A social media professional takes a test spin on Google+

BY HESSIE JONES, WHATSYOURTECH.CA

Your Google+ profile will include “Circles” of friends drawn from other social media accounts

I'm so excited. After being on what seemed to be a perpetual waiting list, I've finally had my chance to try out Google+ – Google’s much-discussed alternative to Facebook.

It wasn't really daunting at all. What I really like and what has set it apart from Facebook is G+'s ability to segment your contacts from the outset. They have the usual suspects: friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers. But now there is the ability to create your own “Circles”. I added 'clients', high school friends and social media peeps. What I love about this is once they've pre-identified your list from your linked accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, Flickr, LinkedIn, you automatically bucket these contacts (once they join G+) into your Circles.

What's now great is that your status/wall post can now be distributed to all or to individual segments! That's so much cleaner than Facebook's Newsfeeds, which only shows you friends/family posts based on your latest interaction with them...#fail. My niece found me right away. That's because you get notified on the top right-hand side (it'll show up under your "circles") if one of your contacts joins Google+.

The Welcome Page provides you with a summary of the features: 1) Circles; 2) Hangouts (create a video hangout for up to 10 friends); 3) Sparks (feeds from stuff you like).

I love Sparks. This is one thing that's very different from Facebook. On Sparks you have the ability to pick topics of interest: I picked Jeffery Deaver, movie trailers, entertainment, Apple iPhone. This automatically generates feeds right to your home page. This is amazing. It's Google Reader within a cool user experience. And it almost negates the need for brands or product categories to be added as pages if the user has only interest in certain topics. We'll see how this plays out as Google figures out how brands play in this new platform.
Read More...