I am usually the first to admit that I am virtually useless without Google. A few of my Apple obsessed friends love to give me a hard time for that. I literally cannot function without Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendars, and Google Chat. When I first heard that the search engine giant would be unveiling a brand new social network I was super skeptical. Google experimented with Wave and Buzz which are both now considered dead and nobody really figured out what the purpose of either of those services were. Immediately once Google released Google+ to the public Twitter instantly lit up with tweets from eager people sharing invites and asking for invites. I am also a huge fan of Twitter. Interacting instantly with other users around the world is the purpose of a social network and there is no network out there that allows such an instant and personal line of communication as you find with Twitter. After a few tweets back and forth with a couple of Google geeks I received my invite and finally had set up my own Google+ account http://gplus.to/davidskelton.

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?