Google+ is Google’s social media site, and Facebook’s first real challenger. I received an invite to Google+ a little over a month ago. Here are my impressions and experiences so far.

It is not surprising that Google, operator of the largest search engine on the Internet, would want to join the social media game. After all, what better way of obtaining the likes, interests, and habits of your customers and market than to have them willfully enter all that data directly into your system? Call me cynical, but the following quote keeps coming to mind: “If You’re Not Paying for It, You’re the Product“. It is with that minor trepidation that I signed up for Google+.

At its core, Google+ is not unlike Facebook. You add friends, share thing with your friends, and read things shared by your friends. The biggest initial difference is that your friends are grouped into circles. Whenever you share something on Google+, you can choose which circle your post is displayed to. This is a great feature for people like me, who have many different social and interest groups all following the same blog stream. Using circles, I can easily share techie stuff with my techie friends, family stuff with my family, and so on.

The funny thing is, Facebook used to support this exact same thing. Actually they still do, it’s just that they made it so convoluted that nobody uses it anymore. With each post you have to change your settings by specifically adding or excluding certain people and … ugh, it’s just a mess, and I suspect they intentionally broke it because Facebook works by people sharing information with people, and they don’t want you limiting your posts to small circles of people. If you’ve never seen the option on Facebook, the next time you go to post something, click on the small padlock icon underneath your post and you’ll see this:

Compare that with the Google+ interface, which makes things so much easier:

In Google+, you simply click on the groups circles you want to share with and go. It almost seems like if Facebook hadn’t bungled this one single feature, there would be almost no need for Google+.

One other major difference between Google+ and Facebook is that Facebook requires a “two-way” agreement for two people to begin sharing information between one another. As far as I can tell in Google+, all I have to do is add someone to my circle, and they’ll begin receiving my updates. It works the other way too, as several people I barely know have added me to their circles, and began sharing their updates with me. While I’m sure from Google’s standpoint this is a good way to get people sharing, it puts an unnecessary onus on the receiver to have to remove people s/he may not have wanted to receive updates from in the first place.

While planning this post out in my head I was planning to talk about how much better Google+ is since they don’t have games, and seem to be dedicated to the exchange of information. Unfortunately, yesterday it was announced that Google+ just added games, so I’m not sure what to think about that. It appears that by default other people’s game streams don’t post directly into your stream, but seriously, how long can it be before that starts happening?

If you use GMail or log in to Google, you’ll notice that the bar across the top of your screen in now black. The very first link on that bar now takes me to Google+, and the links on the right allow me to update my stream directly from my browser. I can also see when other people have added me or shared things with me from this same bar. It’s a little scary, actually. Visually the bar is not very invasive, but technologically speaking it blurs the line between social media and the rest of my internet usage. I rarely access Facebook during business hours, but when Google+ is now a part of my Google search window, it makes it very tempting to click on a link and select “share”. To people within my stream, it may now appear that I am spending a lot of time on Google+ during the day, when in reality I’m not. Then again, I’ve had to schedule my posts here at robohara.com to appear outside of working hours to quell rumors that I was working on my blog during working hours. I suppose with smart phones and Twitter, all of those lines are being blurred; I have so many automated processes firing off at this point that a new post here on robohara.com doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near a computer (I’ll schedule this one to fire off Sunday morning at 3:33am, just to make the point).

The biggest problem with Google+ is the the same problem MySpace has, and that’s that nobody’s there. Okay, 20 million people aren’t exactly “nobody”, but it’s a far cry from Facebook’s 500+ million. Chances are, there’s still people on Facebook most Google+ users wish to communicate with, and therein lies the problem: that means participating in two social media sites. (Three, if you’re one of the seven people still on MySpace.)

So, eh, mixed bag at this point. There are things about G+ (that’s what the cool kids are calling it, apparently) I like, but until 500+ million people bail on Facebook and join us at G+, I suspect I’ll be living with one foot in each world for the time being.