I mentioned in my reading round-up for July that a lot of the article I have read over the past month have been about Google+. There are links to the best and most useful articles at the bottom of this post.

What I want to share with you here is my first reaction to Google+ and my experience one month in. And that can be described in one word…

Meh!

I just don’t get it, or perhaps more accurately I just don’t need it. I got an invite quite early on and set about creating some circles. What I found was that I was just replicating my networks from Twitter and Facebook. But what’s the point in that?

  by  ekcragg 

Facebook works perfectly well for me as a way to communicate online with my friends and family. Twitter works perfectly well for me as a way of sharing information and getting involved with my professional network.

  by  ekcragg 

Yes, I see that the theory behind Google+ is to bring both of those networks into one place to make it easier to share and communicate with selected groups. But at the moment it’s just not working for me, and why is that the case? I don’t want to have to specify for every single post I make who that content gets shared with. It’s as simple as that.

Julia Turner summed my feelings up perfectly in the Google+ segment on a recent edition of the Slate Culture Gabfest (which I would thoroughly recommend you listen to, it starts at around 17min):

“you can’t compartmentalise your public self from your private self with Google+”

If there is to be one social network to rule them all then that compartmentalisation needs to be doable and easy.

Further reading

• Could Google Ruin Your Online Personal Brand – PC Sweeney
• 30 Google+ tips to enhance your Google+ experience – webtrickz
• Several tips to help you get started with Google+ – Mark O’Neill
• Google+ tips and tricks – Janet Fouts
• Google+: And you thought Facebook is a privacy nightmare – ConceivablyTech
• So what is Google+ all about then? – Phil Bradley

• Thing 19: Create a Google Document and share it.
• Thing 20: Sign in to ThinkFree Office and try its Write application.

I will not hide the fact that I LOVE Google Documents. I use it on a regular basis to work on documents as I move around my various computers. For me the best thing about it however is the ease with which you can create forms. I have set up two for the 23 Things programme alone, the first for registrations and lately the one for completion. This year I have also used it to create a booking form for the Business Librarians Association (BLA) conference and conduct a social media survey, also for the BLA.

The one downside I find is the interface. Yes, it’s simple and clean but I often want to be able to do a little more with the formatting of my documents. For that reason I have recently started using Dropbox which acts as a central folder that I can save files to and access from any computer I work on.

For thing 20 I signed in to ThinkFree Office. When I opened a document I was immediately impressed by the range of formatting options – an improvement on Google Documents for sure. However, it is so p a i n f u l l y slooooooow that it is impossible to get anything done. So I promptly signed out and don’t think I shall be going back any time soon.

Last week Google launched multiple inboxes in Gmail. What an exciting new tool this is; it allows you to divide up your incoming messages yet still view everything in one screen. To use this feature you must first enable ‘Multiple Inboxes’ in the ‘Labs’ tab of your Gmail Settings. Once you’ve done this you can create new inboxes in the ‘Multiple Inboxes’ tab by placing is: in front of any label or category, e.g. is:starred or is:family.

For me this tool has proved invaluable for splitting off my hockey emails from my regular inbox. To do this I set up a secondary inbox using my pre-existing label ‘Hockey’. I then set up a filter which automatically applys the label hockey to any message from my team mates and also automatically archives them. The auto-archive is very important so that the conversations don’t appear in both my regular inbox and the label’s inbox.

Here’s a great post Laura wrote for her work blog this week:

Making the most of your Google search

I love the way she’s used colour to explain everything – it makes it so simple to understand. There are of course times when just sticking a word or two into Google and clicking Search is enough to find what you’re looking for but there are time when you’re looking for something more specific that these tips and tricks will come in handy. Give it a go and you’ll be surprised.