Last night I got my first look at google+, I spent just over three hours diving in and playing with all the features they have to offer. For those of you who already have access, please share your thoughts in the comments and those without access, enjoy this preview and share your thoughts on what this new social network could mean for seo.
First look
Below is the “Home” screen, which seems vaguely familiar to a different social network I use but seems to be somewhat more streamlined. You can simply sort your friend groups, called circles, by clicking on the “Streams” in the left sidebar. This give you a chance to only see things shared from your family or other circles, for example I can select “Family” and see only their content. This looks like it makes it really easy to combine all your work and personal contacts into one network.
Circles
The first thing I got right into was Germany Business Fax List creating circles, which are much like facebook groups where you can categorize people. This is helpful for people like myself who don’t like to share my seo related stories/posts with my friends/family members. The process of adding people to these circles was relativity easy, granted I only had 8 people in my list, but this process seems very streamlined.
Hangouts
An interesting feature that rand, space, mike and I got to try last night was google hangouts. It’s a feature that allows you to chat and video chat Email Lists with up to 10 friends. We found the feature to work, though it wasn’t as great as I thought it was going to be. The cool thing is that when you start a hangout, it alerts other people in your circles that you have started a hangout so they can join. You can limit who sees that you have started a hangout this prevents you from starting a business hangout and having your mom show up.
