Google+ has been around for a little over a month now and we’ve all been busy settling in and exploring this new space.  In the process I’ve been forming some opinions on how each of the main features may impact, and be used in, campaigns.

Although Google+ is mostly thought of as lining up against Facebook, I find it’s actually more like an extend Twitter. Mainly this is due to the fact that circles are asymmetric, so like Twitter (or Facebook pages) you can follow someone without them needing to return the relationship. However posts are longer and there is more finely grained privacy than Twitter. The biggest difference I see for us is there is no concept of a wall. This means that there is no way to send a message to someone and have all of their friends see it (a favorite tactic for spreading the word).  Only the user can share things with their circles and not a third party. This means many of the experiences we build which rely on sharing would need a fundamentally different experience to work.

As far as I’m aware it’s unknown exactly how content is featured in spark topics, but search ranking almost certainly plays a large role.  If so, this is all the more reason to emphasize SEO, and could potentially impact keywords selected for a given campaign.

Photos are fully integrated with Picasa to the point where you can’t sign up for Google+ without converting your Picasa to be plussed (although the standalone experience doesn’t seem to have changed).  Only interesting to me in that Facebook believes their photo offering is successful since it only lets users tag others — the one and only thing they believe users care about.  We’ll see how this simple vs. complex view plays out here. With Facebook you can’t always easily get to photos from outside Facebook, where in Google+ you can just share via Picasa. Actually, the whole “loosely coupled” vs walled garden is subtly interesting from a user perspective.

Buzz is rolled in as a tab, yet still exists independently as well.  Since it’s more mature, this is currently the only way that a third party can currently integrate with + (in this case twitter crossposting). However the critical thing for brands is the lack of integration with third party services.  No hootsuite or any other tools work with google+ yet.  This will make managing presences very labor intensive for brand managers until the tools are rolled out.

Still missing are events (use Google calendar, hmmmm…) and most importantly, pages.  Ford and others who were using the existing profiles as brand sites got yanked for them to be rolled out.  I haven’t seen any word on what the features will be, this biggest thing that the current profiles are missing is the custom tabs, so hopefully that, otherwise the Google+ experience will be much less robust than a Facebook one can be.

I think it should be noted that there are absolutely no ads on Google+ as of right now.  I actually had to double check my ad blocker was off. Anyone remember when ads were added to Gmail? Finally, the toolbar changes Google made in conjunction with the launch show how they are reaching to be as much, if not more of a media property than Yahoo, AOL, etc.  Google already owns search (and arguably email), now they are grabbing for all media.

Matt Cribbs is a purveyor of technical delights at Organic