The Short Story on Google+
Posted by Blake Nussbaumer on Mon, Jul 11, 2011
Our team at NetSolutions has had a chance to get in on the Google+ action both on mobile and within the web interface. Here is my brief review of Google+ which seems to have tremendous potential to be a tool for both you and your business (once business pages are released).
Circles
The first and most revolutionary feature in Google+ is circles. Circles allow you to create separate groups of people. It is similar to Facebook friend lists, but the interface is much easier to use. For example in order to add people to your business circle, you simply drag their name into the circle. There is a greater level of privacy to this system, because you can select which circles receive messages on your stream (Facebook's Wall).
Hangouts
The next interesting feature is Hangouts. You can start an unplanned hangout at any time where you can talk to up to 10 people at the same time with video. Having live video chat like this with better quality than Skype is huge for business meetings that don’t need more than 10 in a live conference call. It is as Google says the next best thing “until teleportation arrives...”
Also to note is that Google pictures and videos are instantly uploaded to a private file. This makes it all the more easier to simply grab a photo and upload it since it is already there for you in non-public storage.
Sparks
The penultimate feature is Sparks. Sparks is similar to StumbleUpon in that it finds sights you are interested in and keeps updating those interests so that you always will have something new to look at. I think there is a little more work to do with this but it has great potential.
Finally, Huddle allows groups of people to have mass chats where everyone is viewing each other’s texts.
Here are some Pros and Cons of Google+.
This is a very limited graph of all the Pros and Cons. To summarize, it leans towards being beneficial over having disparate social media tools that need to be managed ecklectly . Google+ is intuitive, has flexibility with privacy in Circles, and centralizes most social media management tasks. We'll see how acceptance plays out in the weeks and months ahead. Watch out Facebook!