Runwell-Steve said:
I'm on forums, I have a blog, I'm on facebook and twitter, I can also actually speak to my friends or email them directly, do I really need Google+ as well?
Not really! But, maybe!
I guess a lot of people will probably see it as an unnecessary alternative to Facebook. Personally I think it has the potentinal to be a better social platform, however that remains to be seen & I guess a lot of it's success will depend on whether people think its worth trying google+ as well as Facebook, because it will need a critical mass of users before it really takes off.
I quite like the way it allows you to organise contacts into "circles" (groups) and then specify which circles/individuals you wish to share individual posts with. It means you can have many different social groups in one place without worrying about sharing those drunken night out pics with your gran, or without your work colleagues seeing that rant at the end of a long day.
I also like the way it can intergrate with Picasa which I use quite a bit. I can see google putting a fair amount of effort behind this, intergrating it with other services they offer/ other parts of the web. They've already started putting those +1 buttons next to google search results - If you click on those then the link is added to the +1 section of your Google+ profile - where other people can comment on them/ also +1 them.
So, no, you don't really need it as well, but might be worth a try if you fancy something different to Facebook. Personally I think its good for Facebook to have a bit of competition, but it will be interesting to see how much success it has.
Oh, and from using it these past few days it seems that it's a LOT easier to view / change you're privacy settings on Google+ than on Facebook.
