nathan jara

If you haven’t heard the latest Buzz, Google recently released its Facebook killer, Google+. The Google Plus Project is the technology giant’s all encompassing foray into the dangerous world of social networking. If you were lucky enough to get an invite to the initial beta testing period, you’ve already monkeyed around with Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts. While I haven’t jumped into all the new fancy pants features, I have to say I’m liking, no Facebook pun intended, the Circles feature most. Circles basically allow you to group your Google+ friends into different categories of your choosing. You can place all your closest chums in your Friends circles while keeping work buddies in a Coworkers circle. The best part about this feature is that when sharing a post, comment or message, you can select the particular person or persons with whom you want to share that post with and not always everyone under the Facebook sun. I think the customization and personal choice of who gets to see what with Circles is an awesome move by Google. As one who has complained about Facebook’s approach in the past, it’s good to see a company taking the user’s choice into account from the get-go.

I am surprised, however, that there hasn’t been more hullabaloo about this categorization aspect of Circles. I thought for sure we’d be hearing people complaining that this “putting people into circles” business (insert whiny voice here) is unfair and will hurt people’s feelings because everyone should be equal. I’m glad there hasn’t been such comments, or at least I haven’t seen any, because I think this feature is needed. When it comes to social groups, we all have people we’re closer to and not so close to. People we want to share more personal things with and those that we just want to say “hey!” to every now and then. I think Google+’s Circles reflects more realistically our offline social lives.

If you agree, ask around and demand an invite from a pal. It’ll be interesting to see how Google+ progresses and grows over the next few months and if any Facebookers will jump ship for the new web hotness or just double up their social worlds. I doubt the Madelaine Zammits of the web will be coming aboard, but I’ve definitely tested the waters and am feeling much more relaxed. Heck, even the Zuck-man himself took a dip. +1 Google, +1.

Those guys at Google just did it again. If you use the Google Chrome browser, from December 15 – 19, Google will make a donation to a charity of your choice based on the number of tabs you use each day. Yeah, I know, cool, huh? You can read the article here.

If you have the Google Chrome browser, a friend at work shared a really cool website with me today. It’s called The Wilderness Downtown. The website allows you to type in any address, preferably one that has been cataloged by Google Street View, and create a movie in your hometown. The application uses the street view of the address you type in along with the satellite imagery of that area as the backdrop for an online film. The application was created using new HTML 5 techniques for the Chrome Experiments project, which is a web development project that continues to explore and push the capabilities of the growing HTML 5 language. Half way through, you can interact with the movie using an HTML 5 canvas and custom font. Try yours, it’s pretty spiffy!

I’ve been using flickr to share photos for a while now. I’ve never been really thrilled with it though. The service only allows you to upload so many photos before you have to sign up for a paid subscription to use more space. Pretty poopy. Over the past few nights, I’ve been converting over to Google’s Picasa. It’s pretty sweet! You have 1 gig of space to start, which is awesome. I also downloaded the Picasa Web Album application which makes organizing and uploading photos a breeze. The one feature I really like is the ability to resize photos during the upload process. That way I don’t have to do it myself :) And I just found the Faces feature which is crazy cool. Check out my uploads so far.