Google+ was announced yesterday and is currently being field tested. Scheduled to be slowly rolled out to users.

What is Google+?

It's a social sharing layer being added to Google. Their answer to Facebook, Twitter, Skype.

(scroll down for videos and demos)

I'm leaving Facebook as soon as Google+ opens — or as soon as I get an invite and can invite the people I care about.

Why

Facebook is hella boring, only a few people post more than once a day, there's a stalker mentality, endless privacy fuck ups, and over time the software has become complicated and bulky not less. The Facebook iPhone app is really badly executed from a design and usability perspective. Google+'s Sparks where they feed people interesting news based on their interests will finally give "non-broadcasters" something to talk about and share. It's like mushing Google Alerts and StumbleUpon into Facebook.

Group video is huge a pain with Skype, and there's no iPad version; the iPad compatible version is just a tiny square. Call quality is frequently terrible, and it's awkward for people to start a video conversation. Working with a distributed team and trying to keep track of everyone's hours; when they're knee deep in code, or out to lunch is reason enough to get a personal assistant. Google+'s Hangouts is like a living room in your office that's actually in your social network. People can join and leave when they're available, videoconferencing where the video being shared or person talking loudest takes center stage. It's like a really natural Sococo that doesn't force you to play with little avatars.

Twitter's character limit is irritating now and I don't want to post to 3 social networks anymore. Every social sphere is on every social network, and Facebook privacy is non-existent. So I'm just posting multiple public messages to randomly dispersed people, and a lot of overlap. Yeah, you can go to a Twitter profile and quickly see a person's updates and absorb a lot of information in a glance from a set of guaranteed-concise updates; but who does that? Yeah you can get your public updates indexed by Google but only a few, a feat not even possible on Facebook. And quite frankly I don't care about all of a person's updates. Using Google+'s Circles to target who get's a given update means fewer, and more meaningful updates — rather than forcing wordplay and brevity.

With Twitter you think about what you post more and how to word it to make it fit, but that's conformity and a focus on structure over content. What you end up seeing is the Twitter version of the people you care about. I want to see the real version. I want to see the thought they had in the moment, worded the way they talk without all these barriers, and supplemented by links; videos; and images —and I want the interface to be clean and minimalist. Twitter's custom backgrounds and colours are a huge flaw.

Twitter also goes down a lot, and only lets you access your last 3200 tweets. Both traits seem a bit ridiculous for a social network that encourages you to post every off the cuff thought.

Demo

Here's the interactive demo, make sure you hit "Take the tour" to get it started.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/

Videos

Here's a link to the full Google+ playlist, just go into Fullscreen and it'll play though them all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SPF3DFB800F05F551A

Dropbox has been getting a lot of flack recently for misleading users. Their attempt to address these issues on their blog is ridiculous; their marketing department spinning nuance into very serious security claims leaves them with a permanent stain on their brand, one of being utterly untrustworthy and incompetent. They tried to walk the line of ambiguity and it's come back and ruined what was once a shining example of a consumer brand done right.

Here's a link that highlights that incompetence, and here's an excerpt from a recent post on the Dropbox blog illustrating how full of shit they are:

For example, one help article formerly stated that “files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256) and are inaccessible without your account password.” We were explaining that there are multiple safeguards on your data: that the files are stored encrypted and in addition, protected by your access credentials. However, a security professional could incorrectly infer that the encryption key comes from the user’s password, so we’ve separated the two points for clarity.

Another statement read “Dropbox employees aren’t able to access user files.” That means that we prevent such access via access controls on our backend as well as strict policy prohibitions. That statement didn’t say anything about who holds encryption keys or what mechanisms prevent access to the data. We updated our help article and security overview to be explicit about this.

In summary, anything you put in Dropbox should be considered public, just like Facebook and Twitter. While all your data in Dropbox is "encrypted" the keys to decrypt all your data is accessible and stored with Dropbox in the cloud, not with you. Meaning the encryption is totally meaningless. Aside from the fact that Dropbox now openly co-operates with anyone who makes a request to peak at your files, any hacker that gains access to the Dropbox servers or codebase can easily get your encryption key and your data is compromised.