I’m new to Google Plus but I’ve already spent a fair amount of time updating my Google Profile, creating circles and adding people. It’s an interesting time for me. I have a healthy dislike of Facebook and therefore very rarely use directly. Flipboard allows me to “magazine” the content in a convenient and disposable form, FriendFeed spreads my updates elsewhere (until that service stops), Twitter occasionally posts there and so does Gowalla.
But I almost never directly use Facebook. I’ve also been aggressively culling my friend list so it’s down from over 300 to almost 50. By this time next year I will probably have less than 20 friends and not be using it. Twitter, on the other hand, has grown for me but primarily I use it as a link sharer so when I find something I like I tend to re-tweet to the small list of followers I have.
I am a heavy user of LinkedIn. This is, I suppose, the business version of Facebook and it’s highly useful me to stay in touch with my business circles.
Enter Google Plus. It easily fills the sharing role of Twitter. It covers off following tech geeks that I want to stay abreast of. It integrates (obviously) with our Google Apps accounts nicely. It’s still early adopter. It’s much better than Google Wave.
So this will be the end of Facebook contribution for me, I suspect – it’s a good place to see what the world is up to, magazine style but no real use for me at all. Twitter will take a beating as a result of the sharing function so I’ll end up transferring my Twitter effort to our corporate account, which is really rather overdue (I don’t really believe in the hype around personal brand).
So that’s my social world now re-organised. Ta Google, oh…and two fingers up to Zuckerberg for making it impossible to get my data out of Facebook easily.
