Google have done a great job. Google+ is fun and was designed thoughtfully. It combines features I love on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter and put them together in a way they make great  fun. I found nothing annoying on Google+.

Google+ (plus) for photographers – What is great?

• At first sight: Nothing new!!
• At second sight: A lot of fun browsing through content that could be interesting for me.

I am a big fan of open systems so I hate facebook for making things so complicated in terms of networking.

For me as a German Photographer with lots of contacts to English speaking photographers circles are the answer to my problem splitting up German and English speaking friends.

At the moment I have only 2 circles called “English” and “German”.

Life could be so easy!

I am surprised how fast my contacts are growing. It is the Twitter Phenomenon that open systems are growing more effective. And I am really impressed about the quality of content in my timeline.

Sparks are in some ways my new Hashtags and I am sure Google will do a good job filtering all the Spam that could appear in my Spark time line. Twitter has done nothing to clean my hashtag timelines like “photography”, “Kiel” or “Hamburg”. They are a kind of worthless for me at the moment. Maybe Google will help keeping the informations for photographers on Google+ cleaner than twitter has done it.

What I am a little bit afraid of is that Google now has more informations about things I am doing on the internet. Especially all my public relation strategies are now in danger to be caught by an algorithm that could give me penalties in googles search index. So Google guidelines are more important than ever in the future. I am not doing bad things so I hope nothing bad will happen.

Google+ (plus) for photographers- What is a problem?

What I am afraid of: Google+ is holding a hand on my content to use it. The guidelines are strictly and clearly. Google is allowed to license your content for what ever they will do in the future. Of course I put some photos in the timeline to give new photographers a short view on my work, but I put a big watermark into the photos. The watermark will be more than a sign not to use it without a permission.

I am hoping for the future that Google will change their guidelines. Because the photo browsing is great.

Google+ (plus) for photographers -What is missing?

There are some things missing like finding groups of interesting user like public circles. So I build up a G+ post where everybody who is interested in photography is invited to connect and write down a comment. If you are an English speaking photo geeks feel free in networking and write down your interests under this G+ post and connect to others:

Google+ (plus) for photographers

Please help spreading this post to build up a great circle of photography interests. And of course add me to your time line: Olaf Bathke @ g+