I TRANSITIONED OVER to Google Plus in late June, effectively using that network as my first stopping point of the day. I think it's helped streamline a few parts of my routine even though some think G+ is a ghost town.
The biggest advantage I've seen lies in the way G+ serves up recent information. With Twitter, you can blink and miss a stream of information. On G+ the flow picks up credibility as people add comments in big threads. I like that viewing information that way because I can vet its provenance better. In fact, I get a lot of the first hand information that I share on Twitter from Google Plus. I extract good value from the 2500 people I follow and encounter few on G+ who pettifog.
I actually follow thousands more people because I have saved searches (key phrases) that let me tap into the flow of chatter on Google Plus. In my experience, it's like having a Lazyweb on steroids close to hand. I chatter a lot more on G+ than I do on Twitter lately because I'm getting drawn into long threads of discussion with people outside of Ireland.
I know my experience on G+ isn't the same as most of the 4200 people who follow me on Twitter. To a lot of my friends, it's still too quiet on Google Plus. That's because you need to decide who to follow on G+ (unless you just want to listen to What's Hot stream).
There's plenty written about Google Hangouts (an excellent channel of communications that I've used with the an Android phone) and about how material from Google Plus often ends up on the first page of search engine results. Both of these features should interest anyone who depends upon their online reach.
Less is written about the visual side of Google Plus but it's always worth my time. I get a lot by swiping through dozens of G+ images gathered in the photo albums on my phone and find myself reading deep into the comment stream of images that attract more than 99 comments. I also believe the auto-upload feature of Google has helped me rescue dozens of images from my iPod Touch that might have been orphaned had they not percolated automatically into Google's cloud storage space.
See you at http://glus.to/topgold?
Rewind: "After one month with Google Plus" on my blog, July 30, 2012.
