I've been procrastinating editing a lot lately, which kept me offline for about a week or two. Finally I said, "Aw, screw it," and got back on Google+ and Twitter just in time to find out that G+ is two years old today and in two days I'll have been on it for two years, and that I've been on Twitter four years as of yesterday. Significantly, G+ no longer slows down my computer to a crawl and TweetDeck's working for the first time in a month. Synchronicity or just serendipity?
Meanwhile Twitter recently killed off Posterous, exactly as I feared (and cynically predicted) when Posterous sold out, so over the coming month I'll be reposting entries from my now dead Posterous blog here and on the project blog. And I'll start blogging about books and music again, and I'll post photographs and drawings.
The important thing is, I'm back. And I'm relieved.
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Friday, June 28, 2013
Thursday, June 30, 2011
First Thoughts on Google+
So Google finally decided to release its "Facebook killer" that they were once going to call "Google Me" but which now is Google+. On the second day of its beta release, I managed to get an invite from a fellow FriendFeeder, so now I'm in on it and get to check it out. These are my initial impressions.
It was a no-brainer for me to accept the invitation, since I already have so much stuff on Google, at Picasa, YouTube, Google Docs, and so on. Looking at the main stream, I can see it has a lot in common with FriendFeed and the Facebook news feed. But the toolbar at the top (below the black main bar) gives you easy access to photos; others' in your stream as well as your own at Picasa (which you can even upload); your Google profile (mine has not just my Plus posts and the "about me" section, but my Picasa photos, the videos I haven't yet uploaded, and my Google Buzz stream); and the new Circles feature, which happens to be the best implementation of a "lists" feature I've ever seen, which even takes care of the privacy problems that have long plagued Facebook. There's a video chat feature called Hangout, and an option to download all your Google data (currently limited to Picasa and Google+ itself) if you want to back it up.
So far, so good. Of course, I'm only beginning to find my way through Google+. There's still the issue of the learning curve; it's still new. There's still a lot of glitches that have to be worked out. And it's still invitation-only. But then, it's still in beta. Hopefully Google will work out the glitches before it goes into full release, and put it into full release a lot sooner than they did Wave. But if one thing's for sure, I'm already using it a lot more than I do Facebook.
It was a no-brainer for me to accept the invitation, since I already have so much stuff on Google, at Picasa, YouTube, Google Docs, and so on. Looking at the main stream, I can see it has a lot in common with FriendFeed and the Facebook news feed. But the toolbar at the top (below the black main bar) gives you easy access to photos; others' in your stream as well as your own at Picasa (which you can even upload); your Google profile (mine has not just my Plus posts and the "about me" section, but my Picasa photos, the videos I haven't yet uploaded, and my Google Buzz stream); and the new Circles feature, which happens to be the best implementation of a "lists" feature I've ever seen, which even takes care of the privacy problems that have long plagued Facebook. There's a video chat feature called Hangout, and an option to download all your Google data (currently limited to Picasa and Google+ itself) if you want to back it up.
So far, so good. Of course, I'm only beginning to find my way through Google+. There's still the issue of the learning curve; it's still new. There's still a lot of glitches that have to be worked out. And it's still invitation-only. But then, it's still in beta. Hopefully Google will work out the glitches before it goes into full release, and put it into full release a lot sooner than they did Wave. But if one thing's for sure, I'm already using it a lot more than I do Facebook.
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