I have been on Google+ for about a week. I haven’t used it much or looked at all the features, but it is obviously still in beta. The number of users seems extremely low at this point because they are shutting off new users periodically even if they have invites. They are doing a very slow rollout.

Until it becomes a public site, I’m not going to try to use it to communicate with my patrons because most of them aren’t on it (if any at all). Also, I don’t use my personal email or social network accounts to communicate with patrons, and Google+ doesn’t currently offer the ability to make pages for institutions or businesses like Facebook does. Until that feature is added, I probably won’t use it.

One feature that is nice, though, is that you can create a circle of people (like a friend list), and you can have your posts go out over email if the people in your circle aren’t on Google+. So that might be a convenient way to manage an contact list because you can contact people who are using the network plus others who aren’t.

As for privacy, I not really inclined to view that as a realistic expectation with this type of social network. Facebook has made rather spectacular missteps in that area, which Google+ will probably learn from. But with Facebook, and even more so with Google, the users are not the customers, they’re the product. There really won’t be any personal privacy with these tools, because selling your personal data (or access to you based on your data) is how they make money. In this way, Google has the edge, because they can combine your social networking with your activity on Gmail, Search, rss feeds, Docs, Maps/directions, Calendar, ad clicks, Books/Scholar activity – any Google tool you use while logged in is probably tracking your information to build as detailed a profile of you as possible. Google+ might do a better job of making users feel safer, but I do think the whole point of the tool is to collect private data, not protect it. As always, read the Terms of Service carefully.

And my library doesn’t have a Facebook page either, although we should by the end of the month. The idea of maintaining that and a Google+ page is daunting – but I guess no more so that the libraries who had both Facebook and MySpace profiles. I suspect that different groups of patrons will use the different tools, so it might be true that libraries will need to be present in both places, but with slightly different focuses.

Would I use Google+ the way I use Facebook? If Google can handle the privacy issues that Facebook seems to keep fumbling, I will definitely use it. (I only just received an invite a couple of days ago, and haven’t done much with it yet.)

Will my library use Google+? Well, we don’t even have a Facebook page yet, but once Google+ is open to the general public, I will certainly put the suggestion out.