• Will Google+ Take You where Farmville can’t?

    Date: 2011.08.15 | Category: Alternative Media | Tags: ,,,,,

    Farmville going to Google+Farmville going to Google+

    I’ve been evaluating Google+ lately after receiving an invitation. So far it looks very much like Facebook with the concept of circles instead of groups. This isn’t a great departure conceptually. Although I have found the formatting and layout exceptionally crisp. There doesn’t seem to be so much clutter in the user’s profile that you would find in an aging Facebook profile. When you are adding contacts to your circles there is a bit of a dynamic graphic as you choose square contact files and select, drag, and drop them into your circles. The circles have a bit of dynamic movement or animation as this occurs, but your profile itself is still a square layout along with the parallel list along the left side of your comment ‘wall’.

    If you already have a Google email account or have downloaded Picasa or use any of the other of the features of a Google account then you already on your way to setting up your Google profile. I have Picasa locally installed on my computer and have found it is one of Google’s better applications for photo management. Once you have your Google+ profile, managing your photos is a snap since your profile and the Picasa cloud photo storage feature  become dynamically linked.

    If you use any of the other Google services such as the calendar or other services everything nicely meshes together with Google+. Although I find it a bit annoying that the navigation bar along the top of your Google+ profile still forces you to launch a different tab when selecting the other services. A gut feeling tells me that an eventual revamp with HTML 5.0 may free us from these annoying tabs when you are jumping from your calendar to Google Docs or other such activities.

    Something else really good about Google+ is the ability to limit your posts from being all out viewable public or just narrowing down to one of your circles. Google+ also seems to think that is important that you ‘check-in’ when you post, that is reveal your geographical location, but this too can be turned on and off. You also able to block seeing notifications or posts by other users that you find annoying or offensive.

    Much like Facebook, Google+ also has games and many of them are identical to those found on Facebook. Although I was never a big game player on Facebook I did find that one can waste a lot of time playing Zynga Poker much like I did the other night when I could have been writing this article.

    Another thing that Google+ has going for them is an established search engine, something Facebook doesn’t have in their social media cache. But overall I still think we are faced with same dogged question, “Will Google+ take you where Farmville can’t”?