Google+ has been getting a fair amount of, well, buzz, in the geek press. Forgive the pun as I refer to one of Google’s social media mistakes from the past, but new social media effort is getting far better reviews, especially compared to the angry backlash Google faced when it launched Buzz.
In addition to some early positive reviews, Google+ garned press attention when it first launched because the new social media network was restriced to a few people lucky enough to score early invites, including most of the top tech bloggers and journalists.
It’s still to be determined if Google will get social media right this time, but the innovative features of Google+ combined with the growing list of intregrated services included in the world of Google Apps, shows Google is making some serious moves in the world of online collaboration, as well as social connection.
Here are a few tips and articles I’ve been collecting that will help you appreciate why you might want to score an invite — something that seems to have gotten much easier to get as of today…
Articles about Google+
My favorite feature in Google+ (and I’m not alone) is the Circles feature, which makes it more intuitive, and more fun, to organizer your ‘friends’ into one or multiple categories. This is SOOOO much better than Facebook’s List feature, which most users don’t even seem aware of…
One of my first critiques of the service is that many of my friends use more than one email address and Google is making it hard to distinguish between them. You can easily add people from your Google contacts list, but then it’s easy to end up multiple icons for one person, which can be confusing at best, and may make it hard to connect with people.
Google seems to already have at least an inkling about this problem, at least based on my recent experience going throught the Google Apps update process for multiple accounts. Anyone who has more than Google account, or uses their own domain name with gmail, has probably already discovered that Google is changing the way you can use IDs for different logins. Exactly how this fits in with Google+ is not quite clear, but I suspect you’ll see more changes to how Google+ manages multiple email addresses in the future.
The Best and Worst of Google+
These two articles will help you appreciate the best new features, and the places where the service is disappointing the early reviewers.
How to use Google+
If you just want to see how Google+ works, or you’ve signed up and you’re not sure how to use it yet, here are the official help docs and demos for Google+
Interactive demo: http://www.google.com/+/demo/
Learn more: http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/
Google+ for mobile: http://www.google.com/mobile/+/