CHAPTER FOUR

How Do I Find and Add Friends?

What use is a social network without friends? Without people to share with, you won’t get a thing out of Google+, so as soon as you set up an account and password, you should find your friends.

Unlike Facebook, which intrinsically considers the relationships between you and your friends to be personal (with people you know in the real world), Google+ enables you to form relationships with people you haven’t met in person by following their public posts. Often you find new people when your friends reshare people’s posts. You can follow their posts, status updates, and other information they decide to share with you. In this sense, friend probably isn’t the right word for everyone you interact with on Google+, which is why Google refers to friends as the more general People in your circles.

But that doesn’t mean that all the people you follow on Google+ aren’t your friends, and you’re most likely to start with the people you know. In this chapter I show you how you can find your actual friends on Google+.