what information is public to them.

You can tell that Google has made the security of your profile and the information you share easier to manage. They have listened to the many complaints about how to use similar features from Facebook users and fixed them.

On the profile page you have links to your Posts, About, Photos, Videos, +1's and Buzz. It is really easy to use as well as set up. 

The Circles page allows you to quickly manage people in your life. You can create new circles and permissions on what they will see. It seems to be a much easier way to manage who will see what content you would like to share. Facebook allows you to create filters but it is very time consuming and hard to distinguish how you know certain people.

I use a Gmail account and it quickly loaded all my contacts. You can easily add friends, family and others you communicate with. There is a Friends Search feature as well. This way you can find people by their name if you can't remember their email address. Simple to use and very effective!

The first version of the Google+ Android App is spectacular! Considering Android is Google it better be!

You can already do so much with the mobile app! Sharing the right things with the right people is now so easy. The feature I mentioned earlier that I really like is the Automatic Upload of the photos. I take a lot of photos with my phone so uploading them can be time consuming. With the Google+ Android app it does it automatically for you!

The first version of the app has already received rave reviews!