By Scott Tibbs, July 19, 2011
I joined Google Plus yesterday. Here are my thoughts on Google's attempt to compete with Twitter and Facebook on a social networking platform.
On Facebook, you only have a connection to someone else if a "friend" request is both sent and approved. On Google Plus, you follow and are followed by other profiles without approval. You could technically follow many more profiles than follow you, or vice versa. In this way, it is much more like Twitter than Facebook. Right now, Google Plus is not nearly as robust as Facebook with its many applications, games and so forth. I expect that will change quickly.
Here is an annoyance. All of your Google products are linked to your Google Plus profile. This means my "album" of pictures posted to this blog is linked on my profile. If the album is not public, then pictures do not load on the blog. This is not a big deal, since all of the pictures in the album were posted to this blog anyway, but it would be nice to have the option to not link to it. Furthermore, the collection of pictures looks strange without the blog posts to provide context.
I have not found a way to feed my blog posts into Google Plus, like you can with Twitter and Facebook. That doesn't mean the feature is not there, of course, just that I have not found it yet. Right now, when I post on this blog, both my Twitter feed and the Facebook fan page for ConservaTibbs are automatically updated. I expect Google will add that feature soon if it doesn't exist already.
Unless there is an option to add a feed to Google Plus, I don't expect my profile will be updated often or will contain much more than the bare minimum it does now. I have more than enough to do without adding something else.
