Plus

I've been forcing myself to use Google+.  The way I see it is simple:  If I don't use it, who will?  There are a lot of photographers posting pretty regularly.  There are a few celebrities posting pretty regularly.  There are no people that I actually know posting regularly, or semi regularly, or ever.

I've been cross posting from here to Google+ and I have seen a small increase in traffic to the posts I send there.  Granted an increase of one or two hits per posts is enough to really stand out.  I sent a post to the private page yesterday and was happy to see that the interface between the two applications respected my privacy settings. 

On the Explore page they have a top 10 trending topics list, just like Twitter.  Many of the topics are photography related and I occasionally throw a post or two to contribute.  Strange though that I never, ever see my posts in the search feed.  Ever.  Even when I set it to show the most recent posts and then dig backward, I don't see anything I've posted.  That pisses me off.

Continuing on the topic of the trending topics, many of the regular people who show up in the feeds have a high-and-mighty, Google-is-better-than-everyone-else attitude.  It shows when Apple, or Facebook show up in the trending topics.  Many people post about how crappy things at Facebook and Twitter are, and how Google is so much more tech savvy and worldly and refined than the other networks.  I wonder then how those people can explain the almost constant inclusion of Justin Beiber, or Selena Gomez, or Kim Kardashian, or Kristin Stewart, or Lady Gaga in the trending topics list.  I guess the upper crust just pretend those don't show up constantly.  More likely there is a shit load of hypocrisy. 

I want Google+ to succeed.  I want Google+ and Facebook to compete with each other as equals so that each company pushes the other to bigger and better things.  That's not going to happen until people start using Google+.  So go use Google+.