My second Google+ related news item of today is that they have added the ability to create communities, which are very similar to the Facebook idea of groups. This makes perfect sense and I'm only surprised that it's taken them this long to get around to it. It has the potential to be a really powerful tool, since you can easily connect with people who share the same interests. However, it is in some ways more powerful than the Facebook offering, as it has options to filter the posts that you want to see according to discussion topics. So for example, in the Libraries and Librarians group there are topic areas on academic libraries, school libraries and so on.
There are a few library based communities, but the 'main' one only has 35 members so far, so if you're on G+ do go along and join it! You can of course search for Google+ communities that interest you, and there are quite a lot already, from car clubs, to football communities, photographers, Star Wars and so on.
It's very easy to start a community - click on 'Create a community' and then decide if it's going to be public or private. Then you decide what you want to call it, check an option to let people join automatically or via request, choose an image to represent the group, some topics and then you're done. You can then invite people, but there is an annoying restriction. I wasn't able to add all the people in my circles, so I'm guessing a limit of maybe 1,000 or maybe even 500, which is irritating. However, if you're interested in joining a Google+ community on Internet Search, it's there.
With the festive season just around the corner and the spirit of sharing entering into our (online) thoughts, Google+ has just added a new community focused feature to its social network, which will “help bring people together to share their interests even more.”
Its more/less the same tool, amd since G+ has few times less users, i dont see any reason using G+ in this case. Besides when FB finally works out their search engine, no one will use G+.. But thats only my opinion :) BTW Great blog.
Posted by: Pdf Search | December 10, 2012 at 08:39 AM