I have been an anti-wave, anti-buzz but I just tried Google+ and it's great. I think this time Google really can kick FB. Great, simple interface and integrated to my gmail, picasa, contacts, gtalk it is definitely great!
I love the circles philosophy and UX.
One problem is the restriction on invites. Google+ is valuable to me if I can share things with others, just like I do it in FB right now. They have to enable invites soon or the early adopters will get bored and leave forever.
Would you mind fielding some questions? I'm interested to know if the photo sharing is any good? Do the full-resolution versions stick around? Are the management features any good?
It reduces the dimensions of the picture, however it keeps a good quality.
Album management is great and it pulls/pushes your pictures from Picasa.
The album UI is also great.
I just found that the navigation bar of gmail is now extended so I can see notifications and comment on them without going to Google+
It's a FB killer :o
Things are going to get interesting in that space. If the people that I relate with get into Google+ I wouldn't need to check my FB. And they can get more people in by pluging it to Google Apps users.
I haven't looked closely at what happens when you upload an image to Google+, but I can tell you that it's trivially easy to share photos out of Picasa, which does let you get the originals.
Does Google Circles show up as group tags in Google Contacts? And vice versa?
From the presentation, Google Circles sounds like a great UI for the already existing group tags funcionality. The group tags are also already used for sharing in Picasa.
They seem to be different. They have predefined circles (e.g. Family, Friends) and you can create others. However I don't see a Create a Circle from a Contacts Group.
I'm not sure if I would want that as I normally don't update my Contacts groups.
I love the circles philosophy and UX.
One problem is the restriction on invites. Google+ is valuable to me if I can share things with others, just like I do it in FB right now. They have to enable invites soon or the early adopters will get bored and leave forever.