What Is Google Plus?

This is a new blog designed to help me answer my own questions about Google Plus. Perhaps someone else will benefit as well.

What is Google Plus? This article seems to have a nice succinct answer:

Complete User Guide: Google Plus Pages

In the above article, which includes embedded YouTube videos, Google Plus is described as a social networking layer that has been layered across all of Google's products. I might simplify this description further. Here's my description:

Google Plus ties all of Google together.

Actually, the author of the article simplifies it even further. He says that Google Plus is Google. It doesn't get any simpler than that, does it?

I'm still trying to figure all of this out. However, my limited experience with Google Plus has convinced me that Google Plus is really a master account that ties together all your other accounts, such as your Gmail account and your YouTube Account.

The potential is enormous! If all your Google accounts are tied together under one master account, it is possible for each of these accounts to share information with each other. Furthermore, information can up-migrate to the Master account from the little baby accounts, or it can down-migrate from the master account to the little baby accounts.

By baby accounts, I mean YouTube, Gmail, Blogger, etc. In other words, information can migrate all over the place within Google, and even outside of Google.

The migration of information is as good of explanation as any I can think of to describe social networking. Social networking is the migration of thoughts, feelings and experiences.

In many ways, social networking is an experience. If it were not, people would not voluntarily spend hours each week on social networking sites.

Candidly, I find social networking a bit annoying. I'm a terrible social networker. I've gone months before checking my Facebook page again. Why is social networking so annoying?

Perhaps it is because it is so often shallow. The ease with with which social networking allows people to share their thoughts is also social networking's downfall. The easier it is for people to do something, the less thought and effort they are likely to put into it.

I have the vague notion that maybe Google Plus will help alleviate some of the noise. I understand that Google Plus has a feature called circles. If circles is what I think it is, it can alleviate a lot of the cross-traffic and noise.

For me, Facebook is 3 radios, all playing at the same time. Not a pleasant experience!

It's my hope that Google Plus is at least a slightly noise better filter than is Facebook. If Google Plus filters out the noise better, I'm in!

Ed Abbott