Google+ - Social Networking, Differently

Aug. 4, 2011 - PRLog -- Recently we saw the launch of the “limited field trial” of Google’s latest social venture, Google+ (or G+). There has been a lot of talk about G+, what it can do, who will use it, and whether it is going to compete against Facebook. As with any service, there are good things and bad things which seem similar to other products and things which seem new. G+ is no exception to this.

In this article, we are going to take a quick look around G+, explain what stage it is at right now, have a look at what is already on offer to enhance the experience and of course compare it to its “rivals”.

As with many of the Google services you are likely to use, G+ is built into the whole framework of Google’s sites. Recently, Google revised their sites to include the now “feels like it’s always been there” Google Bar. Once you have a G+ account, the first entry on this becomes “+yourname” - at least, in general. If you go to Picasa using the “Photos” option on the bar, the first entry becomes “+You”. This is a tiny inconsistency which will no doubt be corrected soon enough.

Right now, G+ is integrated into the Picasa service from Google. In fact, Picasa provides the image hosting for your photos on G+. This is quite a powerful facility.  If you already use Picasa, you will know that you have a free 1GB storage limit for pictures, as a standard. And that any picture you upload that is shorter than 800 pixels on its longest side, is not counted towards that limit. If you have a G+ account, the 1GiB limit still applies, but now any picture that is shorter than 2048 pixels on its longest side is not counted.

For those of you who are wondering what 1GB is:

In the early days of computers, sizes were created related to binary. So a Megabyte (MB) was 1024 Bytes because 1024 could be represented with a single 1 in binary. A Gigabyte (GB) was 1024 Megabytes. Now, this didn’t sit very well with the International Standards Organization because Mega should mean 1 million and Giga should mean 1 billion. Those pesky 24’s were getting in the way of people’s understanding of the terms. To conform, a Gigabyte is now officially classified as 1000 Megabytes. Which left us traditionalists out in the cold. The suggestion was a slight twist on the term, and the KibiByte, MebiByte, GibiByte were born. These now take the place of our beloved KB, MB, and GB terms of old. So 1GiB is “One Gigabyte in old money”.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. This has come about because G+ has followed Facebook’s example of offering you unlimited space for photos on your Facebook account. Any photo you upload using G+ will automatically resize to 2048 pixels on the longest size (and scale accordingly). Of course, because it is using Picasa directly, there are alternatives. For instance, I use the Picasa 3 software on my laptop to organize my photo collection. By default, this is set to scale pictures so that the longest side is 1600 pixels (and thus, with my G+ account, is not included in the storage limit). All I do is what I’ve done for a long time, I create my albums in Picasa 3, sync to the Picasa site, and there they are in G+ as well, ready for me to share to my Circles (we’ll look at those later).

Google have also hinted that they will be offering some form of integration with Gmail and Documents (though they haven’t worked out what that integration will offer just yet). Personally I would like to be able to share documents based on my Circles rather than just by e-mail address. I’d also like to see them do that with Google Calendars.

G+ works around this concept of Circles. When you think about your “real life” friends, we supposedly think in circles. There is the circle of family members, close friends, acquaintances and so on and so forth. Google has taken this and applied it to G+. Also in the same way as real life, a person may consider you in a friendship circle, even if you don’t feel quite the same way. In fact, Google has a pretty good explanation in a video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8



You can make circles, give them names. Put people you know into a circle. Put them in several circles to help you organize. You can put people you don’t know into circles to ‘follow’ them and see their public posts on your “Stream” (we’ll get to the Stream in a bit). For those of you familiar with Twitter, you’ll already understand this concept. Circles allow you a lot of freedom, and as the video above shows, you can also decide to see posts in your Stream that are only from people in a chosen circle. This means that you don’t have to spend ages scrolling down the screen, clicking “More” because there have been 589 new posts since you logged in last night, all on the same Feed. Once you’ve tried it, you’ll wonder why this isn’t the norm everywhere.

Here’s the other great thing with Circles. Not only can you use them to determine which people’s posts you view on your Stream, but you can post your own message specifically to the people of one, or more circles. This gives us a whole new level of control over how we share information with one another. For instance, I follow a person who has a circle that contains people who are crazy about cats. That way, she can share her love of cats with people that are interested in cats, without overwhelming all of her contacts with cat posts that they don’t want to see.

When you start a G+ account, there are a few default circles created; Friends, Family, Following and Acquaintances. There is nothing special about these circles, you can delete them or rename them. However, the names of these circles are special. The four circles with these names are grouped above the rest of the circles you have. So whilst all of your other circles are in alphabetical order, these four will always be at the top. This may be convenient for some - personally, I got rid so that all my circles were in alphabetical order.

Now then, this Stream that we mentioned above is what you will spend most of your time on G+ with. Streams look much like the Newsfeed on Facebook - at first glance. However, they offer so much more flexibility over Facebook's newsfeed.

When logging into G+, by default you are presented with the Stream. This shows you all of the posts made by you and the people you follow (who shared their post as public), or the people who have sent an update to one of their circles of which you were a member. They are all in chronological order, much like the "Most Recent" option on Facebook's news feed, and like Twitter's feed in general.

Now, this can get a little noisy, especially if you follow some of the regular public posters that are so popularly followed. So, with the Stream, you have the option to view the stream from people within each of your circles. So, if you only want to see what your family members have said and you have a Family circle, you click on that circle and the stream only displays posts by the people in your family circle.

This takes the idea of looking at a Facebook friend's wall posts, and expands it to allow you to look at the wall posts of a collection of friends. A great bonus is that you can group people together in more than one circle. This can help if you have people that post similar things that are related. For instance, I have a Google group for members of Google staff that I like to read posts from.

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