Google+ First Impressions

I was provided a Google+ invitation in the first week of the Google+ launch. After activating my account and using it for the past week, I can say that this thing has potential. I really like the Circles features and how it is nicely integrated into my Google Docs and Android mobile phone. I think Google has finally developed a social networking product and applied its lessons learned form past failed attempts (Buzz, Wave) and even learned a few lessons from its competitors (Twitter, Facebook). Powering Google+ is Java on server-side, Javascript (using Closure framework), and some HTML5 on the client-side (Google+ Technological Details). For storage it uses BigTable and Colossus (Google Filesystem v2). The technical details are discussed here. The technology stack employed by Google+ definitely provides evidence based on scalability lessons learned from Twitter who started off using Ruby on Rails (RoR) for everything and has been spending the past few years migrating their server-side processes towards Scala (language that runs on a JVM) for performance reasons. Twitter still uses RoR for client-side but has since migrated its server-side infrastructure to Scala.

You can read about the Google+ ‘buzz’ (no pun intended) all over the web these past few weeks. The adoption rate is even at a respectable level, 10 million users in the past two-weeks (see Google+ grows to 10 Million Users). The question now is, can it become a viable social platform for all of Google’s apps and services. Based on what I have seen, I think yes. And the really important part is that Google is just starting to rev up its enterprise integration services leveraging Google+. This will be an interesting evolution to watch.