In four years on Facebook, I gained 453 friends. In four months on Google+, I have 10,141 followers. In the course of this book, you'll learn everything I know about G+ and have a bunch of fun doing it!
At first glance, Google+ (or Plus, the terms are interchangeable) seems awfully familiar. You can make Posts, like on Facebook's Wall. The Stream—a continuous page of posts from your friends—looks like Facebook's News Feed. That little +1 button on Plus is much the same as Facebook's Like button (and perhaps where the name for Plus came from).
Here's what my Plus profile page looks like currently (as this book goes to press):
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Points of similarity to FB and other social media networks do not end as described above. Early reviewers remind me of the classic poem about the blind men and the elephant. One took hold of its trunk and said an elephant is like a hose. Another felt its leg and said an elephant is mighty like a tree. And so forth.
About Plus, one writer says it's a "Facebook" killer, another that with the Plus Following feature it's more like Twitter than Twitter (but more powerful), and yet another compares it to the digital media haven|Tumblr, because of its ease in sharing photos and videos.
Truth is, Google+ is all this and a good deal more. It's a redesign of social and business contact management using the latest web techniques. And it has a lot going for it, but there is one bit of magic rising above the rest and causing so many of us to come running (over ten million in its first two weeks of limited availability). That magic is Circles!
Because many already see the genius of Google's real offering—Plus is a new beginning! A chance to "reboot" our social life and to better manage all those hundreds of friends on Facebook. We have absolutely no idea who these hundreds of friends are, but their posts clutter our News Feeds.
Circles give us the ability to organize all our contacts into groups. So instead of having a huge mass of "friends" (most of whom you have no idea who they are), you have incredibly more manageable groups such as the ones Plus starts you with—Friends, Acquaintances, Family, and Following (people whose posts you wish to follow, but not interact with, like on Twitter).
You can add all the additional Circles you like. One for each club you belong to, people you went to school with, another for those you work with—the possibilities are endless.
However, as already stated, there are many more attractions. This book:
Gives you an exciting but comprehensive first look at the features of Google+ and how to best use them.
Shows the best ways of rebooting your social networks using the power of Plus.
Displays numerous examples of what you use social networking for and how to do it in ways that work and do not offend.
Explores ways of promoting yourself, a product, your company, a cause, and so on. The right way, effectively and inoffensively.
And a lot more!
Chapter 1, Joining Plus and What to Do First. This chapter introduces that excitement and how you can best join, and the kind of initial setup that guarantees a successful and fun-filled experience.
In it, we will:
Take look at the advantages of Plus
See how to join and do it
Discuss privacy concerns
Set up our profiles (yes, we'll want more than one).
Chapter 2, Sorting Everyone in to Circles. We will:
Learn how Circles work and their tremendous advantages
Set up our first Circles for Friends, Acquaintances, and Family
Decide who we want to follow and learn how to do so
Master easy dragging and dropping in maintaining our Circles
Create and use new types of Circles beyond the standard ones
It's easy to add friends. Thumbnail photos are generated from your regular Google profile so if a photo is not attached to that yet, we won't see you. Not everyone will have a thumbnail ID yet, as shown in the following screenshot:
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Chapter 3, Hanging Out. Other social media systems are adding video chat and related features. Plus was designed from the ground up with these fun and powerful things built in!
In this chapter, we will see (literally see) how Hangouts work.
What Hangouts are and how we use them
Setting up a webcam or other video input
Joining existing Hangouts
Creating your own Hangouts
Here I am checking my hair (uh huh) and preparing to hang out:
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Chapter 4, Streaming. Two major topics join us in this chapter—Streams and Sparks.
In this chapter it's time to:
Practice Posting to the Stream and determine how to drill down so that each Post goes to the right audience
Learn how to control what we see and when we see it (as opposed to all those zillions of posts you're not interested in but which make you miss the good stuff on other social networks)
Chapter 5, Sharing Media. Plus gives us powerful built-in features for sharing photos, videos, animated gifs, and so on. We'll enjoy learning those in this chapter.
So here we:
Select and prepare photos for uploading
Upload and caption photos
Select and prepare videos
Upload and caption videos
Learn how to share to your various Circles or make public
Chapter 6, Mobile and Games. In today's world of smartphones, we take our social networks with us.
Together, we will be:
Finding the right app for your phone or tablet computer
Learning how to keep up with Circles, and so on, on the mobile device
Posting from your phone
Uploading photos and videos from your phone or other device
This is what Plus looks like on the free Android app (iPhone and others no charge too):
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Chapter 7, Promoting on Plus the Right Way. Many people use social media, like Facebook, to promote themselves, their company, their organization, or a cause. This is fine as long as we do it right and don't offend anyone. If people get irritated by your actions, then they won't pay attention to you.
In this chapter, we learn to do it right, politely, and effectively by knowing about:
Netiquette, what it is, and why you should use it
Setting up accounts for a business or organization
Advertising without it looking like an ad
Marketing politely, but in an interesting manner that works
Networking with others
Starting groups
Appendix. This chapter provides helpful websites and other resources.
The only thing required (aside from a computer and/or smartphone) is a Google account, which is free. In Chapter 1, we'll see how to sign up, if you don't already have an account.
Just as Google+ is for everyone, so too is this book. Plus is meant not to be a standalone social network, but an integral part of Google's other offerings such as Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, and so forth. As we'll see, they all work together.
And Plus is also for everyone, in that there are so many fun and exciting ways of using it, as we'll experience in the coming pages. So let's get to it.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Choose a photo from your computer and upload it by clicking on change photo.".
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