On Wednesday, I finally received access to Google Plus, the latest creation from Google and a new social media site to the market. Overall functionality in Google Plus can be broken down into:

Circles – The contact management and organizer in the system. Similar to how contacts work in Gmail – tagging contacts, but with a much better user experience.
Sparks – Basically topics that you can add to follow. The system will present you the relevant posts on the subject. Topics, such as sports, technologies, cars, etc.
Hangouts – simply put, group video messaging
Instant Upload – On mobile, when you take a photo, it is automatically uploaded to your private collection. You can choose to share it with your circles at a later time.
Huddle – You can think of it as a mobile group text messaging and chatting
Stream – On the main page, each spark and circle will have its own stream available. Think of it as a subset view of your friends and people you follow.

After spending a night playing with Google Plus, I have realized that Google designed the new social media site with lots of learnings from Wave and Buzz. The most important improvement of all, is actually the launch strategy! Not every functionalities are implemented just yet, but the new service covers many different features that would certainly appeal to all types of users.

Unlike Buzz, which was a single feature targeted only at Twitter users. It really was a little web application or plugin, not a platform!
Unlike Wave, which was a was a new product, new methodology and probably way ahead of its time. (Design a platform for the masses, not only for geeks and power users!)
And unlike Google TV, which was announced in May 2010 at Google I/O, but the product didn’t ship until October 2010. All the hypes were dry up!

At the end of the day, Google is not a startup anymore. When a new service is launched, people expect more. We don’t want to see you make a big fuzz around a small feature (e.g. Buzz) nor an announcement of something you will launch in 6 months or year (e.g. Google TV.) At least they got this right with Google Plus.

What I like so far

The user interface of Circles is very well done! Extremely useful for organizing people into different circles. It makes group messaging via Hangouts and Huddle much useful. Let say if you find a good article about wine, you can share with your Wine Tasters circle and not necessarily share with all of your friends.
If I feel like reading posts by the people I follow, I don’t need to open a new tab in Chrome. I can just click on the Stream.
The group messaging capability seems useful. Good start for collaboration and sharing information with specific group of friends.
Group video conferencing under the same UI.
The Google Plus settings is somewhat mature. It integrates with other Google services already, this make it seamless for the users.
The system automatically grab your Picasa web albums and share them with your peeps appropriately.
The mobile app is available since day one, and it is pretty slick too.
The photo view in the system is decent and simple.

What needs to be done (and soon)

The Google Plus platform is still somewhat buggy. For example, the people recommendation to create Circles needs to be more refine. Once the system retrieved my contact list off Gmail (about an hour after I created the new profile) the list changed. The system is not reading my list off from my Twitter profile. I had to go elsewhere (http://socialstatistics.com/) to find people to build up my “following” circle. The circle recommendation only limits to my friends now. When I open up the “following” circle, you will show me a few folks that I may be interested in following?
Sparks is not integrated with Google Trends. So I have to manually define the list again.
The Google Plus settings is only somewhat mature. I like to see more privacy and security settings around setting up the new circles. It feels like I was robbed out of something great. And I like to be in control, specially in social media sites.
Why is that Posts and Buzz are separated?
The Google Plus mobile app is not necessarily optimized for Android tablet. Seriously guys, add some Pulse like feature for Streams and Sparks!!!
Where is Aardvark then? Google’s Q&A acquisition from Feb 2010.

Bottom line

Google Plus is a good start and looks promising. Will I switch to it 100% from Facebook? Not just yet! Will I continue to use it? Definitely. I always prefer the one-stop-shop approach and Google did a nice job from both business and end-user perspectives. IMO, Google Plus will threaten Facebook in some ways. (Give it 6 months to a year?) But I think that Google Plus also competes with companies like Twitter and Tumblr, as well as startups who are currently working on group messaging or mobile video conferencing.

And by the way Like vs. Plus. Take your pick!

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