Google Plus After The Dust has Settled Down: Bullet points: Part 1

By now everyone and their mother has heard about Google+ and has probably looked over their inbox for that invite if they haven't joined already. It is quite an elaborate beta test with over 18 million users. Needless to say this is indeed Google's best foray into the elusive 'Social' club of which the only member is Facebook(I still am not sure about Twitter's domain as social network). So having used Google+ for over a month now, here are my thoughts:

• As most folks, when I joined G+, there weren't too many of my friends and the only folks who were on were the early adopters and opinion bloggers. So naturally I followed them and realized how easy it was to follow someone like Twitter but much better because of the ease of conversation and engagement. I could never completely get myself onto Twitter since I could find no compelling reason to post something on it rather than on Facebook. I understand its usefulness for celebrities and companies who wanted interact with their fans and customers respectively. But with Facebook introducing fan pages and company pages with much more extensive features, it became really difficult for me to justify the raison d'etre of Twitter. But with Google+, its almost like the ease Twitter but with all bells and whistles of Facebook.

• Soon enough my wall (can't get rid of the Facebook lingo) started getting drowned with the innumerable posts from the these bloggers and tech gurus. It was fun for a while, but I was tired of the same posts coming up because of the way Google ranks them (it does by popularity meaning +1s and comments). Any posts from my friends though far and few in between would be drowned by the Tech leaders. Of course you can always check different circles but it always opens shows your stream by default and I like because of the flexibility of checking multiple circles at the same time. Also on the mobile app, you can't default to your friends circle or any other circle for that matter. You always are shown your basic stream first. Of course you can mute a post to take it off our stream, but its too much effort to mute each and every post (and you can't do it yet on the phone app).

• I love Facebook's approach on this, they have something called as 'Top News' which is ranked by popularity but even on that it ranks popularity by your friends activity on a post. So for eg. anything that Roger Federer posts always gets a zillion likes and comments from his fans. But it doesn't always stay on top of my wall, unless all my friends decide to comment and like it. That way only stories that are relevant to me stay on top. If Facebook only had that it would be good enough by itself, but it also provides a 'Recent News' options which removes all priorities and just shows posts by recency. Google has copied so many things from Twitter and Facebook so I think they should copy this methodology for the stream without any delay. Right now, the experience sucks on Google+ if you're following a lot of famous people( and I still want to keep doing that without getting bombarded by their postings alone).