Jul 11
11
If nothing else, over the past week Google Plus has stirred up a bit of a dust storm. All over Twitter and Empire Avenue, people have been going to extraordinary lengths to get an invite. Read begging.
It took me about 4 days of persistence to actually get on using an invite obtained by The Next Web editor Zee M Kane. Once in, I could see nearly straight away the wait was worth it. If nothing else, “Circles” are a welcome benefit to the social media scene. In essence Circles allow you to separate friends, family and nutbags into separate circles, and control who sees what comments you make. EG: You might post a comment that can only be seen by your friends.
Where this system falls down a little bit, so far as I can see, is when someone in one of your circles creates a stream that is public. At that point any of your comments to that stream become public. This means you still have to be careful what you’re saying about the nutbags behind their back 
Without a close circle of friends, none of these social media tools are going to do much for. The slight exception is if like Twitter you crash in on someone else’s public stream. It’s not completely inconceivable to gain new friends this way, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you can add some sort of wit or value to the topic being discussed.
With a group of friends online at once, the streams almost work like a multi-threaded chat. This can however be a little challenging to follow. New streams (topic threads) appear at the top of the page. New comments to existing topics appear at the bottom of those topics. As the interface is right at the moment, this could get a little difficult depending on how much is happening at once.
Without numerous people on at once, the streams feel like a big unstructured forum. By that I mean, you feel a little like you’re contributing to a forum post.
From what I’ve seen so far, and heard so far as other people’s opinions go, GooglePlus is likely to be many different things to many different people.
What it does to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn remains to be seen. I can imagine some people dumping one or all of those services for G+, others preferring to stay where they are.
The most common consensus I’ve seen about G+ is it definitely has potential. Perhaps better put another way, most people can see great potential in it. Taking notice of the GooglePlus bar that has appeared on Google services when you log into Google, I can see how Google is angling to unify the end user’s experience by tying all their services together. Having experienced the G+ notification icon, I can see the day arriving when it not only shows you what’s happening in GooglePlus, but also notifies you of new messages, chat requests, videos on YouTube channels you’re tuned into etc.
There’s no doubt this is a really big move by Google, and it could launch them near the front of social media services. I’m not convinced they will rule social media in the same way they’ve ruled search. Many people have a lot invested in Facebook and Twitter. It’s quite possible that for many, it will be just one more thing they use to communicate with others.
One things for sure. GooglePlus is unlikely to be the total flop that Google Wave was. Despite limiting daily invitations, more and more people are joining and connecting. Aside from the conceptual flaws in Wave, the fact you couldn’t collaborate with anyone on it was the biggest nail in it’s coffin in my opinion.
Please join the forum http://www.ozmacuser.com/forums/ if you’d like to contribute your views on this article.