Google+ now open to the public

Google+. Some of you may of heard about it, some may of not. Potential Facebook killer? Possibly. But Google+ has just been released to the public, and is out of private testing and now in beta for everyone! Now some of you may just be like eh forget it, I’ll stick with Facebook since everyone is using it. But it doesn’t hurt to give it a try, now does it? I’ve personally had Google+ since it was still private, and you could only get invited to use it. But here’s the basic run down of it. At a first glance, Google+ is pretty user friendly and easy to navigate around. There are the few odds and ends which are confusing, and cause you think and play around to figure out what something actually does.

Google+ has this neat feature called “circles” which essentially is grouping your friends/family into different categories, so it’s easy to manage and talk to them. An addition to circles is also “hangouts” which allows you do live webcams with everyone within the circle you pick, it’s like an alternative to Skype which I think is pretty cool.

Profiles, it’s the same typical layout as Facebook. Your friends are on the bottom left, profile picture in top left, you have a wall, photos, videos, etc etc. One new feature though that is similar to the “like” button on Facebook is called 1+. At first I thought it was just a different name for the like button, but it’s actually really different. You can pretty much go anywhere and “1+” something (Google searches, videos, websites, comments, etc) and it will show up under that section in your profile. As nice this feature will be to share cool things with your friends, I have a bad feeling it will just be known as the click to spam your friends walls with useless stuff every 10 seconds button.

Last and finally the best feature I think that’s on Google+, games. Yes I know this is typical, and the holy grail of procrastination. But what Google has done here is actually very smart that Facebook, for some odd reason, failed to do. While there aren’t a lot of games on Google+ at the moment, the games they have on there are pretty fun and amusing, heck even Angry Birds is on there and it’s free! But the biggest thing Google did here is integrating the games directly into Google+. None of that whole installing apps, requesting permission, and going to external links to install an application. It’s all done directly on Google+, and as a bonus all the games (Or the ones I am aware of anyway) are all HTML5 based, not Flash. This meaning that the games actually run fast and don’t lag and lock up all the time.

While those are just the basics of Google+, there’s just far too much of it to explore and explain in one post, Google is always updating it so there’s always new features to tryout. But I suggest giving it a shot and just see what it’s like, while it may take a while for it to go mainstream, I have a good feeling it can turn out to be a competitor against Facebook. On a side note, even Mark Zuckerberg (the Facebook founder) has a Google+ account. This means there should be no reason you shouldn’t try it out.