The startpage reminded me a little bit of another social network, just less blue…

Google+ mainly constists of your google profile, a stream including your and your contacts posts – analog to google buzz,  photos from Picasa or uploaded ones, +1 entries, videos and the brand new features as:

1. hangout
2. sparks
3. circles

Hangouts is an unlimited video chat with your contacts and/or circles. Unfortunately I cannot tell anything personally about hangout, as I – shame on me – I do not own a webcam… But I will get one and try it out soon.

Google hangout

The feedback from others I noticed was entirely positive, so let’s see.

Sparks is a news collection of various interests you can choose from or define by yourself.

Google sparks

To me it seems yet unfinished and the results – at least for my fields of interest are kinda clumsy. Nevertheless sparks is interesting, if improved und and pimped up – maybe with recomendations of your contacts from google Reader or +1 items. I’m curious where the fellas at google are heading with sparks. Now with unpersonalized and sketchy news from preselected sources, like affirmed blogs and the big news services,  it’s quite boring, spiced up with a personal taste and more mojo, it might be entertaining and helpful.

Circles is the name for the innovative, neat and sexy contact management system of google+. Circles represent groups you define as you wish and as many as needed, a contact is allowed to be part of several different circles. Your circles are not visible to public and contacts just know they are in your circles, but do not know in which specific circle(s). This is a great advantage towards facebook as you merely follow people like on twitter.

google circles

The shared pictures, links, articles, videos and so on in your stream you send to the circles you chose, which gives complete and absolutely precise control about the visibilty of your posts.

At first time you set up your circles, you will get recommendations from your Gmail contacts and if you took part from Google Buzz.
Managing your contact list with circles is fun – yeah really! Either you choose to drag-and-drop your contacts – as single or in groups – on the circles page or you just organize them as you find them in posts, comments or +1ed lists…

There are some hidden new features, too, if you now google your own name, you will find your google profile  first in line in the results, before the google profile pages did hardly show up on the first pages.

Google+ does not just have sunny sides, the photo integration of Picasa is not properly realised, Alexander Kunz wrote a precise article of the problems with Picasa on google+.
In your Profile in the +1 area only pages you “plusoned” are displayed, it would be nice to see the posts I +1ed, too…

The big question will be how google is handling privacy and the data they get fed with, will they adopt habits from their opponent facebook?

For the first days on, according to me, Google+ does a great job and I am curious how it develops.

Some Links:

Google+ demo

The Google+ Project

20 Google+ Tips to Enhance Your Google Plus Experience

Looking for informations, advices, strategies or hints guiding you on your paths through the social media djungle?
Here you’ll find a composition of free ebooks that might be helpful on your efforts to successfully use social marketing mechanisms for building a brand, attract traffic or gain significance on a certain topic.

So these Links will keep you busy for a while…

Instructions and sum ups

The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
Brian Solis about new tools and philosophies, how to effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn, cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand and build relationships.

Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
Social Media expert Chris Brogan gives you starting points how to inroduce your organization into social media and social networking

What is Social Media?
“a short, sweet summary of the phenomenon called social media”

The Essential Guide to Social Media
A sum up of some essential guidelines, written by Brian Solis

The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
Interesting example of a company entering the realm of social media communities

Social Media Marketing Kit
Tips and tricks for the survival in the social mediasphere, plus a video Webinar

The Zen of Blogging
Really amusing story about a guys efforts to dive into the higher spheres of blogging – with a slight wink of an eye

Learning Web 2.0
Examples of ways in which associations are using new web 2.0 technologies and what possibilities they
may represent for your organization’s professional development

A Primer in Social Media
Advices for approaching social media with their new paradigms and, rules and philosophies

Studies

Blogs & Social Media
This article reports on a three-year-long international survey of public relations
practitioners examining the impact blogs and other social media are having on public
relations practice.

Social Web Analytics
This ebook gives a brief overview of the characteristics of the Social
Web, also known as Social Media.

Research-Based Webdesign & Usabilty Guidelines

Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media
Attempt to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the “traditional” method of analysing a blog’s inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO for WordPress blogs
How to use WordPress to ensure success for your weblog in the Organic Search Engine Results.

Google Adwords Secrets
Tips for keyword research, choosing a domain name, placing keywords, link building, effectively using SEO tools

We Have a Website. Now What?
This ebook provides straightforward advice for entrepreneurs new to search engine optimization.

Marketing

Get Viral Get Visitors
Trying to give and understanding of what viral marketing is about and how methods of successful campaigns can be adopted

The New Rules of Viral Marketing
Whatever you call it—viral, buzz, word-of-mouse, or word-of-blog marketing—having other people tell your story drives action. An example how it’s done…

Marketing With Case Studies
How to Sell Your Products or Services Using Story-Telling Techniques

Twitter for Business
A compact and dense round up how to use twitter.com to promote your company successfully

Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter
If you use the site properly you can build up another stream of traffic to your website or blog, not to mention developing a brand for yourself as well.

New_Rules_Of_Business_Blogs
How business owners and managers should act in blogosphere if they want to explore this new communication channel.

Masters of Marketing
Cleaning up some hypes and myths of internet marketing and giveing ideas for using social media mechanisms

Podcast Marketing eBook
This guide is intended only to give you a broad overview of some of the basics of podcast marketing.

Effective Internet Presence
How to build up a significant and productive internet identity

How to Write a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.

friendfeed.com
Friendfeed works as a feed of your social community activities, one adds services like flickr, picasa, twitter, google reader, digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, youtube, fast.fm and of course own blogs sharing the own post/messages/links with other people and commenting the interesting stuff from others. Seriously good source of hot news right from the streets!

toluu.com
A service to share and tag rss feeds and to find people of the same interest.
Quite new, one still needs an invite code – if you need one drop me a message.

delicious.com
Social bookmarking site, which recently launched a new, fresh layout, for sharing, tagging links, creating networks with friends/users of the same interest.

digg.com
Vote for news links, pictures or videos of your interest and help creating the famous digg effect, a self-made DOS attack on your website, if you’re lucky, you (or your server) must be prepared. Lately rumors said that alpha user take money for pushing news to the frontpage, other users claim to banned from Google Adsense due to the unexpected and sudden traffic created by the digg community.

Related:
socialmedian.com
stumbleupon.com

Create your own community:

Ning.com
This is a platform where one can set up his very own community about any interest, offering video and photo uploads, discussion rooms, messaging, comments, fully editible profiles…
All a fully grown up community needs, so if one already gather a larger group of the same interest, this is a fine service to establish a exchange of thoughts and opinions.

Blog Communities:

Blogcatalog.com
Create groups for your own blogs and gather followers to promote events or interesting posts. Start or join groups for gaining from the strenght of the community. Interact via private messages and so called broadcasts you might send to your follwers. It’s got the social activity componet, too so one is able to see what fellow other bloggers are interested. Providing a widget showing the fans of your blog. A good, thus active and helpful member, might derive traffic from here.

mybloglog.com
Yahoo’s mybloglog is pretty similar to blogcatalog, but offering much more service to integrate, plus detailed statistics for your blog for one week or more is one chooses the paid version.

fuelmyblog.com
Voting site, if a blog gathers enough votes to reach the home page, one should better be prepared for a shitload of traffic.

blogflux.com
Blog Directory offering several paid services, like featured listing in a toplist and stuff.

Related:
blogexplosion.com
blogrush.com
qassia.com

Photo Communities:

flickr.com
Very large photo community with free restricted accounts and Premium accounts for 25$ a year. Yahoo.com scared off some users by forcing them to quit or to get a Yahoo ID and after that enabling videos for upload. But the community is still alive and kickin! Lately they set up a deal with Getty Images so in the future users might be able to sell their flickr pics via Getty Images, which could be interesting.

Related:
picasa.com
devianart.com

Both serve certainly completely different needs, twitter mainly focuses on spreading rather personal opinons/feelings/emotional states/gossip, only randomly establishing a real conversation.
Friendfeed resembles a honey pot of information gathered by its user acting as honey bees collected from various flowers, like Digg, GoogleReader, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and many more.

Definitely the value of information might be varying, but like on twitter it users can adjust that by choosing their subscriptions.

Looking at the user stats both are steadily growing with twitter being comfortable in in the lead.
One of the reasons for this distance is certainly twitter started in August 2006 and friendfeed in October 2007. Another cause might be twitter is used for communication, friendfeed on the contrary deals in information. This shows why the geek ratio on friendfeed is definitely higher…

As a result both services will mostly not bother each other in the future, with their target audience being to different and having unequal demands.
So Twitter vs Plurk or Friendfeed vs GoogleReader would give much more challenging and interesting fights…