When Google launched Google+, a lot of people were very sceptical. Some outright claimed it to be useless. I must admit, it has a number of functions that really rock.

Google Plus is not a Facebook clone. It does not try to mimick Facebook that much. To me, it looks much more like a blog thing. A blog system, where everybody has to have a Google account, and then can comment (plus, you can then restrict access and share only with some people). It also encourages you to share shorter posts. Successful blogs always tried to make their posts “articles”. Now the posts themselves are merely comments; but not as crazy short as Twitter (it is not a Twitter clone either), and it does have rich media contents, too.

Those who expect it to replace their Facebook where the interaction is all about personal stuff will be somewhat disappointed. Because it IMHO much less encourages the smalltalk type of interaction.

However, it won a couple of pretty high profile people to share their thoughts and web discoveries with the world. Some of the most active users I follow on Google Plus are: Linus Torvalds and Tim O’Reilly (of the publishing house O’Reilly)

Of course I also have a number of friends that share private stuff on Google Plus. But in my opinion the strength of Google Plus is on sharing publicly. Since Google is the king of search, they can both feed shares of your friends into your regular search results, but there is also a pretty interesting search in Google PLus. The key difference is that with this search, the focus is on what is new. Regular web search is also a lot about searching for old things (where you did not bother to remember the address or bookmark the site - and mind it, today a lot of people even “google for Google” …) For example I like the plus search for data mining because it occasionally has some interesting links in it. A lot of the stuff is coming in again and again, but using the “j and k” keys, I can quickly scroll through these results to see if there is anything interesting. And there are quite a lot of interesting things I’ve discovered this way.

Note that this can change anytime. And maybe it is because I’m interested in technology stuff that it works well for me. But say, maybe you are more into HDR photography than me (I think they look unreal, as if someone has done way too much contrast and edge enhancing on the image). But go there, and press “j” a number of times to browse through some HDR shots. That is a pretty neat search function there. And if you come back tomorrow, there will likely be new images!

Facebook tried to clone this functionality. Google+ launched in June 2011, and in September 2011, Facebook added “subscribers”. So they realized the need for having “non-friends” that are interested in what you are doing. Yet, I don’t know anybody actually using it. And the Public posts search is much less interesting than of Google Plus, and the nice keyboard navigation is also missing.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook still has its uses. When I travel, Facebook is great for me to get into contact with locals to go swing dancing. There are a number of events where people only invite you on Facebook (and that is one of the reasons why I’ve missed a number of events - because I don’t use Facebook that much). But mind it, a lot of the stuff that people share on Facebook is also really boring.

And that will actually be the big challenge for Google: keeping the search results interesting. Once you have millions of people there sharing pictures of lolcats - will it still return good results? Or will just about every search give you more lolcats?

And of course, spam. The SEO crowd is just warming up in exploring the benefits of Google Plus. And there are quite some benefits to be gained from connecting web pages to Google Plus, as this will make your search results stick out somehow, or maybe give them that little extra edge over other results. But just like Facebook at some point was so heavily spammed when every little shop was setting up his Facebook pages, inviting everyone to all the events and so on - this is bound to happen on Google Plus, too. We’ll see how Google then reacts, and how quickly and effectively.