The Ultimate Combo

What is Google+ ?

To an average person, it is yet another Social network.

To Google, it is their best bet on being Social.

To Other Social Networks: It is a Threat, a warning.

To me : It is near about the thing which I was waiting for since the time I joined Facebook in late 2009.

Let’s talk about the entire social ecosystem it builds around Google’s services.

+1 button: 

It is same as a Facebook like button on Websites and links on Google Search results.

Awesome concept, Will help Google in future to give search results a social touch and move towards Web 3.0 .

in fact if someone is logged in,  his previous +1s can be tracked by Google in giving him search results and trying to understand what the person as an individually must be searching for. this will be more than what semantic search Web 3.0 demands. being Social could well lead to Web 4.0.

[Anyways these terms are coined by biggies like O’ Reilly, Google and others. I will just brag about it in future, if it happens to be so ].

This is the first feature Google brought in without Google+ being launched.

still doesn’t look as cool as Facebook’s like button but in future will be more useful than Facebook’s likes atleast unnecessary pages won’t be created for people just to tell what they like. instead just keep +1ing to tell world , ‘that link is awesome’.

I guess this will also infact affect SEO as it wont just be links to your website but also +1s that will affect your ranking, and that will be something that will only come when people will actually +1 it.

now i can +1 Wikipedia pages and infact Facebook pages without them having to incorporate +1 in their website.

I guess this is the feature that gave Google+ its name.

Circles.

This is The G+ Feature that is grabbing eyeballs.

Create your circles and drag and drop people you wanna follow in it so that when you share,chator  interact with them you have a choice of choosing circle wise.

So here is where G+ betters both Twitter and FB. share with whom you want to and they will only get to see if they want to.

It has got an amazing UI and has also got a lot of scope of innovation around it.

Usage of all related Google services where one needs to interact with people will have contacts and those contacts can collectively be circled and things can be shared.  

example: sharing a Google doc in a circle.

Circles of circles could be possible where people can add circles two  make bigger circles or even substract circles from circles. Reminds me of Venn diagrams and set theory, just that we will be inside the circle rather than outside.

the Google Circle will be the biggest circle. People should be able to sync with each other’s circles and much more.

There could be Interest Circles where people could follow interesting stuff like products and get there feeds.

I just love this feature.

Hangout

This is the feature which is suppose to be a Facebook killer. basically it is integration of Google Video chat with G+.

Here people can hangout which will basically be a video conference of maximum 10 people.

In fact its integrated with YouTube so that these people can simultaneously watch same YouTube video.

It Also has an integrated chat system so that those people can chat, making it a complete chatroom or shall i say a ‘hangout room’ ?

Old Google Integrated services and Future prospects

• Picasa web albums are also your G+ photo albums.
• Gmail chat is there and your previous GMail contacts are as it is just that you can also add people from your circles in your G+ chat and that will send them a chat request like it happens in normal GMail chat requests.
• I guess Blogger will also be changed in future and if it becomes as awesome as Tumblr is so i guess I will have to move from here.
• There are also rumors that they will soon start  Google games and questions.
• the Android g+ app is also available from the day1 and also iOS version is there.

Useful tool:

To migrate your photos from Facebook to Google+

try move2picasa by Aman Jain.

The black menu bar.

The menubar at the top of Google homepage turned black all of a sudden, a few days before G+ was launched.

I thought they have lost their design sense! After two days, everything changed,

that bar became Google’s strongest social weapon. As of now, Its there on all Google sites except Youtube, Chrome Webstore and android market.

For a moment if someone feels I will stick to Facebook and twitter for my social experience and just log in to gmail for mails.

What happens is that that black bar above will always remind you of G+ and in GMail you will always get notifications on that bar and will feel like at least checking once and then you have options to reply there itself and infact give a status update.

Why Google+ ?

It may seem that it is just another Social network and why should I move. Some Facebook fanboys might get hurt when people call G+, a FB killer. The point is its not going to go away like Wave or Buzz. It is here to stay and for long or may be forever. It is a whole hearted attempt that Google has made on its claim of being Social.

A lot of People already have Google accounts, many of them were on Orkut for long. They won’t have to create a new account.

even if Google+ doesn’t replace Facebook, it has definitely shaken it, proven by the fact that it recently blocked a FB to G+ friends exporter chrome extension  from accessing contacts of one’s friends.

Google as we all know as a company, believes in betterment of world and web. There motto of ‘Don’t be evil ’ still holds even if many people still consider it to become a real world skynet.

I love Google, for their innovation. As soon as you open your browser, you are in there domain, the Internet.

They have everything : GMail,Chrome,Maps,search,docs, YouTube, picasa, Google apps,Google sites,Blogger, Android and now Plus and much more.

Even if there are bugs or features missing in G+, I trust them to improve it soon.

look at there doodles, How much passion do they put in while doing amazing stuff.

They host OpenSource projects and give students a chance under GSOC to contribute to it.

They have taught, both IE and FF how a modern browser should be like, there by forcing coming of HTML5 and future of web much before they would have actually come into picture with the introduction of world’s most awesome browser Chrome.

Basically they are company full of enthusiastic and passionate people who do great stuff. 

That’s why, there are key people whose name you take when you say Google, like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and now Vic Gundotra.

 But in case of other giants like Apple, Microsoft and  Facebook there is always one name you would take.

These are companies whose policies reflect only one man’s vision.

Where as Google is a company that has a vision that is much bigger than what these companies collectively are.

I just hope, Google plus comes good and  all my friends shift to Google+ so that I can leave Facebook.

Hope this dream comes true….