Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part One

  I first heard about Google+ through a tweet a friend of mine sent out on Twitter. It went something like 'oh Google+, the more I use you, the more addicted I become', or something like that. What was this? Google+ , Google Plus? Never heard of it. There followed a couple more tweets saying how much he was enjoying this new service and my interest was most definitely piqued. I had to find out more. 

What better place to start than Google itself. I signed into my Google account, which up till then had only really been used for Google Mail and an ancient Blogger page. I looked up Google+ and saw that it was a new type of social media service which incorporates elements of Facebook, Twitter and general social media from around the net and aggregates it into a customisable, personal page.

Being a bit of a geek, not an uber geek, but still pretty geeky, I just had to give it a try. I was salivating at the thought of building a new social network from scratch and finally being able to get away from the agony that is my current, extremely cluttered, clunky Facebook page. 

Then came the downer, what's this, I need an invite to get in? An invite? Oh no! Apparently the service was in a very closed Beta testing state and the only people using it had been invited directly by Google. 

I sent my friend Louis Trapani, a professional podcaster and the guy I had first heard about Google+ from, an impassioned direct message on Twitter. 'Louis, I just gotta get an invite, this looks amazing!'. No problem, he had invites to spare, except the invite button on his Google+ page had disappeared. In an effort to avoid the new service getting flooded with new accounts all at once, Google had very wisely decided to allow new sign-ups, but at a pretty slow pace to avoid affecting the speed of the site as new people were joining.

Fair enough, I did have another plan to get an invite though. A work colleague I know has a friend who works for Google in Ireland, maybe, just maybe, he'll be able to get me an invite? Nope, none to give, although the friend has been using the service internally at Google for quite a few months and was really enjoying it. This just made me want to get in even more!

I did a little searching on Twitter and came across these guys @googleplustweet. These are a small group of fans of the new service who were sending out invites and getting other people with invites to spare to send onto desperate individuals such as myself. I immediately signed up for an invite but of course, they were flooded with thousands of requests and I never got anything back from them, although it seems a lot of people did. A valiant effort, but I was still not able to get in. 

By this time, a couple of days had passed since I had first heard about Google+ and I admit I was getting desperate! I just had to get on! Leo Laporte of the TWIT network produces a superb video podcast called 'This Week In Google'. I guessed that the whole show would be about the launch of Google+ and this latest episode was just that. The usual show hosts, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani and Leo, were joined by two of the key figures in Google+'s development, Bradley Horovitz and Vic Gundotra. The show was conducted in the TWIT studios but also with a Google+ Hangout. This hangout is a feature of Google+ and it allows anyone to create a video conference with up to ten people at a time. It seemed to work amazingly well, with the person who was speaking at the time the main focus of the screen with the other people in the hangout lined up along the bottom. As different people spoke, they became the main screen.

All the different facets to the service were covered as well as a look at it's history and development. It seems Google have been working on this for about eighteen months and pretty much the entire company have been involved in some way. 

What I got most out of the show was the over-riding feeling that everyone at Google had really given this new service an incredible amount of thought and that from what I could see, it was already an incredibly polished product. As a perfect introduction to Google+ you should watch this. Just do a search on iTunes.

Anyway, the next day, Louis asked if my invite had come through yet. It hadn't but I suggested a trick someone else had posted on Twitter. Get someone with an account to add you to their friends circle and then send an invite. Now, i'm not sure if this worked or not, but when I next checked my e-mail, I had not one but two invites! Yes! 

I followed the link in the e-mail, barely able to contain my excitement, the page loaded and ...... boom, a message, 'Google+ is in Beta, please sign up here to get an invite'. What? I already have a bloody invite, just let me in already!  Alas, it was not to be, no Google+ for me today. The annoying thing was, when I read Twitter, other people were getting in, this was beginning to get annoying.

So, periodically, for next twenty-four hours or so, I would follow the link in my e-mail and see if anything had changed. What to do in the meantime, check iTunes of course for any other podcasts about Google+. That was when I came across GooglePlusToday. I saw that the show already had a couple of episodes released so I downloaded these to tide me over.

What a great show! You could tell that Dennis was really enthusiastic about Google+ as were his guests. He'd also released a video walkthrough of your first few steps on the new site, which later on proved very useful.

Finally, the moment came, I was clicking the link in the e-mail for what must have been the twentieth time that day, when boom, I was greeted with the sign up screen. Holding my breath, not daring to hit anything other than the sign up button, I carefully entered my details. Hurrah, after what seem like a week of trying (it had in fact only taken three days), I was in, thank goodness for that! Now what?

Be part of the unfolding story! Add me to your circles on Google+

Google+ user ID's of people mentioned in this article

+Jules Burt

+Leo Laporte

+Gina Trapani

+Bradley Horowitz

+Jeff Jarvis

+Louis Trapani

+Vic Gundotra

+GooglePlusToday

+Dennis Frietas

(c) 2011 Jules Burt, mild mannered bookshop manager, part-time actor, full time Dad, self confessed Cranky Geek. 

Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Two - My First Day - Coming asap!

Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Two

So, after three days of agony I was finally able to get my new account up and running. As I cast my eyes over the initial starter page I was instantly charmed with the simplicity of the layout and how easy it was to navigate around the page. It's all very Google like with lots of white everywhere. I noticed that there was a thin black bar along the top of my browser screen. This has links to other Google services apart from Google+, such as Gmail, Documents, Reader etc. What was interesting was that the first entry on the black bar was marked +Jules.  When clicked this takes you back to your Google+ homepage, very handy when you stray away from the site looking at something else. 

The page was prompting me to add some friends and contacts into Google+. To begin, it had already looked at my Gmail account and created a mosaic across the screen of contact squares that I could send e-mail invites to. I fired off a couple straight away to my most geekiest friends and was about to start on a few more when my invite box disappeared, I guess just like my friend Louis' had when he was trying to send invites out. The service was still very much in Beta and the ramp up was taking time, fair enough, if I had to wait a few days, so could my friends.

I clicked on Circles, which is Google+'s way for you to sort your contacts out into smaller sub-groups, rather than the unwieldy way that Facebook organises your friends. Now this was cool! Just create a circle, it does give you a few suggestions, such as 'Friends', 'Work Colleagues' etc, then drag a contact into that circle. You get little +1 animation and the person's circular icon does a circuit of that circle and is then a part of it! Simple but very effective. 

I continued to create other circles and dropped all my Gmail contacts into the various circles below, an effortless and strangely satisfying experience! Google+ can also import contacts from your Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. Alas, I don't have either of these so I've not been able to try this feature, although I'm guessing it works in a similar way to Gmail importing. 

What I really want is a way to get all my Facebook friends contact details imported, hassle free, into my new Google+ page. Google wants this as well, however Facebook are playing hardball at the moment, probably realising this is a huge potential threat to their service, so they've completely denied Google access. The rotten ba****ds! 

This has resulted in me really loathing Facebook even more. Having used it pretty much since it's inception, with Myspace before that, I'm guessing that maybe, just maybe, it's day has come and people will start to migrate to the new place, in this case Google+. I for one have had enough. So, time for a cull of my Facebook page, but where to begin? First to go were the 1000 or so photos, I just left a few that are being shared on a couple of friends pages. Then all but the most basic personal details were deleted, then, every game and app, with just a couple of exceptions (which i'll get to later). 

In my Facebook status updates, which themselves feed through my Twitter account (so I never have to actually visit the bloody site), I rave about how much I'm enjoying Google+ and that people should check it out. For the majority of my friends this will be the first they even hear of Google+. It's unlikely i'll be able to convince even a quarter of them to move over, but hey, it's early days! 

So, back go Google+. I've now deleted all those photos off Facebook and i'd like to get them back up on the net on my shiny new Google+ page. No problem, enter the re-named Picasso picture service, Google Pictures. Pretty original name eh? This would have to wait until tomorrow, bed was calling and I was truly geeked out.

Be part of the unfolding story! Add me to your circles on Google+

Google+ user ID's of people mentioned in this article

+Jules Burt

+Louis Trapani

1. 2011 Jules Burt, mild mannered bookshop manager, part-time actor, full time Dad, self confessed Cranky Geek.

Coming Soon - Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Three - Getting To Grips With Google Pictures

Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Three

So, a new day and a new thing to do on Google+. Start to get all those pictures that I had deleted off Facebook, back onto the net so my friends could see them. 

Up until now I had never used Google's Picasso picture service but since it has now been rebranded and made to integrate seamlessly into Google+, it was time to give it a try.

Now, I use a Mac as my main computer, so I can't speak for how this compares to the PC, but I doubt it's that much different as it's all web based. Once you navigate to the Google Pictures tab, you get the option of uploading pictures, click this button and then navigate to where the pictures are stored your computer. So for me, this was in my iPhoto library, then, into events. I selected an event, which had about 100 or so pictures in it. I selected the entire folder of pictures and hit upload.

Google has apparently updated their picture uploader and you can now just one-click a button and the whole lot will upload. This I did and the upload started. It uploads three pictures at a time, at what seemed to me a pretty swift pace. Within ten minutes, they were all uploaded and I was able to name the folder and crucially, decide who within my previously created circles, I wanted to share them with. This is fantastic and such a big change from Facebook. So in theory, I can share intimate family pics to just my family or close friends circles but I could say, share a staff outing, with just fellow work mates. Awesome! If it's something I want the world to see, I can make the pictures public, anyone can see them. 

Once the album was created I noticed at the bottom of the page that I had used up about 3% of my total picture disc space. Apparently, you get a whole Gigabyte for free and you pay for extra space above this. Only the very biggest pictures actually count towards your usage. So, small pictures, taken with smart phones probably won't count. This is good news as Google are offering an instant upload to Google+ from your mobile. It's already out for Android and is coming for iPhones soon.

Once the album is created, you get a folder at the top of your Pictures page, which when clicked, fans out to show you a few more from that album.  Click this and the whole album cascades out and spreads beautifully across your screen, filling it up. You can click any photo to zoom in and enlarge, or view the folder as a slideshow. Tabs across the bottom allow you to move to the next page of pictures. This is a truly wonderful experience and one I think that rivals what Apple have done with pictures on Mobile Me and certainly more user friendly than flickr. You can set a new picture to make the folder’s main or top photo and also easily delete a picture. One great thing about the whole service is that it uploads at full resolution, so you have these pictures now backed up online and accessible anywhere.

Once created, the folder then shows up as a new item in your normal Google+ stream where you can also add a comment before it's posted.

So far I have uploaded five albums and I have got to say I'm more than happy with all that it has to offer. I'm certainly planning to upload lots more to share with my friends, especially as Google+ shows your pictures off so well.

In part four i'll go into how I started getting Twitter style features into my Google+ account.

Be part of the unfolding story! Add me to your circles on Google+

Google+ user ID's of people mentioned in this article

+Jules Burt

1. ©2011 Jules Burt, mild mannered bookshop manager, part-time actor, full time Dad, self confessed Cranky Geek.

Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Four

Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Four - How I Got Google+ to (almost) Replace Twitter

I've been a fairly casual user of Twitter pretty much since it's inception and have enjoyed using it as a tool to have quick catch ups with the people I follow and to dip my toes into what people are talking about at that time. I only follow about one hundred people on the service, about twenty of these are actual friends that I know in real life, the rest are just people or organisations i'm interested in. I have about a hundred people following me. I would describe myself as a very average Twitter user.

Now, Google+ can offer a very similar service to Twitter, but it will take a bit of work to get it functional. What I have done is to make full use of the circles feature offered by Google+. I have created about a dozen circles, these comprise of family, friends, work mates, then other ares of interest, such as, Warcraft, science fiction, tech people. You get the idea. Now, when i'm on Twitter, I pretty much have all these interests rolled into one stream of people I follow. I look at my Twitter stream and it's an unrelated mish-mash of subjects from different sorts of people I follow. I know you can create Twitter Lists, but it's not a very user friendly experience, so I've just not bothered.

By using Circles I can view a particular stream of people I follow and just consume that area of content. So, let's say i'm itching for a bit of tech news. I just click my tech friends circle and bam, I have an instant stream of tech news from the people I want to hear tech news from. Let's not forget that these are not just tweets with just one hundred and forty characters, barely a sentence and a link, these are now fully formed posts. The authors now have a chance to flex their writing muscles a bit and be a bit more creative. Indeed it seems people are now considering using Google+ as a replacement for their personal blogs. It was mentioned on the GooglePlusToday podcast when Dennis interviewed Andy Ihnatko that he was thinking of moving his blog to Google+. Also, Kevin Rose has publicly announced that from now on, all his blog posts will be made on Google+. The over-riding reason given was that they get so much more interaction and instantaneous feedback from readers, far more than on a blog page hosted elsewhere on the net. Who'd have thought it? The fact that you can post much more content rich entries is a real plus, pictures, audio and video are dead easy to post on Google+ so why wouldn’t you use it, rather than posting a shortened bit.ly link?

So, for me, with the longer and more in-depth posts, plus the fact that I can organise my stream to read what I fancy at the time, Google+ has just about, managed to replace Twitter.

Alas, there is one slight problem, not everyone I follow on Twitter has migrated over to Google+. Only a couple of my Twitter friends are on here right now and about a third of the other people I follow have moved. I'm sure this will change over time and it's not like I have nothing to read when I start browsing the streams.

Without having to try at all, I have come across other people I follow on Twitter and have been adding them to Google+ as i've gone along. Father Ted and The I.T. Crowd writer, Graham Lineham, actor Will Weaton, tech people such as Leo Laporte and Jef Jarvis. These guys are early adopters. I see William Shatner and Robert Llewellyn have also just joined, excellent!

Of course it's real easy to find people, there's a big box at the top of almost every Google+ page that says 'Find People', also, based on other people you are following in your circles, Google+ will handily suggest other similar people you might want to check out. These suggestions are actually pretty good. One has to wonder though, just how many tech people does an average person need to follow without mass duplication of the same or similar stories.

This happened recently when the Google+ iPhone app was finally released. The stream on Twitter was full of it but the stream on Google+ was positively bombarded! People were testing out the new picture upload service from the iPhone and giving the new Huddles feature a try. It was a manic few hours! 

So, in summary, Google+ hasn't quite replaced Twitter for me, but it's doing a very good job trying to. When viewing my streams on my mobile phone, much the same way I mainly view Twitter, the experience is about 100% better. Once more people have joined Google+, I can see me dropping Twitter all together, but just not right now.

I am looking to write up a part on using hangouts, but I've not done one yet, despite trying! If you're reading this and would like to give it a try, please add me to your circles, i'll add you back and pretty soon, we'll catch up in a hangout. Become part of the ongoing story!

Google+ user ID's of people mentioned in this article

+JulesBurt

+DennisFreitas

+KevinRose

+AndyIhnatko

+GrahamLineham

+WilWeaton

+LeoLaporte

+JeffJarvis

+WilliamShatner

+RobertLlewellyn

1. 2011 Jules Burt, mild mannered bookshop manager, part-time actor, full time Dad, self confessed Cranky Geek.

Diary of a Google+ Newbie - Part Five

Well, it's actually been pretty difficult to review and write this part of my experience as a Google+ newbie. Why, because being online and on the Google+ site for extended periods of time, waiting for other people in my circles to come online and crucially, be willing to participate in a hangout has meant that i've only managed a couple of these so far.

These have however both been pleasant experiences and just about enough for me to finally write this piece up.

My first hangout was just with a few friends who I had asked to come online at the same time so I could try out the service and at least have a proper play with it. There was just four of us but enough to give it a try. The first thing we found was that you do need to download and install a little bit of software to get the initial hangout started. You'll also need to spend a couple of minutes making sure you're mic inputs are OK. Google handles this really well, so don't worry and don't let it put you off!

Once you've done this, you are prompted to cheekily 'check your hair' in the webcam image of yourself, and boom, you're live. You can then decide who you'd like to hangout with. In this instance, I had already arranged for my friends to be online at a certain time so I created a new circle with just these friends in and then invited that circle. This worked perfectly and one by one my buddies appeared on screen. As a new one came online and joined the conversation, we all shifted along a bit on the page which then re-organised itself. As one of us spoke, he became the main central focus of the hangout and had the larger window, if you weren't speaking you are a smaller window at the bottom of the screen.

This worked really well and was a totally seamless experience. The quality seemed to me better than a video call over Skype, although it must be pointed out that all the participants were based in the UK.

We had about a fifteen minute chat, tested out type chatting in the side bar and we shared a couple of You Tube videos. It really was a fun experience! My friends thoughts were that is was cool and something they would use regularly once more of their friends have started to use Google+. Everyone agreed that it has great potential. OK, not bad for a first trial go, now I wanted to be involved in a full house hangout, with all ten spots taken, the maximum allowed per hangout.

I got my chance a couple of days later. As I first logged on one evening and checked my streams, I saw that GooglePlusToday chief, Dennis Freitas was having his own hangout. Would I like to join, hell yes! 

I hit the join this hangout button and up popped the hangout interface, the quick warning about straightening my tie and checking my hair and then I was in. There were about five other people hanging out with Dennis already, including his wife and fellow GooglePlusToday writer Steve Stanger. We went along the boxes at the bottom and introduced ourselves to one another. Dennis informed us that the hangout was being recorded and that we were going to try out a few different things. This we proceeded to do, sharing videos, links, type chatting in the sidebar. The quality of the different video streams varied a bit as we were linking up from all over the globe. As time went on the hangout started filling up and we were soon at the maximum. We even got a soldier who was currently serving in Afganistan.

One really cool thing Dennis did was to switch between two different cameras that he had set up in his office for his video podcasting. This seemed really easy to do and the results were excellent, really high quality. It's made me realise that inbuilt webcams are going to need to improve in quality even more before they become second nature with these video linkups. I have an inbuilt iSight camera on my less than a year old iMac with an inbuilt mic and the results are good, but I think if I start using this more regularly, I'll invest in some better quality kit, just to make the experience that bit more pleasurable.

So, we hungout for about forty-five minutes or so, people came and left but it was almost always a full house. Since it was recorded, you can check out the video, in it's entirety here http://www.vimeo.com/27219791.

Also of note, the longest ever Google Hangout happened around this time. It went on, quite literally, for days. Michael Dell and Kid Rock popped in and hung out, how cool was that? 

I do plan to have some more hangouts soon, so, if you've added me to your circles (and if not, why not?!)' then I'll have added you back, and you'll get an invite. I'd like to host my own full house soon.

Next week, I'll have a look at what some are saying is an underwhelming side of Google+, Sparks, then the week after I'll bring a complete overview of the new Google+ games, if I can drag myself away from Zynga Poker.

Oh, btw, the Halo Jones in the title refers to a classic 1980’s comic strip written by legend Alan Moore and published in top British comic, 2000AD. Pop group Transvision Vamp had a track on their Velveteen album entitled Hanging Out With Halo Jones, check it out.

Google+ user ID's of people mentioned in this article

+JulesBurt

+DennisFreitas

+SteveStanger

+MichaelDell

1. 2011 Jules Burt, mild mannered bookshop manager, part-time actor, full time Dad, self confessed Cranky Geek.