My Experience with a "Google Plus Invite"

First of all, this is about "the friend of a friend." So I am not a "first tier" invitee to the new Google Plus social networking thing-a-ma-bob site.  But let me say I was very excited to get an invite, especially since it came "out of the blue" as a total surprise from someone in my office who knew I was interested in it and wanted to try it out. She was simply able to invite me after she got an invite. I have been somewhat desperate to see what the clamor was all about and I am glad that I did. She was not desperate and was just curious.

I have actually enjoyed the past 24 hours of playing around with Google Plus and getting to "test drive" it. It is nicely designed, well thought through for the most part, and seems to be rather easy to use.You feel like you are in a "communicator's pilot seat" when you are inside the network. It's very much like being inside Facebook.Same neighborhood, different house. But I like the concept and I think it is more "grownup" and has the potential to generate more discussion and feedback on issues rather than just be a "show and tell" site.

But here is the $64 billion question: how are they going to get so many millions of people to switch? When people dropped My Space and gravitated to Facebook, there weren't nearly that many people on a so-called social network." It grew in popularity over time because it was something different with a new twist on an old idea of "finding and keeping up with old friends."  I say this because when I reached out to about 20 of my Facebook friends to "join me"on Google Plus, the responses ranged from no response (mostly) to just "so...the world is still rotating on its axis..." I am talking about educated, well-connected, out-and-about social people who like being seen and heard. No one (except me) seemed to be in a hurry to "pack up the house" and move over to a whole new neighborhood hook, line and sinker.

I'm not even so sure people outside serious techies and true communications professionals"get it" about Google Plus. I felt sort of "weird" as if I were a deejay trying to get people to dance to some type of  weird new music in the middle of a party that was going good. Overall, I like what I have seen and I have started using the new network, but I don't have anybody else to play with except the person who invited me and a lot of people I don't know (like Bill Gates!) who I am following just to have some kind of activity on my account. To me, the key will be what happens when the doors are open to the public. Will people come rushing? In my case, I was somewhat deflated to know that I was the only one in my "circle" who was excited about Google Plus. I felt out of synch in a digital sort of way. I thought people would thank me and rush to sign up and be my Google Plus friend.

I think the biggest thing Google Plus has to work on is improving the "Sparks" feature At first, it is really cool to get a marquee roll of articles, blog posts, videos and other items on topics you are interested in. And it is cool you can have feeds coming in on multiple topics. But it seems to update very slowly if at all. It needs to be "real time." Maybe they are working on that. They have to be. It is too obvious. But that is a tremendous feature. It's great that you can pull items from that list and simply share them.

My favorite part of the network is quite simply the Circles. I use Facebook friends list,but this is a much easier way to group people and I like the fact that you don't have to ask someone to "be my friend," which to me can be kind of awkward on Facebook. Circles is cool, practical and very effective. I can only imagine how cool it would be if I actually had some real friends in them. I actually think Google Plus is misnamed. It should have been called Google Circles. Google Plus (or +) sounds like a new hyper search engine. Google Circles immediately gives off the impression that we are talking about people and communication...our circles! Such a name might draw more non-techies to sign in when it is available or accept invitations from people like me.

The only confusing part right now is the link to Picasa (soon to be Google Photos). It's not clear to me how it works and out of caution,I have posted no photos of my own outside my profile picture. The way that is explained and presented on the site should be revisited.

Overall, I like Google Plus,and am happy I got an invite. It won' t make me leave Facebook totally, but I have room to operate in both networks if I can just get some friends to join me. No fun if I am in this sandbox all alone with no one else to throw dirt on!