Google+ ,Who’s having a play then?

So today I had a friend who very kindly invited me to Google+ and most of this afternoon has been spent playing around with the interface and seeing what it can do.

Right to start with we have some new features to play with that are a little different from the Facebook norm, These are as follows:

• Circles – Group your contacts in named groups for easy interaction
• Hangouts – Jump into video chat with numerous contacts
• Sparks – Add interests and search for them for up to the minute news and posts

OK some of these things don’t really sound new and like technological breakthroughs so if you click here and take the interactive tour to see how these things are a little more special.

Now to be honest this is just the version which is being tested at the moment and it is as they say within the Interactive Tour “Just scratching the surface”, so I can see that there will be some more integration going on before the full version is ready to go fully up against social networking with other names.

After a little bit of playing with the new desktop version of Google+ I decided to install it on my Android phone…

Really easy to install from the Android market on my HTC Desire once you have entered the following url – m.google.com/plus in the phones browser.

Now we have a few more things that we can play with which are as follows:

• Instant Photo Upload – Take a picture on your phones camera and it immediately uploads it to your Google+ account
• Huddle – Gather several of your contacts together on your mobile device and message them together

Obviously both of these rely on a data connection so it is only really cool if you are in a Wifi area or you have unlimited data on your phone contract and a cracking 3G signal.

Overall it some new Tech and it is a breath of fresh air to play around on a social platform that doesn’t bombard you with adverts which are to do with “Old Spice” and various other items and services which you haven’t asked for. Though I guess once this goes live to everyone it will only be a matter of time before adverts are pushed in front of you.

There is a nice User Interface (UI) within Google+ and I can see that as we head towards more touch sensitive operating systems on our computers and devices this will be really well polished and reactive to gestures.