Google+

that with our friends. I thought so. So today we wanted to talk about a social network experiment that launched recently. As of the recording of this podcast, we're recording this in July two thousand eleven, and not that long ago, Google made a an announcement that ended up taking at least the uh, the geek world by storm. Yes, definitely, and we've had a few requests, and I think Jonathan and I have decided that we'll go ahead and record a podcast about it now in self defense before too

many other people ask us how it works. And also we should add that well, first of all, we're talking about Google Plus. In case you didn't read the title, that we're talking about Google Plus but I want to add a disclaimer at the beginning of this podcast, which is Google Plus is in a a beta a rapidly expanding beta program, uh, and could undergo massive changes and

short amounts of time. So anything we talked about today may very well have be be different by the time this podcast goes live, although I don't I don't imagine things changing so significantly that they don't apply at all. But it may be that there are some subtleties that we are not going to cover because they will have emerged between the time we record this in the time it publishes. Yeah, because frankly, that's that's true of a good two thirds of our podcast anytime we don't talk

about something in history. Yeah. But but with with something like this in particular, or when it's in a beta format and a lot of people are testing it out. Um. And not only that, but the team behind it is listening to feedback and incorporating feedback into their changes. You

have a rapidly evolving service that's going on here. So even though we might record something about say Facebook, and sure maybe some things will get tweaked in the Facebook uh service between the time we record in the time we published it might be minor. But with something like this, where it's truly experimental and people are implementing changes at a rapid pace, the change it's more noticeable. Yes, that being said, now that we get the disclaimer on the way,

let's talk about Google Plus. Okay. So one of my favorite descriptions of Google Plus came courtesy of Molly Wood from c net, who said, Google Plus is like you are at this uh, this really fancy party, and you're in a V I P section of the party and there are only a few people there, and everyone's excited to be there, and everyone's talking about being at the party, and that's all that's happening. That's that's definitely an exaggeration, and it's also paraphrasing, so that's not a direct quote.

Molly would put it much more succinctly. But and it's it's also changed in the last couple of days. Right. But but early on, if you were one of the few people who got into Google Plus, I was very fortunate and that I managed to get an invite, uh and and joined pretty pretty early on. Yeah, it turns out I know a lot of people in the tech business. Um. But if you if you were in there early on, it felt like the people who were there were all

these mostly tech and geek culture folks. Yeah. So you had a lot of people who are from tech companies, including folks who are actually from Google, which makes sense, it's their product, right. You had people from other big companies stuff like Twitter or Facebook, even we'll get into that. And then you had a lot of tech journalists, so people like Leo Laporte, tom merritt Um later on, Molly Wood and Brian Tong have seen it. Um I as actor who's a good friend of mine, He's he was

also on there pretty early on. You had these folks who were kind of populating it, so it felt like a weird social network. It felt like a social network that had been designed specifically for this tech geek world. Oh, you also had some geek celebrities, and I say geek celebrities in that geeks like me tend to think of them as amazing celebrities. So Felicia Day will Wheaten those kind of folks. Um, So it kind of felt like a social network built for geeks. Now that's gradually changing us.

More and more people join in and we're starting to to slowly skewed toward a more quote unquote normal population. I use normal just in the sense of average as opposed to geeks are not normal. Yeah, and and I feel compelled to point out that again, like a number of topics on this show, this is one of those

things that has been anticipated for quite some time. Um. It's hard to tell a lot of these things too, things like the Apple iPad and Google Plus and things like this that people say, oh, well, you know, Google's working on a social network that's aimed to take down Facebook, and they talk about it for months and months and sometimes years, and you start going, yeah, happened, sort of like Spotify coming to the United States, which also just

recently happened, but for for a long time. Uh. Again, this is one of those things that I've heard a lot of technicalists called tech unicorns. Yeah. These are like the white iPhone for a long time was the tech unicorn. The iPad was a tech unicorn for a long time. These are apples streaming iTunes services, which is still still Yeah. These are things that everyone quote unquote knows is coming, but it hasn't arrived yet, and it maybe years before

we ever get to it. And ever. Yeah, some of these are some of these turned into vaporware, right, tech Unicorn vaporware. The relationships pretty tight, Yeah, Duke Nukelen forever long time tech unicorn. We will withhold commentary on what actually eventually published anyway, But so let's let's kind of talk about sort of the the we've talked about why, how people wanted to get in. Uh we a lot of people wanted to get in and couldn't get in

because they didn't have enough invites. Um. The the expansion of Google Plus has been pretty impressive to watch over time. You want to say something, well, no, I was just gonna say that they're in between the tech unicorn. Um. It's one of those things. And at least in my opinion, where Google Plus it was so we've heard it for so long, it's like it's hiding in plain sight that they just went, oh, here it is, and we all kind of went. Google Plus kind of launched without a

whole lot of fanfare from Google. But it turns out Google didn't need to provide fanfare that was provided by that community of users I was talking about earlier, because that that that same group of early adopters who are passionate about trying stuff out, are really passionate about sharing information. So these adopters served as the the champions of Google Plus. Google didn't have to say it anything. Really, they showed off a demo um, they explained the concept and that,

and they let everyone else take over. And really, Google didn't just release and watch. They released, watched and listened and implemented changes. Which that's kind of where I think a lot of the tech enthusiasts have really kind of latched onto Google Plus because they're like, they're not just giving us this, They're listening to what we have to

say and they're taking that into consideration. So instead of it being some sort of ivory tower where products come out, but it's a one way street, right, you know, they're they're providing a service, but they're not listening to what we have to say. We just take whatever they're giving us. Google is more of a two way street. Like you

really feel that the people at Google are listening. Now, they may not incorporate all the changes you think need to be there because it doesn't match their vision of what this service ultimately will do, but at least they're listening. Yeah, Ultimately, you know, all of us have our own preferences and choices we want to see in the product. And so Google is not going to make all of us happy.

And you know, those of us it does make happy, it won't make us completely happy because well, we'll be looking for one particular thing or two particular things and maybe you know, that's just a few people. And Google is not gonna change it just for a few people. But yeah, as soon as it was announced, um, you know, the tech enthusiasts latched onto it and and it started spreading.

But the thing is, um, Google was smart about launching it the way they did because they were trying to avoid overloading their servers um and so what they were doing was they were releasing it to a few people at a time. And when I say a few, a few to most of us would be you know, ten people, but you know, a few to Google was you know a few hundreds, a few thousand at a time. And uh so people were going crazy the first few days after the launch looking for an invite to this new service.

Now it also makes it seem really exclusive. Yeah, and of course the more, yeah, the more exclusive something is, the more people want to be in that because people want to be part of an exclusive group. And uh, I mean it's just natural, right. You see, you see the cool click of kids, and you want to be in that click. And once you're in that click, you're like,

this is awesome. And yeah, I don't object to us letting in maybe one or two other people who are kind of cool, but let's not go crazy and let everyone in, because then we don't have a click anymore. So uh, and we can get into sort of the click ish behavior that I've noticed on Google Plus. Not again, this is really really early on in Google Plus. I don't expect that this will last long. There's gonna be

a big change as more people join. And also there were reports that within a couple of weeks of Google Plus launching, they were already possibly as many as ten million people on it. And at the time we're recording this podcast, which is again just a couple of weeks after Google Plus launched, they expect it to be up to twenty million by uh, in a in a couple of days from the recording of this podcast. So if you're looking for let's go ahead and get this answer

out of the way. If you're looking for Google Plus to knock off Facebook, right away, it's not going to happen because they're talking twenty million people out of seven fifty million for Facebook. So the law, the the long term answer to that is maybe. But right now, you know, there's no threat whatsoever. And I don't think Google would

claim that Google Plus is meant to replace Facebook. In fact, that kind of leads us into what is Google Plus because we talked a lot about the the popularity, but we haven't really even discussed anything about the actual service. There are some similarities to other social networks. In fact, there's there are similarities to other Google products. Yeah, and and you will notice if you have used things like Google Buzz or Google Wave, you'll see little similarities here

and there in Google Plus. And you'll notice like, okay, they they've sort of incorporated this idea and the lessons they learned from that into Google Plus. So Google Plus is essentially a social network, though it's not just a social network. And the way it works from a user perspective is that you will look for people who are on Google Plus or have yet to join Google Plus, people you know or people you know of, and you

put those people into circles. Now, these circles are categories so that you can uh put people into whichever ones fit best in your life, so that you can direct messages to those people and read messages from those people in a way that's more granular than your average Facebook user is used to. Yeah. Now, I mean, uh, Facebook fans would probably see, but yeah, I can do that

with Facebook. Well. Um, basically the big difference here, I think is that this is like the first thing you do when you add a new person to your Google Plus account if you want to uh start following Jonathan for example, Um, you know, the very first thing to say, Okay, oh I found him. Now what circles do you want to add him to? And you can add people to more than one circle, yes, and you can create circles. You you start off with some basic circles. I believe

it's friends, family, acquaintances, and followers are following. So I've got let's say, I've got There's there's Chris, And then I have to make a decision do I put Chris in my friend's circle, do I put them in my acquaintances circle, or do I put them in my following circle. Chris is not part of my family, so I'm not going to put them in there, and I'm all right with that. Uh yeah, And and it's nice to note too,

especially if you're concerned with issues of privacy. The person on the other end, the person that you're adding to your circles, has no idea what circles to which you have added them, right, So if you put them in, like, you could create a circle called jerk faces. I know, I know, I know for a fact that I'm in that certain and you could put people in the jerk faces I know circle and they're not gonna know that that's the They know that you've added them, yes, but

they don't know what circle they are in. So I'm probably in a lot of jerk faces I know circles and yeah, and now that our listeners have heard me say this, I imagine a lot of them are making jerk faces I know circles just to put me in them. Um, So you've got these circles. Now you've decided where this your first let's say it's your first person you're following. So I'm going to use Chris as my example. I've decided that I want to follow Chris. I want to I want to hear what Chris has to say, I

want to be able to see his updates. I want to be able to see his photos. Um, I put him in my acquaintances circle. All right. So now, anytime Chris posts and publishes his post to either the public, which means everyone can see it. Everyone on Google Plus can see it, everyone in the in the world can see it. Um. I mean it's not restricted to anybody

in particular right right now. Now, if Chris has not put me in a circle, and he publishes it in anything other than public, I'm not going to see that information. So Chris decides that he wants to publish a status update, but he's just going to push it to his friends. I am not in his friend's circle. He types in his status update, he sets it so that it only publishes to friends he publishes it. I don't know that Chris has done anything to me. His his posts still

are blank. Now let's say that Chris does another one where he decides he wants to talk about an article he edited, and he wants this he wants the general public to know about this article. He sets that status update to public. Suddenly I can see that particular stats update because he set it to public. So anyone following Chris can see it. Then let's say that Chris notices that I'm on Google Plus and he thinks, oh, well, Jonathan's there, I should add him. I'll add him to

my acquaintances circle. Then Chris publishes a set us update and decides he only wants his acquaintances and friends to see it, so he sets it so that this stats update goes up to friends and acquaintances, but not the general public. I would be able to see that stats update. Now, if he had not added me to his acquaintance circle or his friends circle, I would not see it. I would be unaware that he had updated his status. You can get so granular that you can create a stats

update and directed to specific people. So I could create a stas update and just send it to Chris alone, and that's the only person who sees it. Or I could send it to Chris and maybe three or four other people. Let's say that it's three or four people who are in different circles. They don't really belong all on the same circle, but I think they all need to see this message. I might just go in and manually put in each name, and those are the only

people who will see that message. Now, there's some other things you have to remember, like, uh, there is the ability to share posts that other people have published. Now if you you can either turn the sharing on or off, so you don't have to. If you turn it off, that means other people cannot share the same message you just posted. If the share is on, your message that went out to just your friends or just your acquaintances

might suddenly become public. So Chris sends out a message to just his acquaintances, he has sharing turned on, he has not turned that off. I read Chris's post, and I think, hey, that's awesome. Everyone who follows me wants to know that too. I hit share. Suddenly his message that just went to his acquaintances are now it's now out in the wild, So they're attributed to me exactly. Yes, yes,

so people can actually follow it back to Chris. Now, granted they're only going to be able to see the things that Chris has published at that point to the public if they go directly to that's the weird thing. They might see a shared post like I share your post, they see it on my feed, then they follow it back to your feed and selling you that post isn't there because it wasn't set to public when it was originally published, and it gets a little complicated. These are

things that the Google Plus team. They're looking into this stuff to see what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, you know, sharing versus private. And because you have the ability to turn sharing off, if you are someone who doesn't want information to go beyond that group of friends, you can always turn it off. Now, granted, that doesn't stop your friends from say A, saying that Jonathan said, blah blah blah, And there's always you know, copy and paste, right,

So yeah, there are ways around it. But that's the same for any social network. I sort of count on my friends to be lazy enough where they won't I can't share this, yeah, exactly. And and really, I mean it's just like real life. Just like real life. If I come up and I tell Chris is secret, there's nothing stopping Chris from going around and telling other people that secret. I'm sorry, I told you, I'm sorry. Gee. Yeah, well let's see if you ever get any key line

pie from me again. So so that's the basics behind circles and sharing. And also, if let's say that when you're actually consuming information, You're not just that that's sending information out right, publishing information. You can also look view your stream. That's what Google Plus calls your what what Facebook would call the wall right or Twitter would call it the feed, So it's the same sort of concept. It's it's the stream of information coming from all the

people that you put into your circles. You can view that by circle. So if you just have it set to the stream, you're looking at everything that people you follow are publishing. So all your friends, acquaintances, celebrities who might be following people you know of but you don't actually know in real life. All the information gets dumped into the stream. If you want to try and filter

that out, you can view your stream by circle. So I might click friends and now I'm only going to see the updates that my friends have published to their stream, and I've cut everything else out. I can even view it by incoming incoming. It gets really crazy for people like me, and more so for people who are even more even more who are actually famous. Because I have, as the recording of this podcast, I have people following me. If I choose incoming, I see their updates, so I'm

not following them. But by hitting income, I'm seeing everyone who's following me, I'm seeing their updates. So suddenly it just becomes a wall of information. Um. But assuming that everything they've published as public, if they published stuff to their friends or their acquaintances or whatever, I'm not going to see that. I'm only going to see stuff that in the circles that I've been included in and in

the public posts. But it means that I get a lot more information from a lot more people, not just the people I follow, right. Um, So in a way that a lot right. So, in a way, Google Plus is like Facebook and that you can follow specific people, they can follow you back and you. In a way, it's like Twitter because in Twitter you can follow people and just read what they have to say as long as they don't have their profile set to private. You can read Twitter posts from people as they update. So

in Google Plus the same sort of thing. You don't have to give permission to someone in order for them to follow you. But people say, well what about privacy. That's where the the circles come in. That's where you can choose which circles see what you have to say. If you don't want random people seeing what you have to say, you publish it to a specific circle, right, Um, And I mean people compare this product to Twitter and Facebook all the time. Um. I've seen a constant stream

of that. However, I think it's most like at least the ones I've tried. Most like another service that caught on for a little while and Facebook acquired it, and it's sort of languished under Facebook's control, and that's called

friend Feed. If you've ever been to friend feed dot com. Um, it's very very similar and um, it's it's similar to I mean, the the feed is somewhat similar to the wall on on Facebook, but you can um like and unlike and make long comments to it, very much in the style of friend feed, more so than than Facebook or Twitter. But it's it's closer probably to Facebook or friend Feed than it is to Twitter. Now, I mean there is some uh, you know that it looks a

little bit more like Twitter. I mean, just the visual element of it, I would say, Um, but there are some other advantages to using Google Plus that there aren't, um, and that's probably I think of that more as the integration with Android. UM. For example, you know, Jonathan and I both have Android smartphones, and we can set Google Plus to automatically post every photo we take with our phones to Google Plus. Now I don't think that's such

a good idea. You can set your privacy. You can set your privacy so that people don't automatically see those photos. So so if you if you had it where every photo you take is automatically published, uh, publicly to your Google Plus account, that seems like a bad idea. Yeah, I mean even if even if we let's take let's take out the bad behavior aspect, right, so bad behavior, that would be a bad idea because suddenly you're publicly

showing everyone bad behavior. So let's say you know, being intoxicated or being acting irresponsibly in some way, and you're like, oh, let's take a picture of this that well, yeah, that's a bad idea. But let's say it's just a bad photo, like your fingers in the frame. You know, you don't want that publishing because you're like, come on, that's just a I'd rather take that photo again. So you can set your privacy setting so that those photos don't automatically

go to everybody. Yeah, I actually do have instant published turned on right now, because I wanted to try it out, and it's pretty neat. I didn't realize that every picture I take on my phone is instantly published, not just the ones I do through the app, but through anything. So it gets like I've taken photos to upload to Twitter and twit pick. It also has gone to my

Google Plus account. Now I don't have it publishing publicly, so at least people aren't being flooded by pictures of me trying to take a photo of one thing and like, no, that's not right either. Let me change the lighting a little bit and take three more of these. But you could do that, And that isn't to say that that won't that functionality won't come to other phones. Now there is a Google Plus app. Actually, there was a Google Plus app for Android, I would say just about immediately

since I heard about it, I looked for it. There it was the launch, the launch on the web, and the launch on the phone. In fact, the launch on the phone gave some people work around to getting into Google Plus. Early on, they installed the Google Plus app on their phone and found that they could bypass the invite system, and once they tried to activate the app on their phone, it gave them an invite UM, and there was another workaround that got you into Google Plus UM,

but those have been patched since then. But they've also started opening it up two more people too. So I mean, I have hundreds of invites right now, and I just keep getting more, and I'm running out of people who I know would be interested in it and well and personally. And the invite system is not entirely intuitive. No, it's not. It's not. It's not the easiest thing in the world. Like when you see the invite system, it's it's easy

to get a little confused by it. Uh. I guess we can talk a little bit about some of the other features of Google Plus well before we get too far away from the the Android app. We have heard that there is going to be an iOS app that's the operating system for the Apple I stuff. As the recording of this podcast, it's been submitted but not yet approved. Yeah,

so there. I don't know if the automatic photo feature will work with those phones, I you know, and I don't know if there will be something coming for Windows Phone or or web os. Um. We'll see. Yeah, But like a lot of BlackBerry, like a lot of services and products that we're seeing launch these days. Uh, it's really effective if you subscribe to a particular ecosystem in this case Google's, so using Google Plus on Google Chrome

and having an Android phone. It works. I mean it works really seamlessly because all those products are coming from the same company. But when you start mixing matching, your experience may vary. Yeah. There's another feature, um, and that that Jonathan and I tried out pretty much immediately, and that's called the huddle. Yes, Um, this is this relates to uh two phones. Yes, So a huddle is like

having a group messaging system on phones. So everyone who is in a huddle needs to have uh a phone number attached to their Google Plus account, or they have to have the the Google Plus app installed on their their phones. Um. And what you do is you set it up and you can send out a message. Let's say that I want to have get together after work one day and just hang out of the restaurant, have some appetizers and talk about what's been going on in

the company. There might be three or four people I want to invite, so I add all of them to my Google Plus huddle and I send out a message. That message will go to all of those people, and then all of those people can respond to that message and everyone can see each other's responses. It becomes kind of like a chat room via text message, but only among that group of people. And again this is functionality that reminds me of Google Wave and also other services

like Beluga. There are group messaging services Beluga, there are other group messaging services. Chris gave me a look, and I can tell you wanted to do the bulbous bouffont Beluga, which my wife hates um. But the yeah, there there are other messaging services group messaging services that are doing this right now. In fact, a lot of them were launching around south By Southwest and we're making a big, big splash there. Google Huddle is kind of Google's version

of this. Now, that was one of the workarounds too. If you added someone to a Google Huddle, then in order for them to be able to use the Huddle, they were given a link to log into Google Plus, and that's how they ended up getting accounts even though they didn't have an official invite UM and the invitations at that point had been closed. And yet a lot

of people found that workaround. Again, that's been patched since the since since it first happened, took a couple of days before Google caught on, or maybe they caught on, but they let it happen anyway because they're like, well, this is letting the population base expand, but it's not expanding at a rate that's outside of our comfort zone. Yeah yeah, um. And there's hangouts yea. Hangouts are awesome. I haven't tried to hang out yet. I've tried it and it is. It is addicting. So a hangout is

a video chat session. You can start a hangout with specific people if you want to, or you can start a hangout and just make it public where anyone who follows you will see the hangout and can join. And a hangout is you need a web cam and a microphone and speakers in order for this to work, so that you can hear people, they can hear you, and they can see you, and up to ten people total can be in a hangout at one time, so it's you and nine other people max. And the video switching

is very clever. It switches to whomever is speaking at the time, So if everyone's quiet and I'm talking, then the main video will be me as I'm chatting. As someone else starts to talk, the video will switch to

that person, and uh the focus changes to them. And if two people are talking, whomever' is the loudest will have their video featured as the central video, and so you'll actually see uh if in a full hangout, you'll see one main screen of the person who's talking, and then you'll see the other nine miniaturized like thumbnail sized screens below, and it's all moving, you know, like you're seeing video from all those feeds at one time. It can get a little buggy depending upon people's um data

transfer rates. You know, if you're if you're on a slow UH, if you're not really on a high speed broadband connection, you're gonna have some problems with this. There'll be some lag. UM I was. I was having some really bad lag when I was doing it, because I think there were a couple of different uh choking points in the in the data transfer. So I would say something and then about three or four seconds later, I

would hear myself say it. So I'm responding to something that someone is saying right now, but then three or four seconds later there I'm starting to hear it. So there'd be a gap between when I'm talking when they're talking, so you know, they might stop asking me a question stop I don't answer. Then they start asking if I'm there, and that's when my answer is starting to hit and I got a little muddled. But on a fast connection, it's pretty cool. Yeah. And then of course, right after

all this happened, Facebook had an amazing, awesome announcement. Yeah, they're video chat, which is uh partnership with Skype and allows you one on one video chat with another person on Facebook. It's a difference system, right, Like you can use a hangout and just talk to one person if you want to, but you can also talk to a group of people, whereas with Facebook video Chat right now, as the recording of this podcast, it's a one on

one scenario. So um, Facebook may not necessarily see Google Plus as an immediate competitor, but you can bet that the company will be watching Google Plus to see what features are added next. I mean, uh, and I don't think Google Plus is what Google would consider a finished product even you know, assuming that the features are all robust, they open the floodgates and anyone can join. You have two hundred million people on there. I think they will

continue to add new features and new functionality. For example, something that I I don't know expect might be a strong word, but seriously wouldn't be surprised if it happened would be games, which has been a huge driver of traffic to Facebook. Adding adding other kinds of in uh insight apps like that I think would would not be

a shock at all. Just opening up an a p I would be pretty And you already have starting to see some extensions for for Google Chrome that are specifically designed for Google Plus, things like allowing you to reply specifically to the person who posts. We didn't talk about that. When you do post, people can leave comments on that post, just like in Facebook, on a wall wall post or Whitter,

people can reply. Yeah, plus one is kind of like voting up or a comment or saying that you know, I really like this, so I'm adding a plus one to it. It changes the way it displays on other people's streams. Um, but yeah, we should We should mention that quickly. Like in Twitter, you can reply to someone and in general only you and the other person are really seeing that conversation unless other people are following both

of you. Right, So if I reply to Chris. People only Chris and I would see that reply unless other people are following both of us. Uh. Now with Google Plus, it's more like Facebook and that I can make a comment and then someone else can comment on that. Anyone following me can comment on that if I've made it public and then or and you can disable comments as well if you don't want people commenting on something um and then other folks can comment and it becomes a discussion.

In fact, I've had a few discussions like that pop up on Google Plus. Recently. I said, wouldn't it be cool to use the hangout feature to have a D and D game where everyone in the hangout is playing D and D. You have one person being the dungeon master and everyone else is playing a character. And you could do that. You could have people from other states log in and play the game all at the same time.

So or any other game for that matter. Yeah, you could really do that with any game, although once you start getting into things like board games or whatever, it gets a little more complex. Some games you wouldn't be able to do, like like poker, because how are you going to deal with all those cards in? You know, you have to have a video poker game going at the same time, which makes them a little more complicated anyway,

I'm sorry. Yeah, any any role playing type game like that. Yeah, board games you could do too, if everyone had a copy of the board game. Yeah, but you have to all right, you have to move me forward three squares? Is everyone on Baltic Avenue? Good? Next turn? Uh? So that's but another feature we should talk about very quickly is Sparks. Oh yeah, Sparks. Sparks is kind of like

Google Reader in a way. You tell Google Plus what what topics you are interested in, and then Google Plus kind of cultivates a news feed based on whatever interests you've told it apply to you. So, for example, I've said technology, if I go to my Sparks technology uh feed, then I will see news articles that are related to technology within Sparks. Um. That's kind of an feature that people have noticed and said, well, you know, it's it's

just not fully baked yet. So that's something I expect that we'll see more uh evolution in in the near future for Google Plus. Yeah. I think the idea behind the name Sparks is it's supposed to spark a conversation so you see a cool story, you post it to your stream and then you and your friends have a conversation with it. And I it does that, but you know it's I in looking through the sparks that I've

added to my pis. Oh yeah, if you if you add one, say you add technology to your Google Plus account, you'll see it on the left hand navigation, um, along with you know things like your you know lists for your circles and you know the other the other features people who are available for Google Chat that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, so um, so it's available to you whenever. Um. But yeah, I just when I go in there, I just find a few stories and it's not really a very long list.

It's not very compelling. Yet, Uh, the idea is there, I mean the I I see nothing wrong with the idea, and I think they need to And I think this is Google's response to the trend of people getting information and news through stuff like Facebook. Like their friends shares an article that's that that their friend thought was really cool and then you see it on Facebook and you're like huh, and you click on the link and you read the article and you're like, yeah, that was interesting.

Google's kind of taking that and trying to incorporate it directly into the social experience so that you aren't you know you aren't. You don't have to move very far away from Google in order to do it. Also, we should mention that Google Plus has a notifications bar that tells you when people have interacted with your your Google Plus account in some ay, maybe that they started to follow you. It may be that they left a message for you. They they've mentioned you in a comment, They've

applied to one of your status is uh. The cool thing is, if you're on any Google site, so including Google dot com just the web browser, if you're signed into Google, that notification bar is at the top of your screen, and you can actually look at those notifications in real time on that that page and respond to them without ever actually traveling to your Google Plus account. So I might be on Google dot com doing research for an article and I see a notification thing pop up,

and I'm like, com wonder what's going on? Click on it, see that someone's commented on one of my pages. I wanna comment back. I can type in a comment on that notifications page and send it back without ever actually going to my Google Plus uh. Profile and um, we also need to talk really briefly at least about photo albums. Okay.

I was going to add to about about that that you can also turn on email if you really want you and that I gave a bad idea if you have a lot of followers, because you will start getting but you could. You can do the same thing as you would with Twitter or or Facebook and say yes, I want to know, send me an email every time, or or text message every time someone you know fill in the blank. It's pretty much everything sends me a

message gives me a plus one. You can choose. You can choose which ones give you alerts and which ones don't. And uh. For for an average user, it may make sense to have email notifications turned on for me because I have people following me. It would be it would overwhelm my email. Yeah, I would, And I learned very quickly, like day two of Google Plus, to turn all that

off for me. Um. And and you know, I know that there are people who are far more popular than I, and I can only imagine what their email would have looked like, like like Veronica Belmont or Fleicia Day or Will Wheaton. You know some of these people who have way more visibility than I do. I'm sure their accounts would have been overwhelmed in a second. But um, yeah, please go into photo albums. I do have one other thing I

want to mention before we finish. Okay, So yeah, photo albums are using Picasa, Google's photo web photo album service as the foundation. Although Picasa will undergo a name change pretty soon. I think that's gonna be Google Plus Photos or something like that. So but it's it's the same service so Picasa. Normally, if you sign up for a Picasa account, which really you can do. If you have a Google account your you can create a Picasa account.

You are normally given one gigabyte of storage space for photos, which is not really that much. Um. But with Google Plus, if you upload photos through Google Plus, it will automatically resize your photos so that the longest edge of your photo is two thousand, forty eight pixels long, all right, will automatically resize it. So whatever the longest edges gets reduced to that size and at that resolution, it does

not count against your one gigabyte of storage space. So if you upload the Google Plus you effectively have unlimited digital photos storage. I tested this and I have a photo album on my profile that has one thousand photos in it. That's the maximum number of photos you can have in a photo album. Now, you can have unlimited photo albums in Google Plus, so you're not limited that way. It's just that each individual photo album can only have

a thousand files in it. And uh, I recently took a vacation in Europe, and so I have a thousand photos from my vacation in Europe in that photo album. And I probably have about two thousand more photos I need to upload from that vacation, so they'll be most impressive. There'll be at least three photo albums of my vacation photos on Google Plus. Now, you gotta keep in mind it's gonna be a lower resolution than your original file, assuming, of course, you took it with a decent digital camera.

Uh So, the photo that you get on Google Plus is not going to be suitable for printing out, for example, or enlarging. Um So you will need to find some other method at a storage if you want to keep the photo at the original resolution. Um The thing I wanted to talk about was your Google profile. If you want, If this sounds interesting to you, you don't already have a profile on Google Plus. You'll need a Google account. And this is you know, the account works for everything

from Google Plus to Google Docs and all the other things. Um, if you already have a profile and you've been keeping it private, UM, that's going to change one way or the other by July thirty one. I'm not sure exactly when this is gonna published. This may put some of you at a really tight deadline. UM. I don't think a lot of people know this, but Google has plans right now, as of the recording of this podcast, to delete any profile that is not public by July thirty one.

And you have to have a name attached to your profile. So yeah, so you can't just create profiles like multiple profiles and not have a and identity associated with that profile right now. It doesn't necessarily have to be your exact name. However, people, I have heard reports that people with made up names have been questioned by Google, um as they might on on Facebook. Um, you know, they they want to make sure I guess that a real

human is behind it and they're not fooling around. But uh, yeah, I mean this this might cause some issues because I know one of the people. Things that people complain about about Facebook is that, you know, hey, I want to I want to keep this between my close friends, the people I know in real life, and my family. You know, I don't want it to be out there for everybody to see. And this is no longer going to be

an option. The thing is, maybe you say, well, I've had a Google account for ten years now, I have Google account's been around him that long anyway, Um, I've had a Google account for some time now, and you know, I, you know, I guess I'll change my name on Google Plus. Well, if you do that, it changes it across your entire profile.

Um so if you want to rename your Google profile Horatio, your Google Plus profile Horatio T. Wiggle Bottom, then people who you send email to on Gmail will also see that, and they may not realize that that's you, and then they delete it and they make fun of you. Yes, know, it's not necessarily so that's the that's the thing. I

don't know. Uh, it's it's sort of unclear to me whether they mean, you know, we will delete your profile, meaning we will delete your entire Google account, or whether they mean there will be nothing public about this account at all, the the the what they call the profile itself. It's what they're just talking about. And that's still unclear to me as of right this minute, but I have the feeling they're talking about the entire account and and I mean the whole point of this is it's a

you know, to let you connect with other people. So sure, keeping it private means that no one can connect with you. Yes, but this this is happening regardless of whether you have a Google Plus account or not. So yeah, but that's because the Google Plus is on the foundation of that profile. So it's it's forced that to happen. The profile is the bottom of the pyramid is the problem. So um yeah, so it's it's that's a concern some people have, um,

A concern I have. And again this is not necessarily the concern of the average user, but it is for people like Chris and myself and for people more notable than us, is that people can create um the you know, fake accounts or or accounts, uh, accounts claiming to be people and it's not really that person. Well, you know.

One of the big things is, uh, this first couple of weeks of Google Plus was that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook at a Google Plus profile and they were pretty sure it was him because it was a photo no one had actually seen of him before, and the people he had in his circles were Facebook executives. And then thousands of people followed him. Yes, as a matter of fact, he was at one point, I don't know if he still is, uh, the most followed person

on Facebook. I heard a report that he actually left he tightened up his privacy settings. Really, Mark Zuckerberg, you tightened up your privacy settings? Yeah? I thought you said no one wanted to do that. Good thing. It was really easy to find, yes, Um, but uh. And I've also heard reports as of today that he may have actually deleted that account. But um, there are also dozens

of other Mark Zuckerberg's in there now. Yes, and I know that, like Neil Gaiman, he end the Google Plus account for a while, and then he made the conscious decision to to to cut it out. He said it was too much noise and it didn't work for him, so he left. And then, um, he got irritated because he started getting lots of emails from people trying to add him into circles. But because he had left Google Plus, he was getting those invites through email as opposed through

Google Plus. So he deleted his account and then got deluged by email. Um. Yeah, there's the thing I was saying is that there should be are hopefully there will be some point away to verify that you are who you say you are, kind of like Twitter has verified accounts. It would be nice to have a verified account through Google Plus. Because I noticed last night that I had

a quote unquote celebrity following me named Selena Gomez. Uh yeah, so uh the Bebes Main Squeeze and um, and so I'm thinking, why is the Beeb's main squeeze following me? And so I decided to do a little investigative work and noticed that it was not truly her. People who had gone into a hangout with this person said, no, this isn't really Selena Gomez. It's a it's a fake account from a fan, which, you know, whether you believe

that's ethical or unethical is beside the point. The point being that you know, you kind of want to know the people you're talking to are the people that you think they are, right. You don't want to be misled. You may have a genuine interest in following someone who is either celebrity or other notable figure. But uh, you know, you don't mind the fact that they're not following you. You just want to get that information. Let's say it's a politician or it's someone, uh like a notable author

already in a particular field that you're interested in. You don't want to be following a fan of that person because you're not actually getting the information you wanted. So that's that's an issue with Google Plus. As of the recording of this podcast. Yeah, there there are apparently corporate accounts on the way, so yeah, right there, when that happens, there will be a house stuff works dot com account, yeah, tech stuff account, And I applied for a tech stuff account.

Ah yeah, yesterday, So if that happens, I haven't received any information back about that yet, but that's that's coming, you know, Yeah, because right now, it's supposed to just be people. That's what Google Plus was designed to do. And they said, you know, we understand there are corporations that want to use this as a way of connecting with their customers, um, their partners, etcetera. But it's just not designed for that. They're working on that right now.

They being the Google Plus team. Yeah, I think I think that they have that Google has done a much better job with this than it did with Wave and and and definitely buzz and definitely work it. Um is it a Facebook killer? While I can't stand the Blank killer thing. I think it can definitely grow into a Facebook rival and that will be good. I think the competition will be good for Facebook. They don't really have

at this point a serious competitor. My Space was probably the last one, and it's at least a serious competitor and host the world. Yeah, and there are a few places where things like or are actually sure yeah five um, but yeah, I mean worldwide. Uh. Facebook is still a pretty big um juggernauty million users is huge. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I think that given time and some added features and some refinement, I think Google Plus is off to a very good start. Yeah. And it may

very well just be a complementary service. It may never be one that replaces Facebook, because that wasn't necessarily what it was intended to do. It may be that you go to Facebook for certain kinds of interaction and you go to Google Plus for other kinds of interaction, and there's nothing wrong with that, so um, we'll see. I know there are a lot of people who are talking about the fact that are going to just drop Facebook.

In fact, I've seen a lot of people who have changed their profile pictures to say I have moved and have the g Plus logo in there, which is cute. Oh and I was gonna say about the clicks behavior. Let's finish off with this because we are running along. But the clickish behavior on Google Plus. I saw a lot of people and I assume most of it was

joking about how you know, because they joined early. They thought it would be cool to have a Google Plus badge to show that you were one of the original Google Plus beta testers before it went public, and that this would set you apart. And uh, I happened to be of the I mean, I jokingly said that would be awesome, but I honestly think that would be a

bad idea because it would discourage people. It would it would encourage a sense of clickishness and saying like I'm superior to you because I managed to get an invite to this social network, which, by the way, getting an invite to a social network doesn't mean anything. It just means you've got an invite or a work around, which means, you know, equally nothing. Um. The so I would say that that's kind of would discourage new people from coming in because they're like, oh, well, this is like a

closed off club. And also right now it's more or less a boys club according to UH. To Mashable, UM, there was a a survey done to see or a kind of an estimation done to see how many men versus women are on Google Plus. Um. For a while, like women made up about ten of the entire Google Plus population. And when you think we're potentially over ten

million users, that's significant. According to Social Statistics, that percentage is now closer to UH seventy three points seven percent, So there are more females on Google Plus than there were before, but still it's overwhelmingly a male population. So we'll have to see. For Google Plus to really survive, we're gonna have to see that expand beyond just the dudes. Yeah, I think so. Al Right, we are wrapping this up.

Like we said, there's probably a billion other things we could say about Google Plus right now, not to mention the fact that by the time this publishes things may have changed. UH. If you guys have the ability to access it, search us out, or at least search me out Chris. Chris is really good at at at maintaining a nice low profile. I am one of those people that prefers to keep my social networking down to people actually know in real life. And I certainly mean no

offense to any of our listeners. No, it's there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I I am a very extroverted kind of guy who I'm like, look at me. So it's just really different personalities. None of us have noticed. Yeah, I know, you can't tell by the way I dominate

every single conversation. UM. Anyway you can. You can search up, search us out, feel free and uh you know, depending on how long it is from the time we published this, we may be active on it, or we may have given up on Google Plus because it's still early days. I mean, we've seen a lot of Google product get initial positive response only to kind of fade away over time, so we'll see if this is one of those. UM. Also, keep in mind Google Plus does have at least at

the recording of this podcast, and age limit. You have to be eighteen years or older and uh tall, so your mileage may vary on your success at getting into Google Plus. If you guys have any suggestions for other topics we should tackle, let us know. You can send us an email that address is tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can let's know on Facebook or Twitter or Hey Google Plus. If you're on there, you can find me, but the text the text Stuff.

Facebook and Twitter accounts are Text Stuff hs W. Look for us on there, and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities as tomorrow. The house Stuff Works I Find app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you