I got a Google Plus invite from my awesomely brilliant friend Sal yesterday and spent a couple of hours playing with it yesterday evening.
The fact that I didn't get to bed until nearly 1am sums up how I feel about Google's latest foray into social networking....it's pretty awesome!
'Circles' lets you put all of your contacts (Facebook calls them friends) into different groups - just like in real life/offline. You can have as many circles as you like and people can be in more than one circle. Currently I have 'friends', 'family', 'following' (for those folk you find interesting but don't really know), 'arbor lights' (my bandmates), and 'work'.
Each time you post a piece of content (status update, photos, link etc) you can choose who sees it - all your circles, certain circles, or just one person. So your boss doesn't have to see the photos you took at the pub last weekend.
'Stream' is essentailly the same as the Facebook news feed; it shows all of the activity from your contacts and you can filter it by circles, so if you only want to see what the members of your 'family' circle have been up to, you can filter this with one click.
'Hangout' is one of my favourite features - finally Google has bought group video chat to the masses, for free! You start a hangout and your friends are alerted in their stream that you're available to video chat. Again, you can choose who can see the hangout from your various circles, so you only have to chat with the people you want to. Once people join you can group video chat between yourselves. Last night there were 3 of us but from all accounts it works just as well with twice that number of people and more.
When someone speaks their video window is enlarged to highlight them and you can also click on people to enlarge them at will. A feature that makes this element even more social is that you can search YouTube for a video and play it for the whole group to watch simultaneously - everybody watching can 'push to talk' to speak over the video and discuss it, pretty cool?
There's also a text chat box on the left hand side so you can chat without interrupting the video's audio.
'Sparks' is an interesting feature, it allows you to general topics you're interested in (I added 'Pearl Jam', 'Aston Villa' and 'Wolverhampton') and Google brings you a summary of articles on these topics. The clever part is that the content here is driven by +1 recommendations on Google search and from the +1 buttons you've no doubt seen popping up on your favourite websites - so the more +1s (recommendations) web pages get, the more chance they'll be seen in sparks.
'Photos' lets you upload photos (duh!) and includes everything you'd expect - albums, tagging, facial recognition, instant mobile uploads etc. One thing that stands out is the way in which your images are displayed in the gallery with the lead image larger and the thumbnails different sizes; it's a very visually appealing way of displaying content - something that is seen across Plus.
Things I haven't tried yet....
'Huddle' is group chatting via mobile. Forget sending a text to 4 people and have 4 individual replies, with Huddle you can group chat from the Plus Android App. The reason I've not tried it yet is because there's no Huddle in the with Google mobile web app and there's not an iPhone app.....yet!
Summary so far....
So far my experience of Plus been great! I've only used it for around 3 hours but I'm already beginning to see the benefits of how it works and providing more people join up (once they re-open invites I'll send some out!) I can see it fast becoming a realistic alternative to Facebook.
At the moment it feels as if Plus is geared towards slightly younger, tech savvy types, the generation who have grown up trying out new web services and not to people like my parents who are pretty web savvy but don't really see the value in sharing their lives digitally. It could be the 'Facebook alternative for Twitter users' and there's certain no sign of Farmville anywhere yet, which is fine by me!
