As soon as Google’s newest product became the news in some of the RSS feed I subscribe in, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this latest toy from Google. Unfortunately, as usual Google would not open this new product for everyone. We need an invitation to be able to sign up, and that’s a problem since I do not have a friend that can invite me. For few days, I write few Facebook status about invitation request, and no one responded. Until suddenly my wife got the invitation from her friend. The obvious step would be asking my wife to invite me to this new product, and she tried. Did not work at all. Somehow the only person we know that can send invitation is her friend. So I got the invitation from my wife’s friend.
Few hours after, I finally got my invitation, and finally get to explore the so-called Google’s social media.
The first thing that came into my attention was Circles. If Facebook has lists to “group” our friends into categories (which I believe very few people actually use that), Google has Circles. When we “add” our friend into our Google+ network, we need to add him/her into one of our Circles, defining our relationship with this person from the first place. A can put B into his “Friends” circle while B can put A into his “Acquaintances”, or even B might don’t want to add A into his Circles at all. So “friendship” status does not always to be equal both ways. I like Google’s concept better than Facebook’s. I always find it difficult to remember that I have to assign a friend I just added in Facebook to a list so that I won’t forget where I met this guy at. And Google’s Circle is more meaningful as it’s the base of further communication with our friends. We share things, hangout, or just sending messages based on these Circles.
Next to discuss is Stream. This is a combination of Facebook’s News Feed, Wall and Messages all in one place. It’s a News Feed in a sense that we can see what’s happening there (e.g. our friends’ status, activities, etc); it’s a wall in a sense that we can write something there, plus we can fully choose who we want to write to, who will see this writing (it can be few individuals, one or more Circles, all our Circles, our extended Circles or Public). This feature also replaces the need to send “private” message in Facebook. Because in order to send a private message to a person, we just need to write something in Stream (like setting Facebook status), but we set that only one person will receive it. Neat ! Smart ! But it will take time for me to get used to.
Just below the menu for Streams, we have Sparks. This is basically something like your RSS reader, attached in your home screen. We can define some topics that we are interested in, and Google will display some news articles, whatever about the topic so we always have something to read. Another smart idea, but not really useful for me as I still prefer my RSS reader because I can fully control the sources I want to read. But they will probably improve this later, who knows.
Just this morning I tried Hangout feature with few friends. It’s a combination of chatting, group chatting, voice and video conferencing, and group video conferencing. The conference went smooth. The video quality is not as clear as what we have in Skype, but it’s maybe because of the other side’s slow internet connection. Will try later on this. Interestingly, there’s an extra feature here, we can watch YouTube together. When a person watch a particular YouTube video, the others can watch the same too. Can be pretty awesome to watch something together, or to discuss on a project.
In one little word : NICE.
I would like to keep using this service especially when it’s already open for public to join. Glad to see a Google product with a nice touch of user interface.
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