Delving into Google Plus

I readily accepted an invitation to hop on board with the rest of the beta testers and play with the new Google Plus.

On first impression, Google+ doesn’t seem to be anything all that spectacular with its Facebook-like ability to add friends, update your profile and change status updates. But after you start to dig around, you’ll discover some pretty fun elements.

With your status updates, or “stream” as it’s called, you can post comments, share links and videos, and comment on someone else’s post. Nothing new there. Until you look at the option of editing your comment. Have a typo? Realize you posted the wrong link? With Facebook you can delete the entire comment, but with Google Plus you can simply “Edit” and re-save.

Categorizing your friends into circles lets you communicate with different categories of associates, friends and family without having to send direct messages (as with Facebook, who restricts the number of people you can directly message to 30).

With Sparks you can find topics of interest, and Google Plus will locate articles, pictures and links that fall into that category for you. Kind of like your own, customized Google Search.

But to me, the biggest sparkly surprise is the hangout option, where you can set up a room and your friends can join in for a live face-to-face web chat, and the huddle where you can connect multiple text chats into a single group chat. Great for trying to solidify those evening plans with all your friends.

One issue to note is if you do get an invite, don’t sign yourself out of the account. Because the system is still in a beta mode, once you logout, you likely won’t get back in due to the volume of users signing up.

To the question of Google Plus replacing Facebook? My thoughts are it just might. The ability to contact your entire circle of people in an instant, as well as the addition of the video hangout and group chat certainly brings a concept of “social networking” into play that Facebook does not have. And many people are becoming disillusioned with Facebook’s ever changing privacy policy, in-your-face advertising and restrictions. Google Plus will certainly gain the “what’s new over here” crowd, but the question remains as to it’s staying power.

Only time will tell.

All in all it is certainly worth checking out.

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