My dalliance with the latest social networking fad, Google+, has come to and end even faster than normal and ended with me deleting my account on what currently seems to be another useless service.
I just haven’t found out what these services are good for yet, and google’s offering further confuses things by being a number if different offerings that are apparently related? I ended up deleting google+ because I was trying to delete buzz, which appears to be completely unrelated, right up until you try and delete it? Google reader, buzz, google+, and “+1” all appear to be completely unrelated services doing things that don’t really have value unless they work together. +1 should note an item in reader, which should let me choose which circles I want to share it with.
Another minor point about google+ was the fact that I would have the app open in firefox, I’d even have it as the front window, and something new would happen. The browser would update, I would get a push notification, I got an email, and I got the little “new unread items” badge in the open tabs for both gmail and google reader. That’s a lot of notifications. And do you think that marking any one of them as read would mark all of them as read? That would be nice wouldn’t it. I think I’ll stick with my IMAP email, at least I only have to deal with notifications once.
And for the love of almighty Zeus would you please bring back the brilliant “reply in-line to a subset of users” feature from Wave? Circles doesn’t even really help because if I post it to all my circles when someone from one of my circles replies I don’t necessarily want everyone from all my circles being introduced to each other, it sort of defeats the point?
So, aside from complete lack of integration and being unable to understand which bits do what, why did I leave? Because it doesn’t help me talk to you. Utterly useless at it. The noise level is just far too high. Everyone is talking but nobody is listening.? (Believe me, I’m aware of the irony of posting this on my “blog”. Heh. That’s another story though.)
So for now, I’m back to being found here on my website and via email. (You can also see what I find interesting on Google Reader)