Google+ Trial – What’s All the Hype About?

I created a short Google+ Walkthrough Video Tour and thought I would share my thoughts about Google+ after spending the day ‘playing’. Is Google+ all it’s cracked up to be?
Google+1 Button – The beginning of something big?

I feel that Google has a plan and the social media side of Google+ is only a small but essential part of the big picture. After spending the day on Google+, I have the feeling that the +1 button is primed to play a very important role in the future of search rankings, well Google Search results at least. The combination of social networking’s “word-of-mouth” value and the traditional organic search algorithms would form a legitimate ranking system. Only quality content will receive high votes from real human interaction, poor content will rate badly in the “+1″ voting system, both affecting their rankings in Google Search.

Create Your Circle of Friends

We don’t treat all the people in our life equally. Google+ makes it easy to group friends and acquaints for two purposes. Firstly, when posting you can select exactly which group of friends that post is viewable to or accessible by. The other purpose of the ‘circles’ is to filter your ‘stream’ of content from those that you are following.

Spark Your Interests

Google+ understands that social networking is about creating relationships by engagement and interaction with followers. This interaction is often created with sharing content. Sparks in Google+ is a feature that provides you with content that is of interest to you. You create “keyword” alerts accessible quickly with a click on a link. This will enhance the sharing of content with your ‘Circles’.

Hanging Out with Hangout

Wow, this is my favourite Google+ feature and a huge advancement in the basic video chat. Hangout gives you the ability to network face-to-face (via webcam) with up to 20 other Google+ users. I only had a short play in Hangout and expect that it could get a bit noisy with 20 attendees, but the feature has huge potential for both personal and business networking.

Peripheral Benefit

Convenience. With time being in such limited supply for most people, having a social network hosted within a suite of other resources, will be very handy for a lot of people. Having a single login to access social networking; email; documents; RSS reader; calendar and lots more, might make it just attractive enough for busy people to sign up.

Gmail Backbone

With cloud and mobile computing growing stronger by the day, gmail is becoming a no-brainer. Having access to emails and contact’s information is another benefit of convenience. Having an email inbox that ‘talks’ to a social networking platform, is convenience on steroids. In Google+ you can search; chat; ring and video call contacts you store in Gmail.

Other features similarly available on other social networking platform:-
Photo sharing; photo albums; tagging in photos; mobile upload; chat; photo and video upload; and the list goes on.

Time will tell if Google+ will have what it takes to move 700 million fans, but there is a long way to go.

Watch the short tour I recorded and make up your own mind if it is worth getting on board early, or hang around until “Version 2″ when all the bugs are ironed out.

VIDEO