I appear to be a late joiner to Google+, if the list of people in my contact’s circles are any indication. It appears to have pulled my info from LinkedIn and has features of Facebook and a very interesting what if discussion among designers going on. I expect it will be a similar experience to LinkedIn and Facebook, perhaps with less of the silliness of Facebook but with similar features, such as Circles which lets you categorize people into groups.
Just like Facebook, only better.
I’ve always liked that Facebook lets you group people. It’s so natural. I tend to get frustrated by LinkedIn’s degrees of separation – you are either in someone’s network or you have someone or a chain of people between you and the other person. In a way this is nice because you are still able to contact people in your second network while preserving how you know that person (so and so’s friend). Without a grouping feature, once you accept a person to your network on LinkedIn, you lose information about how you are connected to your new contact, unless you go to their page to see shared contacts.
Circles makes Google+ more personal and organized than LinkedIn. It is also more spare, sort of like the defunct Facebook Lite, but I’m witholding judgement for now. Facebook ended up dropping its Lite feature, and I suspect Google will eventually add in Facebook-like distractions and ads, since advertising is their ballywick.
If you are interested in learning more, let me know and I’ll invite you to my Circle.