I spent a chunk of the day playing with Google+ while doing a Windows 7 re-install on the kids machine. My first impression with Google is always tainted with positive bias. But I love it. I like the control it gives. It surely has some rough edges, but it's got some big benefits. The first one that jumps out at me is farmville. I like the social interaction Facebook has brought me, but I loathe the forced co-habitation with Facebook viruses like Farmville. I really hope that Google+ can remain a pure communication hub with the tasteful advertising we get with the other Google apps.
I have not used the video/audio chat features, but I can see them being very useful, especially in a distributed work environment.
Circles. Well duh. I love this feature. But I can also see it getting out of hand. I have about 50 or so friends on Facebook. Setting up circles for these friends was trivial. But I can also see someone having 600 friends with about 40 different circles and the fact that they used circles is foreshadowing - death by Venn diagram.
But the overwhelming positive feature - integration. Whether I'm looking at my Patrick+ page, my gmail, calendar, or any other Google app - I have integration into the social app. Hopefully this story gets expanded so that we have more top-bar integration (it would be nice to always see calendar and mail information as well as Google+). I expect advancement to come with maturing here. Facebook has no ability to compete here. Even on the phones Facebook is off playing in its own sandbox. It's a communication hub with walls.
Sparks are interesting, but I see that being a feature I could easily forget about and end up being wasted real estate. I have been using them for the last two days though, we'll see if that trend continues.
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