Day 258 - Photo Sharing

Thought of the day: I have been playing with Google Plus for a couple of days now and I am really loving it. OK, first I have to admit that I'm a hopeless addict to Google products.  I am already relying on a bunch of them on a daily basis.  That's all for good reasons, though, as they are free, they are useful, and more importantly, they make sense to me.  I have two main issues with Facebook - the lack of control for privacy and the cluttering of messages on my wall.  I have long concluded that I have very little to gain on Facebook when it comes to getting valuable information and have a lot to lose when it comes to privacy. As a result, I have been using Facebook only sporadically. I hadn't deactivated my account yet because there were no other alternatives out there and I didn't want to lose all the contacts I had established over time. Not any more - with the launch of Google Plus, there is now a viable, and in fact far superior, alternative.  In addition to addressing the privacy and cluttering issues, Google Plus has many other edges over Facebook, at least from my perspective.  That includes, for example, my higher level of trust in Google for safekeeping my data and handling the growth of the social network, the seamless integration of Google Plus with other Google tools that I use daily.  My biggest concern for Google Plus is that many of the Facebook users may not feel the same discomfort with Facebook as I have and won't find a compelling need to switch over to a new service.  There's a chance that my online social network will be split into two - some of the more technically savvy and privacy minded folks will make the switch at the first chance they got while the rest will linger on Facebook. As a result, I may lose half of my online social network but it's still better than losing all if Google Plus had not come into being. My biggest hope is that the concept of Google Circles, which is a fundamental concept in Google Plus, will succeed and will permeate into other online services as well.  That might very well transform and dramatically expand our online universe and make it a better reflection of the real world.  After all, we don't live our lives as a singular personality. We are more complicated than that. We do different things, talk about different things, and may even behave quite differently in different circles.  It would be wrong to ignore or deny the subtlety of the real life.  In any case, even if Google Plus would not be able to unseat Facebook in the same way that Facebook had unseated MySpace, it would have already made big contributions to social networking by introducing the concept of Circles, in addition to demonstrating that our privacy and our sophisticated nature need to be, and can be, respected as much in our virtual life as in our real life.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine and her friend climbed up high on a tree - time to snap a photo and share it with grandma!  With instant upload and  tight integration with Mobile, Google Plus is going to make cell phone photo sharing even easier than before.