I was relatively late to Facebook and very late to Twitter. At least in the social media sense. I never joined Google Wave. But yesterday I clicked on an invitation to join Google+
These are my first impressions:
Google+ seems to work like a kind of Twitter/Facebook hybrid that allows more control and looks great. There's a nice quote by Shimrit at Epicenter, "On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction." That sounds about right.
The comment streams are easy to personalize so as someone who really "knows" just about 5 percent of my facebook "friends," it will be neat to tailor feeds to follow those I'm most interested in. Plus I can step back and look at separate streams - like one for my former colleagues in Washington DC debating fisheries policy and another featuring the folks I'm well acquainted with in the science blogosphere. And it's possible to edit comments rather than deleting them. So far, so good.
Lately, the groups feature on Facebook has been frustrating me. Anyone can "add" me to their groups and as a result, I get included in a new one almost daily--often on subjects I haven't heard of. Emails arrive whenever there is group activity until I go in and unselect "to be notified when a member posts." Not a fan of that particular quirk.
Over on my Google+ feed, Dave Mosher writes, "G+ seems like the glue and the wires and the gears that turn a Google account into pieces that suddenly fit together, communicate and form an efficient machine of Internet-based services." He goes on to point out that if this new social network becomes fully integrated with other services, it may save us all time without the need to log into, open, fiddle with the settings of, and otherwise burn time on other services. I like that too.
What I'm most excited about is being able to chat with groups of people by video. Having moved around a lot over the past decade, it would be great to bring people back together to "hangout" from different periods of time.
In short, here's my early review: So far, I'm quite impressed. And I'm wondering how long it will be before we're all using it..
