Thimian flavored

I know that some of this stuff will be coming, but hey, it’s lacking and everybody should know that it is lacking. This is a field test, and Google+ is rough around the edges, don’t forget that in the pundit’s excitement or doom-saying.

Anyway.

Stuff I Need

• Integration with my other Google services. Mail/Reader/Groups notifications in the Sandbar? Yes, please. Sharing Calendar items with circles? Awesome!
• Tied to the above: Trivial—and I mean trivial!—collaboration with my peers via Google Docs. That’d get me to use Google Docs.
• Twitter integration. I can announce stuff I post on Posterous to Twitter (even post stuff to Tumblr, Blogger, and whatnot), I’d like to do the same with and on Google+. “Social networking” is, after all, about talking with friends and sharing stuff together.
• Auto-Circles: I’d like to create geographical Circles for example, or circles based on shared interests/sparks.
• Shared Circles, similar to Twitter lists, but make them opt-in by Circle members. This probably means that I have to reveal the Circle’s name, too, but I’m not too bothered by that, since I decide to share the circle, anyway.

Stuff I Want

• Autoposting to and from everywhere. I want to pull my Posterous subscriptions, newsfeeds, Twitter stream and all that into my main stream (pun intended) on Google+, and would like to share stuff from Google+ to my other services. Maybe make these services part of Circles, so I can get sharing privacy/control for free?
• Muting Circle streams. Some streams are less relevant than others to me, so I’d like to keep my main stream as clean as possible.
• Drilldown to the originator of something my peers share on Google+. “+Person originally shared this at $date” with $date being a permalink to the original item, for example, instead of just “+Person originally shared”.
• Links in Shared Items. Google+ works as a nice, easy blog engine, and I’d like to link to more than a single item, together with a semantic markup in what I share.

General Observations After Day Two

I think it’s working as intended. I’m interacting with my peers better and deeper than I ever could on Twitter or Facebook (Facebook in particular was a chore for me, where I was always wondering “Can I share this? Can I participate?”), and I can do so in a much more natural way. I talk differently to different peers and groups of peers, and Google+ allows me to do just that, without worrying about self-censorship.