The Google Plus app on the iPhone is very nice but there is not yet a native app for the iPad. There will be one soon, I am sure, but if you are like me and can’t wait, there is a way you can adapt the iPhone app to enable it to work on the iPad. It requires some steps but there is a tutorial on how to do it that I found in one of the tech blogs. You can find it here. I found some variations from the steps outlined, and it took awhile to figure it out. If you try it and have problems, let me know and I will be glad to help.
Meanwhile, Google Plus seems to be growing rapidly. Since my last report, I now have 189 people in my various circles and 145 people have me in their circles. As I mused at the last wriing, where does this lead? Everybody connected to everybody? I am not sure how many people will end up in my circles, but I will try to keep it meaningful. The 189 people are people I know, serve on boards with, have worked with, spoken with, or met at a conference. Many of the 145 people who have added me to their circles are people I have never heard of. I get emails every day from Google + with a picture of a person and notice that John Doe has added me to one or more of his circles. I look at the picture and am certain I have never seen this person in my life.
The people in your circles are visible to anyone who looks at your profile, but what circle or circles you have them in is not visible. I have noticed that some of the people who have added me to their circle have thousands of people in their circles. One was just short of 10,000. I don’t how many people I know, but it is not 10,000. I would call those “connections” not meaningful. Perhaps some people are looking for bragging rights–I have 10,000 people in my circles! Wow, how many people have you in their circle? Um, there is my mother and, and, um, thousands of others that I can’t recall right now.
So it looks like there will be a lot of people who will feel good at having thousands of people in their circles. So be it. What is more important is the meaningful circles, like your family circle, your bike club circle, your XYZ Corporation Board circle, etc. Those are circles you can really communicate with and know that only the members that you have elected to put in those circles will see what you post. You may still choose to post things for the public to read, like this story, but many of day to day postings will be much more private. That is what Facebook has not facilitated very well. You can segment things on FB, but it is not easy. Google has made it trivial. I continue to believe they are going to get a lot of converts.
One more thing. There is a transient circle called “Nearby”. If you allow Google to detect where you are, you can look at postings from “Nearby”. The posters are people, you may or may not know, who are “nearby” who are posting about the great meal they had at XYZ Cafe or something about traffic flow, or whatever. This is fun to browse through just to see what people are talking about nearby. I like using the iPad to browse through Google + postings. I don’t spend all day at it–maybe 15 minutes. You can browse my all of your circles, look at the postings in just your family circle, or the board circle, or by those who happen to be nearby.
