Mind Blogging. Mind Boggling.

Three days of google+, and can't get enough of it!

Circles are beautifully done, so my sister sits in my  "family" circle and not on my "wild booze nights" circle. I know for a fact that she is not happy about this: she liked to play "spy kids". Also, the family was getting ignored in these days of social networking, at least in my case. I mean, I couldn't have written "Enjoyed delicious sambar sadam and avial at Mani's restaurant in Matunga" on my FB status without inviting a good number of sniggers and massive public backlash.

Hangout is pretty nice, people at skype must've had a heart attack. Apparently Mr. Zuckerberg has some "exciting changes" lined up, and I guess one of which will most certainly be group chatting. Does not make things any better for the Skype folks. However, there are so few people on google + right now (someone's post called it a "ghost-town") that it's difficult to get a "hangout" running. V and me tried, this morning, and we could not find anyone around.

Huddle is pretty cool, too. Not super innovation, or anything, but it was high time a common chat application like google had the group chat facility.

It's fast changing: although I installed + on my phone three days ago, my Android market is synced to "ashwin.rk@gmail.com" and not "ashwinwins@gmail.com". So I was cursing google for not enabling the Google + App to sync based on other gmail accounts. But I downloaded today's update, hoping wishing praying as the download status bar filled up, and voila! They've done it, the engineers at google. Salut!

Couple of suggestions I had, which I shot off to google in the "feedback" menu from my phone, hope they acknowledge with immense gratitude.

1. Enable different statusses for different circles. When at work, I might want to be "Available" to my work circle, "Busy" to my family circle, and "Invisible" to the ol' wild booze nights circle.

2. Decrease the likelihood of putting posts on the wrong circle. This happened to me yesterday on my mobile, when I put a post meant for "wing" on "friends". Thaknfully, no damage done. There should be an option to enable additional checks on posts to certain circles, such as family. Say a confirmation pop up.

Ideas for you: You can make your gmail user interface look very much like the Google + UI. Under Settings/Themes, choose the theme "Preview Dense". It's a much cleaner UI, and I have switched to it.

So a whole saturday I have pretty much not stirred out (Don't diss, I have plans for tomorrow), and I have logged in to facebook, not even once. I feel like logging in now, as I say this, put will do so only after midnight. I am pretty sure there is a discernible dip in traffic for Facebook last three days. After the smooth sailing so far, here's some testing times for Zuck and co.

However, given the all encompassing platform google has: maps, blog, youtube, gmail, mobile os, search, reader....the possibilites are really immense. I would think in less than a week since inception, FB must see a clear and present danger. Just for the record, I plump for plus.      

Credits: The sister. Vivek Srivats for hanging out with me. Shailendra Jain for making me realize that I hadn't logged in to FB the whole day.