A Facebooker’s guide to Google+ (or Google Plus)

 

Click here to follow me on Google+.

BTW, if you want an invite to Google Plus, e-mail me at .  That’s not a clickable e-mail address… It’s a picture to prevent spammers from easily scraping it.  You’ll need to type that address, exactly as you see it, including the G and the + in front of the word “Invite”.  I’d also appreciate you clicking the “+1” at the bottom of this post.

Also check out The Ultimate Collection of Google+ (Google Plus) How-To’s

Google+ and Facebook are not two faces for the same type of service, though, they may look it at first.  This guide is for people familiar with Facebook and want to get started with Google+.  I’ll refer to common tasks or terminology known to Facebook users and introduce their counterparts in the G+ world.

FB Label	G+ Label	Facebook	Google+
Friending	Following or “in circles”	One facebook user finds another fb user and sends that user a “friend request”. The FB service forwards the request to the other user. The other user sees an update from FB that “Jane Doe” is requesting a friend connection. The recipent of the friend request, accepts, rejects, or ignores the request. If the recipient accepts, then both users’ accounts are officially connected and each can see everything the other posts, for the most part.	On G+, Alice searches for Bob and finds him. She then adds Bob to one or more of her circles. Bob is automatically notified of this. Alice receives no special permissions to Bobs data, other than, anything Bob posts publicly, Alice will see on her data stream (similar to FB’s “News Feed”. Bob may or may not choose to add Alice to any of his circles. If he does, in a way, you could say their “friending” is complete in a Facebook kind of way, but a G+ user would not say that.
Defriend	Remove from circles	On facebook, when you defriend someone, you break your ties with them. They no longer see your posts or photos and you no longer see theirs. They don’t show up in your friends list and vice versa.	In G+, there’s no such thing. You can simply delete people from your circles and you’ll stop receiving their posts in your stream. They may still have you in their circles and will continue to see your public posts.
Poke	n/a	“Poking” is a FB exclusive. You can choose to “poke” a facebook friend and they will receive a message that you poked them.	There’s no equivalent on G+ for poking.
Wall	Profile	In Facebook, each user has their own “wall” where their friends can post stuff and their own posts and activity are consolidated there.	In G+, you have a profile page, that is essentially the same thing as a FB wall, but people can’t post anything on your profile page.
Post on wall	Post to user	On FB, you can go to someone’s wall and write a message just to that person. It shows up on their wall for all their friends to see and in all that person’s friends’ news feeds.	In G+ to post directly to a user, you just do a normal post and when you’re choosing which circles can see it, you enter that person’s name and only that user can see it.
Send a message	Post to user	FB has something similar to e-mail, where you can have private conversations with any friend. No one sees them except you and your friend.	In G+ to post directly to a user, you just do a normal post and when you’re choosing which circles can see it, you enter that person’s name and only that user can see it.
Lists	Circles	FB has a very unknown feature, and very cumbersome to use feature called “Lists”. You make a list and add certain friends to it, then when you post, you can choose which lists of friends see it, rather than posting it to all of your friends.	G+ has what are called “Circles” where you can create as many circles as you like, give each circle a name, then add people to them. Circles are very central to the whole G+ experience. They’re front and center and everybody uses them. Every post you make, you pick one or more circles (or one or more individual users), and/or you choose “public” so everyone sees it, even strangers, just like a Twitter post.
Like	+1	When you’re browsing the web, you’ll find FB like buttons everywhere.  If you’re logged into FB on another browser tab or window, it will cause a new post to show up on your FB account for that web site.  Inside FB, you can “like” comments people make, or their photos or videos and it shows up as “John Doe likes this”.  You can also “like” groups, which is a significantly different thing.  It actually enrolls you in that group and starts publishing their spam to your NewsFeed and gives them access to your private data.	When you’re browsing the web, you’ll start finding “+1” buttons all over the place, usually in a button bar with both a FB and a Twitter button, like I have at the bottom of this article.  Clicking that while already logged into your Google account causes you to post that site to your +1’s tab on your G+ account.  It will also increment a counter on the item you +1’d so others who visit the item will see how many people have +1’d it.  You can do this to G+ posts, photos, and videos too.
Friend List	In your Circles	In FB, a friend list is a list of all the people whom both you and they have mutually agreed to be friends.	In G+, your circles list is simply a list of people you’ve decided to follow.  It doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not those people have accepted anything from you.  It’s like following celebrities on Twitter.  They don’t have to follow you back.

In essence, G+ is more like a merger of Facebook and Twitter.  While the user experience in Facebook is nearly identical to the user experience in Google+, there are fundamental principle differences.

In Facebook, you only see posts of people you’ve friended, and it has to be a mutual friending.  If either of you defriend, you both lose access to each other’s information.  Your access to each other’s data is the same as any other stranger’s after a defriending.  Neither of you show up in each other’s friends list.

In Google+, there is no hard, mutual connection.  You simply follow other people, just as you would on Twitter.  Of course, it’s wrapped up in a nice web user interface that looks an awful lot like Facebook.  Unlike Facebook, you can follow ANYBODY, just like on Twitter.

On Facebook, most people feel somewhat free to post things they wouldn’t post on Twitter because they know (or they think) that only their friends can see their posts (and if they have their security settings set up right, then that’s true… most people do NOT, so they’re posting to the whole world and don’t know it).

On G+, part of the user experience of posting anything is choosing which circles and/or individual users can see it.  This is the differentiating feature for G+.  But, Facebook has something almost identical in concept called “Lists”, but the big difference between the two is not how they function, but how easy they are to use.  FB lists are almost entirely unknown and are cumbersome to set up and use.  G+ Circles are extraordinarily easy to use and are central to the whole G+ experience.  When you invite a user to G+, you are immediately presented with a list of all your circles and you can put a check mark beside each circle you want that user in.  The user doesn’t even have to have a G+ account for them to be in your circles and your posts can be automatically e-mailed to those users in that case.

The biggest differentiating factor between FB and G+ is the ability to easily control who sees what posts.  On FB, a lot of people have to tread a very thin line because they have personal friends AND coworkers AND bosses AND parents as “friends” and anything they post will be seen by all (unless you’ve mastered Lists, that is).  In G+, you can freely post without worry of who will see it because ONLY the people or circles you choose to see it will see it.  You can have a circle called “work” where everyone whom you work with is in there and another circle of “drinking buddies”, where you can post photos of your weekend stupor and tell dirty jokes and never worry about who sees it… just make sure you’re not drunk WHILE you post it though, to make sure you don’t post the wrong photos and jokes to the wrong circle of people.  You’d feel awfully embarrassed if you posted your skinny dipping party pictures to your church circle!

That should be about enough to get you thinking in a G+ kind of way from your prior FB knowledge.

See this image?

You’ll find an actual working version of it at the bottom of this article. Please click the appropriate buttons in it to let your friends know about this article so they too can quickly learn how to convert their FB knowledge to G+ knowledge.

Check back later for updates too!

Click here to follow me on Google+.

Good Luck and Enjoy your new Google+ account!