My first impression of Google+ was that the layout is overly simplistic and I felt there weren’t many options for searching people outside of your Gmail contact book. The interface looks like a seriously stripped down combination of Facebook and Twitter. Instead of friends or followers Google introduces you to what it calls circles. I would use the words privacy bubbles to describe circles. Each post you can decide which circle to include and ideally you can target a specific circle or multiple circles per post. This is a brilliant and simple feature for publishing to certain circles per post. For those who want to post publicly there is also a public circle which would be comparable to a tweet where any fellow + user can see your feed. So you can see that Google+ is working on combining the features of Facebook and Twitter in one clean and simple package. There is already an iOS app in the app store which is great for posting on the run and surprisingly works a lot better than the native Facebook app. Google is clearly pushing hard to grab users and I think the exclusive invite game plan captured a lot of momentum from the Twitter community a month ago.

Unfortunately, other than the amazing idea of privacy circles there really aren’t many game changing features to be found quite yet. The one thing we can count on is for Google to keep on rolling out integration with Gmail, Reader, Chat, YouTube, Picasa, and other services in order to bait the hook for current Gmail users (all 200 million of them). Google is in a perfect position with it’s popular Android OS, Gmail followers, and the never ending Facebook privacy issues that have a lot of people anxious to try a new flavor of social network. If Google puts it’s best people and developers on this project it can certainly become a serious competitor in the next year or two. I’m rooting for Google+ to do great things and offer some truly game breaking features to social networking for years to come. What do you think?

This isn’t our first attempt at a trip to Thailand. Last summer our trip had been postponed last minute due to a sudden and violent political uprising in Bangkok. While the unexpected cancellation of our trip last year felt like a shock and was very disappointing at the time, it was also a great time of reflection for us all. Now that we are about two months from heading to Thailand the excitement is beginning to build again with great momentum.

While in Thailand I will be documenting our travels with a digital camera and camcorder. I was lucky enough to gain brief experience capturing video while on a trip to Trinidad a few years back but I have never been to such a moist climate as Thailand will be in June. The biggest challenge will be keeping the gear dry and also working around the lack of electricity for most of the trip. I have found a few dry bags and extra batteries to bring as well as some silica packs to keep moisture out of the cameras and hopefully there will be a few opportunities to charge. This will be the opportunity of a lifetime to grab some amazing footage to share back home.

I look forward to sharing our adventures with you as we return.