I had no plans to sign up for Google Plus until I did it on a whim a few days ago. I never used Friendster when it was the big social site. Then when MySpace and its animated GIFs and embedded MIDI files came along, I never signed up. Then Facebook showed up and despite the fact that many of my friends and family are addicted to it, I never signed up for an account and don’t plan to do so. In general I’ve never seen a need to provide a forum where my coworkers can contact my family or my high school friends can contact my former employees, etc. If want to talk to a friend or family member, I can send an e-mail, send a text or call them.That being said, I do use Twitter and pipe my posts back to my own website. This is an important fact because I think I’ll use Google+ much like Twitter or my own site. I plan to make everything public even though Google+ offers some very granular and really easy to use privacy options should I ever want to use them. One of the main reasons I’ve avoided Facebook is their disastrous history of making people believe their posts are private and then violated their trust by somehow accidentally making their posts public. I’m not naive enough to think place blind trust in any company, but unlike Google’s “Do no evil” motto, Facebook seems to go the exact opposite direction!
Up til now, I’ve loved almost every Google product I’ve used in the past, so I do have high hopes for Google+.
Who knows how much I’ll use it, but you can find me on Google+ right here.