I have finally had the chance to experiment with Google+! Yah!
My initial thoughts are positive. I like the idea of circles. They took a common term used in real life social settings and integrated it into their new social networking platform. While I just don’t see it competing with Facebook yet, I do think it will leave a mark. One thing I would caution is the idea of public profiles. They have already received a lot of backlash surrounding the Male / Female status and are now facing criticism over displaying of full names.
The amazing, and somewhat scary aspect of Google+, and the reason they probably require full names, is it’s ability to integrate with Google’s suite of applications, such as Picasa and Documents. It’s very efficient for anyone with a Gmail account to hop around apps and share different content.
Although I haven’t fooled around with it yet, I am really hoping for a tight coupling of Google+ with Blogger, which I believe is losing the name Blogger. This is because I am hoping to use Google+ as my next online learning community, or at least see how effective it can be in the classroom.