Google+ First Review
Posted by Bradley Wint on 30/06/2011
Google recently unveiled their latest attempt at social networking, this time calling it Google+. While other endeavors such as Wave and Buzz have proved somewhat unsuccessful, they have put quite the effort into this new project. We were lucky enough to get an invite last night, and it seems the new service was so well received that they have disabled further invitations, but we do hope they re-enable the option later on. Our review first looks at the features they have to offer, and then we make some comparisons to other popular social networks.
The Features
Starting on the homepage (as seen above), you can see the Stream which shows all activity created by yourself and friends. One the left side, you can filter the stream by groups or Circles as Google calls it. There is also a like to Sparks, which categorizes the latest news from Google News by topics such as autos, sports, etc. If you’ve used GChat, your contact also appear in the left column. To the right of the Stream, you can view a quick preview of the folks in your Circles as well as possible suggestions based on your Gmail contact list. Finally, we see the most talked about Hangout feature where friends can video chat with each other in conference style. Ok, let’s get into detail about each feature.
Circles
The one of the more popular features about Google+ is the ability to classify friends into groups or Circles. This has a huge effect on privacy and is supposed to be a step up from other networks in terms of better control over privacy and content sharing. When you initiate your account, there are four groups called Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. There is the option to add more groups to better categorize your friends. They have made it easier to control who sees what, so this means you don’t accidentally share your private photos from the secret vacation with your parents.
Sparks
Sparks delivers up to the minute news on a variety of topics, with the option to search for any topic of choice. It combines Google News and other hot sources, such as articles and videos. You’ll be able to add a link to whatever topics fancy your interest, so whenever you log in again, you just have to click the link and it dishes out the newest headlines based on those topics.
Photos
Just like Facebook, they have also included the option to upload photos via the web browser or via the mobile phone app. Unlike Facebook though, the uploader is very easy to use and quick. Rather than having to configure a million settings, it’s basically a 1-2-3 process.
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