Non-plussed by Google Plus?

Posted by Luke Williams on July 25, 2011 in geeky stuff | 0 comments

Summary:

Too early to tell. If you’re not an “early adopter” type, don’t waste time looking at it just yet.

UPDATE: The early adopter phase is growing rapidly, as of today 03/08/11 the user base is 25 million and growing, time on the site per user is increasing too… have a look personally, ready for the business pages launch.

Main body:

Another google product, another twitter stream full of “invite wanted PLEASE!” type messages… I was lucky to get on quite early and shared the wealth as soon as I could.

Initial gut feeling… I like it. I like the use of circles, an idea that I’ve always sort of used on facebook with the friends lists feature… which is horribly clunky. This however works REALLY well, I like it a lot. It will take some discipline to add everyone into circles to start with, but once you have, it’s a simple way of sending messages to certain groups of people.

The people themselves don’t know the name or membership of a circle, just that they got that message from you.

What about business pages?

Good question, at the moment it is only for personal pages, businesses will get additional functionality but there isn’t any more info than that at the moment.

Is there a mobile app?

Yes and the android one is pretty good, the iphone one has been submitted to the app store, but as of today not live on itunes.

I totally agree with Scobelizers article that “your mum wont use it”… yet. I think it’ll be interesting to see whether the changes at Facebook announced this week deaden some of the impact google plus has (especially the video chat “huddle” feature)

It is still in a beta type phase, once business pages are launched and the user base matures I think it could be one to watch, some analysts are saying the +1 button is already wider used than “tweet this”.