• GOOGLE COMPATIBILITY: Google Plus is socially compatible with other Google products, including Gmail and Google Maps. Most importantly, it is compatible with Google Buzz, a kind of mash-up of Facebook and Twitter which allows you to share information from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader, either publicly or with a selected list of friends. One of the things users like best about Google Buzz is that it is built into Gmail so you don’t need to add friends or set up a separate account; it adds the people you email and chat with the most frequently to your ‘friends’ list. Google Buzz is particularly great with photo sharing, automatically pulling images from links, playing videos online and allowing you to flick through photos quickly. Every time your cursor glides over a thumbnail, the photo is automatically enlarged with no tedious waiting. This is a far cry from Facebook, where you need to click onto a ‘cover’ photo before accessing the rest of the photos in the same album, particularly tiresome if you are viewing them from your phone. • CIRCLES: Google Plus features Circles instead of Friends Lists. It’s all about visual simplicity: the new system makes sharing online more lifelike, allowing you to group friends into different, visible circles so you can share what you want with who you want. It’s all a lot quicker than Facebook, which does allow you to restrict who views your photos and videos, but through a slightly more cumbersome process. Circles are very easy to manage, in that you can just pull friends into them or chuck them out prior to every individual action, like sharing a particular album or video, without having to enter and amend your privacy settings. When you sign up to Google Plus, you’ll find a small number of circles (Friends, Family, Acquaintances, etc.), which you can change and add to as you wish (for instance School Friends, Work Friends Immediate Family, Extended Family, etc.). • HANGOUTS: This function allows you to have video conferences with individual friends or entire circles, which is particularly interesting for work related calls. • HUDDLE: Have you ever tried to get a group of friends to decide on a movie, restaurant and time, only to feel like cancelling the whole darn thing after one too many conflicting phone calls, emails and text messages? Now you can forget about being the conduit between everyone, as you indulge in a simultaneous chat with everyone concerned. Just make sure everybody in the circle you’re using is invited, or at least be ‘nice’ and chuck them out of the circle before initiating the huddle! • SPARKS: This function allows Google to do what it has always done best: search for stuff you’re interested in! If fashion is your passion, or cooking, or technology, just type in the relevant words and Sparks will suggest information you will probably be interested in. This feature works nicely alongside the new
Google +1 button, which is appearing on many Google search results and whose purpose many people are curious about. • GOOGLE +1 BUTTON: This colourful icon, resembling a file with the sign ‘+1’ written on it, is something you’ve probably encountered if you conduct searches on Google with any regularity. It also appears on friends’ posts in Google Plus and within this context, it functions very much like Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button. The button is part of a much larger operation, however, since it allows you to share interesting content both with friends and with Google users all over the world. This is how it works: say you are searching for ‘top gadgets’ on Google. A list of sites appear in your search results and you particularly like one of them. You then click on the +1 button next to the result and the button turns blue. This +1 is automatically added to the +1s tab on your Google profile, where you can manage your +1s, deciding whether or not you wish to publicly share them. Even if you choose not to publicly share your +1s tab, your +1s will be visible by anyone viewing the result you +1’d. This allows users all over the world to find truly useful, popular sites that have been +1’d by many people. The button also allows you to find information that have been +1’d by your friends, which will probably be more relevant than anonymous +1s in many cases. The +1 button is currently only available on the Google search results but soon, they will appear within most websites themselves, making it easy to indicate that a site is informative or interesting after you have browsed through it. Remember, in order to use this function, you need to be signed into your Google account first.
• PRIVACY: Those who have concerns over privacy needn’t worry; Google Plus allows you to assign different levels of accessibility to different aspects of your profile. As with Facebook, you can control who can find you and block undesirables. The people listed in your circles will never be disclosed (even to other people within the same circle) though evidently, they could ‘discover’ each other if they post feedback or they agree to engage in a group huddle or collectively hangout. • PACKING UP: If you decide you don’t like Google Plus and prefer to stick to Facebook, just get out of town! Google allows you to simply ‘downgrade’ your account, so your profile is deleted as are any posts, circles and Google + content. And you’ll still be able to access all your other Google services like Gmail. • DATA BACK-UP: Do you stay up at night, wondering what on earth would happen to all your cherished memories, photos and stored info, if Google ever crashed? Just log onto www.google.com/takeout and download data from all your Google Plus products (like Picasa Web albums, your Google profile, contacts, stream and Google Buzz) onto your home computer. • MOBILE USE: Google Plus is supported by Chrome, IE, Firefox and Safari and can also be enjoyed on your mobile, which is really the ideal place for functions such as Huddle. Moreover, any photo or video recorded on your phone is automatically uploaded to Google Plus. That doesn’t mean that everyone can see them; you have to specify who you wish to share them with. You may feel thoroughly satiated by the barrage of information above but the ultimate question is: do we really need Google Plus? On a social networking scale it may add little to the Facebook experience (apart from sharing information through the +1 button), but on a whole, we love the sense of belonging to something much larger than simply a social experience. In a few months, everyone who’s anyone will most likely have a Google Profile and with features such as sparks, huddle and shared +1s, Google Plus is at the very least a solid competitor to Facebook; let’s see what else it can come up with to move entire social circles from one site to another… e OCTOBER 2011 ESSENTIAL MAGAZINE / 47
149IP.indd 47
26/9/11 12:47:20