First and foremost, welcome to my new blog.
This first post is about Social Networking and Google+.
When people ask me what Google+ is, I find it hard to explain it quickly to most people without using the term "Facebook". The Google+ fanboys (myself included) might shoot me down for this, but reality is that most people don't understand exactly what social networking is.
My first real experience in what we now call "Social Networking" was probably MySpace. I registered an account on MySpace very early, but only used it to view others' photos. I then joined Twitter, and while I have never been a big 'Tweeter', I do think the service has a use, but a very limited one. I've joined various others such as LinkedIn and FourSquare but I always felt they were popularity contests and something I would not use very frequent, if at all.
After a few years of +Liz Davison asking me to join Facebook, I finally joined in November 2007.
After joining Facebook, I quickly started adding the many family members that were already using Facebook, followed by school friends, and people that I'd met in real life through other people that I was already 'friends' with.
Facebook became a big part of my online identity, even though I kept it rather private for quite some time. It was hard to decide what was appropriate to share as I knew my grandmother, little sister, etc. would be able to read the posts that I had sent for 'friends', therefore I would mostly censor myself. I later changed the idea of censoring myself, to removing the people I was worried about seeing uncensored statuses.
So as you can see, Facebook quickly went from being the place I hated, to the place I loved. I think it mostly worked for me, because almost everyone was there. This is probably also what caused me to start disliking the service.
I always tried to keep my Facebook friends to a limit of about 250 people (half of the 500 friend limit at the time) by removing the people that had become less relevant in my life.
Many people I added on Facebook only used the service every once in a while, so while it might seem like I might get 250 status updates from friends each day, really it was more like 10 status updates from 40 'active' friends. It quickly led me to come to the realisation that many of my friends constantly complained about anything they could - this isn't the circle they have me in in their real lives.
I joined Google+ while it was invite only in July, 2011. Rather than searching for friends in real life, I started adding people that I already knew online such as +Keith Gable, +Brandon Amedee & +Graham Green. I of course invited my wife +Liz Davison and brother +Samuel Davison and probably a few others. Whilst this was working, I already had these people on Facebook, I quickly discovered the Nearby stream (which wasn't very nearby at the time) which allowed me to read and comment on other people's public posts. I also started to notice people talking about me on the now defunct 'incoming' stream. It wasn't until October of 2011 that I really started getting in to Google+. The first person I didn't know who's post I had reshared was +Ben Buxton, and the first person I didn't know who commented on a post of mine was +Mandy Abela.
Google+ quickly became my online identity, and I've met many great people through it.
The only drawback (for me) is that I have been unsuccessful in finding most family and friends on it, with the exception of the very distant +Chris Double of New Zealand, who is my wife's 6th cousin (1x removed), and a few people who have a Google+ profile and don't know/are inactive such as +Jade Beale. The rest of them that I can think of I have invited.
I'm not sure if the lack of everyone is what makes Google+ so great, or if that's what could improve.
As I said, Google+ is now what I consider my online identity, and I have heavily included Google+ in my new blog. What do you think of Google+ or Facebook?
