Head Tale

At the end of June, Google released Google+, their latest attempt at creating a social networking site to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

After the failures of Google Wave and Google Buzz, some saw Google+ as a potential “three strikes and you’re out” last ditch attempt by Google to finally gain traction in  the social space (though when you have the resources – financial and talent-wise – of a Google, baseball analogies probably don’t work too well.  I mean, what would that make Orkut – a foul ball caught by a spectator from Brazil?)

Anyhow, as happened with the limited initial release of Gmail invites (when people were buying them for hundreds of dollars on E-bay!), I was able to get an invite soon after the site launched.  This time, my invite came via the generosity of an ex-Googler who was sharing his thoughts about the new service in a MetaFilter thread.

Since then, Shea and I have been on holidays which has given me more time than usual to follow the growth of Google+, read reactions from across the web and play around with the site myself.  And the consensus seems to be that Google has finally gotten it right and that Google+ is a potential Facebook-killer as well as a mortal wound to Twitter.

I’m going to reserve judgment on that for now but what I’ve seen so far has impressed me.  The granularity of the control given to how you classify and share with your contacts via the use of “Circles” is one of the biggest attractions but there are others – from Google’s respect for your content compared to Facebook to defaulting to secure settings for all transmissions.

There are negatives too of course – from malware filled add-ons that sprung up almost immediately claiming they could help people transition from Facebook to Google+ to censorship of any and all nudity instead of some type of ratings system for photos and video.

Reddit’s /r/googleplus sub-reddit has been one of my main sources of information so I encourage you to check it out.  Some of what I’ve gotten from there include:

• Google+ cheat sheet
• 25 Tips to Enhance Your Google+ Experience
• Google User Statistics  (a great place to fish for Google+ people to follow)

I used up my initial allotment of invites fairly quickly but have had some more appear recently so if you’d like an invite, you can either post a comment, send me an e-mail or, if you like irony, you can also contact me on Facebook!