Introduction

Google+ is the newest kid on the social-networking block—a service that allows you to post your thoughts, photos, videos, and more to your stream (see Chapter 1). People who follow you on Google+ can see what you’ve posted on your stream and share it with their followers.

Now, you may be thinking, “I thought we had enough social networks to keep up with already: Twitter, Facebook, even MySpace. Why add another?” That’s a very good question, and I’m sure that many smart people at Google asked the same question before they launched Google+. How can I be so sure? Because it all that careful thought shows when you’re using Google+.

What Google+ Offers

Google+ offers a bevy of features that allow you to share different things with different people. That final bit is the interesting part: Google+ makes it downright simple to share particular things with only certain people.

I clearly remember the day when Facebook changed for me forever: A friend request from my mother appeared in my inbox. Now, I love my mother, and I couldn’t refuse to be her friend (that might have resulted in some awkward Thanksgiving meals), but when your mom is your friend on Facebook, that fact affects the way you use the service. The same can be said when your boss and co-workers friend you on Facebook.

Facebook is invested in your sharing things with the widest audience possible, as the default privacy settings reflect. Lately, Facebook has gotten better about allowing you to choose who can see what, but Google+ was designed with choice in mind. Google+ is the first social network to embrace the idea that people have several groups of people in their lives: relatives, friends, co-workers, the Tuesday-night poker group, and so on. The list is incredibly different from person to person. Isn’t it odd, then, that most social networks assume that you want to share the same things across all those groups? Google+ doesn’t.

In the following sections, I take a quick look at the features this book covers to give you an idea of what Google+ has to offer.

Circles

The cornerstone of your Google+ experience is circles, which group people in your Google+ network. You can share whatever you post to Google+ with any number of your circles, and you can create your own custom circles.

Google+ also has some default circles:

• Friends

• Family

• Acquaintances

• Following

I dive into circles in Chapter 2.

Hangouts

Google+ makes sharing things with other folks on Google+ easy. It makes talking to them very easy as well. You can start a video conference call, or hangout, by clicking a button. Better yet, you can invite people from any of your circles to join you in your hangout. If you aren’t into the idea of video/audio conferencing, hangouts also support group chat so that you can type your thoughts.

Hangouts, and some uses for them, are covered in Chapter 4.

Messenger

The builders of any new social network would be crazy to ignore the explosive growth of mobile devices, so Google+ has a couple of features that are designed to be used only with mobile devices. Messenger, the most prominent of the mobile-only features, is a text-messaging service of sorts—without the fees.

You can message with anyone in your circles. As long as both you and your contact have the Google+ app on your devices (iOS or Android), you can send text and pictures to each other.

I cover this feature in Chapter 7.

Pictures

Google+ allows you to share that funny cat picture you found on the Internet. It’s also become something of a go-to service where photographers can show off their work to their peers and get feedback, thanks to Google+’s robust commenting and 1+ system (the Google+ analogue to Facebook’s Like).

You can not only share individual pictures, but also create entire albums of photos and share them with any and all of your circles. Only the people with whom you’ve shared the photos can comment on them.

Creating, sharing, and managing photo albums on Google+ are covered in Chapter 5.

The rest

The preceding four features would make a pretty good social network all by themselves, but Google didn’t stop there. Here are some more features that aren’t integral to the Google+ experience at the moment but that have growth potential:

• Search. Search is fully baked into Google+, allowing you to search for people, posts, sparks, or other interesting things to post. Chapter 6 is all about search.

• Location. In addition to sharing video, text, images, or links with people on Google+, you can share your physical location. See Chapter 3 for details.

• Instant Upload. If you have an Android device running Android 2.1 or later, and you install the Google+ app, you can take advantage of Instant Upload. After this feature is set up, all the images you take on your Android device are uploaded to Google+ but kept in a private album until you decide to share them. I cover the ins and outs of Instant Upload in Chapter 5.

• Games. Yes, you can play Angry Birds in Google+. What more do you need to know? Chapter 8 covers accessing games and sharing scores (and also tells you why Google+ games aren’t as annoying as Facebook games).

Updates for This Book

One of the most challenging things about being a tech-book author is the rapid pace of technological change. I type as fast as my fingers let me, yet the technology changes even faster. Google+ is a prime example. Google, the company, thinks of Google+ as a project, and it’s actively developing this project, adding tweaks, changes, and new features at a pretty steady rate.

With all these unknown future features, won’t this book become out of date? No, because when you buy it, you aren’t buying just the book: You’re also buying four updates that cover whatever big features Google adds to Google+.

Because I don’t have access to Google’s internal plans for rolling out features, it’s impossible to predict when the updates will be available. Make sure that you register your copy of this book at www.peachpit.com/googleplusguide to get your free updates.

One of the biggest features missing at the moment, for example, is business profiles. Google+ is all about individual users, but lots of companies are very eager to hold “conversations” with consumers who use Google+. (In other words, they want to use Google+ to sell you things. Commerce isn’t always bad, though.) Shortly after Google adds this feature to Google+, Peachpit Press will provide an update to this book that explains how to use business profiles. Neat, huh?