Google+ early review

As soon as Google announced another foray into the social networking sphere, the hunt was on for invitations. Invitees got 500 apiece to dish out and Twitter went ballistic as people tried to get onboard.

It's now been 48 hours since the service launched and V3.co.uk logged on shortly afterwards, although it now seems Google has stopped new invitees joining for the time being. Nevertheless, enough people are starting to get onto the network to make things social, so what is the service like?

The opening page will be very familiar to anyone who has used Facebook, with a similiar news feed and lots of space around the edges for new features. You don't need a Gmail account to use the service, but if it is your primary web mail and IM platform there are a number of integration advantages, particularly for messaging.

If you're not using Gmail then you have one more browser pane to watch out for, and one of the improvements Google needs to make is integrating a unified messaging client that can use a variety of different systems.

When setting up the account, you will be asked to identify a number of friends and move them into customisable circles, in a manner Google says is reminiscent of how people build social groups offline. Your friends won't be able to see the name of the circle or circles they are in, and crucially can choose how much information to share and how.

Facebook can argue that it has similar functionality with its Lists system, but the two are conceptually and practically quite different. Lists is an option, but Facebook does little to promote it, in part down to the corporate ethos that everything must be shared. Google on the other hand is basing the entire system on silos of friends and colleagues.

As Google+ grows, we suspect this difference will become increasingly apparent. Facebook users are already facing an ever-increasing flood of information and the ability to trim and edit that will be crucial. The question is, will users actively take up the option, or just make everything public to everyone anyway?

Uploading new photos is easy enough, with good integration with Picassa and other online image sharing sites. You can also group your photos into those taken on your phone, or by specific circles, which is a nice touch.

On the topic of newsfeeds, Google+ offers Sparks, a way to track news and postings on your favourite topics. This currently looks a bit sparse, and seems to consist of a series of news articles on a given topic. Nevertheless it has potential, providing the topics can be refined down, but is also going to lead to a lot of reposting of similar articles by users.