09 Jul 11 From Buzz to Plus

Sorry, I could not resist playing this pun on Google’s new attempt on social networking. Not that I have ever used Buzz, I have indeed created a Google profile back in those days. Now that Google has started the party again, I have managed to get an invitation and actually join the club (which does not seem too easy, according to some comments). Just started playing with it and I have to admit it really looks interesting. Of course it brings along the standard social features like a profile page and posting your content but there is a fine difference when it comes to connecting to people. While most social networks only have the possibility to “friend” someone on a mutual basis and Twitter only knows the concept of following people, Plus blends these worlds together and allows to connect to people either in a two-way fashion or unidirectional. The Circles feature allows to group your contacts and even the initial collection of circles suggest the separation of contacts that know you from those that you are interested in.

When raising the topic of social networks, most of the time the question of privacy and data protection arises (at least here in Germany). As with its established services, Google makes a quite transparent impression here. You cannot only review the privacy policy of the service, even better, you have the possibility to review the visibility of all your data (there is even a feature to preview your profile from the eyes of another person – just enter the name). All content can be downloaded to ZIP or JSON files which is in my eyes the highest level of transparency that can be established for such a service.

At this point of time, Plus is just a bread-and-butter social network. There are no apps and no API has been released (yet). All looks very neat and tidy and I sincerely hope it stays the same.

My bottomline, this new service looks very promising. I do not think it will replace Twitter or Facebook in the short and medium term but if Google continues this way, it will certainly grab its share of the market.

My profile can be found at: http://profiles.google.com/oliver77charles