I'd been hearing about Google Plus for a while and was quite excited about trying it out. I've loved pretty much all of Googles products so far, some times they can be a little fiddly and not the easiest to manoeuvre or know exactly what it going on.. Google Images/Photos for example.. they've only just tweaked it to tell people you've already shared an album with that you've uploaded new pictures. Anyone who had favourited your work wouldn't know you'd added anything new until you literally grabbed their head and pointed it at the screen. That seems to have been resolved now and its a jolly good thing too.
Anyhoo, I finally got an email from someone inviting me to join Google Plus. I signed up.. basically its a social networking site, on that basis it will suffer if few of your friends use it.. few of my friends use it, which wasn't a major problem as I'm not a big social networking (facebook/twitter) user. What did irritate me however was the level to which it stuck its nose into literally everything I did.
I do pretty much everything through Google and in a weird way its become quite an important part of my life. If you think about it.. you're sharing your messages, thoughts, pictures, video's even current location.... literally all those things that used to be tucked away in albums or diaries or known only to close friends and family (or neither) with this massive brightly coloured company that's primary business is essentially sharing information/telling tales. There is an (large) element of trust there between you and them.. you and Google. Like it or not, that's the situation. So, when it comes to them fooling around with your information, its quite easy to start spooking people.
Whereas Facebook sits separately from your emails and photo's only working with what you decide (to a degree, they've received a lot of criticism for the amount of data they're capturing without your knowledge i.e "would you like to sync your contacts with Facebook... great I'll take EVERYTHING and their phone numbers too") to share with it, i.e specifically picking out an image and uploading it, Google Plus will merge all your pictures and then let you decide what you're sharing from there. Instead of you being able to continue to work with your existing Google products as before, it'll weasel its way into everything and then let you chose whom you share with rather than whether you share at all.
I upload a lot of my photography to Google Images using Picasa (both great ideas) and went to look at them today. Instead of being greeted by the nice simple layout of old Google Images I was met with Google Plus and a bunch of someone else's pictures.. I didn't really want to see that other persons pictures, I wanted to see mine. Imagine walking into a room in your house, expecting to see it decorated the way you'd left it, only to find it altered to someone else's taste and with someone else's work. Agreed Google has always made updates and alterations to its products before and they've generally worked very well however its always been based around your content and not someone else's.
I feel that they might be underestimating how personal a lot of their products are to people and how easily people could become upset by the way their things are being played with. By all means create Google Plus and by all means give me the option to share my photo's or messages or calendars with others but have Google Plus as an extra not a "be-all" as it was quickly becoming, down to every picture I took with my Android phone immediately being sent to Google Plus to be shared... I mean seriously, not everyone is an exhibitionist and some things aren't meant to be shared, just enjoyed by the creator.
Anyhoo, I finally got an email from someone inviting me to join Google Plus. I signed up.. basically its a social networking site, on that basis it will suffer if few of your friends use it.. few of my friends use it, which wasn't a major problem as I'm not a big social networking (facebook/twitter) user. What did irritate me however was the level to which it stuck its nose into literally everything I did.
I do pretty much everything through Google and in a weird way its become quite an important part of my life. If you think about it.. you're sharing your messages, thoughts, pictures, video's even current location.... literally all those things that used to be tucked away in albums or diaries or known only to close friends and family (or neither) with this massive brightly coloured company that's primary business is essentially sharing information/telling tales. There is an (large) element of trust there between you and them.. you and Google. Like it or not, that's the situation. So, when it comes to them fooling around with your information, its quite easy to start spooking people.
Whereas Facebook sits separately from your emails and photo's only working with what you decide (to a degree, they've received a lot of criticism for the amount of data they're capturing without your knowledge i.e "would you like to sync your contacts with Facebook... great I'll take EVERYTHING and their phone numbers too") to share with it, i.e specifically picking out an image and uploading it, Google Plus will merge all your pictures and then let you decide what you're sharing from there. Instead of you being able to continue to work with your existing Google products as before, it'll weasel its way into everything and then let you chose whom you share with rather than whether you share at all.
I upload a lot of my photography to Google Images using Picasa (both great ideas) and went to look at them today. Instead of being greeted by the nice simple layout of old Google Images I was met with Google Plus and a bunch of someone else's pictures.. I didn't really want to see that other persons pictures, I wanted to see mine. Imagine walking into a room in your house, expecting to see it decorated the way you'd left it, only to find it altered to someone else's taste and with someone else's work. Agreed Google has always made updates and alterations to its products before and they've generally worked very well however its always been based around your content and not someone else's.
I feel that they might be underestimating how personal a lot of their products are to people and how easily people could become upset by the way their things are being played with. By all means create Google Plus and by all means give me the option to share my photo's or messages or calendars with others but have Google Plus as an extra not a "be-all" as it was quickly becoming, down to every picture I took with my Android phone immediately being sent to Google Plus to be shared... I mean seriously, not everyone is an exhibitionist and some things aren't meant to be shared, just enjoyed by the creator.
