Google Plus: I am loving it!

After I wondered yesterday if Google Plus can be the new Face of Social Networking, I was able to get an invite today and spent the whole afternoon and evening on it, and I must admit I love it immensely. So much so that I wanted to invite all my Facebook friends to it right away, but soon discovered the tedious invitations have already closed due to overwhelming response.

Here is a feature-by-feature review on Google Plus. I did not want to, but comparisons with Facebook are inadvertent and unavoidable.

Circles: Easy to drag-drop friends into circles. Contacts can be added to more than one circle, the biggest relief I had after the demo did not show so.

Sharing: When you share something, you can choose one or more circles, or make it public, or share it only with one or more people—the best part—belonging or not belonging to your circles, through their email ids.

Facebook had the omnipresent 'Like' on all shares and pages, Google has the counterpart '+1' to the same effect. The advantage +1 has is that all your +1's can be viewed at a single place on your Google Profile.

Stream: Very much like Facebook/Twitter/Yammer/Orkut. The outstanding feature being, you see even private messages on the stream, and need not look for and go to another page on the site. Clicking on one of your circles listed on the left help you see the stream only from friends on that stream. There is even a link that lets you see notifications from people not belonging to any circle! Very useful.

Posts: Commenting/sharing works like FB, but both comments and shares can be edited later. You also have the added privilege of disabling comments or resharing.

Photos: Shows all recent photos from your circles on one page, arranged in non-identical thumbnails(proportionate to image sizes, I think) the way Google image search does. Nice! Includes all your Picasa albums in your photos, and you can share them with specific circles or people. You create a new photo/album, it gets added to your Picasa account. How cool is that!

The photo viewer looks like it is picked up from Orkut. The newer version many people haven't seen since it was post Facebook. Comments appear on a collapsible channel on the right and can accommodate many more comments than a FB photo can.

Sparks: Looks sleek with the photographs of the featured interests, but I did not find it much useful, people who do not read much might like this. I anyway have too much to follow on Reader and networking sites that I don't feel the need of Sparks at all.

Chat: The GTalk chat is integrated into Plus, very much like GMail, with the additional feature that you can chat at once with an entire circle, or choose individuals from multiple circles. Did not try it out yet, do not need it anyway.

Hangouts: The link to start a hangout occurs on the right side, Requires an additional plugin that downloaded in less than a minute. Did not try it again, for the same reason as the chat above. A cool feature nevertheless.

Mobile: A small section in the bottom right displays a link saying Get Google+ for your mobile device that lets you send an sms to your mobile phone containing the url to the mobile version. You click the link on the sms and it takes you to a page that has another link taking you to the Android market that lets you download the mobile app. How lame! It could have simply asked you to search and install the Google+ app from the market.

Also, while entering your mobile number, you need to select your country, which shows Indonesia, Ireland, Isreal, India, and Italia in that random order.

However, having gone through all this, the android app is great to use. The Circles are not circles there, but the app is smooth and clean.

Instant Upload: A very nice feature of the mobile part. I clicked a photo, and within the next minute I received a notification on Google+ telling me that a new photo has been added from Instant Upload. I can then share the photo like I share anything else. Sweet.

UX: Awesome. I hear Andy Hertzfield, the original Mac guy, is the design lead on Google Plus. Hover over a photo album, it opens up like you flick a pack of cards, showing three photos.
You drag a contact into a circle, it makes a full anticlockwise circle inside the circle and sits at the rightmost available space. A green +1 pops up. Drag a friend out of a circle and you see a red +1. Delete a circle, it fades and rolls off the screen, and other circles roll on to take its place. Cute!

Hidden Gem: The familiar Gmail shortcuts of j and k to navigate to the previous and next conversations respectively exist in Google Plus as well!

The bottomline: Google Plus has a long way to go. Both the interface and the idea is easy and meant for the masses, not like Google Wave that interested mainly the techies. It may take some time before Plus evangelists are able to lure all (or most) FB users to Plus, till then, I have another place to share. Phew!!