As I have been a bit of a banner waver for Google+ lately, a curious friend asked me what the big advantage of Google+ is.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that there is a big advantage to Google+ (yet) but there are some competitive features. There are some things missing but I have confidence that Google+ will fill in the gaps pretty quickly.

For me personally, it is really timely that Google+ came along. I left Facebook before there was a competitive alternative. Privacy isn’t a major concern for me, however control is. Facebook allows you to control very little and as you try to lock things down, they either progressively make it harder to control it or they insert consequences that steer you away. For example, “Neighborhoods” and “Calendar” are apps so those things won’t work if you opt out of apps, leaving you to have to block each app individually. Their friend lists feature - the only way to control who sees what - is a joke. I used to employ lists to manage who could view certain posts but not long ago, Facebook decided that “Groups” was the way to go for controlling the audience and progressively made it more difficult to do anything at the wall level. It is practically impossible now to manage the friend lists. One of the more perturbing things to me is that my profile image (and yours too) is regularly borrowed by Facebook to advertise apps I have never used and games I never played. It’s intentionally misleading. It’s Facebook’s philosophy that mainly drove me away. Everything is on by default and you have to constantly go in and tell it “no” in order to have any control. The event that ended it for me was when they surreptitiously hired a high priced, high profile PR firm to send disparaging stories about Google to the press. Facebook is like the Enron of social in my book.

Having said all this, I recognize that most people have had nothing but a good experience with Facebook and it has provided them many benefits. But even for those people, I think it is important to have an alternative. Competition is generally desirable. Facebook will get better and probably be more ‘on-the-level’ in order to compete. Google+ coming online is a great thing for all fans of social. 

At Google+ the defaults make sense and there are some features that differentiate it.

The most important difference is that management of social circles is really simple. You can easily control who you send certain messages to. You can even do it in more than one way. You can select the circles you want to include on each post or you can just post from the circle-specific stream and only that circle will see it. 

Some other advantages:

• You can edit your posts and comments after submitting, for instance if you see a typo - facebook on the other hand makes you delete, thereby losing the likes and comments attached
• You can disallow comments and sharing of individual posts
• Basic text formatting (italics, bold, strike-through)
• You can respond to posts right from the notifications drop-down. This is actually pretty cool and almost necessary in the circles model because you don’t want to leave your main stream to go to a different circle to respond
• VoIP phone and video chat built in (Facebook just added video last week but still doesn’t do voice)
• There are no ads at G+ right now, but they will surely come and probably be fairly similar to what you see in Gmail today

Some disadvantages:

• Hardly anyone is there but it is growing rapidly
• G+ hasn’t added audio players for mp3’s yet. This is nearly inexcusable in my book because Google pioneered HTML5 and most browsers will now play audio without requiring an add-on app. I figure this will be corrected at some point
• No events or invitation feature, one of the only things for which I still keep my Facebook profile alive. It is the only way I’ll get invited to anything because people have stopped using eVite in favor of Facebook
• No eCommerce (this could be seen as a positive to some people) so you aren’t really connected to the businesses you like, nor can you easily connect with your customer if you are a business. I have to think this is just around the corner as well
• No apps (again, could be a positive for people who don’t like all the app clutter at Facebook). I am sure this will change as Google mastered widgets a long time ago and are increasing their presence in the app world
• It is still a challenge to sort out the vernacular that will surround Google+ For instance, I already find myself shortening it to G+ (or g+). At Facebook, you “like” something while at Google you “+1” it, which is weird in the past tense (I plussed it?). Ironically Google spell check doesn’t even recognize the word plussed as valid. 

Similarities:

• You can’t really control the look of your space. There is very little personalization for both G+ and fb when you compare to Tumblr or even Twitter
• Both use the minimalist post and comment stream paradigm, with the left nav for accessing most features.

So, that’s about it for now. I hope you give it a try and see for yourself whether or not you like Google+