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OK, by now if you spend any time on-line you know that Google just rolled out Google+. But what is it, and do you need it?
Google+ is basically Google's (3rd) attempt at creating a social network (basically Google's Facebook.)
In my opinion it's a better version of Facebook. You can put your friends in "circles" (and a friend can be in more than one circle) and then you can post status updates to specific circles. So if I want to make a geeky Linux related post that I know my Aunt couldn't care two rips about I could post it to my geek circle and not my family circle.
While the circles are good at letting you target who is seeing what, I do worry that this will create social insulation for some. My Mother for example may think that I have no social life if all I do is post about my son, when really she's just in my family circle and not seeing the posts about the drunken debauchery that I get into every weekend....
I've also been asked about the privacy issue. Facebook is known for being less than stellar about your privacy, and while the circles at least give the illusion of letting you keep messages to a private circle, remember that Google is in the business of gathering and categorizing data. Everything you post in Google+ is ultimately going to be used to target ads to you. Google has a fairly strong history of anonymizing data, but remember they already know where you are if you use an Android cell phone, have all your e-mail if you use Gmail, know what you're looking up if you use them for search, know what you look like if you use Picasa and so forth and so on.
Google+ has a very nice app, as you'd expect, on Android phones (that's all I have access too, no idea what it's like on the iphone) but I tend to use it mostly on my computer. I found a great plug-in for my chrome browser called Google+ Ultimate that lets me bring my twitter and Facebook feeds within G+, giving me a central location for all my social networks (although private FB mail can't be viewed through it, yet)
All that being said, I think this will ultimately be THE social network everyone uses. After all it's google, their mission statement is "Do no Evil" how can you go wrong with that?
That said if you want an invite to Google+ let me know what e-mail address to send it to.
