I'm not sure how this all started but a few weeks ago I decided to have a look at Google plus.
I was coming at it after using facebook for quite a number of years, and I thought it was just a google copy, but in the end it was nothing like it. But after a crash course of teaching myself how to use it I'm now converted and doubt I'll be staying with FB too much longer.
The big thing about G+ thats tricky to get at first is the concept of circles. You get presented with these little round blobs that are labeled Friends, Aquaintences, Family, Following, VIP, and other stuff I can't recall. It tells you to drag people into your circle, but of course you've no one to drag, cause as yet you have no contacts in G+. And then again, dragging somebody to join your circle seems a bit on an uncivilised way to go about making friends with people, especially people you don't know.
But first things first, you can't see any link that is entitled CIRCLEs, there's some link called Communities,but the next button down is Explore. The other confusing thing here is the menu bar down the left hand side that looks like its greyed out, it's not really cause when you put your mouse over it it wakes up and you can click it. Makes perfect sense now but at first it was just another confusing thing about G+.
So you click the explore button, looks a bit like a compass, which is a bit old hat as us sailors are all on GPS, but then maybe that's a bit obscure as an icon, anyway I digress.
So you click on explore and get a stream of whats "hot" postings, random postings from people and places you don't know, so you browse one or two but there's no way of knowing how I make friends like I used to on FB, So I wander around aimlessly.
I skip events and try Communities. Now this is where it gets interesting. Looks like there are collections of users, into all aspects of life. Be it baking, books, politics, philosophy, Heavy metal, fixing machines, in a word an endless array of icons to scroll through. I find one called recording engineers, I click it and I'm taken their page where there's some fascinating discussions going on about studios and techniques, or about tech talk. But to me it was fascinating so I clicked a big button that said Join this community. So I did.
Next thing I'm bombarded with emails telling me that so and so has posted a comment in that forum, so eventually I go back and unlink myself from that G+ stream, and the notifications stop, thank goodness.
I dip my toe once more into these murky waters of G+ and discover this button called hangouts. What a horrible word I think but there's a link to a songwriters open mic hangout that intrigues me.Open mic on the net, what's this.
Well it turns out to be a gathering of nine people who play and interact with each other over a couple of hours, live, that I can watch in real time. There's one guy who's been doing gigs in second life????????????
All of this is too much for a 65 year old brain to quite comprehend but i'm intrigued.
Hangouts are like mini conference calls I suppose with people connecting with people via video on subjects they are into, I happen to see this musicians link up as being fun, and scary at the same time, but I want to try it out.
So here I am, my circles are a bit more organised, I've joined some communities and I'm interacting in what I think is a meaningful way. I plus 1, now and again, even though I don't quite understand what that signifies, and have tried sharing.
It amazes me how lots of you out there seem to connect, and understand how this stuff works, to me it's still work in progress.
No doubt it will all become clear soon, but for the last few weeks it's been very confusing, but sort of fun.
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