Google Plus + First Look, features, mobile client and Google + CheckIn

A quick look at Google + – Like many of you, I’ve been banging around with Google +, this after finally receiving an invitation from a colleague.

Initially, the biggest question from people was how the heck does one get an invitation. For me, the solution was to simply Tweet and ask… voila, several invitations came through – see also this article, how to get an invitation. On day one of launch there appeared to be a delay in the distribution of invitations, many speculating that the "Beta" was closed. It seems that is now not the case as most people that are interested seem to be getting access. Describing Plus is a little tough. I’m taken back to wave, sort of and like many, I’m a little bit of a skeptic. I’ll admit though, I am getting sucked in, mainly by the Circles feature, essentially, a circle is a group of people, similar to a twitter list of fb group, you group your connections based on similar likes or interests etc… what’s way cool though (and addictive) is that you don’t have to be connected or be friends with people to add them to circles. Users can simply browse your existing friends or contacts (key in a name in the search dialog to locate them, for example, typing in glenn letham will locate me) and then add them to a circle . Then you have access to view their connections and circles and so on and so on… you just keep building. A cool feature about circles is that when adding a new post you have the ability to restrict posting to a specified group, this is way handy, sort of like your very own backchannel!

You can locate me on google + HERE.

Another nice feature is the red notification tab, a subtle little icon that shows up when someone has contacted you, commented, or even added you to a circle. The notification also appears when you are using Gmail. Finally, Plus also is available to mobile users and not just those of you on Android devices. Simply point your mobile web browser to m.google.com/app/plus. Using the mobile client I noticed that Plus also seems to have a Check-In feature and it actually works nicely! I’m thinking the check-in functionality may be much more useful once Google makes an API available to developers (hopefully).Below are a few screen shots of the Google Plus (+) experience.

Finally, there’s no iPhone or iOS app yet so mobile users are stuck with the mobile web app, however, reports have it that an official iPhone app will be coming shortly – this will enable users to do things like post a photo etc… perhaps even video chat, now that would be cool! Android users already have a supporting app in the Android market