Google+ First Look and Impression

Google Plus is a new initiative from Google in the Social Networking after failure of some of its early projects like Google Wave – they must be observing the Social Media Day today by launching this new service. We are here, exploring look and feel of Google+, a new social networking service from Google based on Circles, Hangouts, & Sparks with Google Profiles, Buzz, Picasa Albums & Videos. Also Google Buzz, Socio are not receiving much attention. Google Plus is released just after they globalized their +1 services which is similar to Facebook’s like. Add TechSansar to your friend circle in Google+ or let us know if you want invitation.

The home page says: The Google+ project makes sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life. Let’s see how easy G+ makes our computing behavior.

Google Plus can be accessed by going to http://plus.google.com/ after you signed into your Google Accounts. You can build your Google Friend Circles extensively based on your friend’s invite email address or already those who are in your contact list. We tried it for Google Apps contact and had little difficulty with. TechSansar’s first post in Google+ Stream has been awesome !!! However, Google + seems like using excessive HTML5 and CSS3 technologies to give its users totally fresh look. The use of Web 2.0 (even Web 3.0) is yet to be observed, hope Google will be fast enough in Social Networking this time, which is the only way Google+ can survive.
Currently Twitter and Facebook are serving millions of streaming posts about Google Plus service which is as of now invite only. Also some people are complaining that even though they get the invitation, they can’t login or sign up with Google Plus service. If you want Google Plus invite, drop us a comment with your valid email address!

Google Plus is in another way a central repository of previous Google Profiles, Buzz, +1 collection, Picasa Web album’s shared pics and videos. And all of these can be controlled via Google Plus data liberation from the setting panel. As of now, there is no official Google words regarding the storage capacity of the service because users (free ones) were allocated only 1GB of storage in Picasa which includes the images uploaded in Blogger as well. This will soon exhaust the storage in Plus, if Google uses the same web storage.
The structure of Google Plus profile looks like similar to that of Google Profile, with addiction of a sub-domain “plus” in it. TechSansar @ Google Profiles has the URL: https://profiles.google.com/111909189918490105187/ while the Google + profile URL is basically the same: https://plus.google.com/111909189918490105187 . However, there was an opportunity in Profile pages given for users to customize their Google Profile page into vanity link like https://profiles.google.com/techsansar instead of using a long list of numbers.
Using email address can be one way of getting spam during Google+ (frankly, using numbers in URL can check it, but doesn’t look human friendly like in vanity URLs), people have been giving their email addresses publicly in twitter streams asking for invitation into the Google+ program.

These are some of the features of Google Plus seen as of now, we hope to come across some more in time. Atleast, we can be sure that Plus will depend on Facebook and Twitter plus other social networking sites to bring more users to it, hence you can still connect your other social media profiles to Google+.

These were some of the Google+ features and limitations we have explored as of now. A nice animated demo tour and features of Google+ can be viewed on The Google+ Project page.