So, I finally got an invite to Google+ today. After a first cursory glance, I have to say, I like it better than Facebook. Definitely pluses are no advertisements and no game updates filling my message list. However, I really don't have much at all filling up my list of messages, as it's currently invite only. I've invited a few people, plus there's the guy who invited me, so hopefully that will clear up quite quickly. I have to wonder how long no advertisements will stick around. If they can keep it as clean as their search engine, I'm definitely dropping Facebook. Games aren't really that much of a problem, and are probably a necessary evil to get people to spend copious amounts of time on the site. Which is the primary objective of any of these social networking sites it seems.

I thought the circles things was going to be a lot more trouble, like having to select circles every time I post something. However, it seems to retain the last group of circles I selected so I don't have to continually select family and friends every time I post something. I also like the fact that I can create my own circles. Having an "Arch Enemies" circle is going to come in useful in the future. Even if that circle is currently represented by the empty set. I am also intrigued by the "following" circle, which seems to hint at a Twitter like feature. Although I can't quite see how to get a list of all posts by people I'm following, which would give me a Twitter-esque view, but I think it's there somewhere.

The photos feature seems to work really nice. I can just drop a bunch of photos on the browser and they are uploaded. Plain dumb simple. This is good. Even creates a new "album" with the date. This is also plain dumb simple. I really don't care about organizing photos into albums, which is why I use Dropshots. Just organize all the photos by date and be done with it.

Other than that, there doesn't seem to be anything really great about Google+. It lets you update your status. Lets you post photos. It lets you read the statuses and see the photos of other people. The circles thing is nice. Because I can easily share some things with some people, and not others. I'll have to see if enough people end up switching or getting a Google+ account at all to make it worth while. I feel like Facebook has a little bit too much momentum going to make enough people want to switch. And being on two social networking sites just seems like it would be doubly or even triply time consuming. Then again, it seems like most people despite using Facebook all the time seem to complain about it all the time. So maybe it does have a shot. Plus it could be a big time saver if it combined all the features of Twitter and Facebook under one roof. Anyway, this is all based on clicking around Google+ for about 10 minutes. I really need to look into this some more before I draw some real conclusions.