1066: Doubleplusgood

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over both Facebook and Twitter recently, mostly due to both of them tweaking their terms of service in various ways that some people don’t like very much. Me, I don’t particularly mind too much because at the end of the day, I’m not paying for either of them, so as the saying goes, “if the product is free, then you are the product” — I accepted this some time back and think back on it any time one or the other of them does something apparently stupid. I use both daily to stay in touch with various people, so quitting either is out of the question.

For those feeling somewhat wary of the big F and the big T, however, I’d encourage you to give the big G another shot. (Unless you’re one of those people who irrationally hates Google too, in which case… err, I hear Myspace is coming back soon?) Yes, G+ is still a smokin’ hot social networking service that is far from the ghost town the media likes to portray it as. It’s an active, thriving community that has only gotten better over time.

The latest addition to the service, and one which could well prove to be a “killer feature” with a little refinement, is Communities. Communities are little mini-networks within G+ that allow members to post content as they would do normally on G+, but keep it all within one community rather than sharing it publicly or having to use the slightly cumbersome “Circles” system. It’s a good way of bringing people together who want to talk about the same thing, and it’s pretty customizable, too — you can change the community’s iconic image, title, headline and basic information, but also create categories for posts to help keep things organised, too. The latter feature needs a little tweaking — you can’t reassign a post to a new category if you miscategorise it upon creating it, for example — but the groundwork is there for a solid community system.

And, crucially, people are using it. Google+ may not quite have the same number of daily active users as Facebook, but there are more than enough to make these communities active, vibrant places to hang out. The board games community I joined has over 2,000 members, for example, while there are over 3,500 bronies hanging out in the “Pony+” community. The anime community has over 20,000 members, as do various photography-related communities. G+ is an attractive destination for photographers, as it provides practically unlimited space for high-quality photo storage along with some basic editing tools — and the G+ interface is a nice means of showing off one’s work, too.

G+ is built to be used on a variety of platforms, too. The mobile apps for both iOS and Android are quick to be updated with new features and are consistent in their behaviour and functionality. Pretty much everything you can do on the desktop website can be done from the mobile app — and the mobile app has the added bonus of looking rather lovely, too, for those who like that sort of thing.

So if you’ve got a Google account, give it a shot. And by “give it a shot” I mean do more than just open it up, complain that there’s no-one to talk to and then close it down — like Twitter, you need to actually “follow” some interesting people before it starts to show its true value. The new Communities feature will help people find like-minded friends more easily, as this was one weakness of the old version — it was quite tricky to find new people to follow.

Here’s some links to get you started. Here’s my profile. Here’s the Squadron of Shame Community. Here’s the “Too Old For This” Community run by my buddies Chris and Jeff. Here’s the board game Community.

Now get on there and get chatting! I’ll leave you with this, from The Oatmeal.