Gadgetory

rafe needleman here with a first look of Google Plus Google's Facebook killer well not really but Google+ is the search giant's latest major social networking play and it's the first product that may eventually just give other social networks including Facebook and Twitter a run for the money google has clearly learned a lot from the problems that affected earlier experiments like orchid google buzz and Google Wave the key social concept of Google+ is the circle you can create circles for the different parts of your life your work your family your friends your hobbies and it's easy to drag people into circles and then to create updates that just go to particular circles or to all of them at once and then to keep you from getting overwhelmed by all your contact social updates you can watch just what's happening in particular circles by using streams so if you're in the mood to see what's going on with your family you just check out your family stream the ease with which you can shift in and out of circles send updates to one or some or all of them is Google pluses big differentiator from both Facebook and Twitter now Facebook in particular also lets you send updates to particular groups but in plus the whole setup is around carefully directing updates to particular groups it doesn't feel like an afterthought like it does in facebook google+ also has a very strong video conferencing feature called hangout you can create a video room and then invite your friends from some or all of your circles plus displays everyone's webcam image at the bottom of the window and automatically shows a bigger video of whomever is talking it's a seamless and very powerful video experience we tried it here and we were up and running and having a natural conversation in moments Plus also makes it really easy to share photos it connects to picasa web albums for instant sharing or you can easily drag pictures from your computer into your stream to share with your circles and if your mobile there's a good mobile web version of plus it has some features that you don't get in the big web version like location-based check-in and the ability to see stream updates from the friends that are closest to you but it can't access the video hangout features android users also get a nap and iPhone users will get the app later all is not perfect in plus land though adding people to your circles can be time-consuming and a little confusing especially if you're used to the more monolithic social systems of Facebook or Twitter it's not clear for example if you add someone to a circle if you're also added to one of theirs also integration with other Google services is so far incomplete for example if you have a lot of contacts in say google voice you might see all of those people in google+ but not the categories or the circles that you filed them under and if you send a direct message to a user from plus through the email feature and they email you back it shows up in your gmail viewer not in + + is big on privacy and data ownership though which is a big plus the whole idea of segregating your updates into circles makes it much easier in theory to control who sees what of the things you post Google is also pushing pluses take out feature that lets you export all the information on plus to your own computer for use however you want facebook finally has this too but I was a very long time coming if you want to get into + hit up your friends there's big demand from people to try the service and people who are in it have been sending out a lot of invitations Google is only letting those invitations go out in small batches for the time being but they should start flowing again soon it is unlikely the Google+ will unseat Facebook as the number one social network but it is a worthy additional social service if you're not already overwhelmed by having to manage your connections in facebook and twitter or linkedin and elsewhere it's really worth a try when you can get in i'm rafe needleman prasina you