Is Google+ New or Just the New Google Wave?

So that’s what Google has been working on for the past year+. Google made it official in their Google+ blog post that Google is going full bore (again) into “social”. Word is that this slow public release (think early days of Gmail, but maybe even slower) is designed to prevent failures like Google Buzz and Google Wave by letting a few people in at a time and (assumedly) making adjustments along the way. Beyond “hey can I get an invite…” all of us are really wondering “will it work, will it be any good”.

Since I haven’t seen anything other than the videos on the blog post (I thought they were pretty good) and it seems like the only folks have the entire inside scoop are the folks at Wired. The epically long post on Wired about Google+ gives a lot of inside detail on how Google + came to be, but not much on was Google+ is or will be. That challenge seems to be left to the rest of us.

From the videos (I suggest watching them all), I see that Google+ is trying to do three things at once: help you find things, help you share things, and help you segment the groups you find and share with. We know that Facebook hasn’t done a great job at segmentation. Twitter, I think, is even worse. Yeah I “follow” 6000 some odd people, but in reality I really only pay attention to some 1500-2000 across 4 different lists. Still a lot, but I can’t actually (or practically) segment terribly much more. Twitter list creation and curation is a pretty sad affair. Now, this is where Google+ is supposed to come in. The idea is you want to share stuff, but sometimes not with everyone, but also not just with one person or a couple people.

Here’s a case in point that strikes to Google+ and the idea of Circles, Sparks, Huddles, and Hangouts is trying to get at. So lots and lots of us watched Game of Thrones recently. Awesome, amazing series, full of great action and storytelling. Of course they started out as a series of books. Five books actually (4 out, the 5th coming next month) and I started reading them in the first or second week of the show. I also finished book one before episode 3 or 4… Read More [via futureshop]