I’ve been a huge consumer of online social communities for years now as a way of collaborating with like minded technical brains and catching up with friends and family.
Google+ was released in private beta and I couldn’t resist seeing what they have tried to accomplish with it. First off, I use their search engine as my homepage and started using “+1”, use Google Reader for RSS, use Google Analytics for stats, use YouTube for hosting small webcasts and I also have used Picasa in the past to share photos pre-facebook days. I really like what they’re doing with sharing links, videos, photos leveraging these services. Google+ essentially brings all these together into one activity feed.
LinkedIn vs Google+ vs Facebook
I think Scoble was right on the money by stating that he now has a social network he can use for technology people and then leave Facebook for family and friends. My question here is…what’s wrong with LinkedIn for that approach? It clearly didn’t get the take up of all communities, but it really should have done based on its target market!
Google Reader please…
So I’m a huuge user of Google Reader with other 3000 RSS feeds in there that I regularly check for content. Currently I use the “like” and “share” buttons on good content and I also currently tag the urls with delicious.com. I’d love it if I could just click +1 in Google Reader on a post and add some tags…that I could then go back to later and show all links for “userprofileservice” etc. 
Twitter
So they haven’t gone as far as completely kill twitter off just “yet”. But essentially you can post a status message here and better yet when you reply…you can actually see the threaded conversation very easily much like facebook status comments. The +1 is similar to a retweet, but is a structured defined way of doing this rather than the “RT:”, quote and try Retweet capability of twitter. I believe if Google+ can start surfacing up statuses in the search and applying the hash tags rather than relying on Circles to filter through things…they could really take on Twitter.
I will be trying to encourage the SharePoint community to get on board this to collaborate…to leave facebook for family and friends (real ones), to leave LinkedIn for professional networking. For now, as the majority of SharePoint community are on twitter as a primary, I’ll stay there…but I have no loyalty to that system if everyone makes the switch to Google+!