Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Image from Topgold
IF I BELIEVE a lot of the tech press, I'm surrounded by 6000 ghosts on Google Plus. And I like it a lot.
I like watching the ghosts stream by faster on my iOS G+ app than tweets scream by on my Twitter clients. I like the images that dissolve in and out of view, faster than I get on Instagram or Flickr. I'm following fewer than 4000 people but nearly 6000 people are following my musings. And that's just fine because I'm getting longer interactions on G+ than on any other network. That's "longer" in terms of word count and "longer" in terms of length of time between one of my posts and a comment from an interested viewer.
I know that people I follow on Twitter and Facebook won't feel any sort of need to change where they meet and chat so most of the people I'm seeing on G+ are outside of Ireland and that's perfectly fine for the extended social media strategy we have in LIT-Clonmel. We need more of an international audience, as potential students, as potential employers and as potential users of an application we're developing.
I actually look at people who want to connect with me because like any other network, Google+ has its share of hypsters but without the cut-and-thrust that comes with Twitter territory. When traveling through different parts of Ireland, I toggle over to the "nearby" flow to see names and faces of people who have commented locally. I really enjoy following people with stories they tell in words and in photos.
I jump over to power posters like Mike Elgan and Robert Scoble, not for what they write but for the discoveries that emerge on the heels of comments. I follow a lot of people based on their comments and that has resulted in eclectic bits of information that I often share on Twitter.
Most people don't know that I'm cross-fertilising Twitter from Google Plus because I'm known as @topgold to a lot of people, not as @educast where my G+ activity stream becomes more obvious. (I've five accounts on Twitter so I can easily talk to myself.)
I post most of my stuff to public extended circles and that's the big reason that I always see a red number on the big black bar on top of my Chrome browser. A lot of those 6000 ghosts see my public posts and interact with simple plus-ones or more extensive comments. I also keep some of my stuff semi-private, posting just to myself (handy as a kind of scratch pad) or to family members.
I hope that this summer results in a series of mobile Google Plus posts coming on the heels of the Hangouts on Air that I can now use from my laptop. I think it would be magical to broadcast from my mobile to the public while walking heritage sites in Ireland.
Bernie Goldbach curates links about Google.
