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After many frustrating attempts, finally I joined the Google+ “Revolution”. Look me up if you’re ever in the G+ neighborhood. After reading numerous articles on G+ and now having a hands-on experience of it, I’m simply just going to share my thoughts with you. Most points below can each be an analysis on its own, but I will simply enumerate my feelings and impressions.

Let’s start with the hype: Does the G+/Facebook war seem a little too familiar to you? How many bi-polar wars have we seen throughout the decades? Remember the Coke Wars, the OS wars (Windows-Apple), the Nokia-Eriksson war, the Yahoo-MSN war, the GM-Ford War…etc. The list goes on. Whether a victor emerges at the end or the war simply rages on, no one can deny the ultimate beneficiary (and sometimes victim) can only be us the consumers.

There’s another flip to the above coin: Can G+ and Facebook be actually complementing each other to fuel the new-tech market in tablets and smartphones? Placing business applications aside, why would you dump your laptop for a tablet or a smartphone if there are no real online platforms to use them? A decade ago, the “in” thing used to be laptops loaded with software to compete on the hardware arena. Today, it’s the friendliest and most portable “social media” enabled device that drives demand. Remember, the upcoming “Cloud” technology will render software installation obsolete. Let’s not omit Google places, Facebook places, Foursquare and other Geotag-based apps. It’s not a surprise at all why Google is investing heavily in NFC technology for future smartphone “wallet” payments. Social Media and apps are fueling hardware demand.

G+ is still in its infancy; hence it would be unfair to judge it based on its current state. Was Facebook what it is today when it was launched 7 years ago? G+’s conceptual design and functionality is an improvement over Facebook, although most of the “goodies” are not yet activated. In due time, its true nature of the beast will appear. Recently Google announced it will rename 2 of its most famous services Picassa and Blogger into Google Photos and Google Blogs respectively. Google Photos is already on G+, could Google Blogs be integrated into G+ as the equivalent of Facebook Pages? It’s only logical; at least that’s what I would do.

If you dig into Google+, you’ll see that nothing is completely new except the interface and few names like Circles and Sparks. But almost all the components are a collection of Google Buzz, Google Alerts, Google Reader, Google Maps, Picassa and pretty soon Blogger, Google Places and the rest of the Google Empire merging under one roof forming a large powerhouse called Google+. Facebook was created in a totally inverted approach: the main interface first, then the multitude of components got added later.

Depending on who you talk to, most people tend to think G+ is similar to Facebook. A tiny minority tend to believe G+ is an oversized Twitter. My personal feeling on the issue (I always belong to a 3^rd camp) is that if you literally “combine” Facebook and Twitter, you get Google+. i.e. FB+TWT=G+. Of course I’m not talking G+ today, I am referring to the near future G+ when all the “goodies” will be activated.

Over the years Facebook embarked on a personal crusade against Google, when the latter didn’t really compete with Facebook except in Advertising dollars. The recent Facebook PR scandal is a testimony of how far Facebook is willing to go. Apparently it went as far as awakening the Google Giant : G+.