After being frustrated all day with the lack of a Google Plus invite, I get an email about how those already in the service could invite others to come take a look. Google shutdown the invitations due to “insane demand”, but people can still invite others by just sharing a post with them (so its all good for now). Pretty soon my SMSes, Facebook and Twitter were all about Google Plus. Here are my first impressions.

Google Plus’s design is super elegant. However, it wasn’t as intuitive as they made it out to be. I had to do a fair amount of tinkering and moving around to try to see how to get things to work and where every thing fit (but this is to be expected). I love Circles as it helps you create different “groups” and you can share with specific groups and individual people (Say you want to share a status or a link with your Friends circle AND the other person whose email you have? Go for it!) Hangout is the feature with the most “wow” to me cause in a matter of 3 minutes I had friends from 2 countries (some who have never met before) seeing each other in real time. Introduction were done and we go to watching the same youtube video on the screen and we had the option of commenting (the applications of this feature are astounding!). There is also a big push on the Google Profile front as there are few new elements used to capture more specific details about you and help you share. But truth be told, every element does have a “privacy” setting that is not deeply buried like it is in Facebook. Haven’t tested out the option to share Photos just yet but Picasa integration looks like it’ll make life easy. The only feature I wasn’t too impressed with was “Sparks”. Sparks is a “content discoverer for subjects that interest you” and my concern with it is the fact that there is considerable overlap with Google Reader. Think of sparks as Google News for subjects that interest you AND you can “pin” a certain subject so it appears all the time (like in your Google Reader once you have a feed). I do see some applications for it but then again not sold on that one just yet. And then there is Huddle which you can find in the Google + Android phone application which from the looks of things helps you send group messages

For first impression this certainly looks like a product that I’ll use now Google Plus makes the Google Ecosystem complete. However this might depend on how many people end up using the service cause at the end of the day its all about the “network effect”. But from the looks of thing here are a bunch of services that need to be concerned

• Facebook (and other social media sites) – clearly this is Google’s forray into the social media space and unlike their previous failures this just might be their “3rd times a charm”
• Skype (and other video conferencing services) – with hangout you no longer need to go to a different application to communicate with friends. Yes you did have google video chat but somehow this just feels more “Skype”ier
• GroupMe (and other group communication services) – one of the biggest gaps in Android was group messaging. Now you no longer need a 3rd party application to group communicate. As a further step, a little more integration with the default messaging app and thats all you need

Perhaps if there are more thoughts, a different post is warranted. But for now it looks like I’ll be using Google + for a few more weeks before any decision on “platform of choice” is made. But excellent job so far Google, you have my vote.