Google+ Is Pepsi For People Who Hate Coke

So I feel like I've used this enough to give a not-quite-knee-jerk reaction to this doodad.

You arrange people you want to follow into different "circles," and you don't have to even mutually friend a person, so I have a circle for High School Friends and another for College Buddies and a completely separate one for "Cartoonists I've Never Or Rarely Met." So it's like Twitter, in that I can subscribe to your posts without your express permission (though you can obviously affect the visibility of your posts as you post them.)

Essentially, it's being called Facebook for people who don't like Facebook (the company). Eventually, you'll be able to sign up for this service the same as Blogger or Google Calendar or any of Googles other services just by turning it 'on' with your Gmail account.

You can post text of any length, already format it with BOLD italics and strikethrough, and then explicitly state (every single time) who gets to see it. You can also use Gchat straight from your feed, group video chat, and group chat in "Huddle," so you can plan things without having to text everybody back-and-forth.

So here's my official review:

Why?

Nothing here is new. At all. There is literally no reason for any of this. It innovates nothing. It adds nothing. The only real benefit of this is for people who dislike Facebook. You love circles? Yeah, I did too. A year ago, when Facebook introduced them as "Lists."

You see that? Facebook has had that for a year already. You can view your feed just for that list just like G+. And You know what else? You can make posts visible to only those groups.
 

Oh, but you hate how Facebook defaults to sharing everything with everybody?

SO DOES FUCKING GOOGLE!

"But it's so much easier to share with just certain groups on G+!" Are you fucking retaded? (Sorry, "differently tarded.")

 It's been right there since you complained about it the first time. And you can change the defaults just like Google copied. Actually, Google+ has fewer privacy options for posts, and even fewer on their settings page.

Here's what Google+ is: It's a long-form version of Twitter, where pictures, video and links don't need shortlinks. Google+ is Twitter without a character limit.

Here's the difference between Facebook and Google+:

• Google+ doesn't have apps yet
• Google+ isn't social in that you can share something to another person's feed, only share with only them through YOUR feed.
• Facebook won't have video chatting until they get theirs working over Skype in a few months.
• G+ has all the chatrooms AIM must have sold off in 2001 for being useless.

Reasons to Get Google+

• You hate Facebook but NEED to be social in order to contact people via the internet.
• You want to video chat without using a Mac, iPhone, Droid, other smartphone, Tinychat, Stickam, Skype, Yahoo, an IM client or any of the other services expressly designed to do that expressly. You know, including Gchat.
• You want to be able to message people without that pesky problem of having to use the Private Message service of every other social networking app, and would rather all such messages appear in your Gmail inbox, assuming of course you only have a single email address and not, say, eight of them like anyone else under the age of 35.
• You would prefer shuffling between G+ pages for chat, video, email, sharing, photos and you 3 other email addresses to leaving open one window each for mail, facebook, and maybe Twitter. THREE active browser tabs? What are we? Bajillionaires? I gotta PAY for those bytes, brother.
• You are a Google Faboy.

That's about it. If you love Google then, by all means, Download the G+ Android app to your Nexus 2 and wait for all your (likely 2) friends to get into the beta and start sharing pictures using the facebook to G+ photo transfer tool.

That's right, Google+ depends on facebook for the time being to get you interested.

And so far, that's how I've given out every invite I've given. (All three of them.) Facebook.

But go for it, Google. I mean you buy or create a version of every other Most Successful Service, why not through one more in the mix. I'm sure you'll get a few thousand people who exclusively use your product because they think a billion dollar information conglomerate  is more trustworthy to hold personal data than a dedicated social network with seasoned legal teams constantly reverting their fuckups.

After all, someone has to hate Mob City notifications that much. (And lack the knowledge to click the 'block app' X button.)